In the third chapter Mills criticizes the empirical methods of social research which he saw as evident at the time in the conception of data and the handling of methodological tools.
This can be seen as a reaction to the plethora of social research being developed from about the time of World War II. This can thereby be seen as much a criticism by Brewer that Mills may have been critical of the research being conducted and sponsored by the American government.
As such Mills criticizes the methodological inhibition which he saw as characteristic of what he called abstracted empiricism. In this he can be seen criticizing the work of Paul F. Lazarsfeld who conceives of sociology not as a discipline but as a methodological tool (Mills, 1959, 55-59).
He argues that the problem of such social research is that there may be a tendency towards "psychologism", which explains human behavior on the individual level without reference to the social context. This, he argues, may lead to the separation of research from theory. He then writes of the construction of milieu in relation to social research and how both theory and research are related (Mills, 1959, 65-68).
The idea has drawn criticism, with Stephen J. Kunitz writing that "Abstracted Empiricists embraced a philosophy based upon what they considered natural science, emphasizing, according to Mills, the significance of Method over substance", with quantitative survey research being the favored practice, for which "large teams, budgets, and institutes were required, leading to the bureaucratization of scholarship and transforming it from a craft to an industrial process".[4] Another critique by Nigel Kettley states that the method "seeks to perfect the art of number crunching, while setting aside the cognitive processes involved in theory building as a form of morbid introspection".[5]
