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【About the book】
What would the 21st-century sociological imagination look like? Based on some exemplars of sociological studies and my own research experience, this book puts forward a framework of quaternary sociological practice that combines dynamically techniques, fundamental issues, epistemology and existential touch of social research. It first reviews the genealogy from Mills’ Sociological Imagination to Willis’ Ethnographic Imagination and Bourdieu et al.’s The Craft of Sociology, pointing out their legacy and potential to be fulfilled, which pave the way to a framework of quaternary sociological practice. It then explores the ways to raise significant and meaningful research questions, to deepen them, and to link the techniques of questioning and the quaternary practice. This is followed by the answers offered, namely, the logics of fields for research, which are the embodiment of social order, one of fundamental issues of sociological research. It then presents a repertoire of skills of analyzing and interpreting data, informed by the quaternary practice, such as specification of the phenomena and classification, conceptualization and re-conceptualization, as well as detection of meanings conveyed by actors. How to construct the object of research out of common sense, an epistemological concern, is then detailed, as well as the attempt to view the phenomena as a whole, another epistemological act. Finally, this book investigates how sociological research itself may contribute to social reforms, which, an ontological concern itself, may trigger the other three dimensions of the quaternary practice. This book concludes with the multiple routes of linking techniques, fundamental issues, epistemology and existential touch, which therefore constitute a holistic way of doing sociology.