abstracted empiricism A term coined by C. Wright Mills in The Sociological Imagination (1959) and used to refer to the work of those sociologists who equate empiricism with science and make a fetish of quantitative research techniques. Whilst Mills accepts that there is a place for numerical data and statistical analysis in sociological reasoning, he insists that they are not sufficient for sociological analysis. Indeed, in the absence of the theoretical categories and comparative historical analyses that give ...