Conclusion: The Promise of Sociology?

Abstract

The concluding chapter critically reassesses the future of sociology and C. Wright Mills’ vision of the promise of the sociological imagination, and discusses Michael Burawoy’s call for ‘public sociology’, a more recent attempt to address sociology’s cultural relevance. As Mills’ original idea of the sociological imagination has become even something of a truism in latter-day sociology, to continue stimulating thought and provoking novel insights we need new concepts and a new sociological imagination. The chapter also maintains that it is only by imagining a different sociology that we can make sociology responsive to life in the 21st century and to understanding the world in which we live as both a human and a non-human world, marked by, say, computed sociality, ubiquitous waste and global climate change.