An interest in biography has a long history in sociology and includes work by such luminaries as Weber, Mills, Merton, and Elias. It has developed around the broad trajectories of biographical sociology and the sociology of biography and encompassed ideas about the everyday, the thinking subject, life histories, storied lives, identities, and reflexivity. It has had two key influences on sociological work. Its emphasis that ideas derive from particular viewpoints and through researchers reflexively engaging with their subjects has given rise to a discipline-wide recognition of reflexivity matters. Its approach has also resisted conventional distinctions between macro and microlevels of social life, with its emphasis on the interconnectedness of lives and social structures contributing to related developments in narrative inquiry and everyday life sociology among others.