But so far no universally accepted classification has been produced. Primary reason for this is that in society no problem is absolute. Every problem is relative and is also linked with one or more aspects of our life. Social problem is not welcomed in any society. Problems create disharmony and maladjustment but still the problems exist. What are the main causes, which has been posed by our sociologists.
So far the problem has found no solution and every attempt made in this regard has failed. The main reason for this is that the sociologists cannot pinpoint a single cause responsible for creating such problem. The cause, which may be responsible in one society, may not be responsible in the other society.
Similarly what may be responsible under certain circumstances may not be under certain other circumstances and so on. In contrast, the sociology of social problems defines social problem differently and adopts a different analytic approach. This approach—sometimes called constructionist—defines social problem in terms of a process, rather than a type of condition.
It focuses on how and why people come to understand that some conditions ought to be viewed as a social problem, that is, how they socially construct social problems. Typically, the social problems process begins with claimsmakers who make claims that some condition ought to be considered a problem, that this problem should be understood in particular ways, and that it needs to be addressed.
The process is complex: some claims produce a speedy reaction, while others have difficulty finding an audience. The constructionist approach began to guide researchers in the s and has generated a substantial literature that continues to develop in new directions. Most introductory textbooks for social problems courses do not develop a constructionist perspective.
Rather, their chapters present basic information about a set of social conditions usually understood to be social problems, such as crime and racism. Such traditional textbooks display minimal theoretical integration; that is, they do not discuss crime as a social problem, or compare social problems.
Three books do adopt a consistently constructionist stance. The classic statement is Spector and Kitsuse Two more recent texts adopt rather different orientations: Loseke is more microsociological, while Best is more macrosociological. Best, Joel. Social scientists use evidence of various sorts to support and explore the arguments they develop; their conclusions can be judged against that evidence. In the previous section we looked at the issue of competing explanations of social problems.
Here we want to take a rather different approach by starting from one of the major dividing lines between different types of explanation. These dividing lines are ones that recur in the definition, interpretation and explanation of a range of social issues: for example, patterns of inequality between men and women; crime and juvenile delinquency; the persistence of poverty, and so on. Despite the fact that we have referred to these topics as social issues or social problems, the most basic dividing line between different social constructions is the distinction between the natural and the social.
This might seem slightly confusing, given our focus here on social issues, but ideas about the natural basis of social arrangements or social problems are widespread. Ideas about the natural basis of society or of social problems within society refer us to a set of claims about the universal laws of biology or evolution that determine how we might behave.
They identify a range of attributes as the biological basis of human society and often insist that these are unchanging and unchangeable. In claims about the natural, biological attributes are often brought forward as explanations of social patterns.
Thus, biological differences between men and women are drawn upon to explain differences in social behaviour or patterns of social inequality. Classically, women's biological capacity to bear children whether they do so in practice or not has been held to account for a range of social patterns.
For example, for many years women's exclusion from education was justified on the grounds that they didn't need to know anything beyond being a wife and mother, because stimulation of the brain would drain energy that should be devoted to the tasks of reproduction.
Equally, men's behaviour has been interpreted as the product of biological forces and drives. Women invest qualitatively the best chance for a small number of eggs , while men invest quantitatively scattering their seed. Such distinctions between men and women have been held to account for a variety of social differences — in attitudes, behaviour, sexuality, patterns of employment, levels of income, involvement in politics, and so on Barash, ; Wilson, While there are many arguments about whether there is evidence to support this sort of explanation, our main concern with it here is as a distinctive type of social construction.
It centres on the claim that our social world is formed and constrained by a variety of natural causes and conditions. The emphasis on the natural in this form of social construction provides a strong claim to authority and truth, by referring to a world of natural laws that are seen as universal and immutable. As a consequence, many of the social constructions that refer to natural conditions or causes tend to warn against attempts to change or tamper with these natural laws.
An emphasis on the social character of social arrangements suggests that such patterns might be re-arranged. Thus, if some forms of undesirable behaviour — such as delinquent behaviour by young men — are defined as resulting from following bad examples, this construction implies that the provision of better role models would lead to improved behaviour.
Each provides a way into defining, interpreting and acting in the social world that we inhabit. Each also provides a framework within which events, actions and types of people become meaningful, and which allows us to position ourselves in relation to them.
However, the distinction between natural and social orientations is a significant one because of their different explanations of social behaviour. Different policy conclusions will also be drawn.
The distinction between the natural and the social is not the only significant one. Even the social orientation in constructions of social problems is complicated by different sorts of emphasis. The growth of social science since the late nineteenth century has ensured that a variety of competing theories, disciplines and perspectives are available to us in our attempt to make sense of social problems.
Such theories have made their way into the realm of everyday or common-sense constructions — we all know bits of economic theory, bits of psychology and even bits of sociology. For the purposes of this course, the most useful way of distinguishing the differences in this approach involves considering different levels of explanation. Others might focus on the family or kin group of the individual — how he or she is socialised, what behaviours, values, outlooks are learned or acquired in the family setting.
The third level would then be the locality — patterns of social networks, peer groups and other local influences. Beyond this, one might look to constructions that deal with the culture of a particular society — its values, orientations and how these are communicated the role of the mass media, education system, and so on. Finally, some explanations look to social structures for the causes and conditions of problems — how the society is arranged, how the resources and power are distributed, and how inequality is organised.
Different perspectives are likely to emphasise different levels of explanation. Let us take another social issue, unemployment. Using the grid below, write against each level of explanation the factors you think would be important in constructing social explanations of unemployment. We do not intend this to be an exhaustive survey of all the different types of social explanations of unemployment, but we hope it illustrates the range and the way in which different levels provide a focus for such social explanations.
Do some people fail to respond to the sticks and carrots needed to make people work? In this section we have tried to sketch some of the main lines of division in social constructions of social issues. The distinction between the natural and the social in constructing the causes that underlie social issues is a profound and recurrent one. However, it is also important to bear in mind that such an orientation will itself be complicated by differences of perspective, particularly about the level of society upon which the construction focuses.
It is worth taking a little time to reflect on what we have discovered so far. First, there is a question about whether particular issues are commonly understood to be social problems. As we have seen, there are views which say either that poverty does not exist in the UK today, or that, if it does, it is not a social problem but a natural consequence of having a competitive society.
Second, we can see that common-sense understandings are not cut from a single cloth. In the case of poverty, we have seen that there are different views of poverty and its causes which pull in different directions. We can see these both in the form of simple statements and in the more developed form of arguments about poverty. This suggests that there is no absolute or clear-cut distinction between everyday or common-sense talk about poverty and academic analyses and arguments — a point to which we will return later in this course.
Third, we have seen that these multiple perspectives are not only different but that they are contested. These different perspectives are engaged in conflict about how to define and explain poverty.
We can therefore suggest that the social construction of social problems is a contested process. Fourth, each of the brief quotations in section 3 announces its claim to be the correct or true understanding of poverty in different ways. Let us look back at how this was done. Anderson talks about how some suggested solutions that is, those from other perspectives do not address the causes that he has identified.
Each of them tells us about why they are superior perspectives. Each of them becomes something to be studied as part of the process by which social problems are socially constructed. It is disconcerting to take the position of being a stranger, but it is necessary if we are to understand how social problems are socially constructed.
The notion of social construction, we have argued, is fundamental to a social science approach to the analysis of social problems. However, some authors have developed the notion further into a more focused perspective, which may be called social constructionism.
This perspective starts by emphasising one essential feature of human societies — the role of language. In human societies, action is preceded by understanding and intention.
We intend our actions to have meaningful outcomes. Our actions convey messages to other members of society. Although, as we shall see, some aspects of the social constructionist perspective can be quite complicated, it starts from a relatively simple point of departure.
We might call this the naming or labelling of things. How we name things affects how we behave towards them. The name, or label, carries with it expectations. Let us consider the example of motherhood. The link between the biological facts of motherhood and its social expression are frequently taken for granted. The social constructionist approach has a rather different starting point.
What matters here, say social constructionists, is not the biology but social expectations. From a social constructionist standpoint, the appearance of the word natural or unnatural is usually a warning that deeply embedded patterns of social expectations are at stake.
Instead, we attribute them to causes or forces beyond society — to the realm of nature. Rather, it is positively to affirm the importance of the ways in which such differences are given meaning through processes of social construction.
Thus, the person who gives birth to a child is called a mother although, of course, it is also possible to become a mother through adoption. However, it is not clear that the same assumptions are made about the behaviour that follows from this biological relationship in all societies, at all times, or in all classes. In contrast to the model outlined above, for example, in some societies infanticide has been an acceptable form of birth control; in others child care has been shared through wide kinship networks; and in some social classes and at some times the passing on of babies to wet-nurses and then nannies, with little continuing maternal contact, has been viewed positively.
Licensed forms of abandonment might also include the sending of children to boarding school at an early age. In all of these contexts it is the social expectations rather than the biological necessity that matters. Those who take a social constructionist approach for example Burr, frequently contrast their position with what they characterise as essentialism. Most obviously, perhaps, essentialism finds a reflection in the notion that each of us has some basic personality which then determines the way in which we relate to others and fit into the wider social system.
Similarly, the notion of some shared human nature can be seen as essentialist. Critics of essentialism have not, however, restricted themselves to questioning biological determinism: they question any explanation which suggests that the best way of understanding social phenomena is to analyse them to find some underlying truth just waiting to be exposed. So, for example, classical Marxism has been criticised because it sees history as the working out of fundamental conflicts between classes which are rooted within a capitalist mode of production.
Jot down any you can think of. For example, our expectations about how people of different ages should behave are often seen as natural particularly with regard to the young and old.
As a consequence, we may think of older people who do not behave in a dignified and restrained manner as befits their age as behaving unnaturally. Social constructionism — as a way of studying social arrangements — starts from the rather mundane point that the naming of things affects how we act, and develops into an approach which sees the whole edifice of society as socially constructed. One of the earliest attempts to develop this approach, by the sociologists Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann , treated it as the means by which humans could create order out of the potential chaos of life.
For them, social constructions simplified the business of living by establishing patterns of mutual expectations: mothers are like this, fathers are like this, children are like that, and so on. Such simplifying constructions were a form of energy-saving device. In time, such assumptions became habitualised — habits of mind that required little thought or attention. People forgot that they were constructions and they became naturalised — simply features of how the world is.
In the process, people reproduced these constructions and the assumptions behind them in their behaviour. The social order is produced and reproduced through the ways in which we enact these social constructions. As individuals we find ourselves operating within a limited range of choice of positions — sometimes called subject positions — within that social order.
For example, a mother may find herself exploring the options of housewife, working mother or single mother, each of which is constructed as a set of expectations about how she will act. Berger and Luckmann's view of social construction is only one strand in the development of this perspective see Burr, , for a fuller introduction to social constructionism.
However, what all of the different strands that have contributed to the perspective have in common is their stress on the way in which collective or shared understandings, interpretations or representations of the world shape our actions within it.
Where they differ is in how they view these constructions. Some, particularly those associated with the concept of ideology, see constructions as a means through which social groups promote or legitimate their interests. Others, more closely associated with the idea of discourse, see social constructions as forming, rather than reflecting, social identities and interests.
Common sense is a complex and contested phenomenon. The practice of systematic scepticism is a key aspect of social science, particularly in the analysis of common sense and the consideration of the social construction of social problems. Social constructionism emphasises the importance of social expectations in the analysis of taken-for-granted and apparently natural social processes. It starts by exploring the assumptions associated with the naming or labelling of things.
It is sceptical about any form of essentialism, which seeks to explain social phenomena in terms of natural or biological drives. The labelling perspective associated with Berger and Luckmann focuses on the processes by which some behaviours and types of people become marked out for social disapproval — targeted by the wider society as different and requiring some form of social response.
Berger and Luckmann's perspective stresses the importance of language in shaping how we define, understand and respond to social problems by drawing attention to the role of labelling. However, the perspective is less helpful in dealing with the question of why some conditions become identified as problems and why some sorts of social constructions are in widespread use.
One of the ways in which the labelling perspective has been developed is through linking social construction to issues of social interests, power and ideologies. In this view, societies are characterised by patterns of inequality between social groups, for instance between different classes, between men and women, or between different ethnic groups. Groups in dominant positions in society will try to use sets of ideas that legitimate existing arrangements — and their positions within them.
For example, groups or classes who control a large share of a society's wealth are likely to spread ideas about the necessity or even desirability of these patterns of economic inequality. They may argue that inequality is necessary to encourage everyone to strive to be successful.
They may argue that wealth is a responsibility held in trust for future generations. Such sets of ideas that legitimate advantageous positions tend to be called ideologies.
Similar ideologies have been used to justify the inequalities between men and women men are stronger, better at thinking abstractly; women are better at caring or need to conserve their resources for the demands of childbirth, and so on. Each structural pattern of inequality is likely to create interests in preserving or changing the existing pattern and these interests are likely to provide the foundation for ideologies which seek to legitimate or challenge these inequalities.
This is the most simple view of ideology: as a set of ideas which attempt to legitimate or challenge social position and inequality. Even in this most simple form, however, we can see ways in which it can link to and develop the labelling approach to social construction.
Let us return to the issue of poverty. How might poverty be defined in ways which would reinforce or challenge the position of the powerful? We suggest that it might be in the interests of those with wealth to deny that poverty is a social problem or even that it exists.
Alternatively, poverty can be explained as a necessary, if unfortunate, by-product of a system that creates wealth. In distinguishing between the normal and the deviant, the wider inequalities and differences of social interest are concealed.
On the other hand, if poverty were solely blamed either on the behaviour of the rich or on the operation of an unfair or unjust economic system, it might underpin a political ideology which aimed to challenge the powerful in society. Ideologies are also likely to be involved in defining who and what are social problems. Most obviously, those who challenge existing social arrangements are likely to be defined as troublemakers, agitators or rabble-rousers who aim to cause unnecessary social disruption and disaffection.
Alternatively, such challenges may be dismissed as Utopian, unworldly or even unnatural because they claim that other ways of arranging the social world are possible. Beyond this, however, there are ways in which specific social conditions or patterns of behaviour might be identified as social problems because they run counter to the interests of dominant groups. For example, some social scientists have suggested that the interests of a capitalist class mean that it needs a healthy and reliable workforce.
In the period of industrialisation, therefore, indolence and insobriety came to be defined as social problems because they threatened to disrupt patterns of work and the norm of a sober and industrious worker see, for example, Clarke and Critcher, Social problems here are the result of interests being threatened, and the definitions of those problems stem from the power of dominant groups to determine what counts as a problem.
In this view ideologies are functional. That is, they are geared to legitimating social positions. In principle, one can look behind ideologies to see what interests they protect and serve. They are also intended to mystify or conceal what society is really like by explaining away inequalities. So, for example, these legitimating ideologies may celebrate forms of equality equality before the law, for instance which distract attention from other areas of social life where inequality is rife.
Much social science analysis has been devoted to exploring the variants and consequences of this simple view of ideology, including capitalist ideology, which legitimates the interests of owners of capital against the working class; patriarchal ideology, which legitimates the interests of men against women; and racist ideology, which legitimates the interests of dominant ethnic groups against others — most evidently in the ideology of apartheid in South Africa.
However, this simple and functionalist conception of ideology has been developed in a number of ways. Opening up ideologies in this way gives a more dynamic view of ideological conflict and struggles.
Oppositional ideologies are likely to try to define different sorts of social problems. Thus, socialist ideologies define inequality and its effects as social problems; feminist ideologies define gender differences in income, work and access to power as well as issues of male violence within and outside home as social problems; and anti-racist ideologies have attempted to construct inequalities of income and rights and other dimensions of racism such as vulnerability to racially motivated attacks as social problems.
In this sense, one can treat the public agenda of social problems as one focus of ideological conflict in which competing ideologies struggle to establish their definitions of social problems, and what needs to be done about them. Age is another issue around which there are contested understandings. One airline crash every year is grounds for concern, but not for the definition of a social problem. But, five crashes in one month will get the public's attention! Example: A good example is the controversy over the Monica Lewinsky affair.
The liberal press lamented it, but maintained that the larger issue was the quality of the job that the President was doing. The conservative press saw it as a basic flaw in the moral fabric of the presidency and counter to the values of the larger society. On this issue, the general public seems to have sided with the liberal position if public opinion ratings of the President's job performance are to be believed.
Example: If the general population has adopted a Marxist ideology, then such things as corporate power, militarism, imperialism, etc. However, if the public, as a whole, holds conservative values then "big government," "national defense," and "declining morality" will be perceived as social problems.
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