"To study these problems, to realize the human variety, requires that our work be continuously and closely related to the level of historical reality--and to the meanings of this reality for individual men and women.  Our aim is to define this reality and to discern these meanings . . . It requires that we seek a fully comparative understanding of the social structures that have appeared and do now exist in world history.  It requires that smaller-scale milieux be selected and studied in terms of larger-scale historical structures.  It requires that we avoid the arbitrary specialization of academic departments, that we specialize our work variously according to topic, and above all according to problem, and that in doing so we draw upon the perspectives and ideas, the materials and the methods of any and all suitable studies of man as an historical actor" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 134).