Social Problems, Politics of

Abstract

In the sociology of social problems, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the state and the political system. Given the central importance of social problems as public issues and claims for political action and public policy, and their role in shaping social and political change, this neglect seems all the more surprising. Especially in newer US versions of constructing social problems – very often seen as the only valuable sociological perspective on social problems – they have been defined either as “claims‐making activities” of collective social actors (Spector & Kitsuse 1987 [1977]) or as public discourses and rhetoric narratives (Ibarra & Kitsuse 1993). If the struggle for social problems were merely cognitive and symbolic, then the conflicts about their definition would have to be understood only as a system of contested narratives that result in new narratives. In these perspectives, references to power and conflict and to the political functioning of public issues and collective actors have attracted only little attention. But if the construction of social problems is based in the interests and values of collective actors, we have to ask how the struggle for public attention relates to the distribution of material, political, and symbolic resources. In this perspective, already the social construction of social problems by collective actors in society has to be analyzed as a social conflict, and in this sense as a fundamental political issue.