Few people second guess Apple or their products, their image is well-maintained and the products are widely owned by people of all kinds. However, the process of making these much beloved iPhones and iPads is widely overshadowed by the company’s rate of constant innovation. In a series of articles by The New York Times, journalists attempt to unmask the controversial use of overseas manufacturers indicate a true crisis; a labor-power problem which abuses foreign workers as well as harming mid-wage jobs of consumers in the U.S. Many different lenses can be used to further analyze the structures, relationships and interactions that characterize this phenomena. Figures such as C. Wright Mills, Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels, Pierre Bourdieu, Immanuel Wallerstein and Leslie Sklair.
The Sociological Imagination was the work in which C. Wright Mills introduced the study of society: sociology. Grasping large scale social trends lends a greater understanding to the actions of people, groups and nations. To try to understand why the entire Apple company shifted business to China, one must utilize sociology to look beyond purely economic motives and locate our position in human history, “the individual can understand his own experience and gauge his own fate only by locating himself within his period, that he can know his own chances in life only by becoming aware of those of all individuals in his circumstances” (SI, p. 1). Apple argues that the reason for overseas manufacturing is in the flexibility, diligence, industrial skills and low cost of the foreign factory worker. One could argue that a person is a person and being Chinese does not make a human more physically capable of over 60 hour work weeks than the average worker in the U.S....
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...ls but do not fit into a proletariat class: they are the consumers who work service jobs. Assembly and manufacturing jobs left the U.S. during a period of deindustrialization and moved overseas, creating a transnational capitalist class with U.S. workers torn between Marx’s “petit bourgeoisie” and the proletariat worker, Sklair defines them as a fraction of the capitalist class who share mutual interests and lead similar lifestyles to the corporate fraction of modern capitalists. The Chinese worker is a tool in the perpetuation of Sklair’s “culture-ideology of consumerism” where consumers in the U.S. care more about buying the latest iPhone than about workers’ conditions in Foxconn Technologies in China.
Works Cited
SI: The Sociological Imagination
GI: The German Ideology
WLC: Wage, Labor and Capital
CST: Contemporary Sociological Theory and Its Classical Roots
Since the worker’s product is owned by someone else, the worker regards this person, the capitalist, as alien and hostile. The worker feels alienated from and antagonistic toward the entire system of private property through which the capitalist appropriates both the objects of production for his own enrichment at the expense of the worker and the worker’s sense of identity and wholeness as a human being.
Timmerman suggests that “We share little with the people who make our clothes nowadays. We’re divided by oceans, politics, language, culture, and a complex web of economic relationships. It doesn’t affect our daily lives if they are overworked and underpaid as it did during the turn of the twentieth century,” thus demonstrating the inadequacy of outsourcing and the relationships between the corporation, factory workers, and the consumer (180). The dynamic between the corporations, factory workers, factory owners, and middle-men is complicated and tense due to the interactions, communication, and duties differentiating between each group. For the factory workers, they suffer working in hard conditions, though the workers are happy to have a job, they would rather endure the harsh stipulations for the means of production to make money to send to their families than to protest against their factory owners (Timmerman 7).
According C.Wright.Mills (1959), sociological imagination enables one to understand the larger historical scene in terms of its meaning for the inner life and the external career of a variety of individuals. It enables one to take into account how individuals, in the welter of their daily experience, often become falsely conscious of their social positions. It is not only information that they need - in this Age of Fact; information often dominates their attention and overwhelms their capacities to assimilate it. It is not only the skills of reason that they need although their struggles to acquire these often exhaust their limited moral energy. What they need, and what they feel they need, is a quality of mind that will help them to use information and to develop reason in order to achieve lucid summations of what is going on in the world and of what may be happening within them.
What is sociological imagination? Our textbook describes sociological imagination as the ability to see our private experiences, personal difficulties, and achievements as, in part, a reflection of the structural arrangements of society and the times in which we live. The movie entitled Forrest Gump is a great example of sociological imagination. In this paper, I will cite examples from the movie and tell how they correlate with sociological imagination. Sociological imagination allows us examine the events of our lives and see how they intersect with the wider context of history and tradition of the society in which we live. (Hughes/Kroehler, The Core, p. 7)
With means of production becoming more efficient due to the introduction of modernization and technology, workers jobs begin being replaced by machines. No longer is the laborer’s skill of any value to the capitalist, especially, when the worker can be replaced by a more affordable machine, or when they can be replaced by the exploitation of another countries’ cheaper laborers or resources. With capitalism main objective being profit at whatever means possible; we see that one nation isn’t enough to contain this destructive force, so it stretching across the globe. When the differences of age, sex, race, nationality, gender and any other distinctive social validity, the sobering consequence develops the very demise of the capitalists and creates an untamable globalized chaos caused by the force of productions and the greed of the
For decades there have been many questions that sociologists generally ask themselves when examining a social phenomenon. One well known sociologists is C. Wright Mills. Mills came up with the concept of sociological imagination. It is used to describe the ability of individuals to think away from routines that they are used to in everyday life and look at them from an entirely new perspective. Using this concept, mills applied it to asking and answering imaginative thoughts of sociological questions. Mills came up with three questions that many thinkers have consistently asked in their investigations of humanity and society. The three questions are what is the structure of this particular society as a whole? , where does this society stand
Modern industry has replaced the privately owned workshop with the corporate factory. Laborers file into factories like soldiers. Throughout the day they are under the strict supervision of a hierarchy of seemingly militant command. Not only are their actions controlled by the government, they are controlled by the machines they are operating or working with, the bourgeois supervisors, and the bourgeois manufacturer. The more open the bourgeois are in professing gain as their ultimate goal, the more it condemns the proletariat.
“However, to develop our sociological vision we must do just that: We must be willing to look at our own society with cool detachment, careful observation, and scientific analysis. We must examine the groups we live in- our family, our neighbours, our classmates, our nation- as if we had just set foot in a new and strange land.” (Goode, 1977, P. 3) In this essay I intend to demonstrate my understanding of the ‘Sociological Imagination’, as well as critically discuss what C. Wright Mills meant when he spoke about the ‘Sociological Imagination’.
The Sociological Imagination speaks to the understanding of our own actions being a part of a larger historical and social picture. It encourages us to see what influences we have and what influences society has over our own individual lives, whether our decisions are determined by sociological factors and forces or are entirely in our own control. The sociological imagination enables us to see the relationship between history and biography. It helps us to understand the relationship between personal troubles and public issues, and as well as this, it addresses the three profound questions that C. Wright Mills asked. The three videos given, offer a range of successful and unsuccessful insight and explanations about the sociological
During the years before 2012, loyal Apple customers were in protest and petition when they found out that the labor conditions of Apple in Foxconn were unaccepted, the issue emerged to a worldwide attention. Also, the customers did not want to buy Apple products anymore because of the increasing number of accidents or suicidal in Foxconn. The employees were working in a dangerous environment and living in dorms that looked like a prison. These issues came to the attention that Apple decided to join Fair Labor Association, a monitoring group including at least 43 violations of Chinese Laws and regulations.
Scanlan J Stephen; Guest-editor; Grauerjolz Liz (2009) 50 Years of C.Wright Mills and the Sociological Imagination, Teaching Sociology 37, (1), pp1-7
Sociologist are invariably trying to decipher the social aspects of the environment around us. When examining these social phenomena, sociologist take a systematic approach in order to extract information. Typically, there are four questions that sociologist come to ask themselves: the empirical, theoretical, comparative, and developmental questions. C. Wright Mills coined a famous phrase called, Sociological imagination. According to Mills, sociological imagination is defined as an awareness or an insight of the environment around us. With this imagination, we are then able to gain a sociological perspective of the world. The application of sociological imagination will enable you to ask questions, and view the interactions of society, and
The “sociological imagination”, therefore, was supposed to be used by sociologists, intellectuals and the public alike. It is a theory conceiving both individuals in society and society as a whole, and looking at the historical context in which society and individuals are placed. Mills wanted to merge the history of society with the biography of individuals, as he believed it was the job of sociology to understand both.
Sociology is a study of society social life, social change, and social causes and consequences of human behaviour and allows us to gain an understanding of the structure and dynamics of today’s society, looking at the interlinking links patterns of human behaviour. Sociology looks at the in which social structure and institutions affect our everyday life. Sociological imagination was founded by C. Wright mills in the 1950`s it is an overall understanding of that some of the things that happen in society may lead to a particular outcome. Mills said it is “the vivid awareness of the relationship between experience and wider society.” sociological imagination can also be defined as the ability to look at how sociological situations can unfold due to how everyone is different. The way we behave is shaped by the situation that we find ourselves in, the values and norms that we have and the way that other members of society act around us. It is also a way of thinking about how things in society have led to a particular outcome, and understanding of what led to that specific outcome. Sociological imagination is an ability to look at things socially and how they interact and influence each other gaining an understanding of different cultures and class systems.
Foxconn has factories in Asia, Europe, Mexico and South America why is it that only China’s Foxoconn was in highlight and not any other country? While the Chinese factories happened to be the largest factories in China, these factories are also facilitated with dormitories and other infrastructure to host the workers and provide workers to go back at end of the 12 hour shift to relax and reenergize for the next shift. A quarter of the employees live in these so called dormitories. My Case study will analyze how the various news sources revealed the global sweatshop to the world and the reactions by the companies who were using Foxconn to manufacture electronic goods. The Chinese newspaper displayed Foxconn employees having social and psychological reasons leading to suicides whereas US news showed it as human rights violation. Both of them did not acknowledge the social justice and world economy aspects and steps that were taken by the electronics giants to rectify the problems that were being faced in Wuhan, China.