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Chapter Overview
Sociologists have long grappled with social problems. Since the beginning of the field, Marx, Durkheim, and Weber all employed sociological methods to help them understand the central issues that faced society. Of great importance, C. Wright Mills developed the idea of the sociological imagination to help us conceptualize the relationship between the macro and the micro, the macro being large-scale social issues and the micro, small-scale personal troubles. In this light, we can view social problems as both conditions and processes of subjective and objective factors. We will especially focus on the objective factors of social problems in the chapters to come. The takeaway of chapter one is that all of society is embedded within a great and diverse social web. How we think about the problems that this web creates is central to being able to solve the issues that face our social world.
Six theoretical frameworks are useful in understanding social problems. Structural functionalism considers the social processes and institutions that allow society to function well. For the structural functionalist, the blame of social ills falls on social institutions failing to do their jobs. Conflict theorists, on the other hand, see social problems as being a direct byproduct of social inequality and capitalism. Feminists focus on male domination through the patriarchy, while symbolic interactionists look at the role of small groups in creating social ills. Post modernism and post structuralism decode broad social statements and attempt to deconstruct their social meaning, while the population health perspective looks at health as a measure of how well a society is doing. Together, these methods constitute an analytical framework that can be employed to understand, and perhaps even solve, the social problems that face our society today.
In this chapter, we also learned other important terms that are central to our understanding of social problems. Moral entrepreneurs are upper-class members of society who are responsible for deeming a social situation a problem. In this way, they are claims-making, asserting that a situation that might really be neutral is, in fact, a problem. Witchcraft, and the condemnation of women who they believed to be witches, was an example of this. The moral panic that ensued was short-lived, but it caused the downfall of many innocent people. Sometimes claim-makers challenge the existing status quo within an organization or industry. These people are called whistleblowers. They critique social circumstances within their own company or a corporation they are intimately familiar with.