Wright Mills is one of the most cited thinkers on social research. His appendix to the Sociological Imagination is a key text on social theory and it gives a picture of his idea of theorisation, in the context of studying power elites. (This was published in 1959 and uses the gendered language of the day). He addresses themes which have dominated social research since, including ideas of positionality and deduction / induction.

Three things you might think about in reading this:

If your life experience affects your intellectual work in the way he argues, do this make social research necessarily subjective?

How does he uses his ‘journal’?

A key idea here is that of abduction, how does this differ from induction and deduction?

Wright Mills, C. (1959) The Sociological Imagination, New York: OUP. Appendix On Intellectual Craftsmanship.

(You can find this in the library - or to be honest it is very easy to track down on the Web).

After you have read this can you compare with the approach in the grounded theory example.