On the Social Construction of Social Problems and Social Problems Theory: A Contribution to the Legacy of John Kitsuse

Abstract

As is well known, John Kitsuse played a prominent and indispensable role in both founding and advancing the social constructionist approach to social problems theorizing. He did so in explicit opposition to structural functionalist approaches to theorizing social problems (Spector and Kitsuse 2001; Schneider 1985a). Whereas functionalist theorists have tended to regard social problems more or less as Durkheimian social facts that occur independently of the ways in which they are perceived by members of society, Kitsuse insisted that social problems cannot be separated from the perceptions and practical activities undertaken by members of the social worlds menaced by those problems. In observing that the very reality of social problems depends on the ways they are perceived and managed by members of historically and culturally specific constituencies, Kitsuse brought social problems research to an unprecedented level of epistemological depth and subtlety. Furthermore, through the use of constructionist insights he and his social constructionist students and colleagues have illuminated an extensive domain of hitherto unexplored directions for sociological research. For example, constructionist theory has enabled social problems researchers to more effectively examine the social processes through which phenomena are construed as problematic, through which they are constituted as public rather than private problems, and through which prospective remedies for them are socially produced, implemented, evaluated, revised, combined, replaced, forgotten, and so on. In each of these ways constructionists have taken important theoretical strides beyond the limitations that had attended prior approaches to theorizing social problems. Attention to what Spector and Kitsuse (2001) once called the “subjective component” of social problems production and amelioration has indeed yielded a vast catalogue of empirical studies that demonstrate how social problems as various as AIDS (Epstein 1996), alcoholism (Schneider 1978; Wiener Am Soc (2009) 40:61–78 DOI 10.1007/s12108-008-9059-5