SOCIOLOGICAL IMAGINATION AND SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF REALITY
What we experience in various and specific milieux, I have noted, is often caused by structural changes. Accordingly, to understand the changes of many personal milieux we are required to go beyond them. And the number and variety of such structural changes increase as the institutions within which we live become more embracing and more intricately connected with one another. To be aware of the idea of social structure and to use it with sensibility is to be capable of tracing such linkages among great variety of milieux. To be able to do that is to possess the sociological imagination (Charles Wright Mills 1959).
Don’t be a CHEERFUL ROBOT: You can use the social structure with sensibility. That is, appreciate how individual challenges are influenced by macro social forces and use this quality of mind to translate personal troubles into public issues and resolve them through collective action. See http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/249537/Viola_Desmond_A_Black_Canadian_Hero#ixzz1l9KRFFQV
Unlike the puppets, we have the possibility of stopping in our movements, looking up and perceiving the machinery by which we have been moved. In this act lies the first step towards freedom (Peter Berger 1963: 199). Our human agency gives us the power to do these as individuals and groups, and experience freedom. This is the essence of the sociological concept of Social Construction of Reality.