Sociological knowledge is useful for understanding each person's place in society and how societal issues affect us in our daily lives. One can even use one's sociological imagination to examine ideas and issues such as race, class, gender, and culture. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”?Get the original essay Is our society stable or is there constant competition between different groups within our society? Or is it based on everyday human interactions? How one answers these questions is an indicator of the perspective a person has towards our society. In the first chapter, our textbook introduced the four main sociological perspectives: functionalist, conflict, symbolic interactionist and postmodernist. Each of these four perspectives offers a different view of our society and is an important starting point for examining our society. According to the functionalist perspective, our society is quite stable and organized. Within our society, functionalists view our society as being made up of individuals who share a very similar set of norms, principles, and expectations. Within a society, there are social structures and foundations, such as family, education, government, and religion. All of this contributes to our society remaining stable and functioning. In contrast, the conflict perspective views our society as a constant power struggle and competition for limited resources. For example, these conflicts may concern family, finances or even politics. Karl Marx and C. Wright Mills are two influential conflict theorists. Mills supports the idea that the power elite, made up of a small group of top economic, political, and military officials, make most of the decisions within our country. The third sociological perspective is the symbolic interactionist. Unlike the first two perspectives, symbolic interactionists examine societies at the micro level, meaning the view is at the individual level. This perspective is more focused on small groups. However, the other two perspectives examine society at a large-scale level, called the macro level. Our book argues that symbolic interactionists see our society as the interactions of individuals and different groups. Basically, these theorists define interaction as communication and symbols include: gestures, signals, values ​​and written language. The final sociological perspective is the postmodern perspective. These theorists consider other theories to be ineffective in describing our society. This theory is based on the idea that there is social change, globalization and technology that is necessary in our times. Sometimes this rapid change within a society can cause chaos and uncertainty. This perspective is often criticized because it still offers answers, but poses more questions. The sociological imagination can be used to examine the world around us from a different perspective. Our book defines sociological imagination as “the ability to see the relationship between individual experiences and society as a whole.” C. Wright Mills believed it was important to be able to connect our personal lives to larger societal issues. Using the sociological imagination to examine race and gender, as a white American male, I may have lived a somewhat privileged life and where I in, 2018.