Many people often wonder what sociology does and why this is important to know. The answer to this question varies depending on the person. C. Wright Mills, for example believes that "[t]he sociological imagination enables its possessor to understand the larger historical scene in terms of its meaning for the inner life and the external career of a variety of individuals," meaning that an individual's personal situation is often due to the environment they live in or characteristics that they possess. This also ties in to the fact that if one person has a problem, it is a personal trouble, but if many people have identical problems, it is a sociological and local/national/global issue. For example, it is good to distinguish between one teen getting pregnant as compared with thousands of teen pregnancies. There is also a link between these personal troubles and larger issues, and normally similarities between large groups of people who have similar problems, successes, or situations exist.
Paul Stang
Karl Marx (1818-1883)
A portrait of Karl Marx.Yen Le Espiritu, a professor who particularly likes to incorporate ethnicity into sociological study, believes that "sociology ask[s] difficult questions about important social issues and believe[s] that it [can] inform social action in answering them". While both of these sociologists think that sociology is the study of the causes of issues, Espiritu supports using the information gained from sociological research to improve the situation, instead of only knowing for the sake of knowing.
Many different sociological issues are present today, including Karl Marx's writing about the splitting of the classes into the Bourgeoisie and the Proletariat during the Industrial Revolution. The Bourgeoisie is the upper class people who employ the Proletariat, or lower class, to do work. The Bourgeoisie then ends up getting paid for work that Proletariat preformed, and the workers do not receive the full...