The Cambridge Handbook Of Social Problems [1, 1 ed.] 1108426166, 9781108426169, 1108656188, 9781108656184, 1107121558, 9781107121553, 1108426174, 9781108426176

Table of contents :
Cover
Half title
Title
Copyright
Contents
About the Contributors
Introduction
Part I | General Concerns and Orientations in the Study of Social Problems
1 | The Challenges of Conceptualizing Social Problems
2 | Research Methods
3 | Participatory Action Research and Social Problems
4 | Public Policy and Social Problems: Recent Trends in the Formal Control of Individual Behavior
5 | Social Problems in Global Perspective
6 | Bridging Social Movements and Social Problems
7 | Public Sociology and Social Problems
8 | Service Sociology and Social Problems
9 | Astrosociology Social Problems on Earth and in Outer Space
10 | Prospects for the Sociological Study of Social Problems
Part II | Historical and Theoretical Issues in the Study of Social Problems
11 | Settlement Sociology
12 | Chicago School: City as a Social Laboratory
13 | Luhmanns Sociological Systems Theory and the Study of Social Problems
14 | The Conflict Approach
15 | Radical Interactionism and the Symbolism of Methamphetamine
16 | Social Constructionism
Part III | Problems of Discrimination and Inequality
17 | Racism
18 | Immigration
19 | Gender Inequality
20 | Sexualities and Homophobia
21 | Poverty and Income Inequality: A Cross-National Perspective on Social Citizenship
22 | Housing Market Discrimination
23 | Hunger and Food Insecurity
24 | Ageism Past and Present
25 | Disabilities
Part IV | Problems of Institutions
26 | Media and the Construction of Social Problems
27 | Family Problems
28 | Problems in Education
29 | Problems of the Workplace and Workforce
30 | Long-Term Unemployment in the United States
Index

Citation preview

The Cambridge Handbook of Social Problems The introduction of the Affordable Care Act in the United States, the increasing use of prescription drugs, and the alleged abuse of racial profiling by police are just some of the factors contributing to twenty-first-century social problems. The Cambridge Handbook of Social Problems offers a wide-ranging roster of the social problems currently pressing for attention and amelioration. Unlike other works in this area, it also gives great consideration to theoretical and methodological discussions. The Handbook will benefit both undergraduate and graduate students eager to understand the sociology of social problems. It is suitable for classes in social problems, current events, and social theory. Featuring the most current research, the Handbook is an especially useful resource for sociologists and graduate students conducting research.

A. Javier Treviño, Professor of Sociology at Wheaton College, is the author and editor of several books, including The Social Thought of C. Wright Mills (2012), Investigating Social Problems, second edition (2018), The Development of Sociological Theory: Readings from the Enlightenment to the Present (2017), and C. Wright Mills and the Cuban Revolution: An Exercise in the Art of Sociological Imagination (2017). He has served as president of the Justice Studies Association (2000–2002) and as president of the Society for the Study of Social Problems (2010–2011). He was a visiting research Fellow at the University of Sussex, UK (2006), was a Fulbright scholar to the Republic of Moldova (2009), and, since 2014, has been a visiting professor in Social and Political Theory at the University of Innsbruck, Austria.

The Cambridge Handbook of Social Problems

 Volume 1 Edited by

A. Javier Treviño Wheaton College, Massachusetts

University Printing House, Cambridge cb2 8bs, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, ny 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, vic 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi - 110025, India 79 Anson Road, #06-04/06, Singapore 079906 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108426169 doi: 10.1017/9781108656184  C Cambridge University Press 2018

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2018 Printed in the United States of America by Sheridan Books, Inc. A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Treviño, A. Javier, 1958– editor. Title: The Cambridge handbook of social problems / edited by A. Javier Treviño, Wheaton College, Massachusetts. Description: New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2017042226| isbn 9781107121553 (2 vol. set : hardback : alk. paper) | isbn 9781108426169 (vol. 1 : hardback : alk. paper) | isbn 9781108426176 (vol. 2 : hardback : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Social problems. Classification: lcc hn18.3 .c36 2018 | ddc 306.4/61–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017042226 isbn 2 Volume Set 978-1-107-12155-3 Hardback isbn Volume 1 978-1-108-42616-9 Hardback isbn Volume 2 978-1-108-42617-6 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls for external or third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such Web sites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

About the Contributors Introduction

page vii xi

pa r t i GENERAL CONCERNS AND ORIENTATIONS IN THE STUDY OF SOCIAL PROBLEMS 1. The Challenges of Conceptualizing Social Problems

7. Public Sociology and Social Problems 3

23

119

Joshua Meisel and Mary Virnoche

8. Service Sociology and Social Problems

133

A. Javier Treviño

39

Randy Stoecker

4. Public Policy and Social Problems: Recent Trends in the Formal Control of Individual Behavior

99

Jaime Kucinskas

Amir Marvasti

3. Participatory Action Research and Social Problems

77

Yvonne A. Braun and Michael C. Dreiling

6. Bridging Social Movements and Social Problems

Joseph Schneider

2. Research Methods

5. Social Problems in Global Perspective

9. Astrosociology: Social Problems on Earth and in Outer Space

149

Jim Pass

10. Prospects for the Sociological Study of Social Problems

169

Joel Best and Donileen R. Loseke

57

Mark Peyrot and Stacy Lee Burns

v

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contents

20. Sexualities and Homophobia

pa r t i i HISTORICAL AND THEORETICAL ISSUES IN THE STUDY OF SOCIAL PROBLEMS 11. Settlement Sociology

185

22. Housing Market Discrimination

221

pa r t i v PROBLEMS OF INSTITUTIONS

259

279

477

27. Family Problems

497

Donna Holland

28. Problems in Education

513

Peter A. J. Stevens, Marios Vryonides, and A. Gary Dworkin

29. Problems of the Workplace and Workforce 303

319

Cecilia Menjívar and Andrea Gómez Cervantes

William J. Scarborough and Barbara J. Risman

26. Media and the Construction of Social Problems William Hoynes

Heather M. Dalmage

19. Gender Inequality

459

Robyn Lewis Brown

pa r t i i i PROBLEMS OF DISCRIMINATION AND INEQUALITY

18. Immigration

441

241

Peter R. Ibarra and Michael Adorjan

17. Racism

423

W. Andrew Achenbaum

25. Disabilities

Michael A. Katovich

16. Social Constructionism

23. Hunger and Food Insecurity 24. Ageism, Past and Present

Steven E. Barkan

15. Radical Interactionism and the Symbolism of Methamphetamine

409

Stephen J. Scanlan

Werner Schirmer and Dimitris Michailakis

14. The Conflict Approach

385

W. Dennis Keating

203

Roger Salerno

13. Luhmann’s Sociological Systems Theory and the Study of Social Problems

21. Poverty and Income Inequality: A Cross-National Perspective on Social Citizenship Eiko Strader and Joya Misra

Patricia Lengermann and Gillian Niebrugge

12. Chicago School: City as a Social Laboratory

363

Catherine A. Gildae

531

Héctor L. Delgado

30. Long-Term Unemployment in the United States

551

Ofer Sharone, David L. Blustein, and Carl E. Van Horn

339

Index

567

About the Contributors

W. Andrew Achenbaum, to combat ageism, retired from the University of Houston to the Institute for Spirituality and Health. Michael Adorjan has applied social constructionism to examine youth crime debates and policy responses, Stockholm syndrome as a vernacular resource, and public sociology. He is currently researching youth and cyberrisk. Steven E. Barkan is Professor of Sociology at the University of Maine. He is a past president of the Society for the Study of Social Problems and also of the Textbook and Academic Authors Association. Joel Best is Professor of Sociology and Criminal Justice at the University of Delaware. His most recent book is Social Problems (2017). David L. Blustein is Professor in the Department of Counseling, Developmental, and Educational Psychology in the Lynch School of Education at Boston College. His research, writing, practice, advocacy, and teaching have been devoted to creating a broad and inclusive approach to understanding the role of work in people’s lives, optimally encompassing everyone who works and who wants to work.

Yvonne A. Braun is Associate Professor in the Departments of Women’s and Gender Studies and International Studies at the University of Oregon specializing in gender, intersectionality, international development, environment, globalization, social movements, and inequality. Her recent scholarship has appeared in Gender & Society, Social Problems, Global Ethics, International Feminist Journal of Politics, Journal of Environmental Management, and Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy, and Society. Robyn Lewis Brown, PhD, is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Kentucky, where she also serves as chair of the undergraduate Health, Society, and Populations program. Her work emphasizes gender differences in experiences of health, illness, and disability and frames both gender and disability as fundamental sources of social and economic inequality. Stacy Lee Burns is Professor and past Chair of the Department of Sociology at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. She recently served as chair of the Crime and Juvenile Delinquency Division of the Society for the Study of Social Problems and is author of Making Settlement Work: An Examination of the Work of Judicial Mediators (2000), editor of Ethnographies vii

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about the contributors

of Law and Social Control (2008), and coeditor (with Mark Peyrot) of New Approaches to Social Problems Treatment (2010). Andrea Gómez Cervantes is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Kansas with specializations in globalization and sociology of families. Her research focuses on immigrant families, immigration policy, race/ethnicity, and social inequality. Heather M. Dalmage is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Mansfield Institute for Social Justice at Roosevelt University in Chicago. She has authored and edited four books and is a former Fulbright scholar at the University of Kwa Zulu Natal, South Africa. Héctor L. Delgado, the author of New Immigrants, Old Unions: Organizing Undocumented Workers in Los Angeles (1994), is a Professor of Sociology and former chair of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of La Verne and the Executive Officer of the Society for the Study of Social Problems. Michael C. Dreiling is Professor of Sociology at the University of Oregon specializing in political and environmental sociology. He is author of two books (most recently Agents of Neoliberal Globalization [2016]) and numerous articles and is presently working on a comparative study of the network power of energy industries. A. Gary Dworkin is Professor of Sociology and former chair of the Department of Sociology, University of Houston, and currently serves as president of Research Committee 04 (Sociology of Education) of the International Sociological Association. His teaching, research, and publications include several books and articles on teacher burnout, student dropout behavior, minority–majority relations, gender roles, and school accountability and high-stakes testing. Catherine A. Gildae is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Northeastern University. She holds a PhD in Law, Policy, and Society, and her work emphasizes how law and public policy interact with and shape family life, especially for LGBTQ people. Donna Holland, PhD, is Associate Professor of Sociology and the Director of the Center for Social Research at Indiana University–Purdue University Fort Wayne. Her research interests include resilience, family, foster care, and disaster.

William Hoynes is Professor of Sociology at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, where he has served as director of both the Media Studies and American Studies programs. He is the author of Public Television for Sale (1994) and coauthor, with David Croteau, of The Business of Media (2005) and Media/Society (2015). Peter R. Ibarra is Associate Professor in the Department of Criminology, Law, and Justice at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Most recently, he has published work in Crime, Law, and Social Change; Journal of Technology in Human Services; and International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology. Michael A. Katovich is Professor of Sociology at Texas Christian University. His publications include a variety of approaches, including ethnographic participant observation, experimental laboratory studies, and cinematic analyses. W. Dennis Keating is Emeritus Professor of Urban Studies and Planning, Department of Urban Studies, College of Urban Affairs, Cleveland State University. He has published widely on housing, cities, and neighborhoods (including his 2016 history of Cleveland’s historic Tremont neighborhood) and is a past president of the Housing and Built Environment Research Committee of the International Sociological Association. Jaime Kucinskas is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Hamilton College. Her research interests span social movements and the sociology of religion, inequality, and cultural change. Patricia Lengermann is Research Professor of Sociology at the George Washington University. She has been writing with Gillian Niebrugge since 1985. Their primary scholarly work is in the history of sociology and feminist sociological theory – most notably, The Women Founders: Sociology and Social Theory 1830–1930 (2007), the chapter on the complex history of the relationship of sociology and social work in the American Sociological Association centennial history Sociology in America (2007), and several article-length studies of the history of settlement sociology. Lengermann and Niebrugge are the founders of the ASA Section on the History of Sociology. Donileen R. Loseke is Professor of Sociology at the University of South Florida and the 2016– 2017 president of the Society for the Study of Social Problems. Her current interests focus on

about the contributors relationships between narrative and the politics of meaning in a “postfact” world. Amir Marvasti’s research focuses on identity work in everyday encounters and institutional settings. He also has an active publication record on the pedagogy of qualitative research. Joshua Meisel is Associate Professor of Sociology at Humboldt State University and past coordinator of the MA in Public Sociology. He is codirector of the Humboldt Institute for Interdisciplinary Marijuana Research (www .humboldt.edu/hiimr) and author of a forthcoming California Geographer article, “Hidden in Plain Sight: Cannabis Cultivation in the Emerald Triangle.” Cecilia Menjívar is Foundation Distinguished Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Kansas. Her work focuses on the manifestations of state power; on the form of enforcement practices and the creation of legal statuses; and on the everyday lives of immigrants, primarily from Central America. Dimitris Michailakis, PhD, is Professor of Sociology and Social Welfare in the Department of Social and Welfare Studies, Linköping University, Sweden. He is research director for Platform for Theory-Driven Research in Social Work. Joya Misra is Professor of Sociology and Public Policy at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She studies labor, inequality, and policy, mostly from a cross-national perspective. Gillian Niebrugge is Professorial Lecturer at the George Washington University. She has been writing with Patricia Lengermann since 1985. Their primary scholarly work is in the history of sociology and feminist sociological theory – most notably, The Women Founders: Sociology and Social Theory 1830–1930 (2007), their chapter on the relationship of sociology and social work in the Sociology in America (2007), and several article-length studies of the history of settlement sociology. Niebrugge and Lengermann are the founders of the ASA Section on the History of Sociology. Jim Pass founded the multidisciplinary academic field of astrosociology in 2004 to fill the void in which the social sciences and humanities failed to focus enough on issues related to the impact of outer space on both terrestrial societies and beyond Earth’s atmosphere (i.e., the human dimension of outer space). He serves as

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the CEO, a board member, and an executive editor of the Journal of Astrosociology at the Astrosociology Research Institute, a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization established in 2008. Mark Peyrot is Professor and former chair of Sociology at Loyola University Maryland. He published (with Stacy Burns) the edited collection New Approaches to Social Problems Treatment, vol. 17 (2010) in the Research in Social Problems and Public Policy series which is related to the topic of their chapter, and they are currently collaborating on a related monograph. Barbara J. Risman is Professor of Sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago and president of the Board of Directors of the Council on Contemporary Families. Professor Risman’s book Where the Millennials Will Take Us: A New Generation Wrestles with the Gender Structure (2018) offers a revision of her gender structure theory and illustrates it with qualitative interviews with a gender-diverse sample of young adults. Roger Salerno is Professor of Sociology at Pace University in New York City, where he teaches courses in urban sociology, gender, and social theory. His most recent book is Boyhood and Delinquency in 1920s Chicago (2017). Stephen J. Scanlan is Associate Professor of Sociology at Ohio University. His research areas include environmental sociology, international development, social movements, and social inequality, with specific interests in environmental justice, hunger and food justice, gender and development, and poverty. William J. Scarborough is a PhD student in Sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His research focuses on the economic and cultural forces involved in the reproduction of gender inequality. Werner Schirmer, PhD, is Senior Researcher at the Department of Social and Welfare Studies at the University of Linköping, Sweden. He has published several articles applying Luhmann’s systems theory to a variety of social issues. Joseph Schneider is the Ellis and Nelle Levitt Professor of Sociology at Drake University. He has written on the medicalization of deviance and the experience of illness (both with Peter Conrad), social problems theory, Donna Haraway, and the place of objects and materiality in human experience.

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about the contributors

Ofer Sharone is Professor of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and the author of the book Flawed System/Flawed Self: Job Searching and Unemployment Experiences (2013). His research and teaching focus on career transitions, job searching, unemployment, and qualitative cross-national comparisons. Peter A. J. Stevens is Associate Professor at Ghent University, Department of Sociology, where he teaches Qualitative Research Methods. His research focuses on sociology of education and race and ethnic relations. Randy Stoecker’s practice focuses on using technical assistance and training, and participatory action research, to build the capacity of grassroots groups. He also writes and speaks on these topics. Eiko Strader is a doctoral candidate in Sociology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her research interests focus on inequality,

race/gender/class, welfare states, incarceration, and immigration. Carl E. Van Horn, PhD, is the founding director of the Heldrich Center for Workforce Development and Distinguished Professor of Public Policy at the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University. He is a visiting nonresident scholar with the Federal Reserve Bank and a fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration. Mary Virnoche is Professor and chair of Sociology at Humboldt State University. She identifies as a feminist public sociologist working on diversity and inclusive student success in higher education and STEM fields. Marios Vryonides is a professor at the European University Cyprus, Department of Education, where he teaches Research Methods in Education and Sociology of Education. His research focuses on educational inequalities, social and cultural capital, and new forms of education.

Introduction

Social problems – those conditions, events, or behaviors that occur locally, nationally, or globally and cause or threaten to cause harm to all or some segment of the population – tend to be regarded as enduring and entrenched. Two thousand years ago, Jesus told his followers that the poor will always be among them, indicating to some readers of the New Testament that poverty would a persistent phenomenon (Mark 14:7). In The Rules of Sociological Method, first published in 1895, Emile Durkheim noted that crime was not only universal but also unavoidable (Durkheim 1938, 67–72). In 1932, Sigmund Freud, in partial response to Albert Einstein’s query about the inevitability of war, maintained that humans are instinctually inclined toward aggression and destruction (Einstein 1968, 198). At first blush, these exemplifications seem to suggest that some of the towering minds in history have regarded social problems – poverty, crime, war – as intractable. And yet, these three personages were neither pessimistic nor complacent about such adverse circumstances. Indeed, in the very next phrase, Jesus invited his disciples to help the poor.

Durkheim, a few pages later, noted that the behaviors of criminals can have transformative benefits for society. And Freud, for his part, proposed the establishment of an international judicial court with unquestioned centralized authority to resolve conflicts before they escalate into armed violence. This is all well and good, but the fact is that poverty, crime, and war, to say nothing of racism, sexism, unemployment, drug abuse, and numerous other social problems, continue to be pervasive in many societies – a circumstance that seems to naturally, and perhaps exasperatedly, evoke Tolstoy’s imperative inquiry, “What then must we do?” Clearly, action must be taken to address and rectify social catastrophe, injustice and oppression demand reform, and societal ills cry out for alleviation. But it is also important that sociologists and students of sociology understand social problems: their histories and trajectories, their causes and consequences, their incidence and prevalence. The Cambridge Handbook of Social Problems provides analyses of a large variety xi

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introduction

of social problems. The sixty chapters that compose this two-volume work were prepared by distinguished (and soon-tobecome-distinguished) scholars – primarily from the United States, but also from several other countries – all of them experts in the topics on which they have written. This is a handbook, implying that it is to be used as a basic reference – in this case, as a reference to the broad, amorphous, and unwieldy field commonly known as the sociology of social problems. But it is also intended as a compendium that provides an inventory of today’s most pressing troublesome issues. Of course, not every such issue could be included, and the reader will be certain to note the absence of this or that social problem. But every effort has been made to make every chapter included in the collection to be as comprehensive and current as possible. The first volume of the handbook is organized into four parts. Part I consists of chapters having to do with “General Concerns and Orientations in the Study of Social Problems.” Part II focuses on “Historical and Theoretical Issues in the Study of Social Problems,” and Part III considers specific social problems, namely, those having to

do with “Problems of Discrimination and Inequality,” including sexualities and homophobia, housing market discrimination, and hunger and food insecurity. Part IV looks at social “Problems of Institutions,” including media, family, education, and work. The second volume consists of three parts. The chapters here continue an analysis of specific social problems, in this case in relation to “Problems Related to Health, Safety, and Security,” the subject of Part I, and “Problems Related to Crime and Violence,” the subject of Part II. The volume ends with the chapters in Part III that discuss “Problems of Global Impact.” The object of The Cambridge Handbook of Social Problems is to inform, guide, and inspire academics and activists, practitioners, and students in better understanding their social world – in all its troublesome variety.

References Durkheim, Emile. 1938. The Rules of Sociological Method. New York: Free Press. Einstein, Albert. 1968. Einstein on Peace. Edited by O. Nathan and H. Norden. New York: Schocken Books.

Pa r t I

GENERAL CONCERNS AND ORIENTATIONS IN THE STUDY OF SOCIAL PROBLEMS



CHAPTER 1

The Challenges of Conceptualizing Social Problems Joseph Schneider

Abstract The sociological study of social problems is reviewed in terms of the question of conceptualizing the key term social problems as a technical term in the discipline and beyond. Dilemmas brought by the very word problem, by who uses it and how, are considered. Against a dominant tradition of the sociologist using the term normatively, elements of the definitional approach proposed by Malcolm Spector and John Kitsuse are reviewed as the most analytically sound conceptualization of the last century, still offering promise. That argument is then linked to work in science studies and the respecification of sociology by Bruno Latour to suggest a revitalized study of social problems and sociology.

I write here having earlier spent many words on “social problems theory,” shaped by Malcolm Spector and John Kitsuse’s ([1977] 2000) influential Constructing Social Problems. But I am not interested in rejoining any of the debates that emerged in the wake of their provocative book (e.g., the so-called strict vs. contextual debate; see Ibarra 2008), and I do not review research and writing that have drawn on it. That work and the “social constructionist” tradition in social problems, and far beyond, have been quite thoroughly reviewed (see Holstein and Gubrium 2008; Holstein and Miller 1993). Moreover, Peter R. Ibarra and Michael Adorjan offer a chapter in this volume that brings that review and consideration up to date. I am, however, inter-

ested in foregrounding certain ideas and arguments central to Spector and Kitsuse’s (hereafter S&K, unless as a citation) work that have shaped my own understanding of what social problems in sociology can be thought to be and that bear directly on this chapter’s topic: conceptualizing social problems.

Conceptualization and Definition The history of “social problems” in sociology is one that might best be characterized not by S&K’s theory but rather more likely by C. Wright Mills’s (1959) famous vision of the sociological imagination. Mills offered an accessible argument, distilled 3

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from more complex European origins of sociology – Marx, Durkheim, Weber, and others – that has been used widely by subsequent generations of sociologists who have taken up social problems as a topic, especially so in the United States. His claim that this “imagination” could explain how “personal troubles” are a result of or emerge in the context of “social issues” was a clear and compelling statement for generations of sociologists. Social issues, for Mills, were thought primarily in terms of what he called “social structures,” with particular attention to structured differences of power and income/wealth. Mills’s brief but not simple claim has been at the heart of the understanding that sociology offers of itself as an intellectual and scholarly as well as a political pursuit, inclusive not only of “personal troubles” but of the full range of human sociocultural biography as it unfolds in culturesociety. Mills may have been motivated in this by his review of social problems writing in sociology. In his “The Professional Ideology of the Social Pathologists” (Mills 1943), he offered a wide-ranging and detailed critique of the conceptualization of social problems in sociology textbooks up to the 1940s. While directed at the politics and ideologies of this work – Protestant, politically conservative, antiurban, middle class, functional, order/“balance,” and assimilationist – he frowns perhaps as much on the relative or complete absence of attention to careful and consistent sociological conceptualization and definition. Social problems, or “pathologies” in those textbooks and professional publications, were conditions, practices, and, by extension, people that/who were seen by those authors as athwart these assumedly consensual “American” values and ways of life. Their personal but surely also socially and institutionally located moral commitments were the standards in terms of which social problems were defined. It was perhaps not so much that there was no “theory” in that work but rather that the theory and the moral/ethical commitments of the authors were the same

thing. This fell far short of Mills’s sense of what a legitimate theoretical sociology, focused on serious structural analysis and critique, should be. To underscore the importance of his notion of structure, he also took to task William I. Thomas and Charles Horton Cooley for their focus on what he called “isolated situations,” a “situational approach,” the overstated importance of “a Christian-democratic version of a rural village” and “community” – and too much attention to “process,” such that the central importance (to Mills) of the political and economic as “structure” is pushed out of view (Mills 1943, 10–11, 16). Ironically, Mills himself used a political/ideological/moral frame as one foundation of his own argument, although couched in a quite different sort of discourse from those he criticized. This kind of blindness, intentional or not, to one’s own moral and ideological presuppositions, treating them as societally consensual and/or, vaguely, as “theory” – but as, in fact, untheorized – has a long history in the sociology of social problems. Mainstream sociology in the United States has mostly offered an account of the individual in terms of the effects of such social structure or structures, although the Marxism in Mills’s analyses certainly was not mainstream. This sociology sees social problems as “undesirable conditions” of shared or categorical human experience, defined as suffering, oppression, devaluation, and exclusion, or, leaning toward the “deviant,” as criminal or nonconforming, that can be causally traced to particular structures of/within society and/or culture – and the claim that those structures and related practices themselves, e.g., modernity, capitalism, racism, sexism, colonialism, heteronormativity, and other forms of inequality, are also “the problem,” calling for social-scientific study and criticism if not intervention. Distinct from Mills’s critique of the effects of the structure and operation of capitalism, and more influential in social

challenges of conceptualizing social problems

problems analysis at the middle of the last century, were the arguments made from theories of social disorganization and dysfunction (e.g., Merton and Nesbit 1971). These theories shifted emerging academic sociology away from making explicit moral judgments on the basis of the sociologist’s personal commitments to seemingly neutral, theoretical accounts of such conditions as the result of a society or social system gone awry, out of sync with its better self, “disorganized” and “dysfunctional.” Based nonetheless still on a moral preference – in this case for societal or system integration, order, and value consensus – social problems here are those social structural conditions that made it impossible for, or less likely that, certain categories of people could achieve success and personal fulfillment by conformity to the social expectations that they were taught and that were thought by the sociologistanalysts to define their society and/or social group. Although such theories saw the source of problems to be social structural, given the liberal, neoliberal, individualist, and Marxist-phobic politics of the United States and of sociology as well, proposed interventions against such problems implied by sociological theory and research tended mostly to be attempts to help affected individuals deal with these structural effects. Policydriven, more radical interventions in those structural arrangements thought to cause the personal troubles were less likely. Moreover, the institutional location of most sociologists in the United States, and the somewhat uncertain status of the discipline as a social science, likely militated against more politically radical critique. Sociology, even in its European origins, has often been seen as a kind of “social engineering” (Latour 2005); and Michel Foucault ([1978] 1991) suggests that social science disciplines such as sociology operate as part of what he called “governmentality.” The politics of knowledge in which sociology finds itself is made more complex and fraught by the ideology that veritas and knowledge are other

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to power, which easily seems alive and well in sociology, even in the wake of Foucault’s (1980) critique. In this early, through-mid-twentiethcentury writing, the concept of social problems is not much elaborated. While the moral/ethical/ideological weight of the term itself remains significant, still offered as a judgment and as a professional responsibility – social problems are “undesirable conditions,” and it is the sociologist’s job to study and work to eradicate them – the theoretical insight and elaboration of the term is limited. From the social pathologists to the social disorganization and functionalist analyses throughout the 1960s and into the early 1970s, there is little to advance our understanding of what one might mean by social problems as a concept fit to direct productive empirical research. As S&K write in their detailed critique, the concept was sometimes introduced and defined in an introduction, perhaps with an eye to conforming to “scientific” standards, and then not much mentioned again. The issues here are primarily methodological, although those are hardly separable from theoretical obfuscation, such that even if there were definitions of “social disorganization” or “dysfunction” or the absence of “functional prerequisites” for the “society” or “social system” in question, they were virtually impossible to define empirically in a useful and reliable way (Spector and Kitsuse 2000, 23–39).

Two Dilemmas in Social Problems Sociology Sociologists who take up social problems as a topic of research and teaching face two questions – I will call them dilemmas – that turn on the concept itself, on who uses it and how. The first is that the word problem brings an evaluative judgment, even in the most mundane instances of its use, as in “You got a problem with that?” (e.g., Maynard 1988, 312; Schegloff 2005, 449). And the social problem requires a particular kind of

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judgment in which the weighty and, simultaneously, light-as-a-feather concept “social” complicates matters significantly (Latour 2005). There are of course uses of the word problem that bring less explicit judgment, as in a “scientific problem,” read as an “interesting puzzle to solve” or “the question before us,” although, after Thomas Kuhn’s (1970) study of science, we can see even this use as moral. Without the implicit or explicit use of some standard of evaluative judgment, the word makes little sense. A robust relativism, with some input from linguistics, tells us that nothing is inherently a “problem”; indeed, nothing is inherently anything. Without the interpretive frame, without judgmental meaning brought to bear, a problem does not exist (but see Schegloff 2005). This simple insight is, in a sense, where a “definitional approach” to social problems in sociology might be seen to have begun – in a kind of “common sense,” in and of the world. That does not mean the absence of these words should be taken as a comment on the conditions under which people live. We have plenty of evidence of “undesirable conditions” and/or practices with long histories about which there is no empirical evidence of such public claims being made. Such absence in these instances no doubt reflects “political” realities having to do with who has “voice” to speak publicly and who is heard and listened to by various others when and if they do speak. And that is not to say that oppressed, exploited, and abused people don’t, at the least, feel their lives in ways linked to these words of complaint, quite aside from what they might or might not think and say, and even write, about them. Of course, one of the contributions of sociological research, which might not frame its topic by a serious use of this concept “social problems,” has been to call attention to the study of such conditions and the contexts in which they emerge and exist (cf. Latour 2005). The choice for sociological study of “social conditions” by the analyst based on his or her own sense or feeling or certainty that the matter is a “social problem” takes

us to the second dilemma or question: who is making the judgment about said conditions and then using this term to characterize the phenomenon? Such judgments and usage made “as a sociologist” are of course the focus. While we who are sociologists surely make evaluative judgments in our lives, those judgments are not therefore sociological. The question becomes one of the sociological or theoretical “warrant” that supports such a claim. What does the theory (or ideology) being used require in terms of bringing definition and candidate empirical instances of “social problem” together? What does the theory say the world is and should be? Where, in particular, does the sociologist, “as a sociologist,” stand on this moral terrain when he or she says “social problem”? If you have come to social problems by way of studying deviance, you may hear in that question the distant echo of Howard S. Becker’s writing that launched the socalled labeling tradition. Confronting and engaging this second dilemma, Becker (1963, 9, emphasis original) boldly wrote, more than fifty years ago, that “social groups create deviance by making rules whose infraction constitutes deviance, and by applying those rules to particular people and labeling them as outsiders.” He did not write “sociologists of deviance create deviance by making judgments about the conditions, conduct, and persons before them” and then studying their own creation, although as his troublesome “secret deviant” category made clear, he perhaps was not as certain about his own claim as S&K later could be, thanks to his problematic “fourfold table” and Melvin Pollner’s (1967) critique (Becker 1963, 20). Sociologists could use deviant, then, not as a member’s term but as a “technical term,” a concept in sociology. The theory he wrote warranted this use based on what the analyst could see of what people were doing and saying. Becker’s claim about the creation of deviance should have been taken as a guide for sociologists of social problems. Both terms, full of moral judgment, insist that we be clear about who is using them, and how.

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“Whose Side Are We On?” The Normative Stance of the Social Problems Sociologist Becker’s (1967) recommendation on how to proceed “as a sociologist” in a “political situation” involving deviance, where “sides” – usually more than two – already have been marked publicly by the people involved, is instructive. Facing such pointed political lines, which is where one likely would begin in the study of social problems, Becker urges us to choose a side or set of sides and, as carefully and accurately as we who are trained in science can manage, tell an empirically grounded and analytic story from those perspectives chosen. In this, we of course inevitably entwine their stories and our sociological story. The latter foreground the question of conceptualization or theory, but not, hopefully, as themselves more important than the stories of the “side” we have chosen to tell, which is one of Latour’s (2005) chief criticisms of what he calls the “sociology of the social.” In making this choice, we are seen typically by those on the “sides” of the situation that we do not tell, or do not tell “properly” or “correctly,” as “biased” or worse. Becker insists that since we cannot tell some “complete” or truly “balanced” and distanced (aka big O “Objective”), or “God’s-eye” or Archimedean story – impossible, he says – we choose a side, make the data the best we can, and be on the lookout for the effects of our own always present sympathies, political, ethical, and moral as they will be. We offer our sociological analyses of people’s stories and see what our colleagues, the people studied, and others have to say in response. In a valuable relativist insight, Becker treats the charge of “bias” as a claim of resentment rather than as a matter of accuracy or as a methodological misstep. The sociologist charged with bias is thus said to have told the “wrong” story (“not ours”). In “choosing a side,” the choice made so often by sociologists is to tell the story of those Becker called “the underdog” –

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those who variously suffer the inequities produced by those structures that sociologists and others foreground and, we feel sure, whose stories are not, or are only rarely, told publicly. I don’t mean to say that all sociologists are either sympathetic in these ways or necessarily foreground the influence of sociocultural structures as primary. But whether pointing to the common labels for dominant structures in American society – class, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, age – as accounting mechanisms for the existence and nature of conditions of injustice and inequality or “choosing a side” in Becker’s more ambiguous terms, such choices of what to study and how to study it rely on use of an explicit norm or moral standard, even when that is not mentioned or taken as given and when the language or discourse used discourages such a reading. I am sure this is not news to you, and I suspect that you, very likely, share with me these arguably liberal or leftist moral/political sentiments. It’s using them as grounds for defining a social problem “as a sociologist” that I call into question (and see Latour 2005 on “critical sociology”). The point to consider – looking back as well as forward to what is offered today as social problems sociology – is what this move implies for the status of a distinct sociological subfield called “social problems” understood in the same way that, say, a sociology of social movements, deviance, sexuality, family, or stratification/inequality might be seen. The aim is, as offered by S&K, a sociological subfield framed by research guided by a conceptualization that is less about the personal politics of the researcher/teacher and more an attempt to discern how people collaborate with others to make something “new” and keep it going – or challenge those attempts. If whether we have a “social problem” to study is contingent on the political and ideological sympathies of the sociologist proposing the study, then, at least in terms of conceptualization, we have made little progress over the last century. This is not lost on our undergraduate students, and while the politics may fit (or not) their own sympathies,

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it often leaves them – among others – unsure about just what constitutes a sociology of social problems (if not sociology itself). This matter of the normative stance taken by the sociologist is a major source of the claim that opens Spector and Kitsuse’s (2000, 1) book: “There is no adequate definition of social problems within sociology, and there is not and never has been a sociology of social problems.”

Recent Candidates for a Sociology of Social Problems: Public Sociology, Service Sociology, Social Justice Work Despite the critique of a normative approach to theorizing social problems, it remains highly popular among sociologists and, I suspect, nonacademic analysts and commentators as well. In view of that popularity, I briefly consider three lines of work that either present themselves or can be suggested as relevant to the study of social problems by sociologists. All three take an explicitly normative stance to the definition of social problems. The three journal articles on which I rely primarily for these following comments appeared in Social Problems, the journal of the Society for the Study of Social Problems (SSSP); two of them were presented earlier as presidential addresses for that society, whose membership comprises primarily sociologists.

Public Sociology Michael Burawoy (2005a, 2005b), in a series of influential papers and talks (see Hartmann, forthcoming), has proposed what he calls “public sociology” as a way to revitalize and recenter the original “moral commitment” and drive for “moral reform” that characterized the origins of the discipline, from its European founders to its early Chicago activists (Burawoy et al. 2004, 103). In a symposium with colleagues, he stories the familiar tensions between those themes of an explicitly moral or normative soci-

ology of social problems and the rise of a more explicitly scientific version, which allowed, in the early part of the last century, US sociologists to take their place in the academy along side other, already institutionalized “social science” disciplines. While the end of “sociology’s moral prehistory” was triumphantly declared by leading figures in the early 1960s, Burawoy notes that this was indeed a premature claim, as the events and developments within and outside the profession in the ensuing decades make clear. Think the civil rights movement and the anti–Vietnam War protest, not to mention Watergate. He suggests that the attempt to banish this moral commitment as a defining quality of sociology will recurrently fail – as he says it has done – and that the liberal, leftist, and humanist values that fueled the emergence of sociology in the United States will not remain repressed for long (see Calhoun 2007a, 2007b). He proposes that such an attempt to repress explicit moral commitment in the name of science is ill conceived, limiting to the discipline, and, finally, unnecessary. What if, he asks, “we were to give it room to breathe, recognize it rather than silence it, reflect on it rather than repress it?” (Burawoy et al. 2004, 104). The benefits of this embrace, he argues, are worth whatever risks it might bring to the discipline’s future. Toward this end he offers the notion of public sociology: “a sociology that seeks to bring sociology to publics beyond the academy, promoting dialogue about issues that affect the fate of society, placing the values to which we adhere under a microscope” (Burawoy et al. 2004, 104). Burawoy’s vision of sociology is inclusive and multiple in terms of the kinds of work to be encouraged – both inside and outside his proposed category – and, as he notes, it is consistent with Mills’s vision. Burawoy sees early-twenty-first-century sociology as having four component sociologies. In addition to public sociology, he describes a policy sociology, a professional sociology, and a critical sociology. The job of public sociology is both to take the accomplishments of professional or more academic sociology to

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a range of relevant publics outside the university; and to pursue sociological research shaped specifically to address the interests and issues that these diverse publics confront – ranging across the full expanse of familiar divisions in the society. This indeed has been an aim of sociology from its beginning, although the question of who should take up the responsibility for the translation and connection between professional or academic sociological knowledge and those diverse publics is central for public sociology rather than, as often has been the case, usually left unasked, on the academic assumption that “application” is the job of others. For public sociologists thus conceived, this work of connection and translation that make it “successful” are part of the project from the outset. This explicitly widens the scope of what sociology is and what sociologists are responsible for doing compared to traditional, professional/academic practice. On the other hand, it is equally possible to argue, as these authors do, that it reaffirms what sociology, from its beginnings, was intended to be and do. Burawoy calls public sociology the “conscience” of policy sociology (cf. Hartmann, forthcoming), keeping in the foreground the question of who is served by sociological knowledge and how; a question that should be addressed before, or as directly as, questions of who pays for the research in question and who are the most important clients – always the most “powerful”? – to be served. Similarly, he calls critical sociology “the guardian of the discipline and the conscience of professional sociology” (Burawoy et al. 2004, 105). This critical sociology, he adds, has moral values at its core, is addressed to one’s academic colleagues, and “often veers toward ideology and utopia.” His notion is that professional or academic sociology, with its abstractions and technical sophistication, is “balanced” by its trio of siblings so that it remains relevant to the needs and interests of the publics beyond the academy. In Burawoy’s characterization, professional sociology typically fails to maintain a

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critical reflexivity about its own foundations and assumptions, whereas critical sociology, especially, brings these questions to the foreground. He writes: “Reflexive knowledge holds instrumental knowledge up for examination in the light of its presuppositions, often challenging those presuppositions as arbitrary, and even proposing alternative principles” (Burawoy et al. 2004, 105). Notwithstanding this picture of a dynamic balance and exchange across the tensions of these four sociologies, which is, he admits, much more complex and fraught than his model suggests, Burawoy writes that, warts and all, “the fact is that today without professional sociology there can be no other sociology” (Burawoy et al. 2004, 105). Service Sociology In his 2011 presidential address to the SSSP, A. Javier Treviño (2012, 3) champions what he calls “service sociology,” “an ethos . . . distinct from other sociologies . . . that . . . emphasizes its moral character.” In the context of “economic downturn and divided government” of today, Treviño proposes a voluntarism by all citizens, including academics, as the opportunity “to play active roles in the amelioration of social problems.” Announcing a “new era” in the United States characterized by “a culture of service,” Treviño (2012, 2) argues that various collective forms of citizen service can be effective “to ease or mitigate the predicaments and uncertainties caused by poverty, hunger, racism, sexism, epidemics, calamities, and so on.” Rehearsing US sociology’s origins as intimately involved with “applied social reform and philanthropy,” this vision of a service sociology, as with Burawoy’s argument for public sociology, is seen to revive what defined the discipline in its earliest academic forms, at both Chicago and Columbia. Treviño draws several “principles” from these origins to guide this new ethos. These include “neighborliness, fellow feeling”; “systematic coordination of services” in the name of efficiency; “communal reciprocity” among those involved; and a

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commitment to eventual “self-reliance or sustainability” (Treviño 2012, 6; emphasis in original). He names additional, more recent work that supports service sociology, found in “humanist/libertarian sociology,” “communitarianism,” and “public sociology” (Treviño 2012, 7). From these latter three traditions, Treviño says we learn the importance of developing “empathy” with those to be served; a commitment to “social justice” that grows from the sociologist’s deepened appreciation of the effects of oppression and the value of equality; how “community service and civic involvement” serve the “common good”; and our role in conveying sociological knowledge to communities to protect “against predatory business practices and government abuses” (Treviño 2012, 10). This vision of sociology and of social problems sociology in particular offers a prime example of what S&K mean by a normative stance. Treviño (2012, 10) specifically comments that “the main problem of social problems theories is [and has been] that they are deficient in rectifying troubling situations” and have done a “poor” job “of offering practical remedies; remedies that have to do with useful diagnosis and control.” Crediting theories of social problems with “splendid” work at “explaining the origins and natural histories of social problems,” but adding that they have “failed miserably” in “developing an analytical framework for meeting the urgent needs of people,” it is clear that Treviño’s (2012, 10) service sociology seeks to elaborate these aspects of the discipline, widening significantly the work and responsibilities, not to mention the training and skills needed, beyond what has been the case. Service sociology is, as he says, “a problem-solving endeavor” (Treviño 2012, 11). Social Justice Work: Purpose-Driven Scholarship Commitment to and advocacy for social justice occupies an important place in Treviño’s conception of service sociology and is easily seen as also part of Burawoy’s

public sociology, at the least. JoAnn Miller (2011), also in a presidential address to the SSSP, foregrounds this as what social problems sociology, at its best, should be. As do public sociology and service sociology, social justice work premises its definition of social problems on normative grounds that are embraced by the sociologist; and it is defined by an explicit commitment to social justice and to the amelioration and removal of conditions and practices that challenge or diminish it. Citing the particular history of the SSSP and its commitment to bring sociology to bear on the amelioration of human suffering and exploitation believed due to social and cultural structures and institutions, Miller, like Treviño, sees the job of the social problems sociologist to include activism to “do something” in the face of problems. Distinguishing “discipline focused, or dispassionate social science,” somewhat pejoratively, from social justice work, Miller (2011, 3) calls the latter “problem driven scholarship. That is, the social problem addressed by the scholarly work is the answer to the question ‘why do it?’” She allows that in this work, understanding is of course necessary, but that it is where this work begins. Social justice scholarship is seen in “whatever advocacy or activist actions are necessary to provoke change . . . [It] is action focused” (Miller 2011, 3). For Miller (2011, 4), the motivation of the social justice sociologist is important; “professional promotion or publication in an academic discipline’s ‘top’ journal” as a prime motivator of one’s work is not itself valued. Miller’s examples of what she considers social justice sociology virtually all – and more explicitly so than Treviño’s illustrations of his service sociology – story sociologists doing what might be called academic or professional research on contentious matters involving a range of instances of human suffering, inequality, and injustice. They then take various steps to speak or write that relevant knowledge to various audiences or publics positioned to help improve, reduce, or erase these circumstances and the suffering they bring. As with Burawoy’s public

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sociology and, to a lesser extent, with Treviño’s service sociology, we here can see the sociologist as the expert, choosing to bring that expertise to bear in a variety of institutional and community arenas. Beyond writing and speaking through various media and in person to various groups or publics, one example of social justice work that Miller (2011, 3) foregrounds is the work of sociologist Michael Radelet, whom she calls a “scholar-activistadvocate.” Radelet has brought his voluminous research – which, surely, has been peer-reviewed and thoroughly vetted in the most “traditional” academic ways – to bear as grounds for the critique of capital punishment in the United States. Miller (2011, 3) reports that he “has testified in seventyfive death penalty trials and before U.S. House and Senate committees” and has “documented 350 cases of innocent persons who were convicted of first-degree murder.” Surely, one must see this as a prime example of how academic or professional sociology can be and has been turned successfully toward making the world a better place. I applaud it unequivocally.

But Whither Social Problems as a Concept? These examples of recent work that might be seen as social problems sociology are of course too limited to represent adequately the many varieties of research and writing that use a normative commitment as grounds for defining conditions as problems and thus warranting study and/or intervention/solution. Much could be written, for instance, about the way that Marxism (see Manza and McCarthy 2011) and feminism (Clough 1994; Collins 1991) along with theory and research on race and ethnicity (Collins 2007; Winant 2007) have made important contributions to this kind of analysis in sociology. As is the case with earlier parallel work, much of the most consequential and insightful writing in the history of the discipline is found here. But again, the contributions made, whatever considerable

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merits they offer, have arguably added little to the conceptualization of social problems as a “technical term” in sociology. Juxtaposed to the work of S&K and the elaborations that Ibarra and Adorjan detail, the three lines, too briefly described above, do not strike me as instructive about how to think theoretically about social problems. I am not sure the authors cited would themselves claim that they are writing primarily about social problems as a sociological concept. But given the history of social problems in sociology, the perspectives they suggest are familiar as that. In the remainder of this chapter I aim to make a case for the singular contribution S&K make to the task of taking social problems seriously as something more than sociologists’ moral, ethical, and ideological/political judgments about undesirable conditions. I hope this juxtaposition of arguments from their work and the recent candidate examples of what might pass for social problems sociology are provocative of a continued conversation about the ways we sociologists theorize this topic. The elements of S&K’s contribution, in my view, remain viable and productive resources for subsequent theory and research focused specifically and intentionally on this concept. If we can take it as an index of relevance, their book, first published in 1977, has been reprinted twice, most recently in 2000, and has been continuously in print for almost forty years.

The Mostly Radical Claims of a Seriously Conceptual Approach to the Study of Social Problems S&K saw their proposal for a theory of social problems as “radical.” As a socialscientific argument, of course, it was hardly that. They were trying to bring theoretical and methodological order and consistency to the sociological study of social problems, where, in their view, these had been absent from the start; a modicum of disciplinary respectability for this subfield was their aim. “We have argued for the importance

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of a theoretically defensible, methodologically specifiable, and empirically researchable definition of social problems” (Spector and Kitsuse 2000, 27). Eschewing a “grand theory” of social problems as part of an encompassing systems or societal model and a normative stance, they focused much more narrowly. Instead of social problems as “undesirable conditions” defined as such by the sociologist, the “social causes” of which are then the sociologist’s responsibility to determine, Spector and Kitsuse (2000, 75, emphasis original) insisted that it is members’ collective “definitional activities” of claimsmaking and responding “with respect to some putative conditions” that constitute the appropriate subject matter of social problems theory. This reflects their intellectual preference (and yes, that, too, is normative) for a more dynamic, interactional view that takes language and discourse seriously, with an unmistakable ethnomethodological flavor of seeing the social as built constantly in situ and from local resources (with more than a little skepticism for the “givenness” of “shared values”; and see Maynard 1988; Gubrium and Holstein 2012; Lynch 2008; Pollner 2012; Zimmerman 2005). Sociologists here are not in the position of being the moral “conscience” of, or arbiters for, “society” or various categories of people; or acting as the stewards of its moral terrain (a responsibility that had been taken up by the functionalists Merton and Nesbit and others; also by those offering normative definitions from the opposite political pole, such as Mills; much still apparent; see Burawoy’s definition of public sociology, above). Foregrounding members’ definitions as central to what social problems are was not a new idea when S&K proposed it. Clifford Case, as early as 1924, made it an essential element of his definition and it is reiterated in the work of Willard Waller (1936), Richard Fuller and Richard Myers (1941), and others across the following decades (Spector and Kitsuse 2000, 40–58). What was arguably radical, and a direct challenge to conventional thinking in social problems work is their insistence that such

definitions are both the necessary and sufficient grounds for the existence of a “social problem” as a technical term in sociology. Their theoretical argument insisted that these seemingly essential “undesirable conditions” were not admissible in their definitional analysis except as referenced in those member claims (see Ibarra and Kitsuse 1993). The important question for them was not the validity of those claims but rather their viability. This is signaled by their provocative use of the adjective “putative,” which, in effect, shifts these “conditions” as actual, material phenomena out of the sociologist’s legitimate consideration. If member definitions as “grievances” are the essence of the concept social problems, they said, then attention to so-called conditions separate from those member definitions could only deflect theoretical and research attention from what social problems are. When that happens, they had seen, members’ definitions typically are then treated as “reactions to threats” caused by these conditions, and “The independent significance of the definitional process fades from sight” (Spector and Kitsuse 2000, 45). In this, their theory disallows such conditions as causes of member definitions, a standard sociological as well as commonsense generalization but one they saw as empirically flawed. Why people make claims, not unlike the question of why people “break rules” in the earlier research on deviance, is discouraged on similar grounds. Instead, the analyst seeks to describe and trace the emergence, organization, and movement of such claimsmaking or definitional activity as it occurs and/or in various records of that occurrence (Spector and Kitsuse 2000, 83). Examples of such claims, a commonsense, members’ category, are: “demanding services, filling out forms, lodging complaints, filing lawsuits, calling press conferences, writing letters of protest, passing resolutions, publishing exposés, placing ads in newspapers, supporting or opposing some governmental practice or policy, setting up picket lines or boycotts” (Spector and Kitsuse 2000, 78– 79). But the prime evidence of such claims’

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existence is to be found in the interactional and local join of this claiming and responding. A claim without response dies at its end; it has no viability or “life.” In Latour’s (1987, 2005) terms, there is nothing then to “follow.” This is ever an empirical question, just as is the vexed matter, in past social problems work, of “how many” people making claims is required to constitute a social problem for sociological analysis (Spector and Kitsuse 2000, 39). That question could be answered only in terms of the claims’ viability and not what Spector and Kitsuse called “the numbers game.” To teach an undergraduate course in social problems is to be reminded how salient this game remains in the common sense. And in the face of a long disciplinary insistence that “values” are of prime causal importance in social problems analysis, S&K offer, perhaps with a certain sly irony, Mills’s (1940) argument in his “Situated Actions and Vocabularies of Motive.” Against the “subjective” understanding of values as internal states produced through socialization that then can be used by the analyst to explain behavior – in a circular or tautological way – in what Latour (2005, 3–5) calls “using the social to explain the social,” Mills writes a sociological view of motives, and Kitsuse and Spector extend that to include values. They argue that both terms are linguistic/discursive and local (situational) resources people use to give accounts of their own and others’ past as well as anticipated conduct (cf. Hewitt and Hall 1973). The question then becomes how such “vocabularies of motives” and values are used by members to morally ground and/or challenge claims and actions in particular instances of definitional activity. Faced with another opportunity to take a more “reasonable” or compromise position on the familiar question of (self) “interests” or (altruistic) “values” as causes of claimsmaking, the authors say, again, that is a methodological conundrum and so refuse to engage it. They ask: “Given that most social problems express moral positions, how would the sociologist separate those who are sincere, thus [ostensibly] driven by value posi-

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tions, from those who are cynically manipulating values to pursue their own material interests?” (Spector and Kitsuse 2000, 89). The attribution of motives and values to social problems participants, is, surely, something those participants themselves do. The sociologist/analyst who wishes not to become a participant or themselves a topic of study does not engage in such attribution. Rather, that attribution is part of what they study. “Values are the explanations people give in support of their claims, complaints, or demands” (Spector and Kitsuse 2000, 92). In a move that decenters any expert discourse of “real motives” and “real values,” we have instead “real” claims and definitions made; actually observable phenomena. “Morality is a way of talking” they insist (Spector and Kitsuse 2000, 95). Finally, when they wrote “putative conditions” in reference to what members seem to be claiming about (Spector and Kitsuse 2000, 75), they may as well have written “putative reality,” given the centrality of this notion to and its place in conventional sociological analysis. After all, “social conditions” are what sociological expertise takes as its topic. If the givenness and solidity of such conditions can be called into question with this “putative,” what are the implications for those who study them as that? The definitional approach . . . pursued to its logical conclusion, requires that the sociologist, as a participant in the politics of defining social problems, be denied the special status of one who stands outside the process as objective observer or scientist. Whether the sociologist will be treated as a scientist by other participants in the process and accorded the special status of a disinterested and unbiased expert is a problematic, empirical question. (Spector and Kitsuse 2000, 70, emphasis original)

While they write here specifically about the sociologist “as a participant in the politics of defining social problems” – that is, not their definitional sociologist of social problems – their serious use of the word putative was surely consequential.

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In that move, scientific claims by the participant-sociologist about the “undesirable conditions” occupy the same status as those of nonscientists, nonexpert claimants. How others respond to those claims and the difference the claims thus make in the definitional process constitutes a key part of their data. Miller’s (2011) reference to Radelet’s research and his legal testimony about the death penalty, for instance, seem to demonstrate an instance where such claims by a sociologist have had notable viability. S&K would not address the validity of Radelet’s claims, which is not to say they would be skeptical of their empirical soundness. Given what Miller writes about them, it appears that other participants in that arena arguably may have done so, but S&K would direct us to any evidence of that in the relevant definitional data rather than taking it up as their own analytic task. But the corrosive or productive effects of their “putative” – depending on one’s intellectual politics – cannot be contained within the boundaries of their own argument about social problems, especially given their use of the adjective “definitional” to describe the activity in question. Are they themselves not involved in a definitional process in championing their “social problems theory” within the discipline? Do they themselves not propose their sociologist of social problems as an “objective observer”? Does this sociologist not make claims offered not as “putative” but as empirically sound and methodologically defensible? Do they themselves not embrace scientific realism in their focus on “claims making and responding activities”? All of these questions are of course implied in the Woolgar and Pawluch (1985) critique of “ontological gerrymandering” or a selective relativism in service of S&K’s own argument. Woolgar and Pawluch made the move that deconstruction itself always makes and always also fears: pointing out the “silences” in a text or argument that allow it to apparently cohere and without which it begins to come apart, calling attention to what is backgrounded and/or assumed, and on which the erected scaffolding rests.

But in the late 1970s it still was some time before the impact of “post” thinking on notions of the “real” and “objective” would be acknowledged – never mind taken up – in the US academy and in the social sciences in particular. Kitsuse and Spector refused to be “reasonable” on this point (cf. Best 1993), as they themselves note. This is not because they sought to bring French continental philosophy to American sociology. Malcolm Spector would joke that he would consider any critique of their definitional argument “as long as I don’t have to read Derrida!” Their move of no compromise opened the door – perhaps from an unlikely place – to an even larger disciplinary heresy: a thoroughgoing deconstructive reflexivity brought to bear on questions of how knowledge is secured and, in this particular case, of the status of the sociologist’s scientific knowledge claims about those “undesirable conditions” thought essential to the conceptualization of social problems. For many colleagues, this was a step too far “inside” the very process being studied, forsaking the protection or privilege that scientific realism provides (until it doesn’t). A little reflexivity can be a “dangerous” thing. It is heartening to see that Burawoy (Buroway et al. 2004, 105) appreciates the importance of this reflexivity, coming, in his view, primarily from what he calls “critical sociology,” for keeping our analytic attention on the very practices of knowing. By contrast, I see this as precisely what S&K’s view of “definitional activities” and “putative conditions” invites, offered not from “critical sociology” but from a quite “academic” or “professional” point of view. Latour (2005) is more harsh, suggesting that critical sociology would be perhaps the least likely sociology to turn that reflexivity on itself. I don’t suggest that S&K were interested in taking their argument beyond the building of an empirically useful sociological theory of social problems, at least as far as I know. The many studies that drew directly on their work – a number of which were published in the journal Social

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Problems from the late 1970s into the 1990s and continuing, as well as in a number of research monographs – testify to the success of that aim, echoing the research productivity that followed Becker’s arguments for deviance. At the same time, their critique of the arguments and research practices of fellow social problems sociologists, from the pathologists forward to the functionalists and on to those “reasonable” valueconflict writers who allowed “objective conditions” to go along with “subjective definitions” as comprising social problems, could hardly be stopped, once begun. As science studies scholars Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar ([1979] 1986) were then pointing out, such reflexivity is a bit like the proverbial “genie” freed from the confines of its bottle into the world: the slope is indeed very slippery and, to mix metaphors farther, it’s turtles all the way down. When S&K first wrote, US sociology was only becoming aware of the writing of the French poststructuralists and their critique of the politics of knowledge; and of the Edinburgh School in the sociology of science, which went far beyond the reflexive limits of a Manheimian sociology of knowledge. Foucault’s works were gradually beginning to be taken up by a few US sociologists; surely, those in the discipline who had read and considered the relevance of Jacques Derrida’s writing on deconstruction for the practice of sociology were even fewer. Perhaps, like analytic philosophers, it took us sociologists a while to appreciate that the constitutive coin of our professional realm is in fact writing and discourse, in use. Beyond the emerging political critique of dominant canonical “Knowledge” and an awareness of the voices that are thus simultaneously and inevitably silenced by it, a critique of scientific knowledge itself, which is to say any and all knowledge, was emerging in the interdisciplinary field of science studies (Lynch 2005). This critical, reflexive move also had been central to a “moment of crisis” or a “crisis of representation” in 1980s cultural anthropology, foregrounded in George Stocking’s (1983) Observers Observed: Essays

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on Ethnographic Fieldwork and in James Clifford and Steven Marcus’s (1986) disciplineshifting Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (and see Starn 2015). The provocative move, when the analyst senses that she or he is part of what is being studied, is to turn one’s own critical lens on one’s own practices, arguments, sympathies, and blindnesses for how they inflect the results of the study (cf. Spector and Kitsuse 2000, 69) – just as Burawoy’s allusion to “reflexive knowledge,” from whatever source, suggests. That is, the sociologist includes oneself in the analysis, subjecting themselves to the very theory they are using to study “members.” But, of course, the definitional sociologist of social problems is a “member” too, apparent in a shift of frame that their incipient science studies analysis invites (cf. Schneider 1993). In turning their definitional and deconstructive attention on the work of earlier and contemporary colleagues, moving them into the category of members whose claims and related activities become topic, they would not be surprised that their own arguments would become so for that same analytic resource, even if they did not take that step (cf. Pollner 1987, 2012). As Becker, they, and Latour and Woolgar note, how such work is read and received, and whether it remains viable, is in its readers’/hearers’ hands.

Social Problems, Science Studies, Sociology S&K succeeded in the challenge they set for themselves: to create a viable program for sound social-scientific research on social problems. Whatever the criticisms of their argument, it shifted not only research on social problems in sociology but university teaching as well, at least in the United States. Although S&K would not have proposed it, their model for understanding and studying social problems and public controversy is arguably pertinent to public sociology’s aims of taking expertise to publics and suggesting how they might translate theory

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and research into strategies of action on their own behalf. I suggest, hypothetically, to my undergraduate social problems students that they could become lay consultants to groups, and in political actions in which they are or might become involved, offering S&K’s insights and suggestions on strategies for shaping the language of claims; of reviewing strategies for lodging claims; of anticipating responses thereto; and of reviewing and selecting vocabularies of motives and values that might be used on various “sides” of the controversies in which they become involved; and more (cf. Adorjan 2013). That, surely, would be what Miller calls “action focused” and what Treviño marks as “problem-solving” participation. While Spector may, and Kitsuse may have smile/d at the idea of the sociologist-expert providing insight and teaching to activist “members” on “how to make trouble,” they would not smile at the sociologist themselves becoming involved in that troublemaking. That is not because they themselves didn’t like to make trouble, but rather because of the complications it introduces for what they, “as sociologists,” could see and say about what was going on around them. Beyond the success of their social problem theory, S&K’s argument is a sort of incipient “science studies” that offers a revitalizing link both back to the idea of “construction” and forward toward a similarly enlivened sociology. I’ve noted how their use of the word putative invites us to problematize any and all knowledge claims, theirs included; and how, similarly, their definition of fellow sociologists as “participants” begs the question of S&K’s own participation in another “game.” We thus suddenly find ourselves interested in how their own theory or argument is being made, just as they pointed to the parallel practice of those they studied. Instead of social problems, per se, we are drawn to think about the work of both knowing and making, constructing, worlds. This move has perhaps been made easier for me by my interest in continental phi-

losophy, ethnomethodology, and the work of science studies scholars Bruno Latour, a sociologist, and Donna Haraway, trained in biology. My own past writing on “social construction,” early on, with Peter Conrad on the medicalization of deviance (see Schneider 2015) and from my collaboration with Kitsuse and Spector (Schneider and Kitsuse 1984; Schneider 1985, 2008, 2009), is of course relevant. While I here have mostly avoided the term “social construction,” Latour’s and Haraway’s criticisms of it help me draw this line from S&K to science studies and on toward Latour’s view of a respecified sociology modeled loosely on science studies (Latour 2003, 2005, 88–93; Latour and Woolgar 1986, 281; Haraway 1997, 2000; and see Schneider 2005, 155–56). Their critique reminds us of certain key insights the word “construction” brings forth and why it still repays attention. Two claims stand out: first, Latour’s “the more constructed, the more real”; and second, both he and Haraway insist that the adjective “social” does not begin to name the range of agencies doing “constructing” in the worlds we typically study. The word “construction” is not the problem (cf. Hacking 1999); again, it is “social” that obfuscates. Both Latour and Haraway acknowledge how “social construction” helped us step back to see how ideology can create understandings of “structures” and practices as “natural” and inevitable when they are not (thank you Karl Marx and Michel Foucault); and that such understandings, with a good deal of work, may be deconstructed and reconstructed to serve other interests, although neither would be likely to use the word “deconstruction.” And they do not exclude their own arguments from this scrutiny, underscoring that what they write and claim is also constructed (how could it not be?). But because both saw science from the inside out, so to speak – more as natural scientists in practice might – this “constructed” never was, for them, a word that weakened science and its claims. They never thought, as many critics as well as advocates claimed, that to say “socially constructed”

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meant “not solid” or, using Durkheim’s word, not “things.” Who better than scientists might be expected to know what that work of making facts involves and what it yields? Latour (1987) saw from the start that the more carefully and well constructed an “object,” the stronger it is; more able to withstand challenge, precisely because of the sheer number of entities “enrolled” behind or below or in making the claims and definitions in question – both material and symbolic – and the “work” done by those participants/actants to sustain that solidity. Haraway (1994, 1997, 33–34), avoiding Latour’s flavor of masculinist agonism, shapes a parallel but feminist argument of the collective as that on/in which such constructed claims are made and remain viable (or not). The science studies insight here is unmistakable: solid “knowledge” is always made so by the collective of entities, human and beyond, that/who offer and sustain it – give it viability (cf. Harding 1992 on “strong objectivity”). The “best” conventional science, and knowledge more broadly, is, arguably, thus the most constructed. The notion that knowledge, truth, facts exist in some “universal” or “objective” sense, separated from the practical and material worlds that carry and sustain them is, for them, an ideology that is both mystifying and limiting. As Latour (2005, 91) suggests, the opposite of relativism is “absolutism” and the opposite of constructed is “fundamentalism.” He cautions, be careful what you destroy with your critique (Latour 1999, 2004). Taking these insights to S&K’s argument allows us to see the conditions for its continuation, alteration, elaboration and extension toward not only social problems as they saw them but to sociology itself. The second productive claim, marked by Latour’s term “actant” (rather than actor); and by Haraway’s long-used “materialsemiotic entity,” notes the ever entwined and inseparable symbolic and material symbiosis of us and our subject matter. They insist that to write of “social” construction inflates human exceptionalism, assigning to humans capacities that more accurately belong to other nonhuman, including

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inanimate entities that/who collaborate with humans – wittingly and not, on both “sides” – to bring the worlds in question reiteratively into being. The insight that there are many more “agents” with whom/which we humans collaborate in making worlds and lives, no doubt comes from their deep appreciation of Alfred North Whitehead’s (1978) philosophy, which insists that we create concepts that allow us to see more rather than less of the worlds before us (Stengers 2011). The importance of matter, materiality, and objects for a more thorough study of culturesociety has been taken up recently in a subgenre of humanities and social science writing variously labeled “new materialism,” in some cases with a feminist theme, and “object-oriented studies” (on the first, see Alaimo and Hekman 2008; Coole and Frost 2010; and on the second, see Behar 2016; Bennett 2010; Bryant 2011; Bryant et al. 2011; Clough 2007; Harman 2002; Shaviro 2009, 2014). Taking these ideas into S&K’s definitional theory of social problems would broaden it beyond the “claims” and related “activities” that language shapes, which is where they leave their argument. “Claimsmaking and responding activities” would have to become more inclusive of nonhuman agencies surely present in the controversies that sociologists of social problems study. And meaning would be decentered here as well, allowing us to appreciate this broader range of what is doing “constructing” and how that is and might be so – allowing a speculative dimension, a metaphysics, back into science practice. Latour’s (2005) critique of conventional sociology and the very concept of the social as a “special kind of stuff” takes us to his preferred focus on following members/actants in their/our making of connections and associations, in which the hard and transformative work that makes something new, again and again, goes on (cf. Shaviro 2009). The job of the sociologist is not to create an overlay of theory and concepts that secures order, but, rather, to follow agents as they/we endlessly do the work of making it (Latour 2005, 184). Thinking social problems analysis in these ways takes

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a page from S&K but writes over it toward a more complex understanding of the always contingent and dynamic practices of knowing anything at all in and about a world that itself seems to be endlessly contingent and dynamic, never quite finished; never quite fitting together without remainder; always multiple; being endlessly put together and taken apart, in which we humans, along with many others, participate.

Glossary Claimsmaking A category of definitional activities typically involving the lodging of grievances and complaints or demands; can be used as synonymous to definitional activities. Definitional activities In reference to the interactionally grounded use of language by humans to create meaning in culturesociety. Member A term from ethnomethodology used to mark those whose practices of ordering and making the social are the subject of study. More loosely, those whose activities are being observed and as a general reference to those the sociologist studies. Normative Most inclusively, the use of any evaluative standard by humans to mark and organize their mundane lives (including the lives of scientists). More specifically, here, the tradition in social problems sociology of using one’s own moral and political/ideological preferences, often masked as theory, as grounds for defining objective conditions as undesirable. Objective conditions In conventional social problems sociology, the undesirable, real world, material circumstances thought to be the cause and essence of social problems. This term itself is typically not problematized and trades on an untheorized realist philosophy. Reflexivity Beyond “reflective,” the sustained practice of making one’s own meaning making and knowledgeproducing activities the topic of critical

analysis and review, even as they are being pursued. Viability As distinct from validity, the quality of being kept “alive,” sustained; ongoing, as determined by observation (based in realist philosophy).

References Adorjan, Michael C. 2013. Igniting constructionist imaginations: Social constructionism’s absence and potential contribution to public sociology. The American Sociologist 44:1–22. Alaimo, Stracy, and Susan Hekman, eds. 2008. Material Feminisms. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Becker, Howard S. 1963. Outsiders. New York: Free Press. 1967. Whose side are we on? Social Problems 14:239–47. Behar, Katherine, ed. 2016. Object-Oriented Feminism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Best, Joel. 1993. But seriously folks: The limitations of the strict constructionist interpretation of social problems. In Reconsidering Social Constructionism: Debates in Social Problems Theory, edited by James A. Holstein and Jaber F. Gubrium, 129–47. New York: Aldine De Gruyter. Bryant, Levi R. 2011. The Democracy of Objects. Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press. Bryant, Levi, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman, eds. 2011. The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism. Melbourne: re.press. Burawoy, Michael, William Gamson, Charlotte Ryan, Stephen Pfohl, Diane Vaughn, Charles Derber, and Juliet Schor. 2004. Public Sociologies: A symposium from Boston College. Social Problems 51:103–30. 2005a. For public sociology. American Sociological Review 70:4–28. 2005b. The return of the repressed: Recovering the public face of U.S. sociology, one hundred years on. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences 600:68–85.

challenges of conceptualizing social problems Calhoun, Craig J., ed. 2007a. Sociology in America: A History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2007b. Sociology in America: An introduction. In Sociology in America: A History, edited by Craig J. Calhoun, 1–38. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Case, Clarence. 1924. What is a social problem? Journal of Applied Sociology 8:268–73. Clifford, James, and Steven Marcus, eds. 1986. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press. Clough, Patricia Ticineto. 1994. Feminist Thought: Desire, Power, and Academic Discourse. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. 2007. Introduction. In The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social, edited by Patricia Ticineto Clough, 1–33. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Collins, Patricia Hill. 1991. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. New York: Routledge. 2007. Pushing the boundaries or business as usual? Race, class, and gender studies and sociological inquiry. In Sociology in America: A History, edited by Craig J. Calhoun, 572–604. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Coole, Diana, and Samantha Frost. 2010. New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Foucault, Michel. 1980. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977. Edited by Colin Gordon. New York: Pantheon. (1978) 1991. Governmentality. In The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, edited by G. Burchell, C. Gordon, and P. Miller, 87–104. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Fuller, Richard, and Richard Myers. 1941. Some aspects of a theory of social problems. American Sociological Review 6: 24–32. Gubrium, Jaber F., and James A. Holstein. 2012. Don’t argue with the members. The American Sociologist 43:85–98. Hacking, Ian. 1999. The Social Construction of What? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Haraway, Donna J. 1994. A game of cat’s cradle: Science studies, feminist studies, cul-

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tural studies. Configurations: A Journal of Literature and Science 1:59–71. 1997. Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium. C _Meets_OncomouseTM . New FemaleMan  York: Routledge. 2000. How Like a Leaf: An Interview with Thyrza Nichols Goodeve. New York: Routledge. Harding, Sandra. 1992. Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? Thinking from Women’s Lives. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Harman, Graham. 2002. Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects. Chicago: Open Court. Hartmann, Douglas. Forthcoming. Rethinking sociology and its publics: The next generation. The Sociological Quarterly. Hewitt, John M., and Peter Hall. 1973. Social problems, problematic situations, and quasi-theories. American Sociological Review 38:367–75. Holstein, James A., and Jaber F. Gubrium, eds. 2008. Handbook of Constructionist Research. New York: Guilford Press. Holstein, James A., and Gale Miller, eds. 1993. Reconsidering Social Constructionism: Debates in Social Problems Theory. New York: Aldine De Gruyter. Ibarra, Peter R. 2008. Strict and contextual constructionism in the sociology of deviance and social problems. In Handbook of Constructionist Research, edited by James A. Holstein and Jaber F. Gubrium, 355–69. New York: Guilford Press. Ibarra, Peter R., and John I. Kitsuse. 1993. Vernacular constituents of moral discourse: An interactionist proposal for the study of social problems. In Reconsidering Social Constructionism: Debates in Social Problems Theory, edited by James A. Holstein and Gale Miller, 25–58. New York: Aldine De Gruyter. Kuhn, Thomas S. 1970. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Latour, Bruno. 1987. Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1999. Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 2003. The promises of constructivism. In Chasing Technoscience: Matrix for

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Materiality, edited by Don Ihde and E. Selinger, 27–46. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 2004. Why has critique run out of steam? From matters of fact to matters of concern. Critical Inquiry 30:225–48. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. New York: Oxford University Press. Latour, Bruno, and Steve Woolgar. (1979) 1986. Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Lynch, Michael. 2005. Social studies of science. In Encyclopedia of Social Theory, edited by George Ritzer, 760–64. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. 2008. Ethnomethodology as a provocation to constructionism. In Handbook of Constructionist Research, edited by James A. Holstein and Jaber F. Gubrium, 715–32. New York: Guilford Press. Manza, Jeff, and Michael A. McCarthy. 2011. The neo-Marxist legacy in American sociology. Annual Review of Sociology 37:155–83. Maynard, Douglas W. 1988. Language, interaction, and social problems. Social Problems 35:311–34. Merton, Robert K., and Robert Nisbet, eds. 1971. Contemporary Social Problems. New York: Harcourt. Miller, JoAnn. 2011. Social justice work: Purposedriven social science. Social Problems 58: 1–20. Mills, C. Wright. 1940. Situated actions and vocabularies of motive. American Sociological Review 5:904–13. 1943. The professional ideology of social pathologists. American Journal of Sociology 49:165–80. 1959. The Sociological Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press. Pollner, Melvin. 1967. Sociological and commonsense models of the labeling process. In Ethnomethodology, edited by Ralph Turner, 27– 40. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin. 1987. Mundane Reason: Reality in Everyday and Sociological Discourse. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2012. The end(s) of ethnomethodology. The American Sociologist 43:7–20. Schegloff, Emanuel. 2005. On complainability. Social Problems 52:449–76.

Schneider, Joseph. 1985. Social problems theory: The constructionist view. Annual Review of Sociology 11:209–29. 1993. “Members only”: Reading the constructionist text. In Reconsidering Social Constructionism: Debates in Social Problems Theory, edited by James A. Holstein and Gale Miller, 103–16. New York: Aldine De Gruyter. 2005. Donna Haraway: Live Theory. London: Continuum. 2008. Saving social construction: Contributions from cultural studies. In Handbook of Constructionist Research, edited by James A. Holstein and Jaber F. Gubrium, 733–52. New York: Guilford Press. 2009. Off the sidelines and onto the court! Figuring a modestly radical subject of knowledge in the work of John I. Kitsuse. The American Sociologist 40:38–50. 2015. The medicalization of deviance: From badness to sickness. In Handbook on Sociology of Deviance, edited by Erich Goode, 137– 54. New York: Wiley. Schneider, Joseph, and John I. Kitsuse, eds. 1984. Advances in the Sociology of Social Problems. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Shaviro, Steven. 2009. Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Aesthetics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 2014. The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Spector, Malcolm, and John I. Kitsuse. (1977) 2000. Constructing Social Problems. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Press. Starn, Orin, ed. 2015. Writing Culture and the Life of Anthropology. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Stengers, Isabelle. 2011. Thinking with Whitehead: A Free and Wild Creation of Concepts. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Stocking, George, ed. 1983. Observers Observed: Essays on Ethnographic Fieldwork. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Treviño, A. Javier. 2012. The challenge of service sociology. Social Problems 59:2–20. Waller, Willard. 1936. Social problems and the mores. American Sociological Review 1:922– 34. Whitehead, Alfred North. (1929) 1978. Process and Reality. Corrected Edition, edited by

challenges of conceptualizing social problems David R. Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne. New York: The Free Press. Winant, Howard. 2007. The dark side of the force: One hundred years of the sociology of race. In Sociology in America: A History, edited by Craig J. Calhoun, 535–71. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Woolgar, Steve, and Dorothy Pawluch. 1985. Ontological gerrymandering: The anatomy of social problems explanations. Social Problems 32:214–27. Zimmerman, Don H. 2005. Introduction: Conversation analysis and social problems. Social Problems 52:445–48.

CHAPTER 2

Research Methods∗ Amir Marvasti

Abstract I begin this chapter with an overview of research methodology as an essential part of investigating and creating knowledge about social problems. I argue that research methods emerge from and support different theoretical traditions in social problems. Quantitative and qualitative methods are then introduced and compared in the context of their shared emphasis on empirical research. I then describe three major data collection methods used in the social sciences: survey interviews, in-depth interviews, and ethnography. Each method is discussed in terms of its conceptual framework and its approach to data collection and analysis.

Introduction Though it may seem tedious, describing and understanding the methodical process by which researchers go about collecting data is a foundational part of any empirical science. The methods section of a research manuscript essentially answers the question “Why should I believe this?” (James A. Holstein, pers. comm., 2015), and it does so by describing the procedures and rationale used for collecting the empirical data under analysis. Additionally, informing readers about the type of methods used in the study enables them to evaluate and ∗

Portions of this chapter were adapted from Qualitative Research in Sociology (Marvasti 2004).

interpret the findings in a particular context. For example, ethnographic studies typically underline social interaction in a specific setting. By comparison, surveys use large samples to draw broad generalizations. In fact, it is impossible to fully appreciate the aims of a study without understanding its methodological footing. Even in the world of fiction, books are marketed as belonging to specific genres such as “novel” or “poetry.” These labels are used to guide readers’ interpretation of the text, as well as the writers’ organization of the material (Freedman and Medway 1994). In the social sciences, research methods serve a similar purpose. On the one hand, for researchers, adopting a certain method directs what type of data are to be collected and how. Conversely, 23

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for readers, the description of the methods employed provides a framework for reading and judging the quality of the text. Of course, there are others ways in which research methods are linked with the production of disciplinary knowledge. Most importantly, there is a reflexive relationship between methods and theory. Theoretical assumptions both frame the questions we ask about social problems and the way we go about answering the said questions methodically and convincingly. To put it another way, research methods follow social theories and social theories require methodical research to support them – the two should not be thought of as distinct realms of knowledge production. The many methods used in the study of social problems can be divided into two broad paradigms: quantitative and qualitative. As the names suggest, the former quantifies the subject matter while the latter is focused on its experiential qualities. Quantitative studies provide numerical representations of a given social problem. For example, they could estimate the number of homeless persons in a region or gage changes in public sympathy toward the homeless (Bunis et al. 1996). Qualitative methods, by comparison, are more likely to observe the experiences of a particular group with social problems in a given context and over time. With the example of homelessness, a qualitative study could illustrate the daily survival strategies of the homeless (Dordick 1998) and the experiential meaning of being homeless for individuals and the organizations that serve them (Marvasti 2003). For quantitative purposes, measurements must be consistent (reliable) and accurate (valid). To ensure reliability, in particular, it is crucial to administer the measurement instrument fairly consistently across individual respondents. In the same way, the researcher must maintain the role of a neutral or detached professional who simply administers the measurement instrument. This allows quantitative researchers to capture variations across individuals without the responses being biased or corrupted by

changes in the setting or the administration of the questions. As a whole, quantitative research focuses on the measurable or objective dimensions of the topic under analysis. By comparison, for qualitative purposes, the subjective and contextual qualities are brought to the forefront, rather than simply controlled for the purpose of measurement. For example, the setting (where the data are collected), rather than being a source of bias, is viewed as constructive of the topic under analysis. The qualitative data collection (which could take many forms as discussed later in this chapter) is always contextual. Furthermore, the observers themselves could become part of the context, and by extension, part of the data. The “researcher-respondent duality” (Gubrium and Holstein 2002), commonly associated with survey interviews, is far less rigid in qualitative designs so that researchers’ own interests and experiences are added to the mix of data. The researcher-respondent role duality could be dissolved to the point of explicit collaboration between the researcher and respondent (Lassiter 2005). In sum, qualitative research designs tend to be more flexible and sensitive to the personalized or subjective ways people make sense of their surroundings and experiences. Returning to the example of homelessness, for quantitative purposes the researcher might approach people who are “visibly homeless” and ask a series of very structured questions such as: “How long have you been homeless?” A qualitative researcher, in contrast is more likely to collect observations in a particular setting and ask: “How did you become homeless?” Notice that in first instance, a numerical value (e.g., five years) would suffice for the answer whereas the second question solicits a more in-depth account of the story or the process of becoming homeless over time. One measures the quantity of experience and the other describes its quality. On a more theoretical level, the quantitative-qualitative divide corresponds with the constructionist-positivistic

research methods

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Table 2.1. Comparison of Qualitative and Quantitative Methods Positivistic/quantitative

Constructionist/qualitative

Common themes

Modeling social research after natural sciences Search for universal laws that explain the causes of human behavior Reporting findings using a standardized and neutral language

How reality is constructed

Importance of empirical data

Search for situational variations that shape reality

Production of useful knowledge

Concerned about the ideological and practical consequences of research

Methodically recording and reporting the way the research is carried out

Source: Adapted from Marvasti (2004, 8).

separation in social problems (see Chapter 16 in this volume). Table 2.1 summarizes the key points of qualitative and qualitative methods along with their corresponding analytical frameworks. The boundary between quantitative and qualitative research needs not be unduly rigid. There are many points of commonality between the two, as indicated in Table 2.1. For the most part, both models adhere to the standard of empirical evidence – though their views of what constitutes “evidence” might vary (see Denzin 2008). Similarly, both, whether implicitly or explicitly, allow for collaboration or joint construction of meaning. While this might be more evident in qualitative studies, it is equally true for quantitative designs. Indeed, even in a structured quantitative survey (to be discussed later in this chapter), questions are adapted to cope with variations in meaning and interpretation. For example, a careful examination of the General Social Survey question “What race do you consider yourself?” shows that by allowing the choice of “other specify,” survey interviewers essentially invite a wide interpretation of the category of race, generating irregular responses such as “mixed bag” or “don’t have one, just me” (National Opinion Research Center 2007, 85). Conversely, qualitative researchers refer to numbers when they speak of sample size or length of time spent collecting data in

the field. It is also possible for quantitative and qualitative research to complement one another, some of which will be discussed later in this chapter under the heading “mixed methods.” Ultimately, the choice of methods is not simply a matter of objective versus subjective data. Methods have implications for 1 2 3 4

the type of data to be collected, the social context for data collection, how the data are to be analyzed, and conceptions of the person behind the data (e.g., the subject, respondent, or research participant).

It is also important to keep in mind that different research questions require different methods. For example, ethnography is ill-suited for answering the question, What is the average income of a white family in the United States? In the remainder of this chapter, I provide an overview of several common methods framed as quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods, without perpetuating the notion that one is inherently better, more useful, or more scientific than the others.

Survey Interview The structured or survey interviews are fairly popular for a number of reasons. First,

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it is the preferred data collection instrument for the purpose of quantitative research and analysis because the questions are precisely worded and the response categories are predetermined and fixed. Therefore, the transition from data collection to analysis is fairly rapid. Once the data have been entered, powerful software packages (e.g., Statistical Package for Social Scientists or SPSS) enable researchers to produce elaborate graphs and statistical models with a just few clicks. Moreover, websites, such as SurveyMonkey, allow users to invite participants from anywhere in the world to complete their surveys and make the data available for analysis instantly or in real time (for a guide to online survey design, see Sue and Ritter 2012). In this way, online surveys make it possible to collect data from a large sample of respondents relatively quickly and at a low cost (though traditional phone or mail surveys based on nationally representative samples can become quite costly and timeconsuming). With surveys the primary goal is to measure the prevalence or intensity of an underlying concept, and then apply statistical analysis to test hypothesized relationships among groups. The overall conceptual framework of quantitative research is sometimes referred to as “the hypothetical deductive method” (Babbie 2002, 36–38). The basic steps are briefly described below: 1 A specific relationship is hypothesized (e.g., “Men are more likely than women to support the death penalty”). 2 Variables are constructed, for the purpose of measurement (e.g., “On a scale of 1 to 10 with one indicating very little and ten indicating complete support, how would you rate your attitude toward the death penalty?”). 3 Empirical data are collected firsthand, or through secondary sources (e.g., General Social Survey). 4 Statistical analysis is conducted to support or refute the hypothesis (e.g., “Gender has no statistically significant effect on attitude toward the death penalty”).

Selection of Participants A relatively small group of respondents, a random sample, is selected to make generalizations about a larger population (the entire group for the purpose of generalizations). The sample would have to meet certain requirements to be suitable for the purpose of statistical analysis. Most important, it must be representative of a larger population, sufficiently large, and randomly selected. Random sampling is a requirement for quantitative research because many types of statistical analysis are founded on the assumption of a random selection. Data Collection Procedures While surveys may be self-administered, for the purpose of this discussion, I assume a survey interviewer who reads the questions to a respondent over the phone or face-toface. According to Fontana and Frey (2000, 649), the fundamentals of structured interviewing include: asking the same question with no variation, preestablished response categories (i.e., closed-ended questions) and strict control of the interview protocol using a script (or a very specific description of how the dialog should proceed). Generally, survey interviewers are instructed to follow these rules: 1 Read the questions exactly as written. 2 If a respondent does not answer a question fully, use nondirective follow-up probes to elicit a better answer. Standard probes include repeating the question, prompting with “Tell me more,” and asking such questions as “Anything else?” and “How do you mean that?” 3 Record answers to questions without interpretation or editing. When a question is open-ended (requires a response that does not fit a precoded format), this means recording the answer verbatim. 4 Maintain a professional, neutral relationship with the respondent. Do not give personal information, express opinions about the subject matter of the interview, or give feedback that implies a judgment

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about the content of an answer. (Fowler, quoted in Singleton and Straits 2002, 70) The overall goal is to reduce bias, or error, through standardized data collection and meticulous training of interviewers. It is assumed that if all respondents receive the same treatment, any variations in their answers can be attributed to “variation in the concept being measured” (Schaeffer and Maynard 2002, 578). Ideally, aside from asking questions, the presence of the survey interviewer should have no effect on the respondents. Similarly, respondents’ varying interpretations or personal experiences with the topic would be of no immediate interest, unless such experiences were somehow incorporated into the interview schedule as measurable items (or variables). As noted earlier, survey interviewers are particularly methodical about the way questions are worded. For example, they avoid double-barreled questions that require respondents to speak on two topics in the same question. An example of a double-barreled question would be: “How many times have you smoked marijuana, or have you only tried cocaine?” (Berg 2001, 79). Similarly, emotionally charged or valueladen questions are avoided. For example, it is recommended that interviewers not ask direct questions like “Why?” for fear that they could be interpreted as hostile or argumentative (Berg 2001, 78). Finally, special attention is given to the sequence of questions or the order in which they are asked. The goal is to establish trust and put the respondent at ease with innocuous questions before moving to the more controversial ones (Berg 2001, 81; see also Babbie 2002, 241–47). Data Analysis Surveys results are analyzed using statistical techniques. In particular, variations in responses are summarized to describe the characteristics of a population or to test a cause-and-effect relationship. For example, if researchers were interested in exploring the effects of social class on attitude toward the death penalty, or capital punishment,

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they would summarize all the responses from people in one social class (e.g., middle class) and compare their mean with responses from people in another (working class). Differences in means, or similar summary measures, are then tested using various statistical procedures to see if they indicate random or patterned variations. Where differences are patterned, as opposed to randomly scattered across two groups, “a statistically significant effect” is reported. In addition to statistical significance, other tests may be conducted to examine the strength of the relationship, or the degree to which variations in one variable predicts variations in another (for a detailed example of statistical analysis of survey data, see Weitzer and Tuch’s 2004 study of the effect of race on attitude toward policy misconduct). Validity In the context of quantitative research, validity is largely about: What do the measurements really show? Did they capture the topic under consideration accurately (for a full discussion of this topic, see Kirk and Miller 1986)? Survey interviewers are especially concerned with the social desirability effect, the presumed tendency among respondents to distort their “true” feelings by answering questions in a socially acceptable manner, or in a way that casts them in a positive light. For example, in face-toface interviews about how often high school students physically assault their peers, it is reasonable to assume that many respondents, with the exception of the diehard bullies, would underreport or completely deny involvement in such violent behavior because of the social disapproval surrounding physical violence. For survey interviewers, the solution is to reword the question or fine-tune the measurement instrument so that it seems less obtrusive or accusatory. For example, instead of asking “How often do you beat on your classmates?” they might ask “How often do you become physically involved with your classmates out of anger?”

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Example The following is an example of a closeended question used in the General Social Survey, a national survey conducted annually in the United States dealing with hundreds of social issues. How firm are you about your opinion on race relations – would you say you are very likely to change your opinion, somewhat likely to change, somewhat unlikely to change, or very unlikely to change? (National Opinion Research Center 2007, 225)

Questions such as this are meticulously worded by the staff of the National Opinion Research Center and pretested using small samples before they are administered to over 1,000 respondents each year. As stated earlier, the goal of this style of interviewing is to measure variations in a concept across different respondents. In this example, respondent A might report that his opinions on race are “somewhat likely to change” and respondent B might report that her opinions are “somewhat unlikely to change.” But how meaningful are such differences? In this example, while the variation among the response categories can be objectively cataloged and enumerated, the meaning of the difference remains somewhat enigmatic or arbitrary. One way of gathering a more complete and contextualized picture of what respondents mean by their words is through the qualitative methods discussed below.

In-Depth Interview In-depth interviews are more fluid and less structured than survey interviews, allowing for greater variations in responses and individualized interpretation of the questions. Additionally, by elaborating on the questions and asking for probes, the interviewer is more actively involved in the in-depth interview. Lastly, as the name suggests, the in-depth interview is founded on the notion that delving into the subject’s “deeper self ”

produces more authentic and meaningful data. As John Johnson puts it, [In-depth interviewing] begins with commonsense perceptions, explanations, and understandings of some lived cultural experience . . . and aims to explore the contextual boundaries of that experience or perception, to uncover what is usually hidden from ordinary view or reflection or to penetrate to more reflective understandings about the nature of that experience. (Johnson 2002, 106)

Selection of Participants While it is possible to gather random samples for the purpose of in-depth interviews, it is more likely that the selection of the respondents is a matter of knowing the right person and being in the right place and at the right time. In this context, terms such as “convenience” or “snowball” sampling are used to describe a nonrandom selection process that makes use of existing contacts or opportunities to recruit participants. Since the sample is not random and or representative of a larger population, generalizations are not advisable. Instead, using smaller numbers of research participants allows for a more in-depth, detailed, understanding of a given topic. Data Collection Procedures In-depth interviews, also referred to as open-ended or unstructured interviews, allow more fluid interaction between the researcher and the respondent. Generally, in qualitative interviews, respondents are not required to choose from a set of predetermined answers; instead, they are invited to provide elaborate statements (sometimes in the form of narratives) in response to broad questions. The following is an example of an open-ended interview with a nursing home resident. Jay: Everybody has a life story. Why don’t you tell me a little about your life? Rita: Well there’s not much. I worked in a telephone company as a telephone operator before I was married. After I

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got married I moved to New Jersey and had two boys. (Gubrium 1993, 20)

As seen in this example, rather than asking a meticulously worded question, the qualitative interviewer simply provides a general direction for respondents to follow and turns the conversational space over to them to tell their stories. Instead of controlling and standardizing interviewerrespondent interactions, unstructured interviewing allows for, if not encourages, joint meaning making or collaboration between the interviewer and the respondent (Holstein and Gubrium 1995). Data Analysis For the most part, the process of analyzing qualitative data from in-depth interviews, or similar methods, involves “data reduction,” “data display,” and “conclusion drawing/verifying” (Huberman and Miles 1994). Essentially, this means (1) transcribing and reading through the interview data (or carefully listening to recorded interviews and transcribing excerpts), (2) reducing the data using a thematic or coding scheme, and (3) drawing conclusions about the meaning of the data within a particular analytical framework. Well-established models such as narrative analysis (Gubrium and Holstein 2009) and content analysis (Glaser and Strauss 1967; Charmaz 2006) are particularly helpful with steps two and three: reducing and drawing conclusions about the data. It should be noted that qualitative data collection, analysis, and writing are not distinct and sequential but interrelated components of a larger research process. The different phases of research often proceed concurrently and inform each other. As Amanda Coffey and Paul Atkinson put it, The process of analysis should not be seen as a distinct stage of research; rather, it is a reflexive activity that should inform data collection, writing, further data collection, and so forth. Analysis is not, then, the last phase of the research process. It should be seen as part of the research design and of the data collection. The research process, of

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which analysis is one aspect, is a cyclical one. (Coffey and Atkinson 1996, 6)

Validity In qualitative research the question of validity is addressed in a number of ways. First, it is possible to use the traditional quantitative paradigm, described above, for the purpose of ensuring the validity of qualitative data as well. For example, researchers can systematically control the wording of their questions and their nonverbal cues in their interviews to avoid biasing the results. Alternatively, one could use more a qualitatively oriented validity check such as respondent validation. This basically involves taking the analysis and writing back to the research participants for their comments and suggestions. The goal is to see if the researcher’s conclusion is consistent with respondents’ perceptions of themselves. Another way of checking validity in qualitative research is through triangulation, which involves collecting data from multiple perspectives (Denzin 1970). For example, a researcher might examine how a homeless shelter treats its clients from the perspectives of the clients, the paid staff, and the volunteers (Marvasti 2003). Deviant cases analysis is yet another approach to verifying findings from a qualitative study. Here, deviant cases, instances of data that do not fit the rest of your analytic model (the equivalent of what quantitative researchers would call “outliers”), are carefully examined to check the accuracy of the coding or thematic scheme used in the analysis. In Gill’s words, deviant case analysis is “detailed examination of cases that seem to go against the pattern identified. This may serve to disconfirm the pattern identified, or it may help to add greater sophistication to the analysis” (Gill 2000, 187). Example The following example comes from a research interview about the experiences of Middle Eastern Americans in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks (Marvasti and McKinney 2004). Here, the interviewee is

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invited to comment on the significance of his name, Ali. This inquiry was inspired by the interviewer’s own insights about how a “Middle Eastern–sounding name” might trigger prejudice. Amir: Do you get any reactions about your name? Like people asking you what kind of name is that? Ali: Sometimes they do; sometimes they don’t. Sometimes, if they haven’t met me or if they are sending me correspondence, they think it’s a lady’s name and a lot of correspondence comes in Ms. Ali [last name]. They think I’m either Alison or something like that. Nowadays, when my name comes up [in face-toface contacts with clients], I use my sense of humor. For example, when they can’t spell my name or ask questions about it, I say, “I’m the brother of Muhammad Ali, the boxer.” (92)

The question and Ali’s explanation in this interview excerpt emerged in the context of a larger conversation. Prior to this exchange, Amir and Ali had talked about their personal backgrounds and became acquainted. As the interview went on, neither Amir nor Ali adhered to the conventional roles of respondent and researcher. Instead, they followed the norms of an everyday conversation, both posing questions and providing answers when it seemed appropriate or “natural.” While the interview was guided by a few general questions, the particulars of the conversation were not decided in advance. However, this was not an “idle chat.” Ali’s story illustrates a significant interactional strategy. In particular, this interview shows how Ali uses humor to humanize himself and thus cope with, and possibly avoid, prejudice.

Ethnography At the heart of this type of qualitative research are two activities: participating and observing. An ethnographer simultaneously observes and is involved in the topic under study. For example, Patricia and Peter Adler (1997) studied the world of

“upper-level drug traffickers.” In the course of their research, their own lives as ethnographers became intertwined with the lives of their subjects. We socialized with . . . members of Southwest County’s dealing and smuggling community on a near-daily basis, especially during the first four years of the research (before we had a child). We worked in their legitimate businesses, vacationed together, attended their weddings, and cared for their children. (59)

As seen here, the line between the researcher and the respondent, so clearly defined and maintained in the context of survey research, is often blurred in ethnographic research. The professional and personal interests of observers and their research participants can overlap to the point of the observer attaining “complete membership” (Adler and Adler 1987, 67) in the field. Another distinct feature of ethnography is its methodical attention to the social context in which information about a culture or a people is gathered. As Barbara Tedlock (2000) puts it, “Ethnography involves an ongoing attempt to place specific encounters, events, and understandings into a fuller, more meaningful context” (455). Where a survey interviewer, for example, can deal with nameless, faceless respondents over the phone, the ethnographic subjects’ behavior and responses are always linked with a particular location and become meaningful only in that social context. As Isabelle Baszanger and Nicolas Dodier (1997) point out, “A study becomes ethnographic when the fieldworker is careful to connect the facts that s/he observes with the specific features of the backdrop against which these facts occur, which are linked to historical and cultural contingencies” (10). According to Scott Grills (1998a, 4), one of the most important topics addressed by ethnographic research is perspective, or how people see their world. Unlike survey interviews or more structured data collection techniques, an ethnographic study can examine how people make sense of

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their world in circumstances and in the language of their own choosing. Consider for example, Elijah Anderson’s ethnographic research on lower-class black males and his description of what it means to have an identification from the insiders’ perspective:

reciprocal: Why would an assimilated Jew like myself be interested in them? Nonetheless, they did not challenge me. At most, some inquired about my background and how I knew about them at all. (Shaffir

The common identification card associates its holder with a firm, a corporation, a school, a union, or some other institution of substance and influence. Such a card, particularly from a prominent establishment, puts the police and others on notice that the youth is “somebody,” thus creating an important distinction between a black man who can claim a connection with the wider society and one who is summarily judged as “deviant.” (Anderson 1997, 145–46)

Another approach to establishing rapport is to completely assume the role of a professional researcher. This method places the researcher’s interest in the context of an occupational role. Grills adopts this strategy in his study of two “marginal political parties” in Canada and writes in its defense that:

Selection of Participants The participants for an ethnographic study can be recruited in a number of ways. Both traditional probability sampling (see above under survey interviews) and nonprobability sampling (see above under in-depth interviews) can be employed for selecting observations and research participants. A somewhat unique type of research participant in ethnographic research is the informant, who could loosely be defined as a person in the field who is knowledgeable about the local norms and can introduce the researcher to others who are equally knowledgeable about the setting. Another key feature of ethnographic field work is rapport, or trust and mutual acceptance between the researcher and his or her participants. Rapport can be established in a number of ways. For example, in most situations, people are flattered when someone from another culture shows an interest in learning about their ways. This is the approach that William Shaffir took in his research on Hasidic Jews. He writes: From the outset, I determined that the most sensible explanation for my presence [at Jewish places of worship] was to claim an interest in Hasidic Jewry: Who they are and their customs and religious practices. Indeed, this claim seemed to make sense to them. Such curiosity was, to an extent,

1998, 54)

Newcomers may be defined by some as potential police informants, members of competing organizations . . . My field experiences suggests that although disproving these allegations may be difficult, adopting the membership role of professional researcher allows for some concerns to be diffused. By professionalism, I mean to denote the process by which respondents may come to view the participant observer as a serious, committed, and relatively competent performer of the research role. (Grills 1998b, 86)

Thus, professionalism could provide logical answers to many of the respondents’ concerns about the ethnographer’s presence among them. Question like “Why are you here?” or “Don’t you have a real job?” are reasonably answered by “I am a researcher and this is my real job.” Data Collection Procedures An ethnography takes place in a specific context or setting. Therefore, in many ways the data collection begins with the selection of the research site. It is important to keep in mind that one’s definition or boundaries for an ethnographic research site should not be too fixed or rigid. As Hammersley and Atkinson (1990, 43) note, “Settings are not naturally occurring phenomena, they are constituted and maintained through cultural definition and strategies. Their boundaries are not fixed but shift across occasions, to one degree or another,

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through processes of redefinition and negotiation.” Another relevant point in selecting a setting is “the role of pragmatic considerations” (41). Researchers must consider how difficult it might be to gain entry to a particular setting. For example, some settings are open to the public (e.g., a shopping mall), whereas access to others is restricted (e.g., a prison). Generally, it helps to know a “gatekeeper,” or someone who can give you access to the particular places and the information you need. The position, or the field role, from which observations are collected is another important consideration. In Membership Roles in the Field, Adler and Adler (1987) list three general roles an ethnographer may be assigned to or occupy: “peripheral,” “active,” and “complete membership,” respectively indicating greater involvement in the field. According to the authors, how we fit into the field is determined by our individual choices, our personal characteristics, as well as the practical conditions we encounter (Adler and Adler 1987, 52–53). Furthermore, each field role opens some possibilities and closes others. For example, Assuming an active membership role can also have far more profound effects on the researcher’s self than are generated by peripheral membership involvement. In functioning as a member, researchers get swept up into many of the same experiences as members. While this has the distinct advantage of adding their own selves as data to the research, both as a crosscheck against the accounts of others and as a deepened awareness of how members actually think and feel, it propels researchers through various changes. (64)

Ethnographers sometimes supplement their observations with field or ethnographic interviews (Heyl 2001), which are in many ways similar to in-depth or unstructured interviews discussed above. Broad questions are posed and subjects are given a fair amount of latitude in answering them. However, as emphasized throughout this section, ethnography is a site-specific data collection methodology. Ethnographic

interviewers are particularly attentive to how the setting itself influences what is said or not said in an interview. In the words of Hammersley and Atkinson (1990), Ethnographers do not decide beforehand the questions they want to ask, though they may enter the interview with a list of issues to be covered . . . The interviewer must be an active listener, he or she must listen to what is being said in order to assess how it relates to the research focus and how it may reflect the circumstances of the interview. (112–13)

Data Analysis Ethnographic data come from several sources (official documents, interviews, and field observations). The analysis of ethnographic interviews and, to a certain extent, documents is similar to the approach briefly described under the in-depth interview section earlier in this chapter. What is particularly noteworthy in the context of analyzing ethnographic data is that the line between data collection and data analysis is not always clear. This is best illustrated in the process of observation and recording field notes. In the words of Robert Emerson (1998, 20), What is included or excluded . . . is not determined randomly; rather, the process of looking and reporting are guided by the observer’s implicit or explicit concepts that make some details more important and relevant than others. Thus, what is selected for observation and recording reflects the working theories or conceptual assumptions employed, however implicitly, by the ethnographer. To insist on a sharp polarity between description and analysis is thus misleading; description is necessarily analytic.

Validity Typically, the product of an ethnographic study is a manuscript that describes in great detail a people’s way of life. In many cases, readers’ first and only encounter with

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the research subjects is through the ethnographic text itself. Since readers rarely experience the described culture directly, there is great potential for misunderstanding or misusing the research findings. For ethnographic purposes, writing, or the representation of what was observed, is closely linked with validity (i.e., Did the ethnographer see and report what really happened?). One way to achieve this kind of validity, is through “thick descriptions”: Thick descriptions present in close detail the context and meanings of events and scenes that are relevant to those involved in them. This task requires the ethnographer to identify and communicate the connections between actions and events . . . In this sort of descriptive enterprise, actions are not stripped of locally relevant context and interconnectedness, but are tied together in textured and holistic accounts of social life. (Emerson 1988, 24–25; see also Geertz 1988)

Example The following excerpt from my observations at a homeless shelter illustrates an exchange between the social worker and a client. I audiotaped the exchange with the participants’ permission and later transcribed it for the purpose of analysis. Here Tim (fictional name) is about to end an intake interview (an interview that would decide whether or not he would be allowed to stay in the shelter). Social Worker: All right. Can you think of anything else? Tim: I think that’s probably got it. Social Worker: Okay. Tim: That’s got me fixed up. Not unless you got any million-dollar checks? Social Worker: Um, let me check my drawers here. [They both laugh.] Tim: Okay, remember when we were talking about, you know, what was it, World War, World War I and II veterans? [They were] supposed to have some allies in Burma, you know. Uh, Burma, and Algiers, all different kinds of places, you know, where they, and they–you know, army people, military people are funny, you know, about money. Where

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it’s at, who gets it and everything, you know. Who’s acceptable, you know. They may not like someone because he may be a toughie. May not be any good. They say, “No, you ain’t gonna get, no money. We don’t like you.” And so you’ll never get no money . . . Social Worker: So what are you saying? You didn’t get your money when you got out of the service? Tim: No. Uh, I didn’t get no million if I supposed to get one. I didn’t get one . . . Social Worker: Well, think about it, Tim. If they gave you a million dollars when you got discharged from the service, then everyone would join the service. Tim: Right, uh-huh. Social Worker: And they’re not, so I don’t–there may be some kind of separation pay. But it’s not as much as a million bucks. Tim: Uh-huh. [Pause] Well, that should do me, hon. Social Worker: Okay. Tim: Thanks much. Social Worker: Okay. Well, as long as you keep cooperating and so forth while you’re here, we’ll have you through the weekend. Tim: Okay. I thank you so much, dear. (Marvasti 2002, 643–45)

Notice that the data excerpt reflects an everyday setting and the ordinary exchanges and events that take place there. As a researcher in this case I had assumed what Adler and Adler (1987) would term a “peripheral” role. I was introduced to Tim as a researcher and with his consent sat in the corner of the room and recorded the intake interview. The setting was familiar to me as I had worked there as a volunteer for several months prior to this particular intake interview. By this time in my fieldwork, I had become particularly interested in why some clients are admitted to the shelter and others are not, independent of their particular needs for food, clothing, and shelter. I had noticed that some narratives of homelessness seemed to be more convincing to the shelter staff and garner more sympathy than others. My subsequent analysis and writing of my observations focused on variations in

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narratives of homelessness. I interpreted this particular interview using narrative analysis (Gubrium and Holstein 2009) and focused on the way the social worker skillfully edits Tim’s off-topic remarks. Sidestepping his odd reference to a “million-dollar check,” the social worker transforms the nonsense into something meaningful and relevant for institutional purposes. The client and his account are returned to matters of relevance at hand: conformity with shelter rules and “cooperating and so forth.” I compared this extract with others to suggest that who gets help at a homeless shelter (i.e., who is considered “service worthy”; Spencer 1994) is in part decided by how the staff guide client stories, and in turn, how the clients respond to this sort of intervention. If they resisted the narrative cues and editing from their care providers, they could be labeled “treatment resistant” and removed from the shelter.

Mixed Methods Some researchers are moving away from the quantitative-qualitative divide and adopting a practical approach to doing research using “mixed methods” that combine the strengths of both qualitative and quantitative methods. According to Alan Bryman (2006), there are many ways to justify the use of mixed methods. For example, an in-depth qualitative interview could be used to develop a structured quantitative survey questions. Alternatively, qualitative and quantitative methods can be combined to answer both causal and exploratory questions about a given topic. Thus, mixed methods, properly designed and theorized, can broaden the range of our observations and explanations of social life. A related inspiring trend in collecting and analyzing interview data is “multimodal analysis” (Jewitt 2009), which allows researchers to take into account both the verbal and nonverbal aspects of communication, for example. In this way, different types of data can be combined (e.g., video-recordings and interview transcripts)

to produce a more nuanced, contextualized interpretation of the research and its context.

Conclusion The discussion of methods in this chapter represents but a very brief overview of a much larger field of study. Even if we were to limit ourselves to the three methods broadly discussed in this chapter (surveys, in-depth interviews, and ethnography), we must recognize that in addition to the differences across the three methods, there is also much variation within each approach. For example, within the field of ethnographic research institutional ethnographies (see, e.g., Smith 2006) deserve much attention in their own right. At the same time, it is important to note that research methods need not be mutually exclusive, but they can in fact be “mixed” (see, e.g., Bryman 2006), thus dissolving the quantitativequalitative divide altogether. On another front, the growing infusion of web-based technologies into our lives and social organizations will likely require new methodologies for understanding the impact of the digital revolution and the many social problems it can potentially solve or create in its own right. For example, in the area of quantitative research, “metadata” from popular social media (e.g., Facebook) and search engines (e.g., Google) are important resources for studying social problems. For example, Kearney and Levine (2014) measured the frequency of contraceptive-related Google searchers and Twitter posts (or tweets) after the airing of an MTV show about teen pregnancy to estimate the impact of the program on the viewers’ attitudes toward teen pregnancy. Similarly, for the purpose of qualitative research, Skype and other Internet communications provide new possibilities for conducting face-to-face interviews with participants who are thousands of miles away (see James and Busher 2012). Lastly, from the standpoint of social activism, it is worth considering how

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different methods conceptualize the relationship between the researcher and those suffering from a social problem. In particular, 1 survey researchers are instructed to remain detached or distanced from the respondents in order to most objectively measure the topic, 2 for in-depth interviewers proximity (physical and mental) to the interviewees is thought to produce better or more authentic data, and 3 ethnographic observers try to be in the thick of things (certainly physically but also mentally in the case of full participants and autoethnographers). These methods in turn produce specific types of data serving a variety of purposes and audiences. Researchers should choose a method that is (1) suited for the research question at hand, (2) most likely to reach and influence their intended audience, and (3) in sync with the type of relationship they wish to form with their participants.

Glossary Ethnography A qualitative research approach based on observing, participating in, and recording a people’s way of life or social experiences. Generalization A process in quantitative research whereby findings from a study using a random sample are applied to a larger group, or a population. Hypothetical deductive method A research design that begins with a hypothesis, moves on to empirical data collection, and ends with statistical analysis that would support or refute the hypothesis. Informant An insider or a respondent who becomes the ethnographer’s guide or ally in the field. Methodology Specific research techniques a scientific discipline uses to investigate its topics of interest. Positivism A theoretical framework for conducting social research modeled after the

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natural sciences and based on a search for universal laws and strictly empirical research. Qualitative methods Research designs that quantify the topic under study for the purpose of measurement and comparison across groups using inferential statistics. Quantitative methods Research designs focused on the experiential qualities of a given topic. Rapport A sense of respect, trust, and mutual obligation that aids the ethnographer in soliciting information from his respondents. Respondent validation A way of checking the accuracy of qualitative data by asking respondents to confirm the content of the research manuscript.

References Adler, P. 1997. Researching dealers and smugglers. In Constructions of Deviance: Social Power, Context, and Interaction, 2nd ed., edited by P. Adler and P. Adler, 55–70. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. Adler, P., and P. Adler. 1987. Membership Roles in Field Research. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Anderson, E. 1997. The police and the black male. In Constructions of Deviance: Social Power, Context, and Interaction, 2nd ed., edited by P. Adler and P. Adler, 142–52. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. Babbie, E. 2002. The Basics of Social Research. 2nd ed. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. Bamberger, M. 1999. Integrating Quantitative and Qualitative Research in Development Projects. Washington, DC: World Bank. Baszanger, I., and N. Dodier. 1997. Ethnography: Relating the part to the whole. In Qualitative Research: Theory, Method and Practice, edited by D. Silverman, 8–23. London: Sage. Becker, H. 1993. Becoming a marijuana user. In Social Deviance: Readings in Theory and Research, edited by H. Pontell, 185–96. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Berg, B. L. 2001. Qualitative Research Methods for the Social Sciences. 4th ed. Boston: Allyn and Bacon.

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Bryman, A. 2006. Integrating quantitative and qualitative research: How is it done? Qualitative Research 6:97–113. Bunis, W. K., A. Yanik, and D. Snow. 1996. The cultural patterns of sympathy toward the homeless and other victims of misfortune. Social Problems 43(4):387–402. Charmaz, K. 2006. Constructing Grounded Theory: A Practical Guide through Qualitative Analysis. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Coffey, A., and P. Atkinson. 1996. Making Sense of Qualitative Data: Complementary Research Strategies. London: Sage. Denzin, N. 1970. The research Act in Sociology. London: Butterworth. 2008. Qualitative Inquiry and the Politics of Evidence. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press. Dordick, G. A. 1998. Something Left to Lose: Personal Relations and Survival among New York’s Homeless. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Emerson, R. 1988. Contemporary Field Research: A Collection of Readings. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press. Fontana, A., and J. Frey. 2000. The interview: From structured questions to negotiated text. In Handbook of Qualitative Research, 2nd ed., edited by N. Denzin and Y. Lincoln, 645–72. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Freedman, A., and P. Medway, eds. 1994. Genre and the New Rhetoric. London: Taylor & Francis. Geertz, C. (1988). Thick description: Toward an interpretive theory of culture. In Contemporary Field Research: A Collection of Readings, edited by R. Emerson, 37–59. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press. Gill, R. 2000. Discourse analysis. In Qualitative Researching with Text, Image and Sound, edited by P. Atkinson, M. Bauer, and G. Gaskell, 172–90. London: Sage. Glaser, B., and A. Strauss. 1967. The Discovery of Grounded Theory: Strategies for Qualitative Research. New York: Aldine. Grills, S. 1998a. An invitation to the field: Fieldwork and the pragmatists’ lesson. In Doing Ethnographic Research: Fieldwork Settings, edited by S. Grills, 3–20. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. 1998b. On being partisan in non-partisan settings: Field research among the politically committed. In Doing Ethnographic Research:

Fieldwork Settings, edited by S. Grills, 76–93. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Gubrium, J. 1993. Speaking of Life: Horizons of Meaning for Nursing Home Residents. New York: Aldine De Gruyter. Gubrium, J., and J. Holstein. 2002. From the individual interview to interview society. In Handbook of Interview Research: Context and Method, edited by J. Gubrium and J. Holstein, 3–32. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. 2009. Analyzing Narrative Reality. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Hammersley, M., and P. Atkinson. 1990. Ethnography: Principles in Practice. London: Routledge. Heyl, B. 2001. Ethnographic interviewing. In Handbook of Ethnography, edited by P. Atkinson, A. Coffey, S. Delamont, J. Lofland, and L. Lofland, 369–84. London: Sage. Holstein, J., and J. Gubrium. 1995. The Active Interview. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Huberman, M., and M. Miles. 1994. Data management and analysis methods. In Handbook of Qualitative Research, edited by N. Denzin and Y. Lincoln, 428–44. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. James, N., and H. Busher. 2012. Internet interviewing. In The Sage Handbook of Interview Research: The Complexity of the Craft, edited by J. Gubrium, J. Holstein, A. Marvasti, and K. D. McKinney, 177–91. Los Angles, CA: Sage. Jewitt, C., ed. 2009. The Routledge Handbook of Multimodal Analysis. Oxon, UK: Routledge. Johnson, J. M. 2002. In-depth interviewing. In Handbook of Interview Research: Context and Method, edited by J. Gubrium and J. Holstein, 103–19. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Kearney, M. S., and P. B. Levine. 2014. Media Influences on Social Outcomes: The Impact of MTV’s 16 and Pregnant on Teen Childbearing. Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research. Kirk, J., and M. L. Miller. 1986. Reliability and Validity in Qualitative Research. Vol. 1. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Lassiter, L. E. 2005. The Chicago Guide to Collaborative Ethnography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Marvasti, A. 2002. Constructing the serviceworthy homeless through narrative editing.

research methods Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 31(5):615–51. 2003. Being Homeless: Textual and Narrative Constructions. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. 2004. Qualitative Research in Sociology. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Marvasti, A., and K. McKinney. 2004. Middle Eastern Lives in America. New York: Rowman & Littlefield. National Opinion Research Center. 2007. General Social Survey Codebook. Chicago: National Opinion Research Center. Schaeffer, N. C., and D. W. Maynard. 2002. Standardization and interaction in survey interviewing. In Handbook of Interview Research: Context and Method, edited by J. Gubrium and J. Holstein, 577–601. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Shaffir, W. 1998. Doing ethnographic research in Jewish Orthodox communities: The neglected role of stability. In Doing Ethnographic Research: Fieldwork Settings, edited by S. Grills, 48–64. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

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Singleton, R. A., and B. Straits. 2002. Survey interviewing. In Handbook of Interview Research: Context and Method, edited by J. Gubrium and J. Holstein, 59–82. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Smith, D. E. 2006. Institutional Ethnography as Practice. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Spencer, J. W. 1994. Homeless in River City: Client work in human service encounters. In Perspectives on Social Problems, vol. 6, edited by J. Holstein and G. Miller, 29–46. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press. Sue, V. M., and L. A. Ritter. 2012. Conducting Online Surveys. 2nd ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Tedlock, B. 2000. Ethnography and ethnographic representation. In Handbook of Qualitative Research, 2nd ed., edited by N. Denzin and Y. Lincoln, 455–86. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Weitzer, R., and S. A. Tuch. 2004. Race and perceptions of police misconduct. Social Problems 51(3):305–25.

CHAPTER 3

Participatory Action Research and Social Problems Randy Stoecker

Abstract This chapter focuses on understanding participatory action research (PAR) in both concept and practice. I begin by considering PAR in the context of social problems and knowledge power inequality. This allows me to construct a working definition of PAR and then compare variations on this basic definition. Next, I discuss research methods and ethical foundations for PAR practice. Finally, I explore PAR practice, beginning with a researcher’s first contact with a community organizing group and moving through the stages of project development, project implementation, and project completion and exit.

Introduction: Social Problems and Knowledge Power While the causes of social problems are fundamentally structural, their continuation is the result of knowledge inequality. When too few people know what it means to live in poverty, or to be threatened by the police on a daily basis, or to be denied access to the variety of opportunities that constitute the good life, we have a knowledge problem. When we don’t know how to eliminate poverty, reform policing to protect and serve everyone, and open all opportunities to all people, we have a knowledge problem. When we don’t know whether our policies around poverty, policing, opportunity, and the myriad of other social problems afflict-

ing many people in many societies are making any difference, we have a knowledge problem. In these and many other ways, social problems invoke the issue of knowledge. Noticing a social problem, understanding it, developing strategies to tackle it, and tracking our progress in eliminating it all require developing and deploying knowledge. Back in 1963 Betty Friedan called “the problem that has no name” – sexism. Up to that time women in the United States (not to mention elsewhere) suffered mightily from the oppressions of patriarchy. But they defined it as a problem with themselves. They went to their doctors and were treated with Valium, electroshock, and sometimes worse, until Friedan and those who followed her

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began building and publishing the knowledge that the problem was with society, not women. Even before that, the US Supreme Court school desegregation decision Brown v. Board of Education (1954) was based partly on research showing the self-esteem damage done to African American children attributable to racial segregation. The decision laid the foundation for the civil rights movement. And among the movement’s many strategies were the “freedom schools” that were organized across the southern United States (Williams 1987) that focused on helping grassroots people enhance their knowledge and their power. This concept of power/knowledge is important in understanding how participatory action research addresses social problems. Power/knowledge is translated from the French theorist Michel Foucault (1975, 1980). The slogan “knowledge is power” has been infused into educational culture in the United States, but Foucault shows that the two concepts, while mutually reinforcing, are actually distinct. Those who have power can use knowledge to enhance their power; those who lack power often lack knowledge as well. But it is frequently the case that oppressed, exploited, and excluded people have a wealth of knowledge about their social condition that is silenced because they do not have access to power. Foucault fails to explain how those who lack both knowledge and power can change both circumstances. And here is where C. Wright Mills (1959) helps. Mills distinguished personal troubles and public issues. A “personal trouble” is a problem experienced by an individual that is defined as unique to that individual and believed to be caused by something that is wrong with that individual. A “public issue” is a problem experienced by an individual that is seen as common to many people and understood to be caused by societal forces outside of the individual. Knowledge forms, in this framework, as individuals begin to realize their common experience and the common causes of their common experi-

ence. As the women of Betty Friedan’s time in the early 1960s began comparing their experiences through consciousness raising, they began to understand that their personal troubles were in fact public issues and they began to organize to make their knowledge heard. This chapter will employ the concept of knowledge power to refer to the ability to gain knowledge and successfully put it into action. Participatory action research or PAR, in its most effective manifestations, is a systematized form of building knowledge power within the framework of rethinking personal troubles as public issues. But the actual practices performed under the label currently vary so widely that they prevent any single definition.

Defining PAR The term “participatory action research” is an arbitrary choice among more than two dozen other terms (Chandler and Torbert 2003) that describe a range of practices where there is more diversity within labels than between them. In other words, there is often more variation between two people calling themselves participatory action researchers than there is between one person calling herself a participatory action researcher and another calling himself a community-based researcher. But there have been some historical variations. One of the most distinct labels for one version has been “action research.” This practice, probably made most visible by social psychologist Kurt Lewin (1948), was researcher-led. Its focus was engaging expert researchers in solving social problems. The practice maintained the knowledge hierarchy, with credentialed knowledge experts controlling the research process focused on finding solutions for the problems afflicting those lacking knowledge and power. The label then became most popularized in the field of education. But some practitioners, such as Ernest Stringer (1996), have used the action research label for a practice that challenges the knowledge hierarchy by engaging

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grassroots people in the knowledge production process. Another of the more distinct labels, which is perhaps most in contrast with Lewin’s action research, has been “participatory research.” Popularized in a paper by David Brown and Rajesh Tandon (1983), the authors carefully contrasted participatory research and action research. Participatory research then became the standardbearer for an explicitly political approach that started with an analysis of power relations and included a strategy for using research to empower the oppressed. In addition, participatory research was part of a Global South movement around building knowledge power that included more education-oriented practices such as Paulo Freire’s (1974) popular education method and Augusto Boal’s (1985) theater of the oppressed. As the influence of popular education methods spread, it connected with practices in North America, but outside of formal educational institutions, used by the Highlander Folk School (later the Highlander Research and Education Center) in Tennessee, Project South in Atlanta, Georgia, and others. Today, the label is used by only a handful of practitioners who have maintained the original definition. The most popular of the recently coined terms are participatory action research or PAR, community-based research or CBR, and community-based participatory research, or CBPR. All are North American labels. PAR popularized in a very diffuse way inside and outside of academia, and likely introduced confusion with its melding of the action research and participatory research labels (though the most well-known writing using the label, by William Foote Whyte [1990], presented PAR very much in the old researcher-led action research framework). CBR seemed to be the preferred term within the liberal arts disciplines in colleges and universities (Strand et al. 2003) while CBPR was popular within schools of public health (Minkler and Wallerstein 2003). Both are catchall labels that include practices ranging from the most traditional academic-led research

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to the most participatory and activist social change campaigns. These variations and their labels, not to mention the dozens of other labels for the variations, have led to much confusion. It is impossible to know what someone means when they use any term without including a description of their practice. But the variations in practice are not willy-nilly. There are, in fact, some systematic distinctions that can be made.

Understanding Forms of PAR Traditional research, where credentialed researchers control everything from choosing the research question to writing up the results, has been the standard-bearer against which all other forms of knowledge production are measured. But this model of “pure” research has come under attack from two directions. One critique has focused on the lack of participation by the research “subjects.” Critics have charged pure research with practicing a colonizing methodology. They see pure researchers extracting raw data, transforming it, and using it for personal benefit while misrepresenting the people from whom they have extracted the data (Smith 2012). This colonizing methodology parallels the other historical forms of colonization used by those who represent the interests of world powers against people who cannot adequately defend themselves. The other critique starts from the standpoint of application or action, arguing that pure research neglects the importance of application, consequently either wasting time in the transition from initial findings to practical use or leading to dangerous and immoral applications in, for example, the use of weapons of mass destruction. These two critiques also form the two conceptual dimensions from which participatory action research can be considered. Before discussing these two dimensions, however, we need to consider the context in which PAR operates. That context often includes credentialed researchers, students, community workers or service providers,

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108656184.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press

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and constituency members. The researchers are often employed by colleges and universities, and the students become involved through grant-based employment or coursework. Community workers – who include community organizers, and some community development and social work professionals – are distinct from service providers in that the former help grassroots constituency members engage in collective selfhelp rather than provide charitable services to them. Constituency members are people with a common issue related to a common life experience – people who are homeless or hungry or who suffer discrimination or workplace exploitation – that participatory action research purports to serve. These various actors add complexity to the dimensions of participation and action. For example, it is possible for a researcher to partner with a service provider and conduct research that leads to program changes affecting constituency members. In such a case the service provider may participate with the researcher but the constituency members are treated as passive recipients. And the action may result in small adjustments in an existing charity program rather than in activism leading to a policy change desired by constituency members. When we consider the participation component of participatory action research, then, we must consider the ways in which each of these actors is participating. To the extent that researchers are most influencing the decisions about the research, there is a research relationship most similar to the colonizing methodology. To the extent that service providers or community workers, but not constituency members, are most participating, there is a service relationship illustrative of the nonprofit industrial complex (INCITE! Women of Color against Violence 2007) – a system of social control over oppressed, exploited, and excluded constituencies maintained by a network of nonprofit organizations and funders. To the extent that organized constituency groups are most participating, we are approaching the goal of building knowledge power.

But we must also be careful about how we define participation. A half-century ago Sherry Arnstein (1969) conceptualized a “ladder” of citizen participation. On the lowest rungs of the ladder are forms of pseudo-participation designed largely to manipulate and placate. Next are forms of tokenism, where those in power may seek input but retain power to reject the input. Only the highest rungs of the ladder allow for participation that includes constituency members holding power to influence outcomes. The concept of action is also complex. It is not just a matter of what kinds of actions people take, but what results from the actions. The effects can range from changes in organizations or programs to the restructuring of wealth, power, and cultural values (Stoecker 2003); and action strategies can be focused on anything from individuals to organizations, constituencies, communities, and societies (Marullo et al. 2003, 57). Those who most emphasize the action dimension tend to advocate for broad and deep societal change (Strand et al. 2003). Using these two concepts of participation and action, we can distinguish between various forms of participatory action research (Stoecker 2015) as shown in Figure 3.1. In the lower left quadrant is traditional pure or colonizing research. Such research is the least participatory and the least actionoriented. This quadrant also includes Arnstein’s forms of pseudo-participation to get people to buy into a researcher-controlled knowledge process. In the upper left quadrant are forms of research that are action-oriented but not participatory. In the medical and technical fields, translational research (Woolf 2008) and knowledge transfer methods dominate. In translational research, the focus is on field professionals becoming more efficient at communicating research needs to laboratory researchers and, in turn, those researchers conducting research that is more easily translatable into practice. These can include such developments as new forms of physical therapy or new surgical techniques. Translational research also includes a variant

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Figure 3.1. Forms of participatory action research.

where researchers translate research findings to field professionals so they can in turn translate it to patients, as in the case of new techniques for diabetes self-care. A similar knowledge transfer method applies in fields like agriculture, whereby laboratory researchers test seeds, chemicals, and so on and transfer the results to growers to apply (Russell and Ison 2000; Ison 2000). We might also include here those research projects where the researcher partners with a charity organization providing services to a constituency. These methods are not participatory in the sense of engaging the constituency in guiding the research or building their own knowledge power in the process. The lower right quadrant includes a variety of research-oriented practices that are often fully controlled by constituencies but do not necessarily include an action strategy. Community history projects may be the most common example. In a community history the community members may come together to document their history to preserve collective memory. It may be action of a sort, but it does not lead to social change. The research required to do com-

munity muraling or community theater that tells a story is similar. And there are a wide variety of projects where community groups may do research on a social problem, or use such methods as asset-mapping (Kretzmann and McKnight 1993), but never use the results to inform strategies for change. It is important to understand, however, that such projects do not have to be devoid of action. The community theater project, Higher Ground, about the ravages of prescription drug abuse in Appalachia, gained acclaim as a form of community education that motivated action for tackling the problem (Tavernise 2011). These exceptions better fit the upper right quadrant. The upper right quadrant includes the most fully developed forms of participatory action research. In this quadrant are constituency-led research projects that tie directly into action projects. These include worker-led research on wages and benefits paid to restaurant employees that are used in campaigns to improve restaurant worker conditions; housing advocacy groups that use research to test for racial discrimination and that lobby for stronger antidiscrimination laws; public school students who

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study inequitable applications of discipline in schools and use the results to press for more fair treatment, and many others. These are all research practices that both address specific issues and build the knowledge power of the group dealing with them. Interestingly, many examples of such practices are done without the engagement of university and college researchers.

PAR Inside and Outside Academia The various forms of PAR are not simply, or even primarily, academic in nature. In fact, some of the best forms have come through various nongovernmental organizations around the globe. One of the most famous of these is Participatory Research in Asia, or PRIA, founded by Rajesh Tandon, who is associated with the practice coined as participatory research. The United States has a long history of organizations that promote various forms of PAR. The most famous is the Highlander Research and Education Center. Originally established as the Highlander Folk School in Appalachia, Highlander was central to the formation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations and the civil rights movement. It was most important as a site for the propagation of popular education in the United States (Adams 1975). An organization that combines popular education and other forms of PAR with community organizing is Project South in Atlanta. The Applied Research Center, now called Race Forward, focuses on the integration of PAR and community organizing. Founded in Oakland, Race Forward now have offices in New York City and Chicago. It is no coincidence that some of the most visible organizations practicing PAR are focused on racial justice. To the extent that PAR is about building knowledge power, there is perhaps no set of social problems more important than racial injustice. Documenting racial injustice, amplifying knowledge about it, and ending it is the central cause of our time. There are also single-issue activist organizations that have a reputation for using

PAR. One of the most visible of these is the Restaurant Opportunities Center United, or ROC United, which has been masterful at using research to document and make visible the working conditions of restaurant employees. They have been in the forefront of the campaign advocating full wages for restaurant wait staff, and may be the only activist organization to have produced their own book published by a university press, Behind the Kitchen Door (Jayaraman 2013). Local interfaith worker justice organizations, community organizing groups, youth groups and many others have all used PAR in their activities (Sociological Initiatives Foundation 2015). But nowhere have various forms of PAR been more institutionalized than in higher education. With university and collegebased institutes and centers and networks and conferences, the global rise of PAR in higher education has been astounding. In Europe, Living Knowledge has established a global presence. In Canada, CommunityBased Research Canada and C2U-Expo are also expanding their influence across North America and into Europe. In the United States, Community-Campus Partnerships for Health promotes the practice. Somewhere between the campus and the community is a unique form of PAR facilitator – the science shop. Begun in a storefront in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, in the late 1970s (Yerkey 1980; Zaal and Leydesdorff 1987), science shops help community groups connect with researchers to build their knowledge power around issues of importance to them. The idea is for the science shop to be a broker between campus and community. Most science shops are located in universities, but there are some exceptions of community-based science shops that include the Bonn Science Shop in Germany, and the Trent Community Research Centre and U-Links Centre for Community-Based Research in Canada. The rising popularity of PAR in higher education also accounts for many of its problematic variations that engage neither real participation nor real action (Stoecker 2009). As a consequence, a new form of

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community-based organization is springing up to counter the excesses and contradictions of problematic forms of PAR. Perhaps the best example of such an organization is the nonprofit Centre for Community-Based Research or CCBR in Ontario, Canada. CCBR organizes its own PAR (which they call CBR), does research training and has established its own Community Research Ethics Office to review and influence research practices in the community. With such a variety of activities constituting PAR, we next consider whether we can distill a common core of practices. We will first look at research methods, then ethical foundations, and then at the overall practice that goes well beyond research.

PAR Research Methods There is a misunderstanding among some academics that PAR is a “qualitative” research method. But there may be cases where a grassroots group is interested in highly quantitative measurement. A rural residents’ group concerned about crop dusters spraying pesticides on the agricultural fields bordering their houses may want to carefully measure pesticide drift. Other groups may want to do soil lead testing. Still others may want to measure population change. There are even participatory action researchers such as John Green (2012) who specialize in the use of quantitative methods. And of course other researchers bring qualitative methods to the practice, listening to people’s perceptions of crime, or their visions of the ideal neighborhood, and many other social issues. Actually, PAR is not a method at all. Rather, it is a methodology – a way of thinking about research methods; or even an epistemology – a standpoint on how we can best know reality. In this sense PAR employs a qualitative logic (Stoecker and BrydonMiller 2013). That is, PAR as an epistemology maintains that we come to the most accurate understanding of any research question by building relationships. This includes relationships between researchers and those

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who want to use research as well as, in some cases, relationships between the researcher and the researched. The belief is that the best knowledge comes from being in relationship rather than maintaining a “scientific distance.” In this way, PAR practitioners may reject positivist definitions and practices of objectivity. In positivist science, the distinction between objectivity as a practice and accuracy as a goal has been lost. In seeing objectivity as a practice rather than a goal, it is also possible to see its flaws as a strategy for attaining accuracy. Maintaining a professional distance may prevent a research subject from providing full information needed for good research. In contrast, building a real relationship with the research participant may create trust that allows for fuller communication and thus more accurate research. Likewise, if there is not a strong relationship between a researcher and a group wanting to build knowledge power, communication could again suffer, potentially limiting use of the research (Oakley 1981; Acker et al. 1983). From such a standpoint, even quantitative research needs to be conducted as a relationship between the researcher and the group wanting to build their knowledge power and a relationship between research and action. When we move from these epistemological and methodological issues, however, the best participatory action researchers approach data collection pragmatically. Like any good technician, they choose the best tool for the job. And those tools might include the entire range of possible research methods available, not just in the social sciences but in the humanities and the natural sciences as well. The choice of methods is much dependent on the social problem of concern, and the group wanting to build its power could have research questions on virtually anything. The implementation of these methods often looks quite different from that of traditional colonizing research. A neighborhood survey, for example, might involve neighbors interviewing neighbors. A focus group might be facilitated by a resident in

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their living room, with kids running around and conversation ranging wildly. Because there is much more to PAR than research methods, there are also deeper ethical issues facing PAR practice than those that impact research methods.

Ethical Foundations for PAR Why do we need to discuss the ethics of PAR separately from mainstream research ethics? Since PAR is about taking action on local issues and building knowledge power, it is about more than simply research. It is also about more than the individual research subject. If we consider the five steps of research – (1) choosing the question, (2) designing the methods, (3) collecting the data, (4) analyzing, and (5) using the results for reporting or action – the distinction becomes clear. The typical academic research ethics review process has no application at the stage of choosing the question. It has only tangential application at the stage of designing the research methods. In other words, it does not consider how the research is designed, only whether the design itself might put individual research subjects at risk. Its main focus is on the data collection stage, and whether risks to subjects from the data extraction are managed appropriately. At the analysis stage ethics review limits its concerns to whether the data handlers are certified and whether the data analysis is conducted in accordance with what subjects consented to regarding the use of their personal data (such as protection of privacy). Similarly, at the final stage of reporting or acting on the data, the only concern is consistency of the reporting with what subjects consented to in regard to their individual data. These concerns typify the colonizing methodology process. They do not address the control or influence of “research subjects” over the development of the research question, their involvement in designing the research methods, or ultimate use and ownership of the data. As the critique of colonizing research practices grew, so

did alternative research ethics standards that embodied PAR principles. Perhaps the most developed of these is the Canadian Tri-Council Policy Statement (TCPS) on research with Aboriginal peoples (Government of Canada 2005). This policy, influenced by First People’s groups in Canada, and developed by the main body guiding research in that country, took the unprecedented step, in 2005, of drafting a new section on research with Aboriginal peoples. Known as Section 6, the policy embodied with clarity not just an approach to research with Aboriginal peoples, but an approach to PAR. Section 6 advocated practices such as treating research as a partnership between the researcher and the researched, consulting local leadership in the design and conduct of the research, developing the research around the questions of concern to the group, respecting the local culture, engaging the group in writing up the results, and the sharing of data with the group. In 2010, the TCPS 2 was drafted, with a chapter devoted to “Research Involving the First Nations, Inuit and Métis Peoples of Canada.” The main changes to this new edition were to take into account some of the complications of PAR, such as working in a community setting where there were factions. The latest update, preserving much of the 2010 policy, was produced in 2014 (Government of Canada 2014). Another source being used as a partial ethical foundation for PAR is the Community Development Society’s (2015) “Principles of Good Practice.” These principles do not focus on research but on the ethics of outsider professionals working with communities for community change purposes. Within a framework of using PAR for the twin purposes of solving local issues and building knowledge power, the principles are quite useful. Paraphrased, they emphasize the importance of supporting meaningful participation of the broadest diversity of constituency members in decision making, engaging them in understanding the issues affecting them, building their leadership capacity, and supporting their use of the broadest range of strategies and tactics.

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A third source of ethical principles for participatory action research comes from work on covenantal ethics. While on its face a covenant is simply an agreement, in the religious contexts in which it is used, and also in PAR, it connotes a deeper moral commitment. Working from ideas proposed by Hilsen (2006), Brydon-Miller lays out covenantal ethics for PAR (which she refers to as action research) as being “the acknowledgement of human interdependency, the cogeneration of knowledge, and the development of fairer power relations” (BrydonMiller 2009, 247). Like the other ethics models, then, covenantal ethics goes far beyond simply the research relationship. Next we will look at the process of that research relationship.

PAR in Practice There is a vast literature on the process of PAR, most of which focuses on the relationship between the researcher and the community organization and not on what the relationship produces (Wallerstein et al. 2005; Sandy and Holland 2006; Leiderman et al. 2003; Sullivan et al. 2001; Norris et al. 2007; Seifer 2003; Vidal et al. 2002). While it is important to understand such principles as equalizing power, community forms of data ownership, and building trust that this literature emphasizes, it is also important to understand how those principles are applied by looking at the PAR process from start to finish. In the context of a constituency group and an outside researcher, the process starts with finding a “partner.” The possible partners for participatory action researchers are endless. From corporations to governments to institutions to nonprofits to informal constituency groups, there is no shortage of potential groups and organizations to work with. There is an important distinction between PAR with powerful organizations such as governments, corporations, and institutions, compared to small nonprofits and constituency groups. The researcher’s relationships with such large

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organizations is usually formal and contractual, and the researcher is much more likely to operate as a consultant limited to providing specific services. In the community a formal, contractual, consultant relationship is often neither possible nor desirable. Because contractual forms of PAR with organizations operating with institutionalized power have a qualitatively different character from the collaborative research relationships developed in a constituency or community context, and are less likely to take a social problems approach, here we will concentrate only on PAR in the community sector. We will also concentrate on those PAR projects that involve a researcher seen as an outsider to the group. The community sector – made up of formal charitable nonprofits, formal social action organizations, and informal grassroots groups – has been growing globally as neoliberalism undermines the welfare state philosophy in country after country. And, as funding for nonprofits has declined during the economic collapse of the late 2000s, many community sector groups are increasingly aligning themselves with universities in hopes of accessing needed resources. First Contact How does a researcher connect with groups in the community? For researchers who have already established a positive reputation, more projects are likely to find them than they can handle. But researchers who do not already have an established reputation will have a more difficult time. Community sector groups are becoming increasingly skeptical of researchers. For researchers to approach groups in a context of distrust is challenging, to say the least. Often it’s not enough to approach such groups with an offer of providing research services. Instead, community groups are looking for researchers to act as an ally. The idea of allyship is mostly informed by LGBTQ people and their supporters, but has been expanding recently to include cross-race allyship (Woods 2014; Patel 2011; LGBTQ

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Allyship 2013). Becoming an ally requires a commitment far beyond the researcher role. It requires a commitment as a person and it requires a commitment to a cause. A researcher who participates in a cause as an ally builds trust. Of course, such participation and commitment needs to be genuine, and not simply a means to gain access to the group. The other important quality of being an ally is being an open and engaged listener and learner. Listening to the language and interpretive frames the group uses is important. LGBTQ people, for example, are rapidly evolving new language to discuss gender that goes beyond the traditional male-female dichotomy. Anyone wanting to be an ally to a group needs to learn its language (Adam, n.d.). It is also important that the researcher understand that they may need to initially participate on the group’s terms rather than on their own. In other words, the researcher might begin by setting up chairs and tables for a group meeting rather than doing research planning. At some point the researcher will have built enough relationships that the community worker or group leaders will know about the researcher’s professional skills and they may initiate a conversation. In other cases the researcher may initiate a conversation with group members about their knowledge or information or data needs. The challenging part of that initial conversation is making it about action as well as about research. Learning about the community group’s goals and strategies before talking about research can help in designing research that will best serve the goals and fit with the strategies. So the researcher should be listening to understand the extent to which the group has clear goals, or is experiencing stumbling blocks, or is lacking specific knowledge, data, or information that could help it to better achieve its goals. As this conversation progresses, it usually leads to some possible PAR ideas. But these are not simply research ideas; they are connected to tasks involving organizational development, strategic planning, social change campaigns, and organizing.

Project Development In the project development phase the researcher and community group move from an initial conversation that generates some possible research ideas with one community worker or constituency leader to a more involved project development process with a core group of constituency members. The process of creating a core group is a test of the group’s organizing capacity. A group that can’t organize a core group to guide the PAR process probably cannot pull off a social change project. Creating a core group that involves people in developing and/or improving their research design skills also helps the larger goal of building people’s research capacity and, thus, their knowledge power. Finally, because the research design is also partly a strategic planning and organizational development process, a core group is a mechanism by which to distribute and develop those skills among its members. The design process begins with goal setting, and this is where less-organized groups can run into difficulty, because they may lack a procedure for choosing or “cutting” an issue to work on. Sometimes an initial PAR project, such as a needs or issues assessment, can help a group choose what they want to work on, thus providing important group capacity building if there is a skilled community worker or leader to keep organizing the group after the research is completed. The most basic form of such a project in a neighborhood context is a door-knocking campaign where the research team is also a community organizing team, knocking on people’s doors to find out their concerns and get them involved in the community organization. With such research organizing, it is important to think about both the research process of finding out what issues are important to people, and the organizing process of how to bring people together to choose from the issues and start to work on them (Minieri and Getsos 2007). And that has implications for how many people to involve in the research project. Involving more people in the research might get

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more of them involved in carrying out social change. Once a core group gathers both the data and the people, the larger group can “cut issues.” There are many different criteria for cutting an issue. One option is “POW!” (said as a word), which stands for “precise,” “organizable,” and “winnable.” Precise means that the goal is clear. For example, reducing crime in the neighborhood is not very precise as a goal. But reducing fights around the neighborhood bar by 50 percent is quite precise. Organizable means that a large number of people care deeply about an issue and so are willing to contribute time and effort to the cause. Winnable means that the group is likely to succeed in achieving the goal. The purpose of POW! is not to use it as some mathematical formula to yield a certain choice, but to use it as a heuristic device so the group can make an informed decision, even if it decides to do something large and difficult. When members of the community group have a clear issue in mind, they can start thinking about the overall strategy to win the issue and achieve the goal. It can be helpful to think about the project development process as “planning backward,” which means starting with the end goal, and then tracing backward the steps, actions, and resources needed to achieve the goal. This is similar to what has been popularized as a “logic model” (Knowlton and Phillips 2013) but it is more dynamic and focused on cause and effect. The end goal is the final effect, and planning backward is about imagining the causes required to achieve that effect. That usually means imagining several causeand-effect sequences. One way to think about these causeand-effect sequences is as a cycle of diagnosis, prescription, and implementation/ evaluation that may lead back to diagnosis (Stoecker 2013). All of these steps can involve further participatory action research. Using bar fights as an example, the group may need to collect data to diagnose exactly how many fights occur, when they occur, who they effect, and how. They can then also do research to help choose a pre-

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scription – whether to advocate for a policing strategy, a change in bar practices, or something else. Then, as they begin implementing their chosen strategy, they can also begin collecting data to evaluate whether it is working. (I discuss the actual research process in the next section.) At the project development stage, the group needs to map out the kinds of resources and the knowledge they will need achieve the goal. This involves a serious commitment on the part of the researcher. However, in contrast to much of the community-university partnership literature (Curwood et al. 2011), it is not an open-ended, indefinite-term commitment. The ideal is for the researcher to commit to the entire cycle, from diagnosis through evaluation. But a strong core group, community group, or higher education liaison can be the focal point for engaging multiple researchers to complete discrete research projects at the diagnose, prescription, and evaluation stages. It is important to remember that the research is simply one aspect of the social change project, and it is probably not the most important aspect. If a constituency group is going to succeed in its change strategy, it needs to attend to organizational development, member recruitment, fundraising, and effective use of tactics and strategy. These practices, and not the research, will determine whether the group will achieve its goals. And the research process must be integrated with them if it is going to be useful. For example, research testing for lead-paint exposure in housing or manganese in drinking water must take into account how different research results might influence a group’s ability to recruit members and use different political strategies. If the neighborhood context of this research is predominantly workingclass homeowners barely able to pay their monthly mortgages, research showing that the people are being poisoned could cause property values to plummet, destabilizing the group and disrupting the organizing. So the group needs to discuss how it will handle different research findings using “what if ” scenarios.

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The final aspect of the project development stage involves a set of semiformal agreements that must be struck with the constituency group. In higher education this is called the memorandum of understanding or memorandum of agreement (Community-Campus Partnerships for Health 2013). There are various outlines for these agreements, but within this projectbased model it is helpful to set out an agreement based around tasks, roles, and milestones. The tasks are actual things that need to happen for the research to occur. These frequently involve organizing planning meetings (including recruiting people to them), obtaining research labor (students, residents, others), getting university approvals (like human subjects ethics review), and completing research steps. Roles involve who will take responsibility for those things. Milestones are the deadlines for accomplishing significant steps in the research process, and are usually specified to correspond to real-world calendar events such as city council meetings, foundation grant cycles, etc. The importance of writing down this agreement is not so much to hold the various actors accountable but to help everyone get clear on who needs to do what and when. Along with the agreement on how to accomplish the PAR project itself, there needs to be an initial agreement about the possibility of the researcher using the data for their own purposes. The question about data access has important implications for gaining approval from institutional review boards. At many universities, anyone who obtains or handles raw data must take and pass a research ethics training course, and in some cases the university will balk at anyone but the researcher “owning” the data. It is also the case, however, that these conditions usually only apply if the researcher is planning to use the data for their own career advancement – i.e., to publish the data in journals. When the researcher is conducting research where only the constituency group will own and use the data, the situation is often simpler, though the researcher may then have to consider their own pro-

fessional opportunity costs of not using the data. All of this planning and all of these conversations (typically this takes three or more well-organized meetings) result in a PAR project. Project Implementation If the planning process has been thorough and effective – i.e., if it has created a clear plan for achieving a social change goal and shows clearly how research can be integrated into that goal – carrying out the specific PAR project is relatively easy. But it is still rather counterintuitive for academic researchers trained to work in relative isolation and to follow the rules of objectivity. The process of PAR is the opposite. There are two types of social change goals: creating change around a specific constituency issue, and producing broader change around knowledge power. That means that, rather than working in isolation, the researcher works in collaboration with a (hopefully) growing number of constituency members. The best participatory action research engages constituency members in such a way that they begin to develop skills of making informed and strategic research decisions, using datagathering and analysis methods, and applying research in various ways. The best research process will also turn out increasing numbers of constituency members to plan, carry out, and act on the research. And the researcher engages in allyship with a constituency and its cause. Developing an enduring commitment to a constituency and its issues does not, however, mean that the researcher forgoes striving for accuracy. Participatory action researchers, because of their commitment to a constituency and cause, value accuracy because they know that when the constituency goes up against a powerful government or corporate target, that target will be able to afford highly trained researchers who attempt to discredit even the most rock-solid research. One way to think about maximizing participation toward knowledge power is to

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consider again the five basic steps of the research process: choosing the question, designing the methods, collecting the data, analyzing the data, and reporting or acting on the results. Choosing the question involves thinking about which stage in the project cycle the groups is – diagnosis, prescription, or implementation/evaluation – and determining the knowledge needs at that stage. As we develop the question the group learns about which questions are more easily researched, and which are harder; which require more resources and which require fewer. Sometimes choosing the question necessarily involves a discussion of the other research stages, since some questions require more labor-intensive data gathering or more technically complex data analysis. Once we have a question we discuss the specifics of how to collect data on the question. It might seem that this is actually a technical task best left to the technical experts. But constituency members are crucial in designing the research methods. They know what the literacy levels, trust levels, and cultural values and practices are in their context. They know whether a written survey, phone survey, or face-to-face survey will get a better response; whether students or residents will get more truthful answers in interviews; whether constituency members will more likely respond to a research invitation letter from the university or from the community organization; and so on. A detailed research methods plan will then inform the data-gathering practice. Too much participatory action research has previously limited constituency involvement to free or low-paid data-gathering labor, rather than engaging them in research decision making (Stoecker 2009). But that doesn’t mean that constituency members shouldn’t be involved in gathering data. Sometimes they are the only people that other constituency members will talk to. But in other cases constituency members might be more willing to respond to students or researchers who are outside of internal constituency politics. And the university research ethics training and review pro-

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cess may make constituency involvement in data-gathering impractical. This is again why it is important for constituency members to be heavily involved in the research design phase. At the data analysis stage there are more opportunities to build constituency research capacity. Here we apply the same considerations we discussed in relation to data collection. There is also a work-around for some of these concerns. Data analysis is both about compiling raw data into summary form and interpreting it. It is possible for the researcher to compile the raw data, thus addressing the issues of some constituency members handling other constituency members’ confidential data. But then the researcher engages constituency members in interpreting the data. So the researcher could, for example, produce a variety of tables that show how many people answered a question one way versus another, and ask constituency members why they think more people answered “yes” than “no” and so on. The PAR process fully reconnects to the issue-based social change strategy at the data reporting/application stage. Here is where the core group or broader constituency group needs to determine how to use the results in their social change efforts. If the findings don’t show what the group expected, they need to decide how to change their strategy. If the findings do support their position, they need to decide how best to present them. Here again community organizing and constituency culture trumps academic training. It may be that a song, a story, a video, guerrilla theater or any number of reporting strategies besides black words on white paper will be the best strategy. At the point the group takes the research results and puts them into action, there is closure for the researcher regardless of where they are in the diagnosis, prescription, implementation/evaluation cycle. It is, of course, possible for the same researcher to continue into the next part of the cycle and, in any event, there must be a researcher for the next part of the cycle. But when

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any single part is complete, or the cycle is complete, it is an appropriate time for the researcher to exit the relationship. Project Completion and Exit If there is a focused plan in place, and all parties collaboratively adjusted it for changing conditions along the way, it will be clear to everyone when a PAR project is completed. At that point it is time for the researcher to consider how to continue their allyship. Sometimes this can be done through a debriefing process with the constituency core group. Everyone checks to make sure all the loose ends are tied up, and that there is nothing more to be done. They may also debrief what worked well and what didn’t, consider a subsequent project, or otherwise continue to engage with the researcher. The researcher must be alert to all these possibilities. Particularly when the researcher engages with the constituency through the practice of allyship, constituency members come to see the researcher as an ally rather than as only a researcher, and that sometimes creates expectations for continuing involvement. That doesn’t mean that constituency members expect the researcher to commit the same amount of time and effort to all their projects. Sometimes, it only means attending an occasional community event, showing honor for those constituency members continuing to work for the issues. In these cases there is less of an exit than a role transition. In other cases the researcher may, based on earlier agreements made with the group, be working on their own professional articles, and good practice is to engage constituency members in reviewing those articles for errors and misrepresentations. Doing so also helps to further build the constituency’s capacity in knowledge development and knowledge power.

Conclusion As time marches on, more seems to be included in what is meant by participatory

action research and other similar practices. I have attempted to bring some clarity to the discussion by providing a conceptual foundation that allows us to distinguish different practices. Placing PAR in a context of two forms of social change – where “action” connects to solving local problems and where “participation” connects to building the knowledge power of oppressed, exploited, and excluded people – shows how it differs from colonizing methodology, knowledge transfer and translation approaches, and inward-focused research. Understanding how to operationalize action and participation helps us to better see the role of research, from the first contact between community group and researcher all the way to the completion of a PAR project.

Glossary Action research Another label for participatory action research more commonly used in the field of education. It has historically been associated with a more academic-driven practice. Allyship A model of relationship between an oppressed, exploited, or excluded group and outsiders who identify with that group and wish to support their attempts to change their problematic situation. Colonizing methodology A research practice where researchers extract data from subjects, then use the data to interpret the research subjects’ lives from the standpoint of the researcher and for the researcher’s professional advancement. Community-based participatory research Another label for participatory action research more commonly used in the field of public health. Community-based research Another label for participatory action research more commonly used in the liberal arts. Constituency People who share common life circumstances, and thus common social issues.

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Covenantal ethics An ethical formulation that starts from the importance of human relationships and justice. Cutting an issue A process by which a group takes a large and ambiguous problem and focuses on a precise, organizable, and winnable piece. Knowledge power A concept adapted from Michel Foucault that focuses on the ability to gain knowledge and successfully put it into action. Ladder of participation A model developed by Sherry Arnstein distinguishing forms of participation. Memorandum of agreement (or memorandum of understanding) An agreement between two or more parties that specifies goals, methods, responsibilities, timelines, and milestones. Participatory action research A form of research where the research is developed, carried out, and used in collaboration with a group or organization. Participatory research Another label for participatory action research more commonly used in the Global South by activists. Personal troubles From C. Wright Mills, when people experience their problems as unique to themselves and believe they are caused by something that is wrong with themselves. Popular education A form of adult education that includes participatory action research practices, popularized by Paulo Freire. Public issue From C. Wright Mills, when people experience their problems as common to many people and understand how they are caused by societal conditions. Theater of the oppressed A form of adult education that includes participatory action research practices, popularized by Augusto Boal.

References Acker, J., K. Barry, and J. Esseveld. 1983. Objectivity and truth: Problems in doing feminist research. Women’s Studies International Forum, 6:423–35.

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Adam. n.d. Transwhat? A guide towards allyship. http://transwhat.org/allyship/. Adams, Frank. 1975. Unearthing Seeds of Fire: The Idea of Highlander. Winston-Salem, NC: John F. Blair. Arnstein, S. R. 1969. A ladder of citizen participation. Journal of the American Institute of Planners, 35:216–24. Boal, Augusto. 1985. Theatre of the Oppressed. London: Pluto. Brown, D. L., and R. Tandon. 1983. Ideology and political economy in inquiry: Action research and participatory research. Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 19:277–94. Brydon-Miller, M. 2009. Covenantal ethics and action research: Exploring a common foundation for social research. In The Handbook of Social Research Ethics, edited by D. M. Mertens and P. E. Ginsberg, 243–58. Los Angeles, CA: Sage. Chandler, D., and B. Torbert. 2003. Transforming inquiry and action: Interweaving 27 flavors of action research. Action Research, 1:33– 52. Community-Campus Partnerships for Health. 2013. Community-based participatory research. https://depts.washington.edu/ccph/ commbas.html. Community Development Society. 2015. Principles of good practice. www.comm-dev.org/. Curwood, S. E., F. Munger, T. Mitchell, M. Mackeigan, and A. Farrar. 2011. Building effective community-university partnerships: Are universities truly ready? Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning, 17(2):15–26. Foucault, Michel. 1975. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Random House. 1980. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews & Other Writings 1972–1977. Edited by C. Gordon. New York: Pantheon Books. Freire, Paulo. 1974. Education for Critical Consciousness. New York: Continuum. Friedan, Betty. 1963. The Feminine Mystique. New York: W. W. Norton. Government of Canada. 2005. TCPS: Section 6. Research involving aboriginal peoples. www .pre.ethics.gc.ca/english/policystatement/ section6.cfm. 2014. Tri-Council Policy Statement 2, chapter 9. Research involving the First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples of Canada.

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www.pre.ethics.gc.ca/eng/policy-politique/ initiatives/tcps2-eptc2/chapter9-chapitre9/. Green, J. J. 2012. Who counts reality and why it counts: Searching for a community-based approach to quantitative inquiry. Journal of Rural Social Sciences,27(2):137–49. Hilsen, A. I. 2006. And they shall be known by their deeds: Ethics and politics in action research. Action Research, 4(1):23–36. INCITE! Women of Color against Violence, ed. 2007. The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex. Boston: South End Press. Ison, R. 2000. Technology: Transforming grazier experience. In Agricultural Extension and Rural Development: Breaking Out of Traditions, edited by R. Ison and D. Russell, 55–75. New York: Cambridge University Press. Jayaraman, Saru. 2013. Behind the Kitchen Door. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Knowlton, Lisa Wyatt, and Cynthia C. Phillips. 2013. The Logic Model Guidebook. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Kretzmann, John P., and John L. McKnight. 1993. Building Communities from the Inside Out: A Path toward Finding and Mobilizing a Community’s Assets. Evanston, IL: Center for Urban Affairs and Policy Research, Neighborhood Innovations Network, Northwestern University. Leiderman, Sally, Andrew Furco, Jennifer Zapf, and Megan Goss. 2003. Building Partnerships with College Campuses: Community Perspectives. Washington, DC: Consortium for the Advancement of Private Higher Education’s Engaging Communities and Campuses Program, Council of Independent Colleges. Lewin, Kurt. 1948. Resolving Social Conflicts: Selected Papers on Group Dynamics. Edited by G. W. Lewin. New York: Harper & Row. LGBTQ Allyship. 2013. Homepage. http:// lgbtqallyship.org/. Marullo, S., D. Cooke, J. Willis, A. Rollins, J. Burke, P. Bonilla, and V. Waldref. 2003. Community-based research assessments: Some principles and practices. Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning, 9(3), 57–68. Mills, C. Wright. 1959. The Sociological Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press. Minieri, Joan, and Paul Getsos. 2007. Tools for Radical Democracy. New York: John Wiley. Minkler, Meredith, and Nina Wallerstein, eds. 2003. Community-Based Participa-

tory Research for Health. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Norris, K. C., R. Brusuela, L. Jones, J. Miranda, O. K. Duru, and C. M. Mangione. 2007. Partnering with community-based organizations: An academic institution’s evolving perspective. Ethnicity & Disease, 17:S1-27–S132. Oakley, A. 1981. Interviewing women: A contradiction in terms. In Doing Feminist Research, edited by H. Roberts, 30–61. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Patel, V. S. 2011. Moving toward an inclusive model of allyship for racial justice. The Vermont Connection, 32:78–88. www.uvm.edu/ ∼vtconn/v32/Volume_32_Full.pdf#page=78. Russell, D., and R. Ison. 2000. The researchdevelopment relationship in rural communities: An opportunity for contextual science. In Agricultural Extension and Rural Development: Breaking Out of Traditions, edited by R. Ison and D. Russell, 10–31. New York: Cambridge University Press. Sandy, M., and B. A. Holland. 2006. Different worlds and common ground: Community partner perspective on campus-community partnerships. Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning, 13(1):30–43. Seifer, S. D., N. Shore, and S. T. Holmes. 2003. Developing and Sustaining CommunityUniversity Partnerships for Health Research: Infrastructure Requirements. A report to the NIH Office of Behavioral and Social Science Research. Bethesda, MD: CommunityCampus Partnerships for Health. Smith, L. T. 2012. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London: Zed Books. Sociological Initiatives Foundation. 2015. Past grants. www.sifoundation.org/past-grants/. Stoecker, R. 2003. Community-based research: From practice to theory and back again. Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning, 10(2):35–46. Stoecker, R. 2009. Are we talking the walk of community-based research? Action Research, 7:385–404. 2013. Research Methods for Community Change. 2nd ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. 2015. Toward a meaningful definition of community-based research. Unpublished manuscript. Stoecker, R., and M. Brydon-Miller. 2013. Action research. In Reviewing Qualitative Research

participatory action research and social problems in the Social Sciences, edited by A. A. Trainor and E. Graue, 21–37. New York: Routledge. Strand, K., S. Marullo, N. Cutforth, R. Stoecker, and P. Donohue. 2003. Community-Based Research and Higher Education: Principles and Practices. San Francisco: JosseyBass. Stringer, E. T. 1996. Action Research: A Handbook for Practitioners. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Sullivan, M., A. Kone, K. Senturia, N. J. Chrisman, S. J. Ciske, and J. W. Krieger. 2001. Researcher and researched-community perspectives: Toward bridging the gap. Health Education & Behavior, 28(2):130–49. Tavernise, S. 2011. Tackling the problems of Appalachia, theatrically. New York Times, May 14. www.nytimes.com/2011/05/15/us/ 15appalachia.html. Vidal, A., N. Nye, C. Walker, C. Manjarrez, and C. Romanik. 2002. Lessons from the Community Outreach Partnership Center Program. Washington, DC: US Department of Housing and Urban Development, Office of Policy Development and Research. www.cpn.org/topics/youth/highered/pdfs/ COPC_Program.pdf.

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Wallerstein, N., B. Duran, M. Minkler, and K. Foley. 2005. Developing and maintaining partnerships with communities. In Methods for Community-Based Participatory Research for Health, edited by B. Israel, E. Eng, A. Schulz, and E. Parker, 31–51. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Whyte, W. F. 1990. Participatory Action Research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Williams, J. 1987. Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years, 1954–1965. New York: Penguin Books. Woods, J. 2014. 12 ways to be a white ally to Black people. The Root. www.theroot.com/ articles/culture/2014/08/ferguson_how_ white_people_can_be_allies.html. Woolf, S. H. 2008. The meaning of translational research and why it matters. JAMA, 299(2):211–13. Yerkey, G. 1980. Holland’s unique science shops. Christian Science Monitor, January 23. www .csmonitor.com/1980/0123/012341.html. Zaal, R., and L. Leydesdorff. 1987. Amsterdam Science Shop and its influence on university research: The effects of ten years of dealing with non-academic questions. Science and Public Policy,14(6):310–16.

CHAPTER 4

Public Policy and Social Problems: Recent Trends in the Formal Control of Individual Behavior Mark Peyrot and Stacy Lee Burns

Abstract This chapter describes the development of public policy regarding the control of individual behavior in the criminal justice system, or alternative programs outside the criminal justice system. We focus on developments in the United States, primarily in the late twentieth century and later. We identify instances of both expansion/escalation and contraction/deescalation of control and indicate how the latter may be a consequence of and partial solution to the human and economic burdens of the former. We also examine the diffusion of philosophies and practices between institutional sectors of social control (criminal justice, mental health, education) and the shifting of responsibility for control between state and local government, again in response to the human and economic burdens of the preexisting control strategies. Finally, we offer reflections on possible future developments of the trends we have identified.

Introduction The control of individual behavior is one of the core functions of the state. Public policy formulates standards of behavior and creates social institutions charged with enforcing those standards. In particular, governments identify certain behaviors as social problems and establish institutions to prevent and/or remedy those problems. Over the last several decades we have developed a conceptual framework to describe the development and implementation of these public policies (Burns 1996, 2008, 2014; Burns and Peyrot 2003, 2010; Peyrot 1982, 1984, 1985,

1991; Peyrot and Burns 2001, 2010). Fundamental to this framework is the realization that social problem remedies seldom result in the disappearance of the social problems to which they are addressed. As a result, social problems and their remedies may develop over several cycles; remedies may be escalated and/or de-escalated, philosophies may shift, and new institutional sectors may be developed or charged with managing the problem. This institutional development reflects two organizing principles: (1) institutional accretion indicates that new institutional forms are grafted onto existing institutions (e.g., from a criminal 57

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justice response to illegal drug use to courtsupervised drug treatment located within the criminal justice institution) – early institutional forms are rarely dismantled and replaced – and (2) institutional diffusion indicates that institutional forms (e.g., residential programs) diffuse from one geopolitical unit (city, county, state, country) to another, and from one institutional sector to another (e.g., criminal justice to or from mental health or education). In this chapter, we focus on public policy in social control that involves criminal justice institutions and issues, broadly defined. Thus, we do not deal with civil law, nor regulatory control of corporate actors. The chapter will address three developments in social control: (1) expansion/escalation of control, including the development of new categories of controlled behavior (expansion), and increased sanction/enforcement (escalation); (2) contraction/deescalation of control, including legalization of controlled behaviors (contraction), and reduction in penalties (deescalation); and (3) sector/locus shift of control, including shifting from one social control sector to another (sector shift) and from one geopolitical level to another (locus shift). These developments are interrelated; the latter two are often consequences of or adaptations to system overload resulting from expansion/escalation in the criminal justice system. System overload creates a need for system adaptation, and implementation of one form of adaptation may reduce the need for alternative forms. In addition, there may be external influences on these developments – such as changes in economic conditions, cultural beliefs, behavioral innovations, etc. – but detailed consideration of these factors is beyond the scope of the current chapter. This chapter focuses on developments within the United States; while we believe that much of what we say would be applicable more broadly, we are unable to do a cross-national comparison of the nature or timing of the changes we describe. Moreover, we focus on the twentieth and

twenty-first centuries. Indeed, although we provide some background from the early twentieth century regarding the expansion of social control, we focus primarily on developments in the later twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Finally, in looking at more recent developments we focus more specifically on California, which serves as a “canary in the coal mine,” especially with reference to system adaptation, due in part to economic pressures and the ease of using public ballot initiatives.

Emergence of Welfare State Control The expansion/escalation of government control of societal problems can be traced to the Progressive Era of the early twentieth century. As David Garland notes, “during the first half of the twentieth century many key practices of government began to make use of a new way of reasoning about and acting upon the tasks that they faced. A whole series of problems – such as crime, or health, or education, or work, or poverty, or family functioning – came to be conceived of as social problems” (Garland 2001, 46, emphasis original) and laws were passed in attempt to remedy such problems, for instance to ensure food safety (e.g., Meat Inspection Act of 1906), deal with periodic economic crises (Federal Reserve Act of 1913), or prevent unfair and deceptive trade practices (e.g., the Federal Trade Commission Act of 1914). Public policies to address societal problems were advanced during the New Deal under President Franklin D. Roosevelt with the passage of additional laws, presidential executive orders and the establishment of many federal regulatory agencies to enforce them. For example, the Food and Drug Administration was created in 1935 and the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938 was passed to regulate food, drug and cosmetic safety, the Emergency Banking Relief Act of 1933 was enacted to stabilize the US banking system, the Securities and Exchange Act of 1934 was passed to protect the public

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against price-fixing, monopolistic practices and other malfeasance in securities and financial markets, and the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 was enacted to prevent unfair labor practices. Government programs to combat unemployment and revive the economy were created in response to the Great Depression, most notably with the creation of the Public Works Administration in 1933 (which built dams, bridges, hospitals and other public works), the Social Security Act of 1935 (which provided universal retirement pensions, unemployment benefits and welfare benefits to disabled and indigent persons), and the Federal Housing Act of 1937 (which subsidized local public housing agencies in an effort to improve living conditions of low-income families and abolish slums). In addition, the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 was enacted to put limits on most forms of child labor and ensure children’s educational rights (often combined with state compulsory education laws). The expansion of federal government sponsored human services continued during the 1960s under President Lyndon Johnson’s so-called Great Society, which increased spending for education, employment and medical care by passing such initiatives as Medicare (providing federal funding of many health care expenses for seniors) and the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 (providing social services, mental health services, health services and employment services through the creation of the Office of Economic Opportunity), as well as aid in the form of federal subsidies for basic human needs (e.g., Aid to Families with Dependent Children and Food Stamps). The Department of Housing and Urban Development was established under President Johnson to address the growing problems of urban areas. In addition, a wide range of consumer protection laws were enacted during the Johnson Administration (e.g., the Cigarette Labeling and Advertising Act of 1965, requiring cigarette packages to carry warning labels; the Motor Vehicle Safety Act of 1966, setting stan-

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dards for vehicle safety; the Wholesome Meat Act of 1967, requiring inspection of meat to meet federal standards; the Truthin-Lending Act of 1968, regulating lenders and credit providers; and the Land Sales Disclosure Act of 1968, establishing safeguards against fraudulent practices in land sales). Finally, new environmental laws were passed to protect the air, water, fish, birds and wild life and humankind (e.g., the Clean Air Act of 1963, the Endangered Species Preservation Act of 1966, the Solid Waste Disposal Act, the Motor Vehicle Air Pollution Control Act of 1965, and the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969).

Substance Abuse: A Case Study in Public Policy Evolution Duff and Garland argue that the growth of the welfare state from the 1930s to the 1970s, along with the increasing focus of the social sciences on engineering human behavior, led to policies that emphasized rehabilitation and deterrence (Duff and Garland 1994). However, by the mid-1970s, scholars and public policy makers expressed disillusionment with the effectiveness of the “social engineering” through social programs characteristic of the welfare state (Duff and Garland 1994; Allen 1981; Martinson 1974; Wilson 1975). This ushered in a more retributive criminal justice policy (Wunder 1995). For example, the California Sentencing Act of 1976 (California Criminal Code, section 1170(a)(1), cited by Allen (1981, 7– 8)), changed the express purpose of sentencing in California from maximizing rehabilitation to imprisonment for punishment. Escalation of Substance Abuse Control The war on drugs emerged out of this context and, by the early 1990s, had led to vast increases in the number of persons incarcerated in jails and prisons (Shelden 2001, 184–85). From 1980 to 1992, sentences on drug charges increased by over 1,000 percent (Shelden 2001, 140) and between 1988 and

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1994, “the number of prison inmates who had been convicted of drug offenses went up by 155.5 percent, (while) by comparison, only modest increases were seen for violent and property offenders” (Shelden 2001, 185). The drug war and mandatory sentencing had a disproportionate impact on poor people and racial and ethnic minorities (e.g., see Mauer 1995, who reports that one in three African American males between twenty and twenty-nine years of age was under some form of criminal justice supervision). Enhanced penalties for drug possession and use crimes, combined with strong antidrug enforcement and other get tough sentencing policies of the 1980s and early 1990s (such as mandatory minimum sentences that set fixed prison terms for certain types of crimes), overloaded the criminal justice system, which by this time had acquired huge caseloads in many urban areas. Mandatory minimum sentences that set fixed prison terms for certain types of crimes contributed significantly to the unprecedented increase in prison populations. Some such laws eliminated nonincarcerative sentences for certain offenses, or precluded consideration of mitigating circumstances in sentencing. An example of the escalation of social control involving mandatory minimums are the various “habitual offender” laws enacted across the country in the 1990s (Shelden 2001, 145). Adaptation to Consequences of Escalation System overload and the problems created by expansion required the justice system to adapt. The resulting changes in the criminal justice system occurred within the broader context of the Great Recession of 2008– 9, with its drastic budget cuts and more general loss of confidence in the ability of public institutions (e.g., schools, public health and mental health care systems) to effectively address the personal and social problems that often give rise to criminal conduct. Under get tough criminal justice policies, the annual cost of incarceration had been

consuming a greater and greater portion of the state budget in California. As Martin and Grattet note, “In 1970, corrections made up only 3 percent of the state’s . . . budget; in 2014–15, it makes up more than 9 percent” (Martin and Grattet 2015). The cost of incarceration in state prison in 2012 was on average $58,816 per inmate and the average cost of confinement in county jail was $41,563 (Henrichson and Delaney 2012). Following this costly expansion of criminal justice, several measures have been implemented in California to reduce such exorbitant criminal justice expenditures. California state spending on criminal justice reached its height in 2007–08, when it was approximately $15 billion, while state spending on criminal justice in 2012– 13 reflected a continuing decline since 2010– 11 to about $12 billion, with much of the decline related to reduced expenditures for the state’s correctional system (Office of Legislative Analyst 2014). In addition, fiscal incentives to counties were introduced to decrease the number of felony probationers who violated their conditions of probation that would be sent to state prison and to make ineligible for return to prison certain parolees who violated conditions of their parole. There were also increases in the number of credits inmates could earn to speed up their release from prison and in the dollar amount required for certain property crimes to be treated as felonies, thereby reducing the number of offenders eligible for prison. The state’s recent budget crisis also resulted in large reductions to the judiciary, especially trial courts and impacted court services (Office of Legislative Analyst 2014). The development of drug courts served to divert drug offenders from incarceration into court-supervised community treatment, and represented a diffusion of mental health philosophy and practices into the criminal justice system. Unlike earlier diversion of drug cases, in which treatment was only very loosely coupled to the courts with little provision for judges to closely supervise the progress of participants (Peyrot 1985, 1991), the first drug court

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(opened in Miami-Dade County, Florida in 1989) brought treatment directly into the court by adopting a “tough love,” carrotand-stick approach that combined treatment with the threat of punishment for noncompliance (Burns and Peyrot 2003). The original California drug courts implemented a more “therapeutic” approach to handling substance abuse offenders (Hora et al. 1999). Although drug abuse crimes remained within the criminal justice system, there was a general easing of criminal penalties. Nonetheless, drug court judges retained the power to impose incarceration and other sanctions if the defendant relapsed and/or failed to complete treatment. Drug courts, however, proved expensive to operate and did not solve the problem of large caseloads caused by harsh drug laws and heavy enforcement. They handled only very small caseloads (about 5 percent of all drug offenders) and admitted only those defendants who were found to be motivated to recover and thus “suitable,” closely supervising and monitoring their progress (or regress) over the course of the program. In November 2000 (effective July 2001), the voters in California approved by ballot initiative the Substance Abuse and Crime Prevention Act (also known as Proposition 36 or Prop 36, now California Penal Code, section 1210) to expand the availability of drug treatment to substance abuse offenders. Prop 36 continued the trend of diversion by sending most first or second time, nonviolent and nondealing drug offenders to treatment, instead of jail or prison (Burns and Peyrot 2010). The increased number of cases as a result of this law required the legal system to expand court capacity and increased the caseloads of judges in most counties. It also led to dilution of the nature and amount of judicial supervision and treatment. While Prop 36 lowered justice system costs and avoided the imposition of long incarcerative sentences for nonviolent drug users by precluding jail or prison for these offenses, in doing so, it also increased caseloads and net-widened the delivery of

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judicial and treatment services. Reduced per client expenditures and large caseloads changed the amount and nature of the treatment received and altered the kind and amount of judicial involvement and supervision of clients by “farming out” drug defendants to probation and treatment (Burns and Peyrot 2010). The original drug courts involve frequent court appearances and intensive interactions between the judge and clients, while judicial supervision of Prop 36 clients is often minimal, especially in larger counties where judges essentially defer supervision to treatment and probation personnel. Prop 36 also changed the nature of treatment and reduced its amount, in most cases shifting treatment from the intensive residential treatment to less costly outpatient treatment (Burns and Peyrot 2010). However, by decreasing the institutional ability to offer “tough love” (Burns and Peyrot 2003), questions are raised about whether Prop 36 caseprocessing and treatment may be less effective therapeutically (Burns and Peyrot 2010). As a result of 2011 legislation reclassifying and reducing certain drug offenses from felonies to misdemeanors (Criminal Sentences, Misdemeanor Penalties Initiative Statute, also known as California Proposition 47), many offenders who would have received a prison sentence are not now at risk for prison. This reduction in the severity of sentence can reduce the motivation to participate in drug court. As Sugarman explains, Prop 47 defendants can opt to “take a misdemeanor conviction for a crime that previously would have been charged as a felony and walk free in less time than it takes to complete a drug court program”; he concludes that this “is having a disproportionate impact on California drug courts” and drug courts are seeing a sharp decline in participation (Sugarman 2015, 1). Escalation/Expansion of Control Several recent developments in criminal justice policy have served to escalate the severity and/or expand the scope of control. Homelessness has been subject to a process

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of criminalization through the passage and enforcement of laws prohibiting behaviors associated with that lifestyle. Other policies have created a new category of crime – “hate crime.” While these policies do not criminalize formerly unregulated behaviors, they do redefine some categories of criminal behavior, escalating the severity of punishment. Another policy innovation has created a new category of criminals – sexually violent predators (SVP) – with accompanying sanctions. Finally, there are new policies that have brought mentally ill persons under regulatory control, albeit in the civil justice system.

Expansion: Criminalization of Homelessness

of local citations and arrests are difficult to obtain (particularly in Los Angeles), these laws are selectively enforced (Fisher et al. 2015; Boden and Selbin 2015). At the same time, in some places (e.g., New York City), there is evidence that homeless people may not be being criminally prosecuted or punished (Garland 2001, 119n35, citing Fessenden and Rohde; but compare Fisher et al. 2015; Boden and Selbin 2015) and/or may be being quickly diverted from jail into human services (Aquila 2013). In addition, the homeless may have their cases diverted out of the criminal courts and into a specialized homeless court, thereby keeping them under criminal justice supervision and control.

Escalation: “Hate Crime” The homeless population in many cities has been targeted for enforcement of new categories of minor offenses (i.e., homeless “quality-of-life” crimes and infractions) in another expansion of the system. Through the enactment and enforcement of municipal laws encompassing what has been characterized as “otherwise non-criminal lifesustaining practices or acts in public spaces, such as eating, sitting, sleeping, or camping, when no alternative private spaces are available” (American Bar Association 2010, 2), less severe forms of conduct have come to be defined as “problems,” increasing the clientele who are subject to remedial intervention and social control (see Fisher et al. 2015 on these laws in California). A 2015 report by the UC Berkeley Law School Policy Advocacy Clinic indicates that the average California city has nine antihomeless laws on the books, many more than the number of laws in other states (Fisher et al. 2015; Boden and Selbin 2015). The study also reports that more than 7,000 arrests for vagrancy were made in California in 2013, up 77 percent from 2000 to 2012 and found that there is wide diversity across different cities in police decisions about whether to invoke vagrancy laws and how zealously to enforce them (cf. Bittner 1967). While accurate data on the number

Hate crimes are crimes that are motivated by bias against someone’s racial, religious or other social characteristics (Berard 2010, 15– 40). Although motive evidence has always been relevant to establishing criminal intent and the presence of a “guilty mind,” prior to the advent of these laws, motivation was not a required element of crime. Despite the general principle that the law is not concerned with motive and does not punish evil thoughts alone, the separate category of “hate crime” makes motive a central issue, with crimes motivated by bias being more severely punished. The introduction of this new crime category raises the question of the number and types of hate crime victim categories to be protected and how these may be expanded or precluded from expanding. The advent of “hate crimes” extends the substantive criminal law by holding offenders accountable for their motivation and feelings, enhancing punishment on this basis. While the criminal acts to which the label “hate crimes” is applied have long been considered crimes and social problems (e.g., murder or assault), it is only since the 1980s that states have developed the specific classification of a hate crime (Jenness and Grattet 2010). Nationwide, a comparison of

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data from the National Crime Victimization Survey and the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report (arguably the two most authoritative sources) suggests that hate crime victimizations increased moderately from 2009 to 2012, compared to the figures from 2007 and 2008, while police were involved in responding to a decreasing number of hate crime victimizations (www.bjs.gov/ content/pub/pdf/hcv0412st.pdf, 7, Table 8).1

Escalation: Involuntary Commitment of Sexually Violent Predators Another category of offense/offenders subject to expanded social control are sexually violent predators who comprise a very small number of offenders in the system, compared to the number of people who are convicted of low-level drug or property crimes. Though sexually violent predators are extremely rare, because of the great public concern they engender about the grave risks and harms if they reoffend, this category of offender consumes a disproportionate amount of criminal justice resources in terms of the severity of penalties received and the duration of their punishment (Miller 2010; Petrunik 2005). Indeed, SVP may be subject to involuntary civil commitment after completing their full prison term. As Jeslyn Miller explains, “inspired by high-profile crimes and public outrage, these . . . laws, the first one in the state of Washington in 1990, operated as an extension on already lengthened prison sentences and allowed states to keep offenders who had served their full prison sentences in protective custody for as long as they were deemed dangerous” (Miller 2010, 2097–98; see also Petrunik 2005, 49–74). The Washington SVP law authorizing involuntary civil commitment defines a violent sexual predator as “a person previously convicted of and/or currently charged with one or more of several specified crimes of sexual violence who is deemed to have a mental abnormality or personality disorder which makes him likely to engage in predatory acts of sexual

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violence” (quoted in Petrunik 2005, 58). As of May 2011, there were 521 male SVP and one female SVP committed to California state hospitals (California State Auditor 2011). As of 2010, twenty-one states and the District of Columbia had civil commitment procedures on the books for convicted sex offenders with a diagnosed mental illness who are evaluated to pose a risk to public safety because of that diagnosis (Miller 2010). The cost of such civil confinement can approach $200,000 per year (Davey and Goodnough 2007). Monica Davey and Abby Goodnough report that, on average, civil commitment costs four times more than the cost of housing an offender in prison (Davey and Goodnough 2007). Involuntary civil commitment of SVP under these statutes has withstood constitutional challenges up to the US Supreme Court, rejecting the claim that they violate the double jeopardy and ex post facto clauses of the Constitution (e.g., Kansas v. Hendricks [1997]). The Hendricks decision was based on the finding that Hendricks’s mental disorder of pedophilia was so severe that it rendered him unable to control his urges to sexually molest children and that his high and serious risk of reoffending justified his indefinite commitment in the interest of public safety. Civil commitment laws are just one among a range of measures that extend of social control over those designated “sex offenders,” including mandatory public registration as a convicted sex offender, and restrictions on housing and employment.

Expansion: “Voluntary” Outpatient Commitment of Potentially Dangerous People Another expansion of social control relating to potentially dangerous offenders is the enactment of “assisted outpatient treatment” laws in forty-five states, which have as their objective to prevent violent criminal behavior that often results from severe, untreated mental illness. While this form

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of treatment is officially defined as voluntary, it is based on coercion (Peyrot 1985). These laws authorize “voluntary” outpatient commitment of mentally ill persons considered to be potentially dangerous by mandating assisted outpatient treatment. Currently, in twenty-five states, these laws regulate adults with psychiatric disorders and (usually) a history of medication noncompliance and permit court-ordered outpatient treatment (including medication) of those who are deemed potentially dangerous and mentally ill as a condition of their remaining in the community. As in drug court, treatment under such laws are backed up by the threat of containment, in this case hospitalization through involuntary civil commitment, for those who violate the court-ordered conditions (Phelan et al. 2010). Thus, “voluntary” treatment advances the goal of managing risk, and risk reduction is viewed as efficient social control (Garland 2001, 176). Contraction/Deescalation of Control While there has been expansion and escalation of social control in some policy arenas, this has been accompanied by contraction or deescalation of control in other arenas. In most cases these have reflected a trend of decreasing regulation of lower-level crimes, e.g., possession of marijuana for personal use and petty property crimes. In addition, there has been a refinement in the classification of crimes that trigger harsh mandatory sentences, especially by removing petty crimes as triggers.

Contraction: Marijuana Decriminalization and Medical Marijuana Decriminalization and medicalization of marijuana use represents a contraction of social control following the increased criminalization, enforcement and incarceration of drug offenders in the drug war. Decriminalization or medicalization reclassifies marijuana (ab)use as an issue for the public

health system, with continued regulation of its production and sale. California was the first state to legalize the medical use of marijuana in 1996 with the passage of the ballot initiative entitled the Compassionate Use Act (Proposition 215, now California Health and Safety Code, Section 11362.5). In 2010, California de-criminalized small amounts of marijuana possession when Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed into law a bill decriminalizing possession of one ounce or less of marijuana, reducing it from a misdemeanor criminal offense to a civil infraction with a maximum $100 fine and no jail time (California Senate Bill 1449, 2010, effective 2011). These strategies are reflected in a set of states that have liberalized marijuana policy; as of May 2015, eleven states have legal medical marijuana and decriminalization, nine states have only legalized medical marijuana, and four states (Colorado, Washington, Alaska, Oregon) and the District of Columbia have legalized both the medicinal and recreational use of marijuana. Twentythree states and the District of Columbia have enacted medical marijuana laws, with medical marijuana legislation pending in seven additional states.

Deescalation: Sentencing Reductions for Petty Crimes Another example of dilution of social control involves sentencing reductions for petty crimes. In California, some low-level crime categories have been changed from felonies to misdemeanors under the recent enactment of a November 2014 ballot measure entitled, The Criminal Sentences, Misdemeanor Penalties Initiative Statute, aka, Proposition 47. Proposition 47 reclassifies certain drug and property crimes as misdemeanors rather than felonies and, specifically, changes how six low-level, nonviolent drug and property crimes are charged (including petty theft and forging/writing bad checks for $950 or less). The new legislation also allows people convicted of these crimes when they were felonies to apply for resentencing and, unless the offender

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has a prior conviction for rape, murder or child molestation, or are registered as a sex offender, they cannot be sent to state prison (Anderson 2014). As of January 2015, the law had reduced the state prison population by over 2,000. The measure also earmarks the savings to fund mental health and drug treatment (Anderson 2015).

Deescalation: Limiting “Three Strikes” Sentencing to Serious or Violent Third Offenses California’s “three strikes” law as originally enacted and in force until 2013, was a harsh habitual offender law that shifted criminal justice policy toward incapacitation and deterrence of repeat offenders who threaten public safety. The law was one of the toughest habitual offender laws in the nation and provided a mandatory sentence of twentyfive years to life for anyone convicted of a third felony, even though the third strike felony did not have to be for a serious or violent crime. In addition under the law, because of a defendant’s prior record, certain crimes that would otherwise have been charged as misdemeanors could, at the prosecutor’s discretion, be charged as a “wobbler,” i.e., as either a misdemeanor or felony that triggers three strike sentencing (although trial judges had discretion to reduce a “wobbler” charged as a felony to a misdemeanor up to the time of sentencing to avoid the imposition of a three strikes sentence, or could strike allegations of a prior “serious” or “violent” felony conviction). However, habitual offender laws fail to contain crime because most offenders who are so sentenced are already aging out of crime (Grey 2010). California’s aging prison population has increased; between 1990 and 2013, the percentage of offenders age fifty or older increased from 4 percent to 21 percent (Grattet and Hayes 2015). In addition to having little deterrent effect because these offenders are aging out of crime, as a practical matter, they are among the most costly inmates because aging offenders tend to

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have greater health care needs (Grattet and Hayes 2015). As Grattet and Hayes explain, “these trends present a particular challenge with respect to providing constitutionally mandated adequate health care and controlling prison health care costs.” A 2012 ballot measure entitled, Three Strikes Law. Repeat Felony Offenders. Penalties Initiative Statute (also known as Proposition 36), amended the three strikes law (effective 2013) such that only offenders whose third offense was a serious or violent felony could receive a sentence of twenty-five years to life. As of October 2013, more than 1,000 California inmates have been resentenced under the revised legislation and been released or will ultimately be eligible for release (Aleaziz 2013). Sector/Locus Shift in Control Shifts in control involve diffusion across or within institutional sectors. One pattern is the diffusion of control strategies from other institutional sectors into the criminal justice section, especially incorporating therapeutic (mental health) philosophies and practices into the criminal justice system (e.g., problem-solving courts). Conversely, there has been diffusion of philosophy and practices from the criminal justice sector into other institutional sectors (e.g., education and mental health). Finally, there has been a shift of enforcement within the criminal justice system from the state level to the local level.

Sector Shift: Problem-Solving Courts Many low-level offenders with unaddressed substance abuse and mental health problems and other unmet human needs had been recycling for years in and out of jails and prisons due to the lack of rehabilitation behind bars. Accordingly, there have been recent changes in the nature of the institutions that perform the social control functions over many such offenders, especially the use of drug courts for drug crimes/offenders, and various other,

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second-generation problem-solving courts for other categories of offenses and offenders. Problem-solving courts widen the net of social control over low-level criminal defendants by monitoring them within the system as a way to avoid recidivism. The drug court model diffused with the development of other second-generation drug courts and problem-solving courts, including juvenile drug court, mental health court, dual diagnosis court (for justiceinvolved people with co-occurring substance abuse and mental health problems), driving under the influence (“DUI”) court, prostitution court, homeless court, mental health homeless court (for justice-involved persons with mental health and homelessness issues), community court, reentry court (Heward 2007; Nolan 2009), and most recently, veteran’s court (Marek 2008; Gambill 2010). As of June 2013, the National Institute of Justice reported that there were over 3,200 problem-solving courts operating nationally, including more than 2,800 drug courts, with additional courts in the planning or implementation stage. The advent and expansion of these courts suggests that a more therapeutic and less punitive approach is appropriate for people with more mental health kinds of issues who become enmeshed in the criminal justice system. Abstinence/Punishment Model or Harm Reduction Drug courts (and many other problemsolving courts) retain the traditional criminal justice focus on assessing blame and meting out proportionate punishment under what amounts to an abstinence/ punishment model. By contrast, mental health courts operate with the recognition that many of their clients have mental disabilities (and often co-occurring substance misuse issues) which impair their reasoning capacity and free will, leading to an altered calculation of personal responsibility and accountability. This construction of mental health court clients differs substantially from the construction of clients in drug courts, where abstinence is treated as a

reasonable expectation that leads to adverse consequences for participants when violated (Burns 2014). The harm-reduction approach in mental health court reflects the unique characteristics of its clientele and the severity and chronicity of the mental disabilities and disorders from which most clients suffer. The hesitancy of mental health court to impose jail sanctions is evidence of more moderate client expectations and more tempered versions of success than in drug court (Burns 2014; Burns and Peyrot 2003). Thus, the mental health court’s more realistic understanding counts as “success” lengthening the time during which clients can live safely in the community, maintain housing, and engage in productive activity before relapse. While complete abstinence from drugs is typically required of participants in drug courts, most mental health court clients are simultaneously required to take their prescribed antipsychotic medicine to become and remain psychiatrically stabilized and to refrain from taking illegal drugs.

Sector Shift: Education Another example of the diffusion of institutional forms and strategies from one institutional control sector to another is the diffusion of legalistic and criminal justice approaches into educational discipline of students to control campus violence, alcohol/drug misuse, and gangs (Lake 2009). The emergence of enhanced social control and punishment in schools is tied to the concern to maintain school safety and security in the aftermath of several highly publicized school shootings, including at Columbine High School, Virginia Tech University, Northern Illinois University, Sandyhook Elementary and near the campus of UC Santa Barbara, along with other highprofile mass shootings (e.g., the “Batman” shooting in Aurora, Colorado and the Tucson, Arizona shooting of former US Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords). Schools are exercising increasing social control and discipline over students and

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enacting more punitive policies. For example, many schools have recently adopted “zero-tolerance” policies designed to prevent and reduce school violence. Additional social control challenges for schools include enhanced attempts to control campus drug and alcohol (ab)use and to prevent sexual assault and other interpersonal offenses (e.g., stalking and harassment) on campus.

School Discipline and Security In developing an effective response to problems of violence, sexual assault (and other interpersonal offenses), as well as gangs on campus, schools are increasing discipline over their students and mandating punishment for what often amount to petty, nonviolent forms of perceived misconduct, such as suspending or expelling students for such minor offenses in the interest of school security. School antiviolence policies not only increase security measures and surveillance over students’ everyday lives and activities, they also contribute to a culture of distrust. In addition, as Muschert and Peguero (2010) point out, these antiviolence policies contribute to the continued discrimination against racial and ethnic minority youth, similar to that seen in the criminal justice system. Robert Garot (2010) examined an experimental strategy to the traditional school-toprison pipeline in his discussion of the “gang school.” The gang school strategy involves the introduction of a new institutional form and diffusion of a reintegrative approach to gang youth in school similar to the restorative justice movement in criminal justice (Braithwaite 2002; Zehr 2002). Unlike most schools that ostensibly promote an exclusionary approach to gangs, the gang school strategy recharacterizes gang members as children with needs, somewhat normalizing them, and tries to keep gang youth in school by accepting and working with them. The strategy requires openness simultaneous with control and reflects a diffusion of institutional forms akin to the adoption of the “academy” school model within the

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traditional US educational system as a way of avoiding school violence. Alcohol, Drug, and Sexual Assault Deterrence Programs An additional social control policy that colleges and universities have adopted and recently amplified across campuses are alcohol and drug deterrence programs. Higher education institutions have implemented various programs to support compliance with campus drinking regulations and to prevent (or at least mitigate) alcohol/drug (ab)use and its harmful consequences. Such programs include alcohol and drug education and awareness, social norms education, and punishment for violations of campus drinking/alcohol and drug policies, including mandatory participation in college alcohol and drug education. School control and deterrence of sexual assault is another area where criminal justice control has expanded and increasingly diffused to the schools, especially in response to the Clery Act and Title IX regulations. Prior to that time, campus sexual assault policies, if they existed, were directed to prevention and focused on women’s strategies for reducing the risk of sexual assault. Campus officials are now implementing campaigns to change campus policy on sexual assault and other interpersonal crimes and offenses, such as domestic violence, stalking, or harassment. In doing this, campus administrators reinforce sexual assault legislation and comply with the federal government’s recently suggested procedures for adjudicating allegations of campus sexual assault (including student dismissal and referral to criminal justice authorities), which are backed up by the threat of loss of federal funding (Wilson 2015). These campaigns educate faculty, staff and administrators about their new mandatory reporting responsibilities and inform students about new campus policy and explicit conduct expectations (e.g., “affirmative consent”). In addition, campus public safety officials are increasingly called in to assist public law enforcement in investigating and

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enforcing crimes of sexual assault, stalking and domestic violence which involve the campus community. Diffusion in this sense is from public to private law enforcement (compare Ferris 2005 on the sometimes competing interests of public versus private “threat management” in the social control of celebrity stalking). As with mental health profiling, in responding to complaints of interpersonal crimes and offenses on campus, schools are facing an increasing number of lawsuits from students alleging for violations of their due process, privacy and other rights (Wilson 2015). Mental Health Profiling Like racial “profiling” by criminal justice officials who use race or ethnicity as the basis for suspecting a person of criminal conduct, school mental health profiling involves singling out for special treatment students who are considered to be unstable or mentally disordered and hence at risk for future violence (Price 2011; Reiss 2011). Out of concern for school safety, mental health profiling encompasses the growth of campus policies to monitor and evaluate student mental health and control and segregate potentially dangerous students. Profiling in school includes subjecting students to campus behavioral threat assessment committees, or sending students involuntarily for mental health evaluations, or even referring them to a psychiatric facility for treatment, including medication and hospitalization (Reiss 2011). Mental health profiling represents another risk management strategy in social control where various “treatments” are undertaken that punish students not for any actual behavior, but for not reducing their own perceived risk.

Locus Shift: Correctional Realignment The federal courts mandated major reductions in the California prison population and drastic improvements in the medical and mental health care that inmates receive

and this decision was affirmed by the US Supreme Court in the 2011 case of Brown v. Plata (2011). California was required to remedy the violation of constitutional rights and unconstitutional conditions of overcrowding and inadequate medical and mental health care. Specifically, California was ordered to reduce its prison population to 137.5 percent of institutional design capacity within two years (i.e., a reduction of at least 30,000 inmates). In response and in one of the most consequential shifts in criminal justice policy in decades, Governor Jerry Brown signed into law “Public Safety Realignment” (also known as Assembly Bill 109 or AB 109), effective October 2011. This new law transfers those who commit crimes which are considered to be “nonserious,” “nonviolent,” or “nonsexual” from state prison to county jail, placing offenders under the authority of local county sheriffs instead of state prison officials. The significant decrease in the prison inmate population occasioned by realignment is greater than the entire prison population of forty-two other states (US Bureau of Justice Statistics 2013). In its first seventeen months, AB 109 reduced the state prison and parole populations by 28,000 (Anderson 2014). Upon release, realignment also shifts supervision of offenders from state parole agents to county probation officers. Shift from Parole to Probation Supervision Once an offender is released from custody under correctional realignment, they are supervised by county probation officers, rather than state parole agents. Counties are also precluded from returning parole violators to prison (Grattet and Hayes 2015; Martin and Grattet 2015, n. 7). Over $2 billion in state funds has been allocated to local governments to address their additional responsibilities under realignment and an additional $1.7 billion in state bonds has been allocated to build more jail capacity (Thompson 2013), for an estimated 14,000

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new jail beds throughout the state, as well as space for needed services to prepare inmates for successful community reentry (Lofstrom and Martin 2015). The fifty-eight counties in California are taking varied approaches to implementing realignment and additional data are needed to systematically study these variations at the county level. As Martin and Grattet suggest, “at present, we have only a superficial understanding of the communitybased strategies being adopted by counties [and] . . . the state needs to build a more robust infra-structure for data collection . . . It requires data on services, sanctions, and supervision to be linked to data on offender backgrounds, demographics and recidivism outcomes, and currently most counties lack the capacity to capture these minimal elements” (Martin and Grattet 2015, text accompanying n. 24, citing Lofstrom, Petersilia, and Raphael 2012; see also Tafoya, Grattet, and Bird 2014). Increase in Reentry Services or Increase in Arrests There are significant differences in how local counties are spending their allocation of state funds under realignment (Bird and Grattet 2014) and parole violators can no longer be sent back to prison (Martin and Grattet 2015, n. 7). In some counties, there is an increase in referral to reentry services. For example, San Francisco has been emphasizing rehabilitation services over law enforcement (Center for Investigative Reporting 2012) and Santa Clara allows inmates released under realignment to have the same access to reentry services as other ex-prisoners (Aleaziz 2013). By contrast, other counties (e.g., San Jose) are using the funds to intensify enforcement efforts, sometimes returning offenders to jail for probation violations (Center for Investigative Reporting 2012). Moreover, there are a variety of available alternative custody programs and individual counties are deciding which alternative programs they will utilize at any point in

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an offender’s sentence. These programs include “placement in a non-custodial setting during a term of punishment (e.g., split sentence, work release, home detention, electronic monitoring) . . . , probation, supervision by a specialty court . . . , community service, placement in a half-way house or sober living facility, fines, mandatory treatment or training” (Martin and Grattet 2015). Among the alternatives being used are reentry courts for parole and probation violators. For example, a parole agent in Santa Clara can send a parolee with a substance abuse and/or mental health issue to reentry court instead of jail for a parole violation. Santa Clara reentry court also accepts people who are being supervised by probation in “post-parole probation” after realignment (Kircher-Allen 2012).

Summary and Implications We are witnessing cycles of overlapping expansion/escalation of social control (e.g., criminalization of homelessness and mental illness, as well as enhanced penalties for sexual violent predators and hate crimes) simultaneously with the contraction/deescalation of social control for other offenses (e.g., drug possession and petty property crimes). Moreover, there is diffusion of philosophies and practices between social control sectors (criminal justice, mental health, education) and shifts within social control sectors (especially decentralization of enforcement). In this section we reflect on these trends and consider the implications for future developments. Trends and Consequences in Expansion/Escalation of Control Michelle Alexander views the expansion of antiviolence policies in the schools as part and parcel of the “school-to-prison pipeline” in which schools continue the marginalization, discrimination against, and ultimately the criminalization of youth of color (Alexander 2012). As Alexander recently

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stated in an online interview, schools “began viewing children as criminals or suspects, rather than as . . . children needing our guidance” (Sokolower 2011). In waging the drug war and building the prison industrial complex in response, huge amounts of public funds were diverted away from the schools and education to fund mass incarceration. Rather than providing youth with a meaningful education that leads to enhanced economic opportunity, the diffusion of criminal justice strategies to the schools increased the pathways to prison and populations seen as in need of control. The efficacy of the escalation strategies identified here is not well known. For example, we do not know if increasing criminal penalties for hate crimes will have an increased deterrent effect, since these crimes are thought to be highly motivated by feelings (Berard 2010) and the criminal justice process may bring offenders into contact with their victims (e.g., in court), sometimes exactly what the offender wants (see Ferris 2005 regarding deterring stalkers). Similarly, will enforcement of sanctions on the lifestyle of the homeless result in less of the sanctioned behaviors if the perpetrators continue to live that lifestyle due to lack of solutions to homelessness itself (or will it be determined that problem-solving courts for the homeless represent the best chance for a solution)? Coerced civil commitment of sexually violent predators and the potentially dangerous mentally ill is designed to incapacitate high risk recidivists, but at what costs, both financial and in terms of fundamental human rights. Are these strategies being implemented based on their efficacy and efficiency, or as strategies for ameliorating public fears? Unanticipated Consequences of Criminal Justice Realignment An unanticipated consequence of the recent criminal justice policy of realignment is that it is resulting in local jails facing conditions of overcrowding and lawsuits for the same types of abuse, neglect and inadequate medical and mental health care for which California state prison facilities have been

sued and which gave rise to realignment in the first place. Indeed, a recent report suggests that “law firms that previously sued the state are now targeting counties for the same conditions that led to a federal court takeover of some state prison operations” (Thompson 2013b). Joan Petersilia underscores that the realignment policy shift in California represents one of the country’s largest ever criminal justice “experiment(s) about whether prison populations can be reduced significantly without posing a threat to public safety” (Thompson 2013b). These developments in California are part of a larger national trend whereby New York and New Jersey have each reduced their prison populations by 20 percent. In particular, New York reduced prosecutions of low-level drug offenders and New Jersey decreased the return of parole violators to prison by providing increased supervision and services (Mauer 2014). Other states, including Georgia, Michigan, South Carolina and Texas are also adopting similar criminal justice reforms (Mauer 2014). Yet, by March 2013, the California prison population was rising again (Anderson 2014), although this was prior to the November 2014 passage of Prop 47 with its reduced penalties for several nonviolent petty offenses. Recent research has tried to measure the success or failure of realignment and the actual impact on crime rates and public safety of transferring or releasing roughly 33,000 offenders to local jurisdictions. According to a 2015 report by Lofstrom and Rafael based on 2012–13 data, there was “no evidence that realignment has so far had an impact on violent crime rates. The only effect we can attribute to realignment is a noticeable rise in motor vehicle thefts” (Lofstrom and Rafael 2015). Apart from motor vehicle theft, the slight increase in crime statewide in 2012 may not be due to realigned offenders/released prisoners because the increase in property crime was a nationwide trend that occurred in other states and some of it took place before realignment was implemented. With regard to 2013, Lofstrom and Raphael report that

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California’s violent crime rate dropped by 6.4 percent and property crime decreased by 3.8 percent and crime rates, returning to the long-term trend of declining crime rates (Lofstrom and Raphael 2015). However, the crime rate picture appears different in light of the most recent mid-year data from 2015. Following years of general decline in the state, there has been an increase in violent crime and property crime in many counties throughout California. For example, there was a 20.6 percent increase in violent crimes and a 10.9 percent jump in property crimes in Los Angeles compared to the same period in 2014, and similar increases are reported for San Francisco, Ventura and other counties (Williamson 2015). Current data also indicate that jail inmates may not be being monitored after release and that there has been a 15 percent increase of paroled sex offenders who are fugitives (California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation 2013; Thompson, 2013b). Apparently, post-realignment offenders have less of an incentive to comply with parole conditions compared to previously when they could have been ordered back to prison for up to a year for disabling or removing their electronic monitoring ankle bracket. Under the current system, such offenders face up to six months in county jail for this offense and many are being quickly released due to overcrowding.

Trends and Consequences in Contraction/Deescalation of Control In terms of the prospects for future contraction of social control in the domain of marijuana use, a growing number of states have legalized recreational use of marijuana, and an increasing number of states (most recently Delaware in June 2015) have also decriminalized possession of small amounts of marijuana, replacing criminal penalties with civil fines. Additional states are passing medical marijuana laws which shift social control of marijuana use from criminal justice regulation to medical regulation (a newer form of social control).

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There is also evidence of the continuing diffusion of the institutional form of mandatory treatment instead of incarceration with the implementation of alternative problemsolving courts that have expanded from drug offenses/offenders to various other kinds of criminal offenses and offender categories, and from California to many other states and localities. However, the increase in numbers of drug courts, which made drug treatment widely available to (nonviolent) drug offenders in California and reduced costs for incarceration, was accompanied by a reduction in the resources available for treatment of each client, and a decrease in monitoring and supervision by the court and probation. This reflects a lower investment in mental health strategies as compared to criminal justice strategies, even if the former are cheaper and more effective. Some observers believe that reduction of many drug crimes to misdemeanors has had the unintended consequence of removing the threat of a felony conviction and prison sentence for more minor, nonviolent offenses, reducing the incentives for people to participate in court-supervised rehabilitation programs in alternative problemsolving courts and causing the collapse of drug courts and the recent rise in crime. While drug courts lowered recidivism rates before reduction of penalties, that reduction “takes the safety net away. (People are being rearrested) because they haven’t been given the tools to succeed” (Williamson 2015, 1). Shift in Criminal Justice Conceptions of Responsibility In addition to the increasingly therapeutic focus of criminal justice institutions, particularly with the innovation of problemsolving courts, there has also been significant reshaping of the substantive criminal law, which has moved it away from its traditional emphasis on free will and personal responsibility and toward a mental health and treatment oriented paradigm. This has in large part been accomplished by the introduction of a growing number of

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therapeutically based (social) scientific defenses to crime which may serve to excuse (or mitigate) criminal responsibility and thus to alter the appropriateness and/or severity of punishment, further therapizing the justice process. This trend involves the increasing participation of social scientists and mental health experts in court, usually brought in by the defense in an attempt to explain and/or excuse criminal conduct. For example, in recent years, neuroscientists (who “blame the brain”) and social scientists have offered testimony as expert witnesses to challenge notions of free will and individual responsibility with an expanding array of new and evolving excuses (e.g., Valenstein 1998 on “blaming the brain”; Burns 1996, 2008 on the child “abuse excuse” propounded by the defendants in the Menendez brothers’ murder trial; Peyrot and Burns 2001 on the “group contagion” defense of Damian Williams and Henry Watson in the Reginald Denny beating trial; Wilson 1997 on the “Twinkie defense” (too much sugar) in the trial of Dan White for the killings of San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone). Such evidence is also being used in pretrial plea bargaining and at sentencing in various felony and especially death penalty cases. Ironically, some of the same genetic/biological evidence that is introduced at trial to mitigate the culpability of SVP is being used against them in subsequent involuntary civil commitment proceedings to keep them confined longer or indefinitely on the grounds that they are likely to reoffend. Thus, a genetic predisposition to violence can be both a mitigating and aggravating factor in sentencing (Farahany 2011). Biological, neurological, genetic, and behavioral sciences are thus having a significant impact on criminal law, undermining its traditional notions of free will and ushering in a mental health and social science perspective that is further blotting out the distinction between law and science (Farahany 2011). This development is moving social control away from an emphasis on

blame and punishment and toward a more therapeutic, treatment and service-oriented approach which is consistent with the ethos of the welfare state.

Conclusion The trends described in this chapter largely reflect the dissemination of social control strategies across state and local governments in the United States. These trends may have reached their limits, or they may continue to develop. We have focused primarily on trends that are widespread enough to be considered as having potential to become dominant. We have attempted to identify the factors influencing the emergence and spread of these strategies, but the multiplicity of changes and their interrelationships makes it difficult to predict future public policy changes and the impact of public policies on the social problems they seek to remedy.

Glossary Assisted outpatient treatment laws Laws that have as their objective to prevent violent criminal behavior that often results from severe, untreated mental illness. Hate crimes Criminal offenses that are motivated by bias against someone’s racial, religious, or other social characteristics. Mental health profiling Involves singling out for special treatment students who are considered to be unstable or mentally disordered and hence at risk for future violence. Problem-solving courts Courts that address low-level criminal defendants’ specific needs and problems, including drug abuse, mental illness, and homelessness. These include juvenile drug court, mental health court, dual diagnosis court, driving under the influence court, prostitution court, homeless court, mental health

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homeless court, community court, reentry court, and veteran’s court. Public policy Measures that formulate standards of behavior and create social institutions charged with enforcing those standards. “Three strikes” law A California law that provided a mandatory sentence of twenty-five years to life for anyone convicted of a third felony.

Note 1. There is much dissatisfaction with the official data as both the National Crime Victimization Survey and the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report data reflect various influences apart from the incidence of events that may meet the official criteria for hate crimes, including under-reporting by victims, under-reporting by police to the FBI, respondent confusion about hate crime categorization, and questions about the generalizability of victim survey samples. There can also be changes in the definitions or scope of the statistics from year to year, making authoritative comparisons challenging (Berard 2010, 20). In addition, reporting by states and local governments is voluntary and some states with clear histories of racial hatred have no reported incidents. In California in 2013, of the 299 hate crimes that were reported and referred for prosecution, 227 cases were filed for prosecution by district attorneys and city attorneys. Of the 227 cases that were filed for prosecution, 196 were filed as hate crimes and 76 were filed as non-bias-motivated crimes. Of the 153 cases with a disposition available: 44.4 percent (68) were hate crime convictions; 49.7 percent (76) were other convictions; and 5.9 percent (9) were not convicted (Office of the Attorney General, California Department of Justice, Criminal Justice Statistics, 2013).

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Alexander, M. 2012. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: The New Press. Allen, F. 1981. The Decline of the Rehabilitative Ideal. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. American Bar Association, Commission on Homelessness and Poverty. 2010. No such place as “away”: Why banishment is a wrong turn on the path to better and safer cities. White paper, February. www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/ migrated/homeless/PublicDocuments/ ABA_CHP_Banishment_White_Paper_ February_2010.authcheckdam/pdf. Anderson, L. 2014. Fewer prisons, less crime. Los Angeles Daily Journal, October 1. 2015. Prop 47 is just the beginning. Los Angeles Daily Journal, February 12. Aquila, R. 2013. Fountain House: How a community can engage. Talk at Criminalization of Mental Illness conference, USC Saks Institute for Mental Health Law, Policy, and Ethics, April 11. Berard, T. 2010. Hate crimes and their criminalization. In New Approaches to Social Problems Treatment: Research in Social Problems and Public Policy, vol. 17, edited by M. Peyrot and S. Burns, 15–40. Oxford: Emerald. Bird, M., and R. Grattet. 2014. Do local realignment policies affect recidivism in California? Public Policy Institute of California Online Report, April. www.ppic.org/content/ pubs/report/R_814MBR.pdf. Bittner, Egon. 1967. The police on skid row: A study of peace keeping. American Sociological Review 32:699–715. Boden, P., and J. Selbin. 2015. Los Angeles Times, February 15. Braithwaite, J. 2002. Restorative justice and therapeutic jurisprudence. Criminal Law Bulletin 38:244–62. Brown v. Plata. 131 S.Ct. 1910 (2011). Burns, S. 1996. Lawyers’ work in the Menendez brothers murder trial. Issues in Applied Linguistics 7:19–32. 2008. Demonstrating “reasonable fear” at trial: Is it science or junk science? Human Studies 31:107–31. 2014. Mental health/homeless court. Paper presented to the American Society of Criminology, San Francisco.

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Burns, S., and M. Peyrot. 2003. Tough love: Nurturing and coercing responsibility and recovery in California drug courts. Social Problems 50:416–38. 2010. Standardizing social problems solutions: The case of court-supervised drug treatment. In New Approaches to Social Problems Treatment: Research in Social Problems and Public Policy, edited by M. Peyrot and S. Burns, 205–37. Oxford: Emerald. California State Auditor. 2011. Sex offender commitment program: Streamlining the process for identifying potential sexually violent predators would reduce unnecessary or duplicative work. Report 2010-116, July. Center for Investigative Reporting. 2012. Interviews with Steve Cooley, former District Attorney of Los Angeles County, and George Gascon, District Attorney of San Francisco. Broadcast August 20, Channel KQED. Davey, M., and A. Goodnough. 2007. Doubts rise as states hold sex offenders after prison. New York Times, March 4. www.nytimes.com/ 2007/03/04/us/04civil.html. Duff, A., and D. Garland, eds. 1994. A Reader on Punishment. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Farahany, N., ed. 2011. The Impact of Behavioral Sciences on Criminal Law. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ferris, Kerry. 2005. Threat management: Moral and actual entrepreneurship in the control of celebrity stalking. In Ethnographies of Law and Social Control, edited by S. Burns, 9–29. Oxford: Elsevier. Fessenden, F., and D. Rohde. 1999. Dismissed by prosecutors before reaching court: False arrests rise in New York City. New York Times, August 23. Fisher, M., N. Miller, L. Walter, and J. Selbin. 2015. California’s new vagrancy laws: The growing enactment and enforcement of anti-homeless laws in the golden state. SSRN Working Paper. February 12. Gambill, G. 2010. Justice-involved veterans: A mounting social crisis. Los Angeles Daily Journal, May 5. Garland, D. 2001. The Culture of Control. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Garot, R. 2010. The gang’s school: Challenges of reintegrative social control. In New

Approaches to Social Problems Treatment: Research in Social Problems and Public Policy, vol. 17, edited by M. Peyrot and S. Burns, 149–76. Oxford: Emerald. Grattet, R., and J. Hayes. 2015. California’s changing prison population. Public Policy Institute of California Online Report, April. www.ppic.org/main/ publication_show.asp?1=702. Grey, J. 2010. Reducing our prison population. Los Angeles Daily Journal, August 19. Henrichson, C., and R. Delaney. 2012. The price of prisons: What incarceration costs taxpayers. Vera Institute of Justice On-line Report, February 29. www.vera.org/pubs/ special/price-prisons-what-incarcerationcosts-taxpayers. Heward, M. 2007. Problem-solving courts: Changing the way courts conduct business. In Current Legal Issues in Criminal Justice, edited by C. Hemmens, 85–100. Los Angeles, CA: Roxbury. Hora, P., W. Schma, and J. Rosenthal. 1999. Therapeutic jurisprudence and the drug court treatment movement: Revolutionizing the criminal justice system’s response to drug abuse and crime in America. Notre Dame Law Review 74:439–538. Jenness, V., and R. Grattet. 2010. Making Hate a Crime: From Social Movement to Law Enforcement. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Kansas v. Hendricks. 521 US 346 (1997). Kircher-Allen, E. 2012. The case for reentry courts. California Lawyer, November. Lake, P. 2009. Student discipline: The case against legalistic approaches. Chronicle of Higher Education, April 17, pp. A31–32. Lofstrom, M., and B. Martin. 2015. California’s county jails. Public Policy Institute of California On-line Report, April. www.ppic .org/main/publication_show.asp?i=1061. Lofstrom, M., J. Petersilia, and S. Raphael. 2012. Evaluating the effects of California’s corrections realignment on public safety. Public Policy Institute of California Online Report, April. www.ppic.org/main/ publication.asp?i=103. Lofstrom, M., and S. Raphael. 2015. Realignment, incarceration and crime trends in California. Public Policy Institute of California On-line Report, May. www.ppic.org/main/ publication_quick.asp?i=1151.

public policy and social problems Marek, L. 2008. Courts for veterans spreading across U.S. National Law Journal, December 22. Martin, B., and R. Grattet. 2015. Alternatives to incarceration in California. Public Policy Institute of California Online Report, April. www.ppic.org/main/ publication_quick.asp?i=1146. Martinson, R. 1974. What works? Questions and answers about prison reform. Public Interest 35:22. Mauer, M. 1995. Young Black Americans and the Criminal Justice System: Five Years Later. Washington, DC: the Sentencing Project. 2014. Why prison populations are shrinking and how to shrink them more. Governing Institute, March 20. www.governing.com/ gov-institute/voices/col-states-how-shrinkprison-population-costs-incarceration.html. Miller, J. 2010. Sex offender civil commitment: The treatment paradox. California Law Review 98:2093–128. Muschert, G., and A. Peguero. 2010. The Columbine effect and school antiviolence policy. In New Approaches to Social Problems Treatment: Research in Social Problems and Public Policy, vol. 17, edited by M. Peyrot and S. Burns, 117–48. Oxford: Emerald. Nolan, J. 2009. Legal Accents, Legal Borrowings: The International Problem-Solving Court Movement. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Office of the Attorney General, California Department of Justice, Criminal Justice Statistics. 2013. Hate Crime in California. Office of Legislative Analyst. 2014. Report, February 19. Petrunik, M. 2005. Dangerousness and its discontents. In Ethnographies of Law and Social Control, edited by S. Burns, 49–74. Oxford: Elsevier. Peyrot, M. 1982. Caseload management: Choosing suitable clients in a community health clinic agency. Social Problems 30:157–67. 1984. Cycles of social problem development: The case of drug abuse. Sociological Quarterly 25:83–95. 1985. Coerced voluntarism: The micropolitics of drug treatment. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 13:343–65. 1991. Institutional and organizational dynamics in community-based drug abuse treatment. Social Problems 38:20–33.

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Peyrot, M., and S. Burns. 2001. Sociologists on trial: Theoretical competition and juror reasoning. The American Sociologist 32:42– 69. eds. 2010. New Approaches to Social Problems Treatment, Research in Social Problems and Public Policy. Vol. 17. Oxford: Emerald. Phelan, J., M. Sinkewicz, D. Castille, S. Huz, and B. Link. 2010. Effectiveness and outcome of assisted outpatient treatment in New York state. Psychiatric Services 61:137–43. Price, M. 2011. Mad at School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Reiss, B. 2011. Campus security and the specter of mental health profiling. Chronicle of Higher Education, January 30, p. 1. Shelden, R. 2001. Controlling the Dangerous Classes: A Critical Introduction to the History of Criminal Justice. Boston: Allyn & Bacon. Sokolower, J. 2011. Michelle Alexander on the New Jim Crow and the school-to-prison pipeline. Rethinking Schools (blog), December 20. https://rethinkingschoolsbolg .wordpress.com/2011/12/20/michellealexander-on-the-school-to-prisonpipeline/. Sugarman, S. 2015. Drug courts hit hard by passage of prop 47: Rehab initiatives fizzle as offenders drop out to accept misdemeanor convictions instead. Los Angeles Daily Journal, February 9. Tafoya, S., R. Grattet, and M. Bird. 2014. Corrections realignment and data collection in California. Public Policy Institute of California On-line Report, April. www.ppic .org/content/pubs/other/417/STR_appendix .pdf. Thompson, D. 2013a. California struggles with experiment to shift inmates. Website of Justice Center, Council of State Governments, May 12. https://csgjusticecenter.org/ corrections/media-clips/Calif-struggleswith-experiment-to-shift-inmates. 2013b. California realignment of inmates blamed for increase in crime. Huffington Post, May 12. www.huffingtonpost.com/ 2013/05/12/California-realignment-inmates_ n_3263078.html. Title IX, Education Amendments of 1972, Public Law No. 92–318, 86 Stat. 235 (June 23, 1972), codified Title 20, USC, sections 1681–88. Truth-in-Lending Act of 1968.

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US Bureau of Justice Statistics. 2013. Report. Valenstein, E. 1998. Blaming the Brain: The Truth about Drugs and Mental Health. New York: The Free Press. Williamson, L. 2015. Prop 47 blamed by some for rise in crime. Los Angeles Daily Journal, August 12. Wilson, J. 1975. Thinking about Crime. New York: Basic Books.

1997. Moral Judgment. New York: Basic Books. Wilson, R. 2015. Should colleges be judging rape? Chronicle of Higher Education, April 12, pp. 1–4. Wunder, A. 1995. The extinction of inmate privileges: Survey summary. Corrections 20:5– 24. Zehr, H. 2002. The Little Book of Restorative Justice. Intercourse, PA: Good Books.

CHAPTER 5

Social Problems in Global Perspective Yvonne A. Braun and Michael C. Dreiling∗

Abstract For decades, sociological inquiry and praxis about social problems have developed a primary orientation focused on the nation-state and policy solutions within the nation-state system. We argue for globalizing the study of social problems by adjusting analytical frames that explain, address, or remedy social problems. We first examine several transnational processes that illuminate ways that public issues are bursting the seams of nation-states while weaving new spaces for the emergence of, and contest over, global social problems. We then briefly recap a recent history of globalization, suggesting that both the forms of world-historical processes and their consequences trigger new, globally specific social problems. Adapting social problems theory, we then present an analytical framework for globalizing social problems inquiry and praxis. Two cases illustrate this globalized approach to social problems. Last, we conclude with a view toward the future of global social problems research, its place in the wider sociological project, and the importance of transnational intellectual and organizational praxis. For decades, sociological inquiry and praxis about social problems has developed a primary orientation focused on the nationstate and policy solutions within the nationstate system. Yet, human history speaks to a more complex interdependency of social problems and social relations than a nationcentered approach to social problems can fully address. This history is grounded in over a century of social science inquiry that has acknowledged the world-historically interdependent social relationships from precolonial to postcolonial contexts, and ∗

This work represents equal authorship.

conceptualizes the nation-state system as an artifact of these world-historical processes. There is now an abundance of sociological literature tracing inequalities and power relationships that preceded the configuration of modern nation-states but are now embedded in the nation-state system. In this chapter, we argue for globalizing the study of social problems. Even as social problems scholars have advanced a global perspective, a continued reorientation is needed to unsettle the “zombie category” (Beck 2007) of the nation and further globalize our inquiry and praxis by adjusting 77

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analytical frames that explain, address, or remedy social problems. For David Smith (2015), “the ‘critical turn’ in sociology” brought focus to dimensions of inequality and experience, like race, class, and gender, and it also fostered the reinvigoration of comparative and historical analysis, among others, which “re-centered analysis at the world and global level.” But a global or transnational approach need not be limited to those social problems that are more clearly global in their scope. Smith argues, “In fact nearly all research can be enriched by ‘bringing the global in,’ and locating sociological facts in a matrix of various worldwide vectors of global influence, flows, and structures. Inequalities of gender, race, disability, sexual orientation/identity, aging, health, labor, and class in this country (and around the world) are increasingly and inexorably connected to worldwide currents . . . We are challenged to develop a ‘global imagination’ as we study all social problems.” In this chapter, we first examine several transnational processes that illuminate ways that public issues are bursting the seams of nation-states while weaving new spaces for the emergence of, and contest over global social problems. We then briefly recap a recent history of globalization, suggesting that both the forms of world-historical processes and their consequences trigger new, globally specific social problems. Adapting social problems theory, we then present an analytical framework for globalizing social problems inquiry and praxis. Two cases illustrate this globalized approach to social problems. Lastly, we conclude our discussion with a view toward the future of global social problems research, its place in the wider sociological project, and the importance of transnational intellectual and organizational praxis.

Transnational Processes: Reimagining the Domestic The history of social problems research has largely resided within the nation-state.

Bound by an ontological preeminence of the nation-state in post–World War II sociology, it was pragmatic nonetheless that most solutions could be found there. But many contemporary social problems mock the borders of nations and conspire to expose their very ephemeral status. For Beck (2007), the presumed centering of the nation-state within sociology can obscure the complex, variegated, and patterned processes, relationships, and forces that may be at work. Beck refers to this danger as “methodological nationalism,” and calls for a perspective shift in our approach to considering global and transnational dimensions. Beck proposes a “cosmopolitan sociology,” an approach that would resolve methodological nationalism by disrupting the standpoint of the West, or the denial of the “existence of one fixed point” (Lillemets 2013, 3), and reframing the reference unit of analysis. Particularly, Beck pushes us to consider historical and contemporary relations through the lenses of marginalized groups, in for example, the contexts of settler-colonialism, postcolonial relations, and neoliberal globalization, with attention to how social inequality is shaped across borders. This can also be understood as a shift in episteme, decentering a privileged point of view – such as a Western-centric approach to history – and those relationships grounded in false or limited dualities, such as those of the colonizers and the colonized. This opens up possibilities for social problems researchers to construct new understandings of social inequality that capture transnational processes and experiences within a more cosmopolitan world. This is also significant for the identification of new forms of solidarity and mobilization of strategies for building transnational alliances and coalitions to respond to social problems through different “political units other than the nation-state” (Lillemets 2013, 4). However, Kreckel (2008) maintains that individual states and borders are still relevant, shaping the social experiences of and mediating the impacts of the world capitalist order on its residents and beyond

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(through processes of inclusion and exclusion) (Lillemets 2013). Taking Beck and Kreckel together, we assert that a global approach to social problems requires recognizing the twofold character of national borders. On the one hand, national borders are real because they are socially constructed as real. National borders are defined on maps as specific material locations, giving the illusion of a naturalized, predetermined fact even as these borders may and do change over time and throughout history. In contemporary times, national borders are often marked with state authorized border-crossing locations and officers that are imbued with the authority to permit or deny the movement of people and goods across those borders. The symbolic and material realities of borders are infused by the practices embedded in national governments and their policies, laws, administrative agencies and offices. These hardened structures of the state, some of which were designed to solve some problems, may also perpetuate or create new social problems. On the other hand, we can also see that national borders and nation-states are socially constructed in their permeability, as social and natural forces transcend these borders through trafficking in drugs and people, multinational corporations moving capital, manufacturing industries, and work, and the vagaries of pollution and climate change. In these ways, social problems seem to mock the social construction of nations, revealing how ephemeral they are even as they are still contained within a system of reified nation-states. Lillemets (2013) details a global framework for the contemporary study of global inequality that is quite relevant for globalizing the study of social problems more generally. Her global framework consists of three variables, namely global history, global entanglements, and global flows, each drawing from and contributing to a rich history of sociological approaches that address global or transnational dimensions: Global history refers to the past transnational interactions and their legacies in

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shaping for example the post-colonial inequality structures. In essence, global entanglements mean cultural and institutional interconnections of nation-states and transnational movements, and global flows consists of flows of trade, capital, people, ideas and information. In this model, the interactions of these variables, which also reflect the contemporary and historical entanglements between Western and nonWestern societies, unfold into a variety of interconnected inequality paths. (5)

In each major institutional sphere – of the global capitalist economy, the international state system and multilateral governance bodies, global cultural and media processes, and global civil society networks – inequalities pervade. Even where more reflexive attempts among transnational social movement organizations seek remedies, the inequalities behind the global North-South postcolonial order persist even in the social movement sector. Nowhere are these inequalities more acute than in the global economic sphere, where “nearly 4/10 of the control over the economic value of TNCs (transnational corporations) in the world is held, via a complicated web of ownership relations, by a group of 147 TNCs in the core, which has almost full control over itself” (Vitali, Glattfelder, and Battiston 2011, 6). This form of global capitalism, with international financial corporations at the center of these owner networks, relies on numerous multilateral institutions that govern world trade (e.g., World Trade Organization), global financing (e.g., the International Monetary Fund), and development finance (e.g., the World Bank). In 2010, over 70,000 parent corporations owned more than 900,000 affiliates in foreign countries. These multinational corporations compose the bones and sinew of globalization. They link together production, trade, and investment in countries throughout the world. In 2014, the largest 500 companies employed 65 million people worldwide and their total revenues represent nearly two-thirds of all corporate revenues. About 60 percent of all world industrial output is derived

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from the 500 largest multinational corporations (MNCs) (Fortune.com 2015). Among the largest world corporations, the corporate elite are extensively networked among boards, social events, and business associations. Smith (2008) refers to this sociopolitical conglomeration of transnational corporate elite as a neoliberal network. The world capitalist economy is buttressed by the international state system, which remains instrumental to the operation and enforcement of corporate legal interests, standards, and rules for production and trade, and the arbitration of disputes between corporate and state interests. But the multilateral institutions, with the United Nations at the center, do more. They maintain sites for routine political cooperation, communication, and problem solving. A human rights framework has emerged alongside this system and has been an active and growing site for a network of globalizing NGOs and transnational social movement organizations. As a whole, global civil society advocates have latched onto this “complex multilateral system,” to press as Jackie Smith (2008) describes, alternatives to the neoliberal model of globalization and toward a democratic global vision. As the transnational “democratic globalizers” have, at times quite contentiously, pressed for solutions to the contradictions and social problems set in the wake the current neoliberal form of globalization, they have opened new public spaces between and across borders and are not confined to nation-states. The international state system is also the sphere where military alliances and conflicts take shape, patterns of global spending on militaries and armed personnel are sustained – which directly subsidize the arms industry – and where forms of mass violence and social control are administered. The war system is vast with global military expenditures exceeding $1.5 trillion in 2013. The United States and Russia are the main suppliers of weapons to the world. Reflecting the interconnected transnational processes, the global profit-centered mass media often devolves into a champion for the spectacle

of global violence and terrorism (McChesney 2008; Kellner 1992). In sum, transnational processes include economic, political, cultural, and civil networks that are complex and vast in each sphere, and even more so in their manifold interconnections and conflicts. Set in motion with successive waves of globalization, these organizational networks continue to alter nation-states by creating new spheres for global interconnections that create global social problems and open avenues to challenge those problems.

A (Very) Brief History of Globalization In most popular accounts of globalization, human beings are presented as passive observers to a process that appears to be of its own making. When viewed in this way, as an anonymous hand of history, the forms of power and collective agency that underlie globalization are relegated to the shadows. Below we contextualize the project of globalization emerging from the new institutions and actors at the centers of power after the Second World War. Accounts of the postwar (1945–70) transformation in international institutions and global capitalism abound (cf. Evans 1995; Ruggie 1998). Generally, scholars agree on numerous key developments within that period. In the twenty-five years after World War II, for example, scholars often highlight the importance of the militarization of the United States and USSR during the Cold War, the collapse of the formal colonial system and subsequent decolonization, the expansion (in both size and operational scope) of US multinational corporations, and the buttressing of American economic and political power through international institutions. Collectively, these diffuse transformations contributed to a deep restructuring of the world system wherein the United States and the USSR emerged as world superpowers. This phase of globalization involved the United States’s growing political power alongside the success of its

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multinational firms in the areas of finance, manufacturing, advanced technology, and energy; in many cases, the growth of these corporations was fueled by the successful globalization of their operations which included both foreign production and entry into non-US consumer markets. In tandem with these changes, a new international division of labor closely linked to the colonial system quickly took forms in the postcolonial order. With infinite local derivations, the political conflicts associated with decolonization and other postcolonial conflicts became tightly fused with Cold War politics. This drew local struggles for autonomy into the highly politicized economic development strategies associated with the two global powers. The geopolitics, foreign policy, and military interventions of the United States often reflected its interest in shaping and preserving a global “free enterprise system” (Arrighi 1994). Within this broader context, state and corporate leaders in the United States – who worked closely together during the war while hosting the United Nations and sponsoring negotiations for founding the Bretton Woods conference – successfully founded the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) (see Domhoff 2013). What became known as the “Grand Area” strategy in elite foreign policy circles included major US foreign policy projects, including expanding influence in Southeast Asia and Japan, and the establishment of international financial and trade institutions. Domhoff (2014, 10) cites the Council on Foreign Relations’s Economic and Financial Group, which “concluded that the full productivity of the American Economy . . . could only be realized if corporations were able to invest, purchase raw materials, and sell products in . . . Western Europe, South America, and the British Empire.” International economic interests were formulated by corporate elite and channeled through the policy discussion circles to government officials, resulting in a concerted push to expand international trade and investment and boost American corporate interests. Expanding global economic power and market opportunities

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were thus driven not only by state elite, but also by corporate elite who worked closely with the state during and after World War II. With successive tariff reductions through the GATT by the end of the 1960s, tariffs dropped globally and export processing zones grew in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Asia. The postwar institutions and policies expanded markets for globalizing US corporations and fueled a rapid reindustrialization of Europe, Japan, and several emerging, or newly industrializing countries. This era of relatively open trade was embedded in a postwar social accord that assured some protection to many citizens from the costly dislocations that can stem from the international trading system. Yet armed conflicts, anticolonial movements, and mass movements throughout the core nations reflected deepening contradictions in this system. By the late 1960s, historical conditions were set for a new era of globalization. The coming neoliberal politics would weaken many of those social protections. At the beginning of the neoliberal era in the 1970s (Harvey 2005; Dreiling and Darves 2016), corporate elite in the United States and Europe moved political coalitions among business to the right politically. The strident defense of free markets internationally offered an ideological upper hand to more conservative economic voices domestically. Together, free trade abroad and free markets at home fused in a neoliberal economic ideology and a politics of domestic deregulation and trade globalization that, by the mid-1990s, gained hegemonic status in many countries across the globe, anchored strongly in US-led institutions. Neoliberal globalization has since involved highly uneven patterns of growth and development across and within countries as well as reproducing racial/ethnic and gender inequalities. Research on gender and globalization over the last three decades, for example, has captured the gendered nature of globalized processes in export processing zones, military bases, sweatshops or maquiladoras, and the feminization of

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labor, migration, and poverty (Enloe 2007). Scholars generally agree that women’s experiences with economic globalization have been uneven and contradictory, at times allowing them new opportunities to break away from restrictive patriarchal relations, but often through work opportunities that are insecure, low paid, demeaning, or unsafe (Pyle and Ward 2003). An intersectional approach (McCall 2005) brings attention to how work opportunities are not only gendered, but also defined, shaped, and constrained in racialized, classed, and globalized ways (Braun 2011; Plankey-Videla 2012). Women have also been active agents for change, resisting and challenging inequality in formal and informal ways to shift power dynamics and promote political change locally and globally (Basu 2010; Braun and Dreiling 2010; Ferree and Tripp 2006). Many of the social problems attributable to the functioning of global capitalism, such as new environmental toxins, overconsumption, the precarity of labor, economic inequalities, etc., operate at both the national level and (perhaps more insidiously) at the global level. Furthermore, viewing global capitalism in its contemporary form, we see the construction of neoliberalism with the centrality of finance capital and its uncertainty, the upending of industrial capital from older manufacturing centers to new globalized regions of production, and an unprecedented concentration of capital and wealth among a global elite. Indeed, some global social problems are particular to the functioning of the historically specific form of capitalism. Thus, globalization processes are creating new terrain for social problems to develop and for claims to be articulated and mobilized around while also ushering in global transnational avenues for mitigating social problems. Global historical processes of capitalism, class dominance, racism, patriarchy and heterosexism, in both form and consequences, generate and reproduce global social problems. Thus, globalizing a social problems perspective shifts the scope and scale of our analysis, while inviting forms of praxis that transnationalize privilege and power in

emerging global public spaces. This is where the sociology of globalization and transnational processes is useful and can inform a critical approach to global social problems perspectives. In the next section, we present an analytical framework for thinking about social problems and then we illustrate the transnational dimensions of contemporary social problems that arise within an increasingly globalized world.

An Analytical Framework for a Global Social Problems Perspective Nearly sixty years ago, sociologist C. Wright Mills explained the difference between “personal troubles” and social problems. “Social issues or problems have to do with matters that transcend these local environments of the individual and the range of his inner life . . . An issue is a public matter” (Mills 1959, 8). “Personal troubles” occur in the immediate sphere of individual life, involving the character of the individual and her immediate relations. These “troubles,” as Mills writes, are “private matters” to be resolved in the sphere of the individual’s life circumstances. Mills pointed to this difference as a way to illuminate the idea of a sociological imagination, but the formula proved useful for decades of sociological work on social problems, and as we explain, remains applicable to the project of globalizing social problems. Mills’s notion of social issues and problems was formulated in a national context where the public sphere conceptually and practically orbited the national state and remained confined by its borders. Globalizing social problems, in our view begins by crossing those borders to pursue a twofold task. As we discussed above, the first reflection on transnational processes involves identifying those social issues that collide with historically constituted apparatuses of states. Immigration, war and international violence, human trafficking, famine, movement of refugee populations, global crime and drug trafficking, and commodity

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production and trade standards, to name a few. States attempt to control and regulate these processes, with varying success. Second, and these are not mutually exclusive, is an array of human and environmental social issues that bypass borders and explicitly challenge the fiction of border materiality. Notable among these are industrial disasters, such as the Chernobyl or Fukushima nuclear meltdowns, or global climate change. Therefore, at the transnational intersection of borders we can find imprints of social problems – each of these examples cited above, and many others, leave lasting signatures on what states do (not) and can (not) do at their borders. Examining these encounters with a global imagination reveals how public issues, in the Millsean sense, resist being confined to the public sphere of the national state. Ultimately, the world state system produces the conditions for a global public around which social and environmental issues can find expression. And it is at the borders that we find their sharpest articulation. Consequently, and to borrow from Mills, in this global sociological imagination, we find the need to conceptualize a globalizing public space where transnational social problem claims, contests, and remedies are made by actors within and across nationstates. As we globalize social problems inquiry and praxis, it is important to reiterate another distinction from Mills: with personal troubles as well as (global) public issues, people experience negative stress. Sociologists cannot define social problems simply as human suffering. Human suffering may arise from a number of sources: sometimes from personal troubles, sometimes from natural events, and sometimes from social problems. For this reason, social problems theorists explain the difference between personal and social problems in four distinct areas: the scale of the condition, the persistence of the condition, the pattern of impact on specific groups, and finally, the transpersonal nature of social problems. Each applies to our notion of globalizing social problems.

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First, in terms of scale, social problems involve large numbers of people that experience distress over a common, shared social condition, even as the people affected change over time. For example, poverty among nations and across the globe impacts billions of human beings. Yet, we know that the particular local derivations of poverty vary by gender, age, race, and region. Poverty, like all social problems, impacts large numbers of people. Second, social problems arise out of conditions that pose persistent troubles for people over time. Many social problems persist over time because some people profit from the problem. Consider for instance the growing incidence of diabetes among children, not just in the United States, but globally. Is there a correlation between increased diabetes rates among children and the growth in the consumption of refined sugars and fats? Understanding the persistence requires interrogating the food commodity system that stretches across borders – even while homogenizing culture and food aesthetics – and resists with market and political power any policy, cultural, or regulatory efforts to dramatically curtail the consumption of refined sugars. Global social problems also persist over time because the social conditions that create one persistent condition are interconnected with other social problems. Solving one problem often requires addressing other, related social problems. Third, social problems, unlike personal troubles, have definite patterns of who gets affected. Global social problems arise from, and generate patterns that may simultaneously harden one feature of borders while provoking or even challenging others. Shifts in global corporate investments, for example, rely on corporate-friendly trade and investment rules that soften and even weaken certain elements of nation-state authority while reinforcing economic divisions between nations. Finally, social problems – unlike many personal troubles – transcend the decisions of any single person. Indeed, social problems are made in a series of choices and

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actions that are often part of the everyday operations of society, and when we globalize our perspective, we see our society, and the dynamics within, as part of a wider set of transnational relationships and processes. Following Mills and others, Dello Buono advances a praxis-oriented sociology that centers a structurally material, or objective analysis of social problems but also retains the subjective elements of social constructionism and claimsmaking, “preserv[ing] its most salient insights and incorporating them into a more powerful synthesis of social problems inquiry” (Dello Buono 2013, 796). Below we consider the objective and subjective dimensions of social problems inquiry, using the example of climate change.

Objective Elements of a Social Problem When defining social problems, two criteria in the social problems literature are important to consider for a global perspective. One is the objective element of a social problem, referring to real and observable social or environmental conditions that impact the physical and mental well-being of humans or the larger natural environment. From a global perspective, these conceptual distinctions become more problematic and fuzzy across significant differences in cultural, linguistic, and historical power relations. When too few decent jobs are available in a city or small town, joblessness becomes a social problem. When African Americans are refused home loans at four times the rate of whites, even when controlling for income and credit history, then racial bias objectively exists. Some objective conditions speak more directly to people and their needs. An increase in spousal violence, battering, and murders in a town will speak more directly and immediately to people in that town than a slow, invisible seepage of nuclear waste into their water supply. Both involve objective injury to humans, but one may go unnoticed for a generation.

Power relations are crucial in determining whether or not objective violations of human needs will be considered a social problem or dismissed. Globalizing social problems requires methods that can reliably detect power structures (whether in the form of social movements or elite countermovements) and their role in advancing or denying social problem claims.

Subjective Elements of a Social Problem and Critical Intellectual Praxis The second criterion of a social problem refers to the subjective element of social problems. Subjective aspects of social problems means that what is seen as a social problem for some may not be seen as a problem for others: What gets defined as a social problem will differ depending on where and when one is situated in society. Sociologists use this distinction for two reasons. The first is because social problems are often defined as violations of norms or rules that a culture uses to guide certain forms of behavior deemed important to that group. The second reason sociologists distinguish subjective from objective elements of a social problem is because objective conditions that threaten people’s well-being may exist in a society but people may be unaware of them or interpret their affliction in a way that is unrelated to the cause of their suffering. For instance, a rural community exposed to pesticides may not experience the effects for a generation. In this case, for the condition to become a social problem, someone or some group must call attention to the situation. The cause, intensive pesticide use and its drift to rural communities and agricultural workers, may elude their “construction” of the problem for some time. How a problem is defined will shape how people respond to the conditions. This impacts public praxis. Any social condition that systematically benefits one group at the expense of a second group is suspect and likely a reflection of some form of oppression. For this reason,

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a sociological perspective on social problems requires standing on intellectual guard, remaining skeptical of claims where powerful groups define more marginal social groups as the source of social problems (or ignore their needs entirely). A critical intellectual praxis brings awareness to forms of social power that distort or obfuscate issues, opening the door to other forms of sociological praxis and advocacy. Remaining on-guard intellectually encourages us to consider the relationship between the social power of a group and its claims about a social problem within a global and transnational approach. For sociologists, staying on intellectual guard involves conducting research to evaluate subjective claims of social problems that are not clearly linked to objective social conditions, and critically evaluating the ways in which social problems are framed and explained within larger processes of power and inequality that cross local, community, national, and transnational levels. Globalizing the Construction of Social Problems Sociologist Herbert Blumer wrote that “it is a gross mistake to assume that any kind of malignant or harmful social condition or arrangement in a society becomes automatically a social problem for that society. The pages of history are replete with instances of dire social conditions unnoticed and unattended in the societies in which they occurred” (Blumer 1971, 302). And vice versa: gross human suffering need not be present for groups to claim that a social problem exists. Throughout this section, we draw on the global social problem of climate and refer to Table 5.1 for some of the highlights discussed below.

Making Transnational Public Claims Social problems emerge in society when groups of people successfully define or construct a social condition as a problem. As stated earlier, the social conditions may

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include situations where widely shared values are violated or situations where human needs are systematically left unmet for groups of people. When these conditions become the concern of enough people who then define the situation as a problem, then we have a social problem. There are ample examples that reveal one of the great paradoxes of studying social problems: social conditions, while possibly negative for millions of people, do not automatically become the basis for public claims of a social problem. A sociological perspective invites us to look beneath prevailing public ideas, taking a critical stance toward what passes for a social problem and what gets ignored. Global social problems praxis entails the critical sociological research, but also an active engagement with effected communities and institutions to more effectively construct a frame that resonates publicly. Groups establish a social problem through the process of “claimsmaking.” A claim that a social problem exists is an argument or appeal. Best (2001) and others break this process down into four steps. First, groups must successfully make the claim that some negative condition exists. For example, the claim that climate change exists is the first step toward it becoming a problem. The same could be said of any number of social problems. Though some of these claims may be obvious, particularly to people oppressed under those social conditions, it is the first and necessary step for translating oppression into a public issue. The second step is to claim that the condition poses some risk to human well-being. Some people may wonder why global warming would be problematic. In fact, in 1938, Guy Stewart Callendar, who first proposed the simple model of global warming, did not consider it a threat. Global warming was not a risk to humans among early scientists in this field. By shifting the attention from the claim that the problem is not with the planet getting warmer per se, but with climate change: that the consequences of melting polar ice caps, rising sea levels, changing climate patterns,

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Table 5.1. Climate Change as a Global Social Problem Key concept

Description

Transnational scope and scale?

Climate change acts on human societies irrespective of national borders even as the consequences of climate change are experienced through the world geography of national states. Quantifiable greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by human industrial, agricultural, and consumption activities; increase in concentration of atmospheric CO2 ; increasing temperatures of oceans and atmosphere. Disruption in climate patterns, effecting food production, rising sea levels, increase in frequency of high intensity weather events, climate refugees from low-lying islands, and much more. Fossil fuel energy development for transportation, electricity, and materials manufacturing by capitalist firms and state corporations. Energy isomorphism across world-historical system. Early industrial countries in Global North responsible for most emissions. Fossil fuel energy corporations among the largest in the world, expend resources to influence political systems for access to fossil fuel reserves, subsidize development, transport and consumption. Related pollutants deleteriously effect human and nonhuman health. Climatologists and geophysicists in the scientific community; environmental organizations and activists; sympathetic political elite and publics; first-wave climate refugees. Fossil fuel corporations, key energy corporations, their foundations, sponsored think tanks and politicians. Private and state energy corporations, affiliated transport, chemical, financial, and manufacturing industries. Scientific associations; transnational governance bodies; educators; social and environmental movements; national and provincial regulatory agencies.

Objective elements

Subjective elements – claimsmakers counterclaims

Power structures benefiting Praxis and change agents

diminished agricultural production, etc., pose catastrophic risks to human societies. The third element in a social problem claim is that the issue has some definite conditions, causes, and consequences. In 1988, the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Program established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to develop comprehensive scientific assessments of climate changes, their human and ecological impacts, and strategies to respond to climate change. The voice of thousands of climate scientists around the world would begin to speak with considerable authority on the climate change problem.1 In order to claim something is a social problem, someone or something must be defined to be responsible.

Fossil fuel production and consumption was understood quite clearly to be the cause of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by the 1970s. In 1982 even Exxon scientists warned top management that confronting global warming “would require major reductions in fossil fuel combustion” to avoid potentially “catastrophic consequences” (cited in McKibben 2016). In 1998, after President Bill Clinton agreed with the Kyoto climate accords, oil industry interests devised a “Global Climate Science Communications Plan” with the sole aim of promoting uncertainty of the science on climate change. This leaked plan read: “the Clinton Administration and environmental groups . . . have conducted an effective public relations program to

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convince the American public that the climate is changing, we humans are at fault, and we must do something about it.” To prevent Congress from ratifying the agreement, the fossil fuel corporations spent millions of dollars to expose what they termed “a very high degree of uncertainty” in the science. The goal was to sow seeds of doubt and denialism over scientific and environmental movement assertions about climate change. To avoid accountability, fossil fuel corporations mounted this multidecade campaign to deny and obfuscate public understanding of climate science and its consequences (McCright and Dunlap 2003; Brulle 2013; Farrell 2015, 2016). The necessity of interpreting facts about global warming and climate change is the reason why fossil fuel corporations invested so much money in preventing progress on a global climate treaty for decades. And this is why critical intellectual praxis is needed, to inform and engage claimsmaking and the inevitable power struggles in the process. Indeed, who, or what is defined as the cause will shape the next step: what to do about the problem. The fourth step of the claim proposes some course of action to solve the problem – that, for example, a rapid reduction in greenhouse gases (GHG) through fossil fuels could minimize the threats of global climate change. Environmental activists have escalated movement tactics toward this end, pressing institutions to divest from fossil fuels and blocking the export of tar sands from Canada through the Keystone XL pipeline. Climate change has emerged as a global social problem because objective conditions of a warming planet met the successful claims by globally organized scientists (e.g., the founding of the International Panel on Climate Change), local and transnationally organized environmentalists, proactive institutional leaders and the first wave of climate refugees, documented brilliantly in the documentary film by that name. Even as these claimsmakers face a powerful countermovement by fossil fuel interests, the problem continues to gain traction globally.

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Claimsmakers and Social Power Social problem constructs are not neutral. Sociologists agree that when certain definitions of the problem are established, they “serve not only to structure subsequent policy choices, but also to give affirmation to a particular conception of reality” (Elder and Cobb 1984, 115). Social problem constructs, and the claims people make, are shaped by the ideologies that frame how people define, understand, and react to social and political issues. But social problem claims are contingent on some form of organizational and cultural power that successively elevates the claim. Challenges to social problems claims are also conditioned by power. Expounding further on the global warming example shows the congruence of vested social interests and power. Building on the “climate denial machine” (McCright and Dunlap 2000), Brulle (2013) provides an analysis of the financial and network mobilization of the “climate change countermovement” (CCCM), which was able to “institutionalize delay” by raising obstacles to ecologically rational energy policy through the collective power of key energy corporations, their foundations, sponsored think tanks and politicians. Farrell’s (2015, 2016) analyses expand on Brulle’s and identify “network power” – as opposed to just “sheer financial power” – as the driver of influence on “semantic similarity” between climate contrarian organizations and news media. The twenty-year campaign by fossil fuel corporate interests wielded sufficient organizational and cultural power to change the content of media coverage, bring the Republican Party into the denialist camp, and conservative ideology with climate change denialism (ibid). The corporate campaign lobbied to prevent the United States from ratifying the Kyoto Protocol under both the Clinton and Bush presidencies, preventing global solutions to this global problem. As this example was meant to demonstrate, groups often define their position on social problems according to their interests, not the truth or falsity of the

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claims about the problem. By promoting the claim that climate change is not a problem, many groups – particularly industries and corporations that profit from fossil fuels – shaped the issue in a way that was favorable to their interests. Based on our example, it is clear that claims about social problems are shaped by two important conditions. First, all claimsmakers have interests in a social problem. Those interests might be based on moral commitments, such as a shared belief in fighting for justice, or ideals that aim to hold powerful groups accountable. Or, groups may be interested in a social problem because they stand to gain or lose from the way a social problem is defined. Second, a group’s ability to act on their interests and influence public views and social change around a global problem depends on their social power. Social power is necessary to create and diffuse a social problem claim. Without it, claims about a problem will go unheard. It is only with some form of social power that the voices and concerns of people get heard in the larger public. How do groups with few resources create power? And how do powerful groups benefiting from social problems contain and control marginal groups who challenge the problem? To understand social problems and how they get noticed (or ignored) in society it is necessary to extend a global conception of power.

Organizational and Cultural Power The significance of a critical sociology is to reveal the patterned ways in which power is both structurally organized and wielded through political, economic, and cultural processes and practices. We begin with the view that social power is both organizational and cultural. Various theories of power provide considerable nuance, but for our purposes we offer a basic discussion of the concept as it relates to the analytical framework of global social problems (see Lukes 2005; Mann 1986; Boulding 1989).

The first and most commonly understood form of power is coercive power, which involves actions and structures that use the force of threat – do X or else Y. This type of power is employed at all levels of human society. Groups and institutions that use coercive power likely control valuable resources in the society. Power, in this generic sense can be concentrated as in an “iron triangle” (Adams 1981), or in empire, for Hardt and Negri (2001), a “diffuse, anonymous network.” Because a threat, especially when backed by credible force, stokes fear in human beings, coercive power can be viewed as power over others. Stanley Milgram (1974), a social psychologist, described the kind of obedience that stems from fear as the “psychological mechanism” that links individuals to systems of social domination. For this reason, coercive power easily becomes the basis for domination structures in society. Domination structures combine ideologies with organizational hierarchies that reproduce inequalities with the tacit submission of people. Ideological, economic, military or political institutions can mesh coercive norms and organizational structures into “intersecting sociospatial networks of power” (see Mann 1986, 1). Sociologists are equipped with tools to analyze these intersecting networks that form the foundations of organizational power. These same structures can be the source of social problems and obstacles to their resolution. Forms of collective action, such as social movements, can challenge these power structures by mobilizing new organizational capacities toward collective goals. Challenging coercive power or domination structures rooted in that power also requires facing forms of cultural power that reinforce taken-for-granted views of inequality and the social world. Cultural power involves the capacity to define a situation and achieve hegemony, or group consent to the world as defined. For cultural theorists, this capacity resides in both signification through communication practices as well as material productions of meanings (Lull 1995; Williams 1958). Bourdieu (1984)

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demonstrates that forms of culture can empower or disempower collective actors, which offers avenues for the production and reproduction of hierarchy and domination, as classes and other social cleavages distinguish through habits and taste. Confronting hegemonic cultural frameworks that reinforce global social problems is one of the chief tasks behind social change efforts, whether through social movements, education, or policy projects. Critical media studies help illuminate the political economy of corporate media and how their role through advertising and entertainment produce forms of culture in ways that exacerbate global social problems, from consumerism, sexual violence, and racism to the glorification of violence and war. Demystifying forms of cultural power involves what sociologist Douglas McAdam (1999) refers to as “cognitive liberation.” Cognitive liberation is accompanied by a growing recognition that things can be different and that by acting together, society can be changed. People oppressed under domination structures, whether it is a system as vast as slavery or an abusive domestic arrangement, remain oppressed until they stop identifying with the ideology associated with the domination structures. As this cognitive liberation occurs, people must then create alternative forms of social power to challenge (or exit) the domination structures. The significance of a critical sociological inquiry is to reveal the patterned ways in which power is structurally organized and wielded through political, economic, and cultural processes and practices. Praxis bring this knowledge into public life, and with precision, can contribute to social change prospects around the social problem. Global Health: Embodied Problems, Global Governance Solutions The case of global health reveals how local variations of health circumstances and vulnerability may reflect and constitute larger global processes that are increasingly addressed through transnational cooperation and global initiatives.

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In 1978, the World Health Organization and its representatives signed the Declaration of Alma-Ata, urging a strategy for “Health for all by the year 2000.” This optimistic and thoughtful declaration could not anticipate the changes in the world that would cut this dream short. While there have been many public health improvements since then – for example, higher life expectancy and lower infant mortality in many parts of the world – many of these improvements are now stalling. As Dr. Lee Jong-Wook, Director General of the World Health Organization declared in 2003: “Turning [the vision of Alma-Ata] into reality calls for clarity both on the possibilities and on the obstacles that have slowed and in some cases reversed progress towards meeting the health needs of all people. This entails working with countries – especially those most in need – not only to confront health crises, but to construct sustainable and equitable health systems” (WHO 2003, viii). Global efforts have continued to emphasize the priority of health care to national and global well-being, and to cast health care not simply as a “luxury” but, indeed, as a basic human right. More affluent nations, like the United States, face health care problems that in large part stem from unequal access to health services and lifestyles promoted by sedentary work and living environments. In poorer regions of the world, health care problems are vast. Not only do inequalities plague these regions, but problems common to the nineteenth-century United States are also prevalent, such as typhoid, cholera, and dysentery. The spread of infectious diseases, especially HIV/AIDS, scarcity of medical resources and personnel, high maternal, infant and adult mortalities, and the spread of tobacco-related and other noncommunicable diseases, all confront the poorest people in the poorest countries of the world. Child Mortality in the World Perhaps unsurprisingly, the challenge of providing adequate health care to children is greatest in the poorest regions of the world.

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Sine the mid-1960s, nations around the world have worked together to make it possible for millions of children to live well into adulthood. These efforts saw notable gains from 1970 to the present. Whereas about 147 children five years and younger died for every 1,000 live births in 1970, in 2002, about eighty children died for every 1,000 live births (WHO 2003), and in 2015 the global under-five mortality rate was fortythree deaths per 1,000 children (United Nations 2015). Yet, in 2011, the child mortality rate in the world’s poorest countries in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia was twenty-nine times greater than in industrialized countries: 175 deaths per 1,000 children compared with 6 per 1,000 in industrialized countries (WHO 2011). Every day in 2015, 16,000 children under five died, mostly from preventable causes (United Nations 2015). Some regions of the world have seen more modest reductions in child mortality, while many countries in Africa and, recently, in Eastern Europe, have witnessed increases in child mortality. These gains and setbacks mirror changes in the income and wealth of these societies. While HIV/AIDS has played a large part in these reversals, growing disparities in health care resources in many developing countries are also to blame. Analyses by international organizations conclude that attempts to improve child health since the 2000s have not been effective in reaching poor people. Infectious and parasitic diseases continue to be the major killers of children in the developing world. Although notable success has been achieved in certain areas (for example, polio), six conditions still account for about 70 percent of all child deaths: “acute lower respiratory infections, mostly pneumonia (19%), diarrhoea (18%), malaria (8%), measles, (4%), HIV/AIDS (3%), and neonatal conditions, mainly preterm birth, birth asphyxia, and infections (37%)” (WHO 2011). The tragedy in these numbers is that many of these communicable diseases can be prevented or treated with simple, affordable, known interventions. Additionally, many of the

deaths stemming from neonatal conditions, many of which involve malnutrition, can also be prevented with support for diet and nutrition. The HIV/AIDS epidemic has made this only worse, particularly in subSaharan Africa. HIV/AIDS In the span of barely three decades, acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) has become one of the leading causes of death due to infectious disease among adults throughout the world. The scale and scope of HIV/AIDS, as well as the great risks to well-being that the disease poses, clearly identify HIV/AIDS as a global social problem. Millions die and millions more suffer – from the burden of the disease, losses to families, and the heavy toll on financial security. Persons infected with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) who do not receive treatment will almost certainly die. The impact of the disease is so extensive that it has reversed life expectancy rates for some of the hardest hit, poorest regions of the world. The World Health Organization named the HIV/AIDS pandemic as “a major global health emergency” (WHO 2003, 43). Approximately 37 million people in the world are currently infected with HIV/AIDS, including about 2.6 million children. By 2014, the World Health Organization estimated that 34 million people have died from AIDS-related illnesses since its discovery. In 2014 alone, 1.2 million people died from AIDS-related causes around the world and approximately 2 million people were newly affected with the virus. The vast majority of people living with HIV/AIDS live in low and middle income countries (WHO 2014). AIDS is caused by HIV, which undermines the body’s immune system. Because HIV can remain hidden within an infected person for up to ten years, it is difficult to detect the disease without regular blood tests. Of course, in the industrialized world, blood tests are more readily accessible. Without established medical systems and

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access to medical facilities, detection – and treatment – becomes difficult, enabling the disease to spread rapidly. Once the immune system is compromised by HIV, other diseases such as pneumonia or tuberculosis become deadly. Complicating matters, HIV/AIDS is not caused by the same behaviors everywhere. This means that multiple prevention strategies are needed and public health officials must develop a variety of educational and treatment institutions to confront the spread of AIDS. In addition, the public health infrastructure is different – and sometimes nonexistent – in various parts of the world, which means that attempts to prevent the spread of the disease must consider both regional variations in how the disease spreads as well as the infrastructural limitations in many parts of the developing world. In some regions, for example, AIDS is mostly transmitted through sexual activities. There, information and education can help. In the case of Thailand, an aggressive condom promotion campaign targeting military personnel and sex workers has resulted in significantly fewer new infections. In other settings, where HIV transmission is linked more closely to injected drug use, it is best to use prevention strategies that incorporate the provision of clean needles as well as community therapy programs for drug dependence. Overall, a multipronged effort is needed to prevent and stem the tide of the disease. Treating HIV/AIDS is costly. While there is no cure, antiretroviral therapy (ART) treatments have been successful in helping those living with HIV lead longer, healthier lives and to significantly reduce deaths from AIDS in the United States. Yet, HIV/AIDS remains an ongoing social problem for certain groups in the United States and globally. African American women have a disproportionately high rate of HIV infection compared to the rest of the US population, demonstrating how vulnerability and risk intersect with existing patterns of inequality. Furthermore, HIV/AIDS treatments are not widely available in many parts of the developing world, and their expense

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has been a subject of considerable debate and concern internationally as the disease spreads throughout sub-Saharan Africa and, increasingly, southeastern Asia. HIV/AIDS and Activism in Southern Africa Infection rates have been and remain particularly high in countries in Southern Africa, especially among youth and women. Among other factors, issues of inequality – such as socioeconomic conditions, gender inequality, and uneven access to medical treatments rooted in global inequalities – shape the contours of the extent and severity of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the region and the challenges and opportunities for addressing and mitigating the consequences of the disease. Over time, activists, organizations, and even states and transnational institutions framed the pandemic in ways that connected the related social problems of gender inequality and uneven access to medical treatment while making claims that advanced rights for women and called for a public health response at the national, regional, and global levels (see Table 5.2). In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the relationship of gender inequality and HIV/AIDS began to be a central aspect of the global response to HIV/AIDS, such as the World Health Organization (WHO) declaring that “gender inequalities are a key driver of the epidemic in several ways” (WHO 2009). Other major international institutions and agencies also noted how the sociocultural and legal positions of women and girls were fundamental in contributing to the spread of HIV. The 2001 Declaration of Commitment on HIV/AIDS (Abuja Declaration) was signed by heads of state and other high-level signatories to address gender inequalities that fuel the epidemic (Global Coalition on Women and AIDS 2006) and UNAIDS initiatives funded programs to transform women’s legal status in African nations in 2002 and 2003. Local and regional women’s rights advocates successfully amplified the health rights frame that gender inequality fueled the rise of the

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Table 5.2. HIV/AIDS as a Global Social Problem Key concept

Description

Transnational scope and scale?

Global spread of HIV/AIDS irrespective of national borders even as the consequences of HIV/AIDS are experienced in relation to local prevalence rates, social and cultural conditions of risk, and access to medical facilities and treatment. HIV infection can develop to AIDS, advanced stage of HIV, and lead to eventual death if not treated. Treatment can provide longer, healthier life for HIV infected persons but requires ongoing regimen, including specialized care for preventing mother-to-child transmission. Prevalence rates highest in Southern Africa and parts of Asia. Exposure to risk varies by location, such as by cultural conditions (like gender inequality) and associated behaviors. Pharmaceutical research, development, and manufacturing of medicines and treatments by capitalist pharmaceutical corporations. Unequal access to treatment due to uneven distribution of medical infrastructure and medicines, and prohibitive costs of treatments. Early industrial countries in Global North responsible for most pharmaceutical research and development and receive most of the profits generated. Pharmaceutical corporations among the largest in the world, expend resources to influence political systems for patenting of medicines and treatments, affecting their control over access, delivery, and costs of medicines and treatments. In high prevalence regions, there are patterns of consequences related to secondary social issues such as financial, emotional, and labor stress on caregivers and families; rise in orphans due to AIDS in high prevalence regions, increasing their vulnerability to future poverty, lack of education, trafficking, and risky survival strategies; societal stress as HIV/AIDS affects youth and working-age adults reducing labor productivity in economy. Medical and public health professionals in the scientific community; medical, public health, and human rights organizations and activists; sympathetic political elite and publics; patients. Conservative, anti-LGBT organizations and activists; religious, health and cultural organizations and individuals with alternate explanations for virus/disease. Private pharmaceutical corporations, affiliated chemical, medical, and manufacturing industries. Scientific and medical associations; transnational governance bodies; educators; medical and public health advocates; social and human rights organizations; national and provincial regulatory agencies.

Objective elements

Subjective elements – claimsmakers counterclaims

Power structures benefiting Praxis and change agents

epidemic while international health agencies simultaneously sought regional cooperation to raise gender inequality and women’s rights as a strategy to confront AIDS as a social problem (Braun and Dreiling 2010).

The expansion of alliances among women’s rights groups and transnational feminist networks, particularly in the late 1990s, coincided with another important regional political shift: the expansion of health rights campaigns in postapartheid

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South Africa. A vibrant AIDS activist movement developed in South Africa in the years following the transition from Apartheid (Johnson 2006; Nattrass 2004; Schneider 2002). By the late 1990s, this movement initiated a number of legal, educational, and direct action campaigns, challenging the pharmaceutical industry and the government of South Africa. For example, South African President Thabo Mbeki had taken some controversial positions on HIV/AIDS and its treatment. He famously questioned whether HIV led to AIDS and if antiretroviral treatments (ART) were safe and effective. AIDS activists were effective in pressuring the administration through highly publicized legal challenges and protests. Their legal success forced the government to distribute ARV medicines and, in 2006, Mbeki publicly committed to increased availability of ARVs. Over the course of this struggle, this movement “contributed to the reshaping and expansion of international rights discourse to include a serious consideration of socioeconomic rights” (Johnson 2006, 668). Even the South African government, especially evident in the contentious Medicines Control Act, eventually attempted to frame the epidemic of AIDS in ways that helped link socioeconomic conditions, such as poverty and gender inequality, to the spread of the epidemic (Johnson 2006). South Africa’s Medicines Control Act, which attempted to reduce costs of essential medicines, irked large pharmaceutical corporations who stood to benefit from controlling the access and cost of HIV treatments, prompting a series of legal challenges at the national and transnational (e.g., World Trade Organization) levels. Protecting the market and property rights of large pharmaceutical corporations was the central rationale in the corporate challenge to the constitutionality of the amendments to the act, reminding us that neoliberal principles enable corporate interests to be framed as human rights. The 1998 legal battle helped give rise to the kind of AIDS activism in South Africa that linked HIV/AIDS to socioeconomic conditions, effectively rais-

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ing questions of power and rights (Johnson 2006). Resonating increasingly with the evaluations by international health agencies, AIDS activists and the South African government helped open alternative framings for activists to create a regional agenda rooted in shared social problems, many stemming in part from the patriarchal sex norms that set the foundation for the unique magnitude of the AIDS crisis and the uneven access to health care infrastructure and HIV treatment. In 2003, the HIV/AIDS epidemic reached devastating proportions in Southern Africa with nearly one-quarter of the adult population (aged 15–49) living with HIV in Swaziland, Botswana, and Lesotho. Internationally, the objective magnitude of the problem fueled claims for greater resources and action including the establishment of a UNAIDS initiative, the Global Coalition on Women and AIDS (GCWA), in 2004 which “works at global, regional, and national levels to advocate for improved AIDS programming for women and girls” (GCWA 2006, cover). Following the commitment from national governments to address gender inequality in their fight against AIDS, GCWA specifically called on national governments and the international community to act to meet “our shared objective of providing universal access to HIV prevention, treatment, care and support services” (GCWA 2006, preface). This convergence of international AIDS advocacy work and grassroots initiatives identifying the interrelated issues driving and resulting from the epidemic, along with the devastating economic impacts of HIV/AIDS becoming clear in Southern African economies, added to pressure on African states to address the gendered elements of the AIDS crisis and on pharmaceutical companies to modify the pricing and availability of antiretroviral treatments. Regional NGOs were able to draw on this mobilization to push for solutions, such as the criminalization of gendered violence and advancement of women’s rights in the region, while also

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challenging big pharmaceutical companies’ exploitation of the epidemic and advocating for public health solutions to this global social problem. Table 5.2 presents HIV/AIDS in the global social problem framework. It is necessary to note that this table is not comprehensive, and each of these points can be investigated in multiple directions and across different scales. Attempts that focus on country-level solutions, while needed, will not address the globally nested structures of inequality underlying many of the problems within nations. Our review of this case reveals the twofold dilemma we outline above: even as some social problems transcend borders, the nation-state remains a fixed point for policy makers, NGOs, and activists to resolve those problems. Where global institutions are engaged, as in both the HIV/AIDS and climate change examples, a global imagination of the problem is often present, but the structures of inequality and power in the world economy and nation-state system inhibit the kind of global problem solving that is needed. Organizations like the United Nations or World Health Organization are still bound to the contours of the international state system and global political economy. Even as these institutions reflect a globalization of problem solving, they are reluctant to address the deeper structural schisms of power and inequality at the world systemic level that underlie many global social problems. For transnational movement organizations and civil society actors, and for a critical sociological praxis, it is necessary to expose this contradiction that global inequalities in wealth and power are themselves sources of persistent social problems. Without addressing this gulf between the Global North and South, these global social problems will persist because the gulf itself is a problem. To work within countries to reduce global emissions or improve health care options is a necessary but not sufficient solution, as the structural dimensions must also be addressed to undercut to these persistent global problems. This is why critical sociology can inform transnational move-

ment organizing and other forms of praxis to address global social problems. Toward a Critical Global Perspective of Social Problems In this chapter, we have made the case for globalizing the study of social problems. Far from only a contemporary concern, C. Wright Mills critiqued “social pathologists” who saw social problems “in a fragmentary way . . . not focused on larger stratifications or upon structured wholes . . . failing to consider whether or not certain groups or individuals caught in economically underprivileged situations can possibly obtain the current goals without drastic shifts in the basic institutions which channel and promote them” (Mills 1943). At the beginning of the twenty-first century, we are compelled to extend this vision to a worldhistorical context. For US sociology, and sociologists working within Western academia, this is a political move to recognize the ways that the absence or omission of a transnational or global understanding in our analyses serves to erase or minimize the role of the United States as a hegemonic power within highly unequal global relations, and the ways in which that power has been wielded to preserve privilege. Contextualizing the historical relations in such a way also compels us to consider the role of colonization, settlercolonialism, imperialism, and militarization in shaping relations of inequality, wealth, and well-being. Illuminating the social relationships of power and inequality that form the objective conditions and social constructions of global social problems can help “transformative solutions to urgent social problems,” which Dello Buono argues, “can only grow out of an insurgent praxis that actively engages and defies the structural regime with a strategic and decidedly emancipatory agenda” (Dello Buono 2013, 799). This will challenge how we theorize and explain social problems and what we count as evidence in our arguments for social change. It will push us to consider silences, or

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absences, in our analyses, to question what is centered and naturalized and what is missing or marginalized, whose voices count and get amplified and whose are not heard, and how our approaches to social problems relate to relations of power in both the diagnosis of the social problem and the prognosis for social change. Reflexivity is implicit in the sociological study of social problems. Staying intellectually alert to the complex claims about social problems globally is a needed feature of the critical sociologist. To dissect those claims, untangling the interests and power behind them, is a necessary step toward an effective public sociological voice on the matter. From a mode of inquiry that critically examines the structural and subjective dimensions of social problems, sociological praxis can facilitate greater public reflexivity on the issue. A sociology that does not selfconsciously find this public role misses the opportunity for social problems knowledge to inform social change.

Glossary Cognitive liberation The recognition that things can be different and that society can be changed by people acting in concert. Cultural power The capacity to define a situation and achieve hegemony, or group consent to the world as defined. Domination structures Social networks (e.g., a system of slavery, an abusive domestic arrangement) that use coercive power to combine ideologies with organizational hierarchies that reproduce inequalities with the tacit submission of people. Globalizing public space The social arena where transnational social problem claims, contests, and remedies are made by actors within and across nation-states. International state system The sphere that operates and enforces corporate production and trade, arbitrates disputes between corporate and state interests, sustains global military expenditures, and

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administers mass violence and social control. Neoliberal network The sociopolitical conglomeration of elite transnational corporations.

Note 1. Interestingly, we do not need to speculate on this. In 1977, Exxon’s chief scientist James Black reported to upper management that “there is general scientific agreement that the most likely manner in which mankind is influencing the global climate is through carbon dioxide release from the burning of fossil fuels” (quoted in McKibben 2016, 2). Exxon executives were aware that their industry was driving up CO2 in the atmosphere and increasing the temperature. However, by the 1990s, Exxon, along with other fossil fuel corporations suppressed this research and began funding climate contrarians and skeptics, ushering in a period of denial of this growing problem.

References Adams, Gordon. 1981. The Iron Triangle: The Politics of Defense Contracting. New York: Council on Economic Priorities. Arrighi, Giovanni. 1994. The Long Twentieth Century. London: Verso Press. Basu, Amrita, ed. 2010. Women’s Movements in the Global Era: The Power of Local Feminisms. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Beck, Ulrich. 2007. Power in the Global Age: A New Global Political Economy. Oxford: Polity Press. Best, Joel, ed. 2001. How Claims Spread: CrossNational Diffusion of Social Problems. New York: Routledge. Blumer, Herbert. 1971. Social problems as collective behavior. Social Problems 18(3):298–306. Boulding, Kenneth. 1989. Three Faces of Power. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. London: Routledge Press. Braun, Yvonne A. 2011. The reproduction of inequality: Race, class, gender and the social organization of work at the site of

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large-scale development projects. Social Problems 58(2):281–303. Braun, Yvonne A., and Michael C. Dreiling. 2010. From developmentalism to the HIV/AIDS crisis: The amplification of women’s rights in Lesotho. International Feminist Journal of Politics 12(3):464–83. Brulle, Robert. 2013. Institutionalizing delay: Foundation funding and the creation of U.S. climate change counter-movement organizations. Climatic Change 122:681–94. Chorev, Nitsan. 2007. Remaking U.S. Trade Policy: From Protectionism to Globalization. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Dello Buono, Ricardo A. 2013. Time to change the subject: A new sociology of praxis. Critical Sociology 39(6):795–99. Domhoff, G. William. 2013. The Myth of Liberal Ascendancy: Corporate Dominance from the Great Depression to the Great Recession. Boulder, CO: Paradigm. 2014. Is the corporate elite fractured, or is there continuing corporate dominance? Two contrasting views. Class, Race and Corporate Power 3(1). http://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/ classracecorporatepower/vol3/iss1/1. Dreiling, Michael C., and Derek Darves. 2016. Agents of Neoliberal Globalization: Corporate Networks, State Structures, and Trade Policy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dunlap, Riley E., and Aaron M. McCright. 2011. Organized climate change denial. In The Oxford Handbook of Climate Change and Society, edited by John S. Dryzek, Richard B. Norgaard, and David Schlosberg, 144–59. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Elder, Charles D., and Roger W. Cobb. 1984. Agenda building and the politics of aging. Policy Studies Journal 13(1):115–29. Enloe, Cynthia. 2004. The Curious Feminist: Searching for Women in a New Age of Empire. Berkeley: University of California Press. 2007. Globalization and Militarism: Feminists Make the Link. New York: Rowman & Littlefield. Evans, Peter B. 1995. Embedded Autonomy: States and Industrial Transformation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Farrell, Justin. 2015. Corporate funding and ideological polarization about climate change. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113(1):92–97. www.pnas.org/content/ early/2015/11/18/1509433112.

2016. Network structure and influence of the climate change counter-movement. Nature Climate Change 6:370–74. www.nature .com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ nclimate2875.html. Ferree, Myra Marx, and Aili Mari Tripp. 2006. Global Feminism: Transnational Women’s Activism, Organizing, and Human Rights. New York: New York University Press. Fortune.com. 2015. Global 500. http://fortune .com/global500/. Global Coalition on Women and AIDS (GCWA). 2006. 2006 Progress Report. UNAIDS. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2001. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Harvey, David. 2005. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Johnson, Krista. 2006. Framing AIDS mobilization and human rights in post-apartheid South Africa. Perspectives on Politics 4:663– 70. Kellner, Douglas. 1992. The Persian Gulf TV War. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Kreckel, Reinhard. 2008. Soziologie der sozialen Ungleichheit im globalen Kontext. In Transnationale Ungleichheitsforschung. Eine neue Herausforderung für die Soziologie, edited by Michael Bayer, Gabriele Mordt, Sylvia Terpe, and Martin Winter, 23–70. Frankfurt: Campus. Lillemets, Krista. 2013. Global social inequalities: Review essay. Working Paper Series 45, desiguALdades.net Research Network on Interdependent Inequalities in Latin America. Lukes, Stephen. 2005. Power: A Radical View. 2nd ed. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Lull, James. 1995/2000. Media, Communication, Culture: A Global Approach. New York: Polity Press/Columbia University Press. Mann, Michael. 1986. The Sources of Social Power: A History of Power from the Beginning to AD 1760. Vol. 1. New York: Cambridge University Press. McAdam, Douglas. 1999. Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930–1970. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. McCall, Leslie C. 2005. The complexity of intersectionality. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 30(3):1771–800.

social problems in global perspective McChesney, Robert W. 2008. The Political Economy of Media: Enduring Issues, Emerging Dilemmas. New York: Monthly Review Press. McCright, Aaron M., and Riley E. Dunlap. 2000. Challenging global warming as a social problem: An analysis of the conservative movement’s counter-claims. Social Problems 47(4):499–522. 2003. Defeating Kyoto: The Conservative Movement’s Impact on U.S. Climate Change Policy. Social Problems 5(3):348–73. McKibben, Bill. 2016. “What Does Big Oil Really Think about Climate Science?” The Nation, February 18. www.thenation.com/article/ what-does-big-oil-really-think-aboutclimate-science/. Milgram, Stanley. 1974. Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View. London: Tavistock. Mills, C. Wright. 1943. The professional ideology of social pathologists. American Journal of Sociology 49(2):165–80. 1956. The Power Elite. New York: Oxford University Press. 1959. The Sociological Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press. Mizruchi, Mark S. 2013. The Fracturing of the American Corporate Elite. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Nattrass, Nicoli. 2004. The Moral Economy of AIDS in South Africa. New York: Cambridge University Press. Plankey-Videla, Nancy. 2012. We Are in This Dance Together: Gender, Power, and Globalization at a Mexican Garment Firm. NJ: Rutgers University Press. Pyle, Jean L., and Kathleen B. Ward. 2003. Recasting our understanding of gender and work during global restructuring. International Sociology 18:461–89.

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Ruggie, John G. 1982. International regimes, transactions, and change: Embedded liberalism in the postwar economic order. International Organization 36:379–415. 1998. Constructing the World Polity: Essays on International Institutionalization. New York: Routledge Press. Schneider, Helen. 2002. On the fault-line: The politics of AIDS policy in contemporary South Africa. African Studies 61:145–67. Smith, David A. 2015. Globalizing social problems: A message from the president of the Society for the Study of Social Problems. www.sssp1.org/index.cfm/m/641/2016_ Annual_Meeting/. Smith, Jackie. 2008. Social Movements for Global Democracy. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. United Nations. 2015. Goal 4: Reduce child mortality. www.un.org/millenniumgoals/ childhealth.shtml. Vitali, Stefania, James B. Glattfelder, and Stefano Battiston. 2011. The network of corporate control. PLoS ONE 6(10):e25995. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0025995. Williams, Raymond. 1958. Culture and Society, 1780–1950. New York: Anchor Books. World Health Organization (WHO). 2003. World Health Report 2003: Shaping the Future. Geneva: World Health Organization. 2009. Strengthening gender-sensitive national HIV monitoring and evaluation systems to improve HIV programming for women and girls. www.who.int/gender/events/2010/ poster_20100723_en.pdf. 2011. Child mortality. www.who.int/ pmnch/media/press_materials/fs/fs_mdg4_ childmortality/en/. 2014. HIV fact file. www.who.int/features/ factfiles/hiv/facts/en/index3.html.

CHAPTER 6

Bridging Social Movements and Social Problems Jaime Kucinskas

Abstract The history of social movement scholarship reveals that, despite implicit connections between movements and social problems, explicit analytical ties between the two areas remain weak. Consequently, based on the history of movement theory and its relations with social problems, I identify four directions for future research that can strengthen ties between the two substantive areas. First, movement scholars should resituate movements in a wider range of collective civic claimsmaking. Second, scholars should revisit Hilgartner and Bosk’s (1988) arenas model of social problem formation as a theoretical foundation for connecting the formation of movement grievances with the social problems. Broadening the application of this theory will better situate scholarship on movements’ multiinstitutional politics in groups multiple institutional contexts. Third, future scholarship should strengthen ties between literatures on global social problems and global/international movements. Fourth, research collaborations should strive to develop new methods of studying activism across locations and over time. Social movements are compelling to learn about because they show how collective action can be used to address entrenched, unjust social problems. Movements can be incredibly inspiring: they can show how the underdogs – such as the poor, disenfranchised, and marginalized in society – can collectively empower themselves and work together to solve social problems. There is extensive evidence of how marginalized people mobilize to confront discrimination and promote inclusion and acceptance of diverse social identities (e.g., by race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexual orientation) in powerful institutions like the state.

For example, the women’s suffrage movement triumphed by gaining the right to vote through the Nineteenth Amendment in the US Constitution in 1920. Marginalized and disenfranchised American blacks and their supporters also collectively organized to empower themselves against institutional and normative racism through sitins and the Freedom Rides of the civil rights movement. In response to the civil rights movement, various federal laws, such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, were passed to outlaw explicit discrimination by race in voting, employment, and government offices. The 99

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Civil Rights Act made segregation in public spaces, accommodations, and education illegal. More recently, LGBTQ protests for social acceptance (Armstrong and Crage 2006) have gained widespread media attention and contributed to the legalization of marriage for same-sex couples in the United States. Activists for the environmental justice movement also fight to raise awareness of environmental hazards in neighborhoods with high proportions of low-income and racial minority residents. The force of their collective voice allows them to be heard in their protests of environmental injustice when participation in conventional political channels fail (Cole and Foster 2001). These numerous cases show how movements can empower participants and raise awareness of a variety of social problems. In some cases, like the civil rights movement, collective action leads to considerable structural changes in the political system. Yet, there is relatively little research that actively connects literature on social movements and social problems. In this chapter, based on my perspective as a movements scholar, I bring explicit attention to how social movements and social problems scholarship is implicitly connected. I then provide suggestions on how future research can develop stronger connections across the two areas of scholarship. In the first part of the chapter, I give an historical overview of social movement theory both to show how scholars’ understandings of movements have been influenced by particular historical conjectures of social structures, movements, and social problems and to provide social problems scholars with an overview of the movement literature. I then show how social problems can be created and publicized by movements. I provide an historical overview of American movements which have had the most success in gaining national stature and attention over the past century. I identify factors that contributed to their frequent national media coverage. In the second part of this chapter, I discuss promising directions of future research that would

strengthen connections between movement and social problems scholarship.

A Historical Overview of Social Movement Theory Social movement scholarship has undoubtedly been influenced by highly publicized social problems and particular forms of collective action characteristic of certain historical junctures. Yet, despite Charles Tilly’s (1983, 1995) insightful historical comparative research which suggests that mobilization has changed in the past several hundred years and is historically contingent, “much of the social movement literature is ahistorical” (McAdam et al. 2005, 2). Below I provide an overview of the major theories of collective action and social movements based on the past century of scholarship.1 By examining these theories, it is clear that the aspects of collective behavior scholars focus on and the popularity of particular movements at certain historical junctures are consequential in how we understand the relationship between collective behavior and social problems. Social Strain Theory Classical social theorists in the late nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century studied collective action in the wake of the rapid social change following the Industrial Revolution. They investigated collective action by studying labor movements, political movements such as communism and fascism, and crowd psychology in the United States and Europe (Meyer 2004; Weber and King 2014). Classical scholars largely believed that collective action erupted in response to various social problems. Collective action – which included crowds, mobs, gangs, fads, revolutions, and social movements – was thought to arise because of social strain (Couch 1968; Pfautz 1961; Yablonsky 1959, 108). Strains included natural disasters, abrupt social events, migration, and urbanization (Turner

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and Killian 1957). Social strain could also arise from a social system’s structural imbalances and contradictions (Smelser 1962). Durkheim ([1893] 1933; [1897] 1951), for example, theorized that a lack of social solidarity and integration created social strains which led to collective action. Marx and Engels ([1848] 1978) emphasized how the systemic contradictions and inequality in the capitalist economic system were the sources of grievances, such as alienation, exploitation, and deprivation, which motivated collective action. Social theorists distinguished between rational institutionalized collective behavior and collective action outside of organizations. In contrast to stable, functional, and often taken-for-granted institutional behavior, collective action was viewed as deviant and disruptive. It was characterized by spontaneity, irrationality, and an erratic nature. Under strained conditions, it was believed that institutional norms and structures failed to adequately guide and channel people’s behavior. Collective action emerged as a result of the simultaneous convergence of people’s latent preexisting dispositions and tendencies, people’s suggestibility, shared grievances during periods of change, and processes of contagion. In short, people were swept up in the emotion of a crowd. Collective action enabled participants to release their pent up frustration, insecurities, alienation, and neuroses (Blumer 1939; Le Bon 1896, 27; Morris and Herring 1984; Turner and Killian 1957). The Theoretical Impact of the 1960s and 1970s Movements The civil rights and countercultural movements of the 1960s and 1970s (e.g., the women’s movement, the anti–Vietnam War movement, and the environmental movement) gave rise to a more focused attention on social movements. Young scholars and their college-educated peers were sympathetic to the progressive movements of their time and often participated in them.

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Movement scholars called strain theory into question and distinguished movements from other forms of collective action. Empirical evidence undermined claims that movements were intrinsically reactive, irrational, or psychopathological. Scholars also critiqued the argument that protests or political violence emerge from structural breakdown or social strains due to rapid change. They instead argued that strain and discontent are a constant feature of society (Bwy 1986; Flanagan and Fogelman 1970; Jenkins and Perrow 1977; McAdam [1982] 1999; Morris and Herring 1984; Tilly 1969; Zimmerman 1980).2 There are a number of differences between classical theories of collective action and the movement scholarship of the 1970s. Sociologists in the 1970s argued that there were not fundamental differences between social movement behavior and behavior in institutions. Building upon economic theories of rational action (Olson 2009), they distinguished movements from other forms of collective action, suggesting movements were rational, strategic, and organized (McCarthy and Zald 1973, 1977). To understand why people joined movements, scholars suggested one had to take into account incentives for participation, available resources, and the broader social environment. Rational choice scholars argued that individual movement participants joined movements when convinced it was in their best interest. Participants recognized as rational actors used utilitarian cost– benefit calculations, considering economic and social incentives in their decisions to participate, rather than spontaneously joining due to latent dispositions or irrational impulses (Olson 2009; Morris and Herring 1984). Theories of movement mobilization in the 1970s took resources seriously. If societies had constant strains and causes for grievances to arise, then other factors, such as a movement’s access to resources, were put forward as crucial to movement emergence. Resources would enable groups

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to create an organized campaign for change (Jenkins and Perrow 1977). Movement theory additionally shifted from social-psychological to macro-level perspectives which took into account larger political environments. Mobilization could be constrained or supported by outsider elites or institutions like the state. The political opportunity structure and the extent of state repression were identified as important factors in mobilization (McCarthy and Zald 1977; Tilly 1978; Jenkins and Perrow 1977).

Resource Mobilization John McCarthy and Mayer Zald’s (1973, 1977) resource mobilization theory argued that movement mobilization is often led by social movement organizations (SMOs) rather than by emotionally charged, marginalized masses or bystander publics. They thus broadened the scope from a social-psychological approach to include organizations and the organizational fields which comprised movements. SMOs, they argued, operated like purposive business firms which made rational decisions to pursue resources and their goals. SMOs depended most on affluent outsiders for skilled labor, leadership, and material resources (McCarthy and Zald 1973, 1977; Morris and Herring 1984). Rather than assume that social problems caused movements, movement scholars now attribute broader awareness of social problems to successful movement mobilization (Morris and Herring 1984): there is always enough discontent in any society to supply the grass-roots support for a movement if the movement is effectively organized and it has at its disposal the power and resources of some established elite group . . . For some purposes we go even further: grievances and discontent may be defined, created, and manipulated by issue entrepreneurs and organizations. (McCarthy and Zald 1977, 1215)

This, Morris and Herring (1984) argue, suggests that social movements and their asso-

ciated social problems can be “manufactured and generated by those with vested interests in the occurrence of such an activity” (28–29). Political Process Theory In the 1970s, a different set of scholars such as Charles Tilly (1979), William Gamson (1975), and Anthony Oberschall (1973) advanced political process theory. Political process theorists shifted their focus specifically to politically motivated forms of contentious action which manifested in “a continuous process from generation to decline” between movements and the larger sociopolitical environments they target (McAdam [1982] 1999). Political process theory did not include elements of classic theorists’ “collective action,” such as fads, moral panics, religious revivals and cults, which were viewed mainly as psychological rather than political phenomena. Political process theorists also thought that the broad purview of “movements” studied by resource mobilization theorists was too inclusive of public interest lobbies or formal interest groups like the Sierra Club (McAdam [1982] 1999). Instead, they examined political movements (such as labor and rights movements), revolutions and wars. These political conflicts, they suggested, typically occurred between marginalized insurgents without access to resources through conventional politics, and incumbent state authorities or business elites (Gamson 1975). Political process theory brought attention back to the importance of a mass base of movement supporters. Theorists such as Doug McAdam ([1982] 1999) argued that elite support was not always critical, as resource mobilization theorists suggested, because mass movements could use disruptive tactics like protest to empower themselves and try to create “resources for bargaining” (Wilson 1961, 292). Political process theorists additionally recognized that movement infrastructure included but was not limited to SMOs. Many successful movements were built upon members’ indigenous resources, networks, and access to

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other institutions (Tilly 1978; Morris and Herring 1984). For example, Aldon Morris’s (Morris and Herring 1984) book on the origins of the civil rights movement described how black activists constructed the movement upon the preexisting infrastructure of black churches. These churches not only provided means to share information and gather material resources, but they also provided leaders trained in community organizing and oratory skills as well as spaces to congregate. Political process theory additionally shifted scholars’ focus to the broader external environments of movements. Political process theorists examined opportunities and constraints in the surrounding political environment, and more specifically in the state, in more depth than previous theorists had (e.g., Jenkins and Perrow 1977; McAdam [1982] 1999; Tilly 1979). This gave rise to a considerable literature on political opportunity structures which examined popular access to the political system, divisions between elite powerholders, access to elite allies, and level of state repression (McAdam et al. 1996; Meyer 2004). Overall, the political process theorists brought together various elements which contribute to movement mobilization. They theorized that successful movements would have preexisting access to resources and infrastructure, favorable, rather than repressive, political environments, and savvy leadership with effective strategies which could capitalize on opportunities and extant resources to advance their cause. The Cultural Turn Since the 1980s, European and American scholars have paid more heed to the cultural side of movements. They have examined how culture is formed, operates within movements to create collective solidarity, and is strategically deployed. European scholars shifted their focus from Marxist labor movements targeting economic redistribution to the importance of postindustrial movements which they called “new” social movements (NSM).

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Similar to the American scholars’ focus in the 1970s, NSM scholars examined environmental movements, human rights movements, peace movements, and other lifestyle movements which, often led by members of the middle class, argued for alternative or communal modes of production and distribution. NSM theorists argued that movements can focus on cultural targets which push back against economic and political institutions’ “invasion” or “colonization” of individuals’ private sphere or life-world (Habermas 1981, 513; Offe 1985). They examined movements which created an intermediate sphere of “noninstitutional politics” between private concerns and institutional politics (Offe 1985, 826). In this sphere, activists sought to problematize, politicize, and publicize previously private practices such as consumption and family-related issues. Researchers also brought attention to how groups mobilize based on identity politics and seek equitable treatment by gender, race, language, region, etc. (Offe 1985; Weber and King 2014). In light of European NSM scholarship and the movements of the 1960s and 1970s both in the United States and Europe, American scholars turned their attention to internal movement culture. They examined how movements develop grievances and share values, language, identity, and other facets of culture through interpretive processes. In particular, American researchers built upon European scholarship on identity politics with scholarship on collective identity. By taking into account the importance of collective identity in movements promoting feminism, LGBT rights, and other civil rights, movement scholars could better explain how movements inspired and retained activists. Movement tactics were also chosen based on ideas members had about who they were as a movement (Polletta and Jasper 2001; Smithey 2009). Collective identity, like the NSM literature, additionally brought attention to the cultural outcomes of movements beyond reforming institutions like the state (Polletta and Jasper 2001). Other American scholars underscored the importance of

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collective action frames, which movements use to present their agendas publicly in ways that resonate with targeted audiences and the broader public (Benford and Snow 2000; Snow et al. 1986; Snow and Benford 1988). In the past decade, scholars have also emphasized the role morality and emotions play in movement mobilization (Jasper 1997; Isaac 2008; Effler 2010). Since the 1990s, empirical work at the intersections of movements and institutions has reinvigorated theories of collective social change (Davis et al. 2005; Fligstein and McAdam 2012; Weber and King 2014). For example, movement scholars have drawn upon neoinstitutionalism to show how organizational forms and movement culture diffuse across social and geographical space (Clemens 1993, 1997; Soule 1997; Strang and Soule 1998). There has also been a shift from focusing on cultural formation within movements to an emphasis on the importance of multi-institutional cultural environments (Armstrong and Bernstein 2008; Rojas 2007; Soule 2009; Williams 2004). Armstrong and Bernstein’s (2008) multi-institutional politics approach argues that, in contrast to the political process model which assumed that social domination occurred mainly through the state, there are multiple sources of institutional power in society. These institutions have both material and symbolic forms of power, which can be contested by many forms of movement mobilization. Movements, including environmental, civil rights, LGBT rights, and religious activism, which target multiple institutions may be more efficacious when using various kinds of tactics, identities, and frames which are chosen at times to build consensus with targeted audiences as well as to initiate contention. Movements can deliberately either suppress or celebrate their differences with mainstream society (Bernstein 1997) and use either contentious or consensus-building tactics which aid them in collaborating with both institutional outsiders and insiders (Kucinskas 2014; Pellow 1999).

The Importance of Collective Mobilization in Constructing Social Problems In tracing theories of collective action and social movements, it is evident how movement scholarship has been influenced by specific visible and historically contingent forms of collective action. Yet, as noted above with resource mobilization theory and theories about movement culture, scholars also suggest that groups of actors, such as social movements, can be critical in constructing collective grievances, and in so doing, creating social problems. In their groundbreaking article on the formation of social problems, Stephen Hilgartner and Charles Bosk (1988, 53) argue that social problems are “products of a process of collective definition.” This process of defining and diffusing awareness of social problems occurs in a field of known social problems, and is embedded in a complex multi-institutional “system of problem formulation and dissemination” (Hilgartner and Bosk 1988, 55). Given the limits of public attention and the many conceivable social problems, only certain issues come to be identified as social problems and brought to the awareness of select groups of people. An even more select sample of “celebrity” social problems become central, widely discussed topics in public discourse. Groups such as social movements, politicians, the media, public relations specialists, and lawyers compete to influence how issues are portrayed, and what is determined a social problem in specific institutions and among the public. They also vie for the limited attention of their targeted audiences, competing with other important issues and social problems. Edwin Amenta and his colleagues (2009) used the New York Times to examine factors contributing to American SMOs’ frequent media attention in the twentieth century. They tracked movements that were most reported on and how movement coverage changed over time. Overall, the labor

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movement’s activity was most likely to be covered in national media (36 percent of SMO mentions), with civil rights/African American SMOs coming in second (nearly 10 percent), and veterans SMOs coming in third (nearly 8 percent). Feminist organizations were covered in about 6 percent of SMO mentions. Nativist/Supremacist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan, environmental movement organizations, and Jewish civil rights organizations were each mentioned in about 4 percent of the sample. Reporting on civil liberties, antiwar, other conservative and other progressive SMOs each comprised about 3 percent of examined articles. Groups against alcohol, supporting farmers, and communist SMOs each made up about 2 percent of the sample. Groups making claims about the following issues each composed about 1 percent of the reported SMO activity in the twentieth century: reproductive rights/abortion, civic, consumer, old-age rights, the Christian Right, other civil rights, children’s rights, general liberal issues, and LGBT rights. The rest of the SMOs mentioned (which included groups against smoking, against abortion, for and against guns, for Native American, Hispanic, and the disabled’s rights, welfare and prison reform, and those raising awareness of AIDS) each made up less than 0.5 percent of all movement activity covered. There has been a great deal of change in the movements that captured public attention throughout the course of the twentieth century. In the 1920s, nativist and supremacist, anti-alcohol, veterans, and labor SMOS dominated media coverage. Coverage of veterans’ issues peaked about 1930, while labor issues were reported on the most from the mid-1930s to 1950. In the 1930s, farmers’ and Communist SMOs also received considerable media attention. Coverage of feminist and abortion issues was high from 1935 to 1945 and again from the 1970s until the early 1990s. The civil rights movement was reported on the most from the late 1950s until the early 1970s (Amenta et al. 2009; Van Dyke et al. 2004).

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Jewish civil rights groups also received substantial coverage from the 1950s through the 1970s. Civil liberties reached its height of media coverage in the 1970s and 1980s. Environmental issues received most media attention from 1980 to 1990. The Christian Right received much national media coverage in the 1990s (Amenta et al. 2009). Based on qualitative comparative analysis, Amenta and his colleagues concluded that movements were likely to receive the most media coverage when they engaged in disruptive protest tactics, when they had organizational support from SMOs, and when a major political policy enforced by a national bureau or department supported movement efforts.

Broadening the Scope of Social Movement Scholarship to Build Bridges with Social Problems Movement scholarship has focused primarily on how movements mobilize. As discussed above, movement theorization has paid much attention to the emergence of movements, SMOs, why people join and stay in movements, movement leadership, movement tactics such as resource mobilization, and movement culture. The social environmental affordances and constraints on movement deployment have also been examined. In the remainder of this chapter, I identify and expound upon four areas in which future research can bridge the literatures on social movements and social problems. First, movement scholars can broaden the purview of their scholarship to include a wider range of collective civic claimsmaking. Second, scholars should revisit Hilgartner and Bosk’s (1988) public arenas model of how social problems are created. This will provide a theoretical foundation from which to better connect the formation of movement grievances with the social problems more generally. Hilgartner and Bosk’s theory will also help movement scholars more deeply embed movement mobilization in multi-institutional politics

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and broader systems of institutional power. Third, future scholarship should better connect and build upon the literatures of global social problems and global/international movements. Fourth, research collaborations should strive to develop new methods of studying activism across locations and over time. Broadening Claimsmaking to Local, Unobtrusive Collective Action Social movement and social problems scholars can better connect the two literatures by resituating movement scholarship in a broader field of collective civic action. The Chicago Collective Civic Participation Study (CCCP), which was conducted by Doug McAdam, Robert Sampson, Simon Weffer, and Heather MacIndoe, does just that. The CCCP study investigated the causes and contours of “collective civic engagement” in and around Chicago from 1970 to 2000. Using local newspaper accounts from a particular location in hopes that local media coverage would be more comprehensive than national media reports, the CCCP study (McAdam et al. 2005; Sampson et al. 2005) tested whether American civic engagement is on the decline (as suggested by Putnam 2000), or whether Americans now live in a “movement society” in which more routine, quasi-institutionalized movement tactics are used by nearly everyone (Meyer and Tarrow 1998).3 They also examined more specifically whether contentious disruptive protests continue to be prevalent in the United States among marginalized underrepresented groups, as much scholarship based on the political process model and movements of the 1970s suggests. The CCCP scholars categorized collective civic engagement events by protest events, civic events, or hybrid “blended social action.” In accordance with the political process model’s depiction of movement mobilization, protest events were defined as an event in which activists collectively made a claim or expressed a grievance that advocated for policy reform or the

delivery of a service on behalf of a social movement organization or social category (Uhrig and Van Dyke 1996). Protest events included the use of common movement tactics such as marches, sit-ins, petitions, letter writing campaigns, and class action lawsuits. Civic events, in contrast, had more implicit, general purposes but did not articulate specific claims. Civic events tended to celebrate community (e.g., festivals), raise money (such as rummage sales, charity balls, or other fundraisers), or center around an activity like a neighborhood cleanup. Hybrid blended social action combined protest claims with civic, communitybased forms such as festivals or art fairs. Hybrid civic acts tended to emerge out of local community organizations rather than social movement organizations. For example, out of a neighborhood association meeting, a group decided to lobby for a temporary public library while the preexisting library was being rebuilt. The CCCP’s findings challenge commonly held views characterizing social movements as collective action by disadvantaged groups which use disruptive tactics to influence national and state policy (as I portrayed in the beginning of this chapter). Their results instead suggest that protests are a small proportion of all collective civic action. From 1970 to 2000, protest composed only 15 percent of all collective civic action in Chicago. Civic action made up about 80 percent of all collective civic action, leaving 5 percent of all events blended forms of collective action (Sampson et al. 2005). Moreover, their results suggested disruptive protests are a small and declining proportion of all protest events. From 1970 to 2000, disruptive protest nearly disappeared in Chicago. By 2000, less than 2 percent of all protest events in Chicago included disruptive tactics which harmed people or property, or led to arrests (McAdam et al. 2005). In contrast, from 1980 to 2000, hybrid forms of civic action increased (Sampson et al. 2005). Protests and hybrid events focused on local claims and issues far more than expected. Less than 6 percent of all protest

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and hybrid events were tied to national movements, which movement scholars most often focus their attention on. Even fewer events (4.7 percent) were based on international movements. In contrast, 43 percent of events focused on local and neighborhood issues. About 30 percent of events focused on citywide issues and 15 percent of events pertained to problems at the state level. Claims related to local issues surged over the time span studied, while protests for national issues such as civil rights, peace, and the environment declined. McAdam and his colleagues (2005) additionally reveal that who typically engages in protest and hybrid civic events has changed over the past four decades. Although blacks, the unemployed, and the poor were more likely to participate in protests in the 1970s, by 2000, residents of higher income areas in the suburbs were more likely to protest. Neal Caren and his colleagues (2011) built upon scholarship on civic engagement and protest trends in the United States by investigating changes in protests and petitioning from 1973 to 2008 using data from twentyone surveys. Their results suggested that although most people have never protested, there has been a national increase in people who have attended a protest. Part of this increase is due to generational replacement by the Baby Boomers; those born between 1943 and 1954 were most likely to have protested than any other cohort. Members of Generation Y (who were born after the 1980s) were also more likely to have attended a protest than other cohorts (excluding the Baby Boomers). The surges in protest among the Baby Boomers and the members of Generation Y were driven by the college educated in those cohorts. Caren et al.’s (2011) results further suggest that engagement in petitioning, in addition to protests, has not diffused evenly throughout the American population; certain people were more likely to protest or sign a petition than others. The college-educated and union members were particularly likely to both protest and sign a petition. Liberals, African Americans, and people living in cities or on the East or West coasts were

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more likely to have attended a protest than others. The unmarried, and men were also more likely to have protested than their counterparts. Women, whites, the economically affluent, and people living in the West were particularly likely to have signed a petition. Results from the CCCP study and Caren et al.’s (2011) research suggest that movement scholars’ assumptions of what movements are, how they mobilize, and who engages in activism, are no longer accurate; collective action has changed since the 1970s. In the 1970s, most protesters were members of economically and socially marginalized groups who convened and mobilized in urban areas or college campuses. By 2000, suburban whites were more likely than others to protest (McAdam et al. 2005). Disruptive protests had declined and noncontentious tactics, such as petitioning, increased (McAdam et al. 2005; Caren et al. 2011). Groups who were less likely to engage in disruptive protest in the past, such as the wealthy, whites, and women, were more likely to have signed petitions than their counterparts (those with less wealth, people of color, and men). McAdam and his colleagues (2005) conclude that movement scholarship has not kept up with the times, and new scholarship needs to reevaluate what activism looks like in contemporary society. Although certain generations, such as the Baby Boomers and Generation Y, have been more likely to participate in protests than others, most Americans rarely, if ever, engage in protest. However, many people participate in other forms of localized civic action such as community events and fundraisers. Out of some local community groups, mobilization around political claims arises in hybrid forms of collective action. Sampson and his colleagues (2005) suggest that hybrid forms of civic/activist collective action have been increasing since the 1980s. This research suggests that movement activism and local civic activism is dovetailing for a growing number of Americans. Future research should adapt accordingly and build stronger bridges between

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scholarship on the emergence of protests, movements, and civic action. Scholars should compare the conditions in which localized political and civic action arise and grow, to complement the bulk of movement research which has focused on the emergence and mobilization of contentious national movements. Such research should build upon resource mobilization theory and Sampson et al.’s (2005) findings suggesting that neighborhoods’ organizational density and capacity is a crucial precondition to collective civic action. However, not all groups are equally efficacious in community outreach and activism. As Paul Lichterman warns in his 2005 book Elusive Togetherness, social capital on its own is not enough to ensure effective civic action. Groups’ social skills, and ability to engage in critical, reflective discussions about how to build partnerships in the community, as opposed to “volunteering” or “helping,” is important in local forms of civic efficacy and community building. Researchers of both social problems and movements have much to gain by collaborating and building future theories which encompass and draw upon scholarship on movement emergence and tactics, civic action, urban studies, and voluntary, nonprofit organizations. Multi-Institutional Politics The conceptual lines between conventional politics, nonconventional politics, and organizational change have become too reified and have limited collaboration across political science, movements, and social problems scholarship on how activism manifests. This has not always been the case. For example, past movement scholarship (e.g., Gamson 1975) included professional associations a contemporary scholar might not expect, such as the National Baseball Players and the Dairymen’s League, in the universe of challenging groups. Gamson also included political groups such as Theodore Roosevelt’s Bull Moose Party and William Randolph Hearst’s Independence League. Some contemporary movement scholars assume

such organizations are part of the establishment and will use conventional political channels rather than alternative means of mobilization. Other political scientists and movement scholars might not include organizational change in occupations such business, education, or other less explicitly politically driven fields, as part of conventional politics. Regardless of such arbitrary distinctions, the fact remains that economic, educational, and other organizational actors can be crucial parts of both conventional and nonconventional political action. There is a burgeoning literature at the intersection of movements, organizational change, and social problems, although scholars at these intersections might not identify with all of these substantive areas. For example, Michael Lounsbury’s (2001) scholarship on college and university recycling programs shows how support from a national movement can be crucial in shaping how organizations integrate activist goals into their organizational structure. Scholarship on academic and extracurricular diversity programs in K-12 education, universities, and businesses show how movements, formal regulations, and institutional normative pressures can drive social reform (Berrey 2011, 2013; Binder 2009; Rojas 2007). Hilgartner and Bosk’s (1988) arenas model of social problem formation provides a useful theoretical foundation for developing more connections between scholarship on movements, organizations, and social problems in multi-institutional contexts. Hilgartner and Bosk’s theory is primarily based upon the building blocks of conventional political channels such as the state, foundations, nonprofits, and the media; they pay far less attention to social movements, which they argue examines “collective action, rather than collective definition” of social problems – which is their main focus (55–56). Movement and organizational change scholarship has much to gain by extending the application of its theory to include not only social problem definition (which is done by movements as well as the other aforementioned institutions),

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but also collective action. Although movement scholars have begun to pay more heed to mobilization across institutions with the multi-institutional politics approach (Armstrong and Bernstein 2008), such scholarship can be deepened with greater sensitivity to how different institutional contexts constrain social problem formation and collective mobilization. Hilgartner and Bosk’s (1988) arenas model suggests that in the process of social problem definition across institutional contexts, scholars should pay attention to six main factors. First, they need to note the dynamic processes of competition which occur “among social groups who promote different problems or different ways of seeing the ‘same’ problems” (56). Second, scholars need to take into account the institutional arenas in which social problems emerge. Third, they should identify the carrying capacities of these arenas, which constrain how many problems can garner attention at a given time. Fourth, it is important to examine the “‘principles of selection,’ or institutional, political, and cultural factors that influence the probability of survival of competing problem formulations” (56). Fifth, researchers should investigate “patterns of interaction across arenas” (56) and how ideas and activities are carried and diffused across institutional fields. Lastly, scholars need to examine the networks of people, such as well-positioned cultural brokers and gatekeepers, who promote and shape the formation of social problems across institutional fields. These theoretical propositions are useful not only in examining social problem definition, but also in assessing collective action and its outcomes across institutional fields.4 In particular, the last four propositions lend important insights to movement scholarship; future research applying these propositions would more deeply embed scholarship on movements’ multi-institutional politics in their complex multifield environments. How does the carrying capacities for attention to social problems in specific institutional fields, and the amount of other movements or other

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publicized social problems influence the efficacy of movement mobilization? Do institution-specific “principles of selection” shape why movements become more developed in certain arenas than others? Can this explain why ethnic rights groups (such as those seeking Asians’, Latinos’, and Native Americans’ rights) most often target the national US government, while the civil rights movement for American blacks’ rights had alternative targets (Van Dyke et al. 2004)? Such questions can take both movement and social problems scholarship in new, promising directions. Future research should also examine in more depth how institutional insiders leverage their existing power and privilege in their organizations and in their networks across institutional fields to support outside movements and broadly promote and diffuse their causes. Such research would help build connections between scholarship on stratification, elites, and inequality with scholarship on mobilization and organizational change. There is a considerable amount of evidence that professionals use their workplaces to collectively mobilize for activist causes. For example, the American College & University Presidents’ Climate Commitment (ACUPCC) is an advocacy organization which is building academic institutions’ commitments to prevent climate change. They describe themselves on their website as: a high-visibility effort to address global climate disruption undertaken by a network of colleges and universities that have made institutional commitments to eliminate net greenhouse gas emissions from specified campus operations, and to promote the research and educational efforts of higher education to equip society to re-stabilize the earth’s climate. Its mission is to accelerate progress towards climate neutrality and sustainability by empowering the higher education sector to educate students, create solutions, and provide leadershipby-example for the rest of society.5

There is also a coalition among businesses dedicated to preventing climate change called the Business for Innovative Climate

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and Energy Policy coalition. Similarly, their mission is to reduce emissions and become more energy efficient in the companies which are a part of their organization. They also support the creation of federal US policy regulating energy to reduce climate change.6 Such cases warrant further investigation of how professional advocacy groups can mobilize their organizations and fields to confront social problems. Scholars should also foster connections between literatures on social inequality (e.g., the inequalities due to intersectionalities between race, class, gender, and sexual orientation), movement mobilization, and other forms of activism. Comparative research on groups mobilizing to address similar social problems from different advantaged and disadvantaged social positions is needed. Ties between scholarship on social problems in the education system (e.g., violence, lack of resources, and racial inequality) and mobilization for education reform should be further developed. Education reform is one of the most important issues local groups mobilize around (Sampson et al. 2005), yet there is a dearth of research on collective mobilization around education reform in the collective behavior and social movement literature. Future scholarship should build upon existing research on local and national mobilization for educational change (e.g., Rojas 2007). Global and International Mobilization Connections between movement and social problems scholarship can be strengthened in research on international/global collective action and social problems. Scholarship on social movements has focused mainly on mobilization in Western democracies such as the United States (Cross and Snow 2012), as suggested by the historical overview of movement theory provided at the beginning of this chapter. However, this has begun to change in the past several decades. Given the popular attention to global militant religious movements and other global social problems such as

climate change and human rights abuses, researchers have increasingly tried to understand how global and international movements mobilize to raise awareness of and address social problems. There are a number of ways to study global and international mobilization, which I describe below. Since the late 1970s, when religious militant groups representing various traditions from the Middle East, South and East Asia, the United States, and Israel emerged onto the world stage, there has been a more focused attention on the use of violent tactics and the growth of religious fundamentalist movements (Almond et al. 2003; Juergensmeyer 2003; Marty and Appleby 1993, 1994, 1995; Riesebrodt [1990] 1993). While many studies on violent tactics or religious movements focus on a specific case (Hafez 2003; Mahmood 2005; Viterna 2013), others make cross-national comparisons to identify how certain kinds of movements mobilize in different contexts. Sociologists and political scientists, for example, have compared how different movements use violence (Juergensmeyer 2003), nonviolent tactics (Nepstad 2011), or tactics to “bypass” or work around the state (Davis and Robinson 2012) in different countries. There has also been increased interest in global and transnational activism since the 1990s. Institutional and movement scholars have different theories of how global and transnational activism manifest. On one hand, world polity scholars suggest that global actors initiate top-down processes of social change. International nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) promote and legitimate certain cultural agendas. They connect with national and local organizations, and increasingly penetrate peripheral spaces around the world. In Constructing World Culture: International Nongovernmental Organizations Since 1875, John Boli and George Thomas (1999) examine how the growth of INGOs has supported the global mobilization of nonprofits and movements since 1875. While many movement scholars would not include INGOs under the purview of “movements,” it is clear that such organizations have at minimum

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served as “movement midwives” (Smith 1996) which have aided local movements around the world in mobilizing. Other scholars (e.g., Berkovitch 1999; Keck and Sikkink 1998, 2014) suggest that INGOs, which have been important in convening movement leaders internationally, facilitating the sharing of movement frames and tactics, and legitimizing campaigns for various kinds of human rights, can be a constitutive element of global movements promoting human rights, women’s rights, and environmental protection. Other scholars instead emphasize the importance of local grassroots movements around the world. In The New Transnational Activism, Tarrow (2005) puts forth an international version of political process theory. He stresses the need to look at how the process of mobilization across borders is both enabled and constrained by local contexts. He acknowledges the importance of international political opportunity structures and support from international governance organizations and INGOs, but emphasizes how “rooted cosmopolitan” actors mobilize using domestic resources, networks, and opportunities in their international activism. A third camp of researchers examine how collective action through coalitions of businesses, the state, activist organizations, and nonprofits can address particular social problems, such as the destruction of the rainforest or human rights abuses in global supply chains (Bartley 2007; Bartley et al. 2015). Such research shifts from a focus on movements to an examination of coalition building and negotiation among different collective actors, including activist organizations, to address complex global social problems. In Looking Behind the Label: Global Industries and the Conscientious Consumer, for example, Tim Bartley and his colleagues (2015) compare the creation and impact of certification programs meant to address labor and environmental abuses across industries ranging from forestry to electronics production. Their results suggest that although the emergence of

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certification and auditing programs and buying fair trade and other certified products are important avenues to addressing human rights and environmental problems in our production systems, they are far from a sufficient solution. Given many companies’ lack of commitment to enacting deep structural change, the complex structure of global commodity chains, and the relatively weak role many developing countries play in protecting their workers, to even have a chance at truly reforming production systems, a combination of social movements and a collective commitment to deep structural change (e.g., increased governmental regulation, reforming structures of production) will be needed. The different approaches to examining global and international social reform discussed above set the stage for future research which attempts to systematically discern how movements mobilize in similar and particular ways in different national political contexts. In particular, scholars need to further investigate the differential importance of top-down and grassroots mobilization in efforts to address global problems. Are top-down and bottom-up forms of mobilization each more efficacious for particular kinds of movements or social problems? Or is mobilization most efficacious when both forms of mobilization are present and work together? In addition, future research should further examine the role and importance of social movements in international coalitions addressing global social problems. Under what conditions can movements, states, businesses and other nonprofits effectively work together and under what conditions do such coalitions fall apart? Parsing out these factors is important not just for scholarship but for aiding groups trying to ameliorate the complex global problems we face. New Methodologies and Cross-Cultural Collaborations Although movements have mainly been studied through case studies and content

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analysis of newspapers, in recent years scholars have used innovative methods such as qualitative comparative analysis (Amenta et al. 2009) or compiled surveys (Caren et al. 2011) to investigate the causal factors influencing movement activity. Scholars should continue to brainstorm and experiment with alternative ways of studying how fields of movement activity, collective action, and social problems are interrelated in the United States and internationally. There is a need for more comprehensive national and cross-national data on activists and social grievances. Although there is not good longitudinal data on activist cohorts (Caren et al. 2011), such data need to be collected on the United States and other countries in the future. Future scholarship should also explore ways of scraping data from social media (e.g., DiGrazia 2015) and other international media sources. To do this, scholars need to develop international research collaborations across regions of the world and ways of better including nonWestern scholars. Building upon the methods of the CCCP study, scholars should also investigate and compare smaller, bounded areas across the United States, Europe, and other parts of the world to test whether McAdam and his colleagues’ (2005) findings on collective action trends are generalizable. Researchers should examine collective action events in suburban towns in more depth and compare “affluent activism” with collective mobilization in urban areas nearby. Such studies could combine content analysis of local papers with interviews and ethnography. International ethnographic teams should also be developed to examine how organizational members of a single overarching SMO, INGO, or social movement family try to raise consciousness and address a similar social problem (or problems) across different national contexts (Burawoy 2000).

In Conclusion Although movements’ grievances were central to classic scholars’ theories of collective

action, the content of activists’ grievances became less important to movement scholars of the 1970s and beyond – who focused their attention more on movements’ organizations, leadership, tactics, and political environments. It is time for the ties between scholarship on movements and social problems to again be fortified for the mutual benefit of scholars in both areas. In this chapter I laid out four promising areas for reconnecting movement and social problems scholarship. First, movements should be resituated in a broader field of civic collective action. Second, theories of social change from the social problems scholarship, such as Hilgartner and Bosk’s (1988) theory on the areas of social problem definition, should be extended to help explain movement mobilization across institutional fields. Third, insights from social problems and movements should be pooled and drawn upon to better understand mobilization addressing global and international problems. Lastly, international research teams should be developed to conduct more cross-national and comparative quantitative and qualitative studies on the conditions of social problems, and collective efforts to address them. Building these connections will not only inform and enrich the scholarship of all, but it will also aid activists’ work to address social problems. With a greater awareness of the structural and cultural conditions of social problems, as well as the most efficacious routes to address such problems, scholars and activists will be more informed in developing recommendations for reform on the ground and in state policies.

Glossary Collective action frames Based on Goffman’s (1974) definition of frames, collective action frames simplify and condense the world into “schemata of interpretation” (Goffman 1974, 21; cf. Benford and Snow 2000), “intended to mobilize potential adherents and constituents, to garner bystander support, and to

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demobilize antagonists” (Snow and Benford 1988, 198). Collective identity An individual’s perceived “cognitive, moral, and emotional connection with a broader community, category, practice, or institution” (Polletta and Jasper 2001, 285). Mobilization The process of increasing “readiness of participants to act collectively by building the loyalty of a constituency to an organization or group of leaders” (Gamson 1975, 15). Social movement A collective, organized, sustained, and noninstitutional challenge to authorities, power holders, or cultural beliefs and practices (Goodwin and Jasper 2003, 3). Social movement organization (SMO) A complex or formal organization which has as its goal the attainment of a social movement’s preferences and aims (McCarty and Zald 1977).

Notes 1. For other reviews, see Goodwin and Jasper (2014), Morris and Herring (1984), Moss and Snow (2016), and Weber and King (2014). 2. There has been resurgence in strain and breakdown theories (e.g., Snow et al. 1998; Buechler 2004). 3. National media tends to capture large, confrontational, disruptive protests better than smaller local events (Amenta et al. 2009; Earl et al. 2004). 4. With the shift to a multi-institutional politics approach to studying movements, scholars have begun to pay more attention to the many institutional fields movements are embedded in (which is Hilgartner and Bosk’s second proposition). Research on movements and countermovements corresponds with Hilgartner and Bosk’s first proposition. 5. www.presidentsclimatecommitment.org/ about/mission-history. 6. www.ceres.org/bicep/principles.

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CHAPTER 7

Public Sociology and Social Problems Joshua Meisel and Mary Virnoche

Abstract This chapter takes the discussion of social problems into the public sociology debate. We consider theoretical underpinnings of the idea of the public and the public problem-solving work in our disciplinary roots. We revisit conceptualizations of public intellectual labor as well as the historical struggles across professional associations as to the value and place for actually solving social problems. We conclude by considering the current national political climate, professional association responses, and challenges for social problems scholars in surreal times.

Introduction We begin this chapter by conceptualizing ideas about the public that acknowledges both the form and content of discourse and action to address social problems. We next turn to examining the origin story of our discipline(s) and the way in which addressing public issues (Mills 1959) has been in our roots. We reflect on examples of sharing sociological ideas to broad public audiences to inform and galvanize social change. This narrative brings us to more recent theorizing about public sociology as conceptualized by American Sociological Association (ASA) President Michael Burawoy (2004) and its implications for other sociological work. We also consider the more practical challenges of implementing the public sociology vision within the existing rewards

structure of higher education. In the final section of this chapter we review the evolution of professional associations and how they have wrestled with often-competing constituencies and priorities for sociological work heading into the twenty-first century. We close by considering the response of the American Sociological Association to the election of Donald Trump to the US presidency as an opportunity for public sociology in a pivotal historic moment.

Ideas of the Public Explicit in its title, the terrain of public sociology rests on some idea of “the public.” The concept’s origins and boundaries, as well its conceptual limits and downfalls, can be traced across generations of political

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and sociological thought. Often theorizing of the “public sphere” itself points not to a particular public group, but rather to the public as a discursive space (Arendt 1989; Calhoun 2012; Habermas 1999) and a site of political ideological struggle (Gramsci 1971). In these discursive spaces, public sociology enters into a dialogue in identifying, defining and offering solutions to the social problems of our times. While a revisiting of the theoretical and political debate around civil society and ideas of the public is beyond the scope of this chapter, readers might recall theorizing of an arena separate from both the state or formal governance, as well as distinct from private (property) interests (Habermas 1999). In the ideal Kantian public sphere, private interests are set aside for universal moral obligations to the whole (Calabrese 2004). Critiques of these constructions of the public stem from considerations of material power and inequalities of actors (Gramsci 1971), form and framing of acceptable public discourse (Higginbotham 2003), as well as from critique of the very separation of private from the public (Pateman 1989). Below we present historical discussions, debates and theorizing of “public sociology” that suggest that most sociologists understand this work as inclusive of and beyond discursive action. We discuss the history of the development of professional associations concerned with social problems and the struggles over professional directions that include activism, political engagement and applied research and knowledge as intellectual work that serves a public good.

Public and Problem Solving in Our Roots The history of sociology is filled with evidence of the active engagement of professional sociologists with audiences and causes outside of the scholarly enterprise. While there were no schools of sociology per se in the early fourteenth century, Abdel

Rahman Ibn-Khaldun wrote sociologically and engaged in two decades of political activity in North Africa and Spain (Ritzer 1996). More commonly recognized sociological figures such as Auguste Comte synthesized Enlightenment political philosophy and social reform. He took sociology to the streets “delivering lectures to groups of unschooled laborers in Paris” in the early 1800s, while aligning with youth and labor movements (Dentler 2002, 6). Karl Marx, whose life and work remains foundational to classical theory texts (Calhoun et al. 2012; Lemert 2013; Ritzer and Goodman 2004), also wove together his scholarly thinking and writing with engaging public discourse. His Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848) coauthored with Friedrich Engels was commissioned by the Communist League and became “the most widely read and influential single document of modern socialism” (Tucker 1978, 469). Charlotte Perkins Gilman brought her articulations of feminist thought to the public through lectures, essays and fiction, along with Anna Julia Cooper and W. E. B. Du Bois (Lemert 2013). Though claimed more recently in disciplinary efforts to write white women and men and women of color into our history, the work of Gilman and DuBois also evidences the early roots of creative forms of writing (poetry and fiction) to convey sociological theory, insights and calls to action into the hearts and minds of a broad public audience. Yet more recent calls that sociologists expand our repertoire of forms for sharing research with many publics (Richardson and Adams St. Pierre 2008) creates fear of losing disciplinary status as a science and an equal among the giants of the social sciences (Glenn 2007). That hard-fought battle for status is both recent history and current battleground. This fear of departure from recognized forms of science (statistical analysis) is no small concern given the most recently developed political climate that touts inaccuracies and lies as “alternative facts” (Blow 2017). The 2016 US presidential election and the political climate of

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2017 place a heightened level of urgency around public sociological education and persistence in differentiating types of reason. The New York Times reported a PolitiFact study on statements made President Donald Trump that found of “365 specific claims by Mr. Trump . . . more than two thirds of the claims were ‘mostly false,’ ‘false’ or, in 62 cases ‘Pants on Fire’ false” (Barstow 2017, 12). As we write, news headlines and fact checker overload shape a surreal political climate that more like an Orwell novel and its “Ministry of Truth” (Orwell 1949), than the longed for ideal type public sphere of social theory.

Theorizing Public Sociology and Social Problems Work Burawoy’s 2004 presidential speech is part of a long history of calls to return to our roots in serving the public good with our research and sociological knowledge. We revisit some of this history later as we trace shifts and discourse across professional associations. In this section we consider conceptualizations of public sociology, as well as the potential implications for particular frameworks. As noted by the editors of the ASA-endorsed edited volume “Public Sociology” (Clawson et al. 2007), an infusion and formal recognition and reward of public sociology across the discipline is not a small feat (Zussman and Misra 2007). Burawoy (2007) identifies a spectrum of public sociological practices from traditional to organic that are differentiated on the sociologist’s level of engagement with their public. At one end of the continuum, the sociologist has little to no contact or dialogue with an imagined audience. This traditional public sociology is the home of predominantly one-way communication of opinion columns, crossover popular monographs and, more recently even Twitter and blog posts when measured only by followers and views. These practices are hopeful for “abstract” (Habermas 1999) publics that may be inspired by our work to consider new

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approaches to thinking about and addressing a given social problem. Far on the other end of the spectrum, organic public sociology is about connection. The sociologist is immersed in the public that they serve. They feel the camaraderie of fellow social movement organizers and local school children in the antibullying and antiracist outreach programs. Burawoy (2007) further situates public sociology in a two-by-two table distinguished from professional, critical and policy sociology (34). Audience serves as one axis differentiating work: sociology for whom? Knowledge type serves as the other axis: sociology for what? While Burawoy acknowledges overlap across types of labor, Calhoun (2005), among other critics, suggests that the model (1) “essentializes” the types and, furthermore, (2) “does not recognize more fully their interdependence.” For those studying and trying to solve social problems, the knowledge distinctions between Burawoy’s public and policy sociology may be academic at best. Their work often involves simultaneous engagement on multiple fronts from protest action to collaborating with local policy makers as they act on behalf of their publics. The underlying impetus then is taking sociological knowledge outside the ivory tower. Other organizing concepts for this labor, such as “practicing” sociology (Dentler 2002) and “service” sociology (Treviño 2012) seem to widen the net, yet have their own linguistic challenges discussed below. It is likely that these concepts did not have the marketing cache that “public” sociology carries. Though this is hard to say given Burawoy’s very effective campaign to put “public sociology” in our radar (Calhoun 2005). Narrow conceptions of public sociology may artificially separate public, private and state arenas that interface in the day-to-day world of solving problems in their communities. For example, consider the small-town business association that asks a sociologist for help in educating its members about racism experienced by college students who

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enter their shops. They partner with the city to reinvent the culture of downtown life, involving students in the process. This seems clearly social problems (solving) work. Is there utility in parsing out the threads of intellectual labor? Or is it sufficient, for the purposes of moving a discipline, to understand the need and implications for getting out “there” and doing something? Stacey (2007) outlines significant changes in the institutional practices of our field that are required by departments taking seriously this call for public sociology. These changes cut across curricular design, learning outcomes and assessment. Embracing public sociology affects faculty hiring criteria, and the related expectations for tenure and promotion. It likely also affects our graduate admissions and the “culture of sociological writing and discourse” (92). Collins (2007) articulates a cautionary position to the labeling and potential (further) ghettoization of the everyday work of those already at the margins of the discipline. Her concern extends to the particular claim to the name “public” a label that itself has come under fire in the conservative political climate that strategically demonizes all things public (López 2015). Collins (2007) also highlights the explosives in the hidden power structure: “Burawoy’s four-cell typology gives the impression of parallelism among professional, policy, critical, and public sociology . . . These four types have never been nor are they expected to be equal to one another” (109). She invokes the image of a limited pie size (jobs, student positions, publication space) that suggest that bringing in public sociology as an equal partner would require the unlikely loss of terrain from the other cells of Burawoy’s typology. We wonder whether the control and interest in that particular pie is more a concern for the elite 1 percent who operate in the limited terrains of “R1” research universities, rather than the 99 percent of academic sociologists who work for community and state colleges and universities. For most of us and our students, there is little choice

but to engage with the social problems of our marginalized communities and pave the pathways to change. Whether we do so at a cost to ourselves and our careers is dependent on our successes or failures at changing institutional structures that shape our work and its rewards and penalties. Unlike Burawoy (2007) who insists that public sociology itself is politically neutral though individual actors will of course have their personal politics, Treviño (2012) conceptualizes his service sociology as a politics and practice of social justice – akin to leftist politics. While Fox Piven (2007) and Touraine (2007) call for abandonment of the neutrality in our public sociology, Smith-Lovin (2007), Stinchcombe (2007) and Massey (2007) fear “that a politicized sociology will distract from and eventually undermine the possibilities of the rigorous and disciplined pursuit of truth” (Zussman and Misra 2007, 11). As suggested above, Treviño (2012) theorizes public sociology as included in the umbrella of “service sociology.” He adopts a particular definition of service as “a variety of practices informed by sociological knowledge” (12). Distinct from professional sociology where we talk and write to imagined others who spend much of their lives in the ivory tower, Treviño narrates a history that stretches from the gospel and settlement movements through recent social justice, humanist, communitarian and public sociology-based organizing. The concept of “service” does indeed seem to capture the essence of this work. They are sociologically informed actions that – at their heart – are intended to actually do something to change the struggles of communities and society. Yet the use of the concept service to explain our work in these areas is also problematic. Recall Collins’s (2007) apt warning about labels. First, by popular definition, service invokes the idea of unpaid labor. Professional sociologists are indeed paid to do service of some kind. But second, and more importantly, this label positions the work in an uphill battle for rewards as it is conceptualized as distinct from scholarship.

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Faculty members are evaluated on the holy trinity of academic labor: teaching, research and service. These concepts are hardwired into the motherboard that organizes higher education intellectual labor. Service is often least rewarded. Yet even where faculty have raised the rewards for service, then locating all public sociology labor under the service umbrella to some extent shrouds the research and knowledge informing that labor. One might dismiss the significance of the language we use to talk about this work we are identifying in this chapter. Yet higher education and its work force (our colleagues) are impacted by our articulation of engaged scholarship. Conceptual articulation that locates this activity in scholarly forms might have better success with real change in reward structures and collegial willingness to align with the movement. Boyer (1990) took such an approach in his conceptualization of forms of scholarship that expand our understanding of what might “count.” This model speaks directly to the institutional constraints within which many scholars must navigate. It is no small feat for institutions to create structures that actually reward these expanded conceptualizations. Locating this work squarely as forms of scholarship, as Boyer does, seems an avenue for less resistance to change and inclusion across institutions, assuming that is the goal. Asking “can we define scholarship in ways that respond more adequately to the urgent new realities both within the academy and beyond?” (3), Boyer provides a definition of scholarship that acknowledges discovery (research), integration, application and teaching. Boyer’s (1990) notion of the scholarship of application questions how knowledge can be made relevant to real issues/problems: “how can knowledge be responsibly applied to consequential problems? How can it be helpful to individuals as well as institutions? Can social problems themselves define an agenda for scholarly investigation?” (21). Over twenty-five years later, Boyer’s model for reconceptualizing scholarship has appeared to have had

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substantial impact in higher education. His book, Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate, has been cited over 10,000 times. Most references to Boyer’s work (7,130 times as of this writing) have occurred since Burawoy’s (2004) ASA address on public sociology. The academy has been considering, debating and in some cases implementing Boyer’s model to encourage more inclusive – and relevant – forms of scholarship. There is evidence that at least some faculties have been successful in shifting the definitions of scholarship to reward public sociology as different than service, in some cases explicitly adopting Boyer’s Model of Scholarship (HSU 2016; UIS 2016). The ASA issued a report “What Counts?” that made recommendations on how to evaluate and count social media and public communication work in tenure and promotion and tenure dossiers (McCall et al. 2016). The authors point to the University of Minnesota and Virginia Tech as two examples of (high ranked) institutions whose tenure and promotion criteria make at least limited space for public engagement as a researchrelated enterprise. These types of changes are outlined in the standards for programs accredited by the Commission on the Accreditation of Program in Applied and Clinical Sociology (CAPACS 2015). Although few programs have been accredited by the CAPACS (four BA and one MA program are currently listed), the standards outline organizational structures and practices, curricular content and even program naming conventions that align program identity with the spirit and practice of public sociology: “The formal title of the Program shall contain any combination of the terms applied sociology, clinical sociology, public sociology, or sociological practice” (CAPACS 2015, 3). Sociologists entering the field today are “natives” to social media platforms. The challenges for their work include the translation of narrative across multiple genres of writing and interaction. Whether academics are the presenter or we engage other mediators (e.g., students, journalists) to translate

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and relay our messages, these actions are not sufficient unless a public engages the ideas (Gans 2016). Thus, public social problems intellectual labor must articulate ideas and respond to debate in language that might be broadly understood yet grounded in the labor of professional sociology. In addition, successful public sociologists operating in online venues rely on the cyberborg presenter of the algorithms behind the search engines that identify and redistribute ideas. Public sociological skill sets for those practicing online include a command of new media and the algorithms behind those search engines. Sociologists practicing in these mediums understand, hope, and strategize so that a post on a particular topic is just the beginning of their public sociological endeavor. Just putting ideas “out there” is not a reasonable measure of successful public sociology. Yet tracking the level of dissemination, let alone diffusion (Rogers 2003), is no small practical hurdle for rewarding this work.

Recent History and Professional Associations Identity Struggles According to Dentler (2002), US academic sociology was founded amid competing forces. Lester Ward was a founder and first president of the American Sociological Society, which later became the American Sociological Association. He grew up in poverty, fought for the union in the Civil War, and supported race, class and gender equalities (ASA 2016a). His first presidential address to the American Sociological Association in 1906 called for a sociology of action: “In other words, sociology, established as a pure science, is now entering upon its applied stage, which is the great practical object for which it exists.” Yet fledging departments were largely taking root in conservative American institutions of higher education funded by corporate and religious interests and rife with the popular thinking of social Darwinism and individualism (Dentler 2002). At the same time, sociology as a field continued to assert and

position itself as a science with the status and influence that positivist scientific method has afforded the natural sciences (Ritzer and Goodman 2004). By 1929, William F. Ogburn in his American Sociological Society address positioned sociology as a “science” interested in new knowledge but not “making the world a better place” (Dentler 2002, 21). So there was a pull to locate oneself and the discipline as separate from and objective about social ills, while at the same time the country suffered through the Great Depression and two world wars. Not surprisingly, the “social work” of the discipline, in the form of the settlement house movement like that of Jane Adams’s Hull-House, was the place the discipline sent sociologically trained women (Dentler 2002). Dentler traces the movement away from overt applied work noting, “Sociology faculty thus got deeply involved in applied projects during 1940s, but they kept these projects carefully separate from their ‘pure’ scholarship and teaching for their universities. Graduate students served as a kind of human bridge between the academic side and the staffing of the projects” (23). The discussion around public sociology has reached those who identify as sociologists in other fields including social workers (Oh 2015) and criminologists (Loader and Sparks 2010; Uggen and Inderbitzin 2010; Rock 2014; Piché 2016) and many others who find the call perhaps more of an endorsement of what they already do. This struggle over the role of praxis within sociology has also influenced the breaking up and remaking of our professional sociological societies. During its annual meeting in 1931, members of the American Sociological Society issued a memorandum seeking to “prune the Society of its excrescences and to intensify its scientific activities” lamenting that “the society is now divided into various sections, several of which are devoted almost exclusively to social problems” (Rhoades 1981, 25). Luther L. Bernard was elected president later that same year and initiated significant changes to the organization. Bernard was an adherent to the positivist

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tradition, yet also believed that sociological insights should be shared with the general public. He introduced changes to the American Sociological Society constitution to promote greater transparency in governance and geographic representation. He conducted an informal survey of society members that showed there was interest in “attracting public attention to questions of sociological interest” (Rhoades 1981, 26). In what would prove to be a controversial move, he also pushed the association to sever organizational ties with the University of Chicago and its publication of the American Journal of Sociology. Bernard believed that the subjectivity of Chicago sociology was undermining the credibility of the discipline. For Bernard, sociology was a value-free science that could also affect positive social change. In the long run, this decision to distance the organization from Chicago sociology showed that the struggle over the intellectual, financial, and political direction of American sociology was also rooted geographically. By the early 1950s, Columbia and Harvard universities had become more influential than the University of Chicago in the governance of the ASA and the direction of American sociology. While Chicago sociology examined urban social problems, the ASA discouraged such focus and its implicit emphasis on improving social conditions. While the positivist tradition was becoming entrenched within American sociology, there was growing interest in ensuring that sociological knowledge was shared with nonacademic audiences. In 1938 American Sociological Society President Frank H. Hankins appointed a Press Relations Committee chaired by Alfred McClung Lee (Rhoades 1981). The committee observed that in order “for the theories of social scientists to gain wide acceptance, they must finally reach the columns of popular periodicals, the speeches of popular leaders, and the discussions of Everyman” (Rhoades 1981, 21). In response, the committee recommended the formation of a Press Relations Committee comprising “sociologists who have had newspaper and pub-

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lic relations experience” who can “interpret” the activities of the society. Ironically, this last recommendation provided the basis for what later became the American Sociological Review which critics have more recently charged with obfuscating rather than elucidating sociological research findings (Agger 2007; Best 2004; Brady 2004). As the American Sociological Association moved further away from engaging social problems, the work and mission of the organization became less relevant to many of its members. In response, Alfred (Al) McClung Lee and Elizabeth (Betty) Briant Lee founded the Society for the Study of Social Problems in 1951 to ensure that the Chicago tradition of social problems research continued with humanistic ideals. Not surprisingly, the early membership of SSSP was overwhelmingly from midwestern sociology programs with strong links to Chicago sociology (Best 2001). In retrospect, the Lees emerged as key figures in cementing the continued relevance of social problems scholarship and the importance of applied sociological work. They became active during an era that saw a narrowing of the field to more conservative theorizing and methods of inquiry. For the Lees, this “dehumanizing type of sociology” was “actually serving the ruling elites” (Galliher and Galliher 1995, 115). Al Lee lamented that sociology was becoming a pro-establishment academic discipline in an era when dominant establishment assumptions were being challenged across the country. After founding the Society for the Study of Social Problems (SSSP) with Betty Lee in 1951, McClung Lee was SSSP’s Council Representative to the American Sociological Association. He was in almost constant conflict with the more conservative ASA leadership and consequently launched a successful write-in campaign in 1975. In fact, 63 percent of ASA members participated in the election, which was the largest turnout in ASA history (Galliher and Galliher 1995, 113). As president, McClung Lee proposed a new periodical, the Journal of Applied Sociology, which the ASA eventually began

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publishing as Sociological Practice Review in 1990. He also pushed for greater transparency and representation in the governance of ASA: under his leadership the ASA council began meeting in public and eventually council leadership positions were filled by geographic region to prevent the domination by clusters of more elitist academic institutions. In reflecting on the careers and work of the Lees, the Gallihers observed that “the Lees have been in search of a sociology responsive to racial and religious minorities rather than to funding agencies . . . according to this view, sociology should be readily accessible to the average citizen, and not limited to the disciples of higher mathematics and to government leaders” (Galliher and Galliher 1995, 178). In addition to founding the SSSP, the Lees also established the Association for Humanist Sociology in 1976 and the Clinical Sociological Association in 1978, later renamed the Sociological Practice Association (Galliher and Galliher 1995). These last two professional associations have provided crucial support to those of us engaged in social justice work and using sociological knowledge to effect social change. Other organizations also were forged in this era. In the flood of protest, activism and change of the civil rights and women’s movements, women sociologists demanded gender-based institutional change within (white) male-dominated higher education and the similarly structured American Sociological Association (ASA). Roby (2009) documents the origin story and intentional naming of “Sociologists for Women in Society.” While the title makes room for all feminist “sociologists,” it extends the organizational cause outside the profession “to the liberation of all women” (1). For many of us, social justice work is a guiding principle of our craft. Not surprisingly Burawoy’s call for a public sociology in 2004 compelled the ASA and SSSP to reconcile their historic organizational missions. The ASA created a Task Force on Encouraging Public Sociology in 2005 and adopted a comprehensive view of public sociology. The spectrum included “traditional” pub-

lic sociologies (where information might be shared with imagined publics via guest articles, popular books or even blog posts) and “organic” public sociologies (where the sociologist is closely involved with a movement, organization or community) (Burawoy 2007). The Task Force crafted retention, tenure, and promotion guidelines to reward public sociology in the academy (Nyden 2008). As noted by the editors of Public Sociology (Clawson et al. 2007), these are significant shifts given the diversification of both the faculty and the students in sociology classrooms that are driving the interest and debates. Particularly for public institutions, but across the board, our faculty now serve greater numbers of women, firstgeneration students, and students of color than ever before. The ASA has engaged in a process of both researching and planning the transition of BA students into careers. That work involves making the links from sociology classrooms to the applied problems and solutions that take them back to their communities. By 2008 the Task Force was merged with the ASA Section on Sociological Practice and rebranded as the ASA Section on Sociological Practice and Public Sociology. For the ASA it remains to be seen how much the changes represent a substantive shift in the methods, voices and social concerns of its membership. Some (Agger 2007) suggest the ASA’s adoption of public sociology is all window dressing in the marketing of an organization still plagued by power struggles between a positivist core and a periphery that “reject the religion of science” (267). Others (Schuyler 2008) present a more optimistic view that public sociology would naturally flow from supportive professional contexts. The Chair of the ASA Section on Sociological Practice and Public Sociology imagined “our section as being a metaphorical kitchen for practice and public sociology: it gives us a warm, friendly place to gather, test ideas, and nourish one another, so we continue to be generative in our work” (2). Meanwhile, the Society for the Study of Social Problems was

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somewhat ambivalent in its response to the ASA call for public sociology. After all, one of the defining elements of the organizational identity of the Society for the Study of Social Problems has been its resistance to the American Sociological Association. During the 1970s SSSP actively resisted the establishment conservatism of the American Sociological Association. This was reflected both in the successful writein candidacy of Al Lee noted earlier and the negative perception of the American Sociological Review, which has been described as “a specialty journal that generally reserves it [sic] space for quantitative-technical reports, with little theoretical or policy significance, and should be renamed” (Galliher, 2000, 8). Joel Best (2001) further elaborated on the SSSP origin story in describing a persistent tension “between SSSP’s commitment to scholarship and some of its members’ call for activism” (6). Best argued that social activism is complemented, rather than discouraged, by good scholarship and the SSSP journal, Social Problems, has in fact provided a crucial forum where “unconventional theoretical approaches and neglected topics” could be published (7). It is perhaps not surprising then that the ASA call for public sociology unleashed a flurry of responses from the SSSP membership. In addition to a series of articles in Social Problems reflecting on Burawoy’s statement on public sociology (Best 2004; Burawoy et al. 2004; Couch 2004; Stacey 2004), the Social Problems Newsletter provided space for ongoing commentary on the issues associated with bringing scholarship to diverse publics. For some, the ASA interest in public sociology only affirms the existence of SSSP as it was founded on such precepts a half-century earlier (Hood 2005). According to Zussman and Misra (2007), Burawoy situated himself within a tradition of ASA presidents who used their address to make a charge on the direction of the discipline, and more specifically, those who called for “political activism and social engagement,” notably “Alfred Mcclung Lee in 1971, Herb Gans in 1989 and . . . Joe Feagin in 2001” (4). For others (Fine 2006), the ASA

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embracing the activist principles of public sociology might undermine the very raison d’être of the SSSP and “suck the air out of our organization” (12). Nevertheless, the SSSP has forged on with SSSP President Valerie Jenness challenging the membership in her 2006 Conference Call for Papers to address the following questions that are central to many actionoriented social problems scholars: Does research matter? Under what conditions does the knowledge produced by research get utilized in the development and implementation of public policy and the pursuit of social, economic, and political justice? By whom and for whom is research conducted and deployed? How is research used by those seeking to address social problems? In what ways do researchers play a role in alleviating social problems as well as contributing to the very conditions and constructions upon which social problems emerge, manifest, get institutionalized, and change? How and when is our research expressed in public debate? What is the content and extent of our influence? And finally, considering examples from the past, what does the future hold? (Fine 2006, 51)

These are critical and timeless questions that social problems scholars can carry forward as we face contemporary challenges.

Ruminations on Public Sociology and the Social Problems of the Trump Era Asking whether “research matters” brings us to the moment of this writing. A new US president has questioned the public policy relevance of scientific knowledge and has promised to unleash rapid-fire challenges to decades of hard-fought gains in combating global climate change (Davenport 2016), safeguarding civil rights (Apuzzo 2017), and promoting environmental (Baker and Davenport 2017) and social justice (Alcindor 2016). This moment reveals much about the convictions of our professional associations that have until more recently resisted injecting themselves in the struggles of the time.

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The American Sociological Association website provided a detailed accounting of its efforts to respond to “the changing climate for sociologists in America” highlighted by the election of Donald Trump one month earlier (ASA 2016b). The American Sociological Association specifically references “developments ranging from a rash of racist, xenophobic, and other forms of discriminatory activities on campuses across the nation to the introduction of the Professor Watchlist which puts academic freedom in jeopardy” (ASA 2016b). While this injection into the political sphere is important, the audience was largely other sociologists. One month later, in a notice from the ASA presidents (current, elect, and past) and Executive Officer, the ASA updated the membership on the actions of the association in response to the president’s executive order banning entry for people from seven Muslim majority countries (US President 2017). The tone of this communication was initially somewhat measured, acknowledging “that there may be a range of opinions on such matters among our members and we respect this plurality of positions as a basic condition for democracy” (Lamont et al. 2017). Then the statement explicitly identified actions the American Sociological Association was taking in opposition to the executive order, for example, “We have co-signed, with many of our sister scholarly societies, a statement written by the American Association for the Advancement of Science which will be released soon.” The statement also provided links for further activism including options to sign on to an opposition letter or a list of specific actions the organization was taking in collaboration with other professional associations to resist the executive order as it affected research, students, faculty and the free movement of ideas. “Digitally enabled” activism (Earl and Kimport 2011) affords professional associations and individual sociologists an avenue to collaborate with colleagues across disciplines and publics on local, national and international concerns. The January 21, 2017, Women’s March brought millions to the

streets across the world. Sociologists organized among each other and with students, friends and family. On the heels of the Executive Order, social media also buzzed with the following message infusing immigration awareness and competency across campuses and communities: Today, immigration historians from across the country launched #ImmigrationSyllabus, a website and educational resource to help the public understand the deep historical roots of today’s immigration debates. Created in partnership with the University of Minnesota’s Immigration History Research Center and the Immigration and Ethnic History Society, #ImmigrationSyllabus is a tool for teaching, learning and advocacy. #ImmigrationSyllabus is available online at immigrationsyllabus.umn.edu.

It is a hopeful idea that the sociological perspective and related problem-solving ideas will infuse public discourse. It is hopeful that concepts like “mass incarceration” and “structural racism” will continue to be a part of popular language and evoke the emotional and thoughtful response that we strive for in our classrooms. President Obama understanding systemic inequity in the prison system, in his last days in office, granted clemency to those nonviolent offenders (primarily men of color) who were imprisoned through racially loaded drug policy: In an attempt to reform punitive sentencings within our criminal justice system, President Obama has now commuted the sentences of 1,023 men and women incarcerated under outdated and unduly harsh sentencing laws, including 342 individuals who were serving life sentences. President Obama has granted more commutations, with the use of his clemency power, than the past eleven presidents combined. (Eggleston 2016)

Tracing the particular pathways for that diffusion of ideas is perhaps less important than knowing we have been a part of the conversation.

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Glossary Alternative facts Ideas one makes up to counter observed (inconvenient) scientific evidence. Organic public sociology Dynamic and involved sharing of sociological knowledge with groups, organizations, movements, and communities. Public An arena separate from both the state or formal governance, as well as distinct from private (property) interests. Public sociology Sharing and application of sociological knowledge and skills in the service of those outside the profession. Service sociology Long tradition, including public sociology, of using sociological knowledge to do good. Traditional public sociology Distanced sharing of sociological knowledge with imagined publics through cross over books, opinion pieces and perhaps some blog posts where little to no dialogue may occur.

Acknowledgment We would like to thank our research assistant, Emely Velez, for her enthusiasm and commitment in working on this chapter.

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public sociology and social problems Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class. Reprint ed. New York: Oxford University Press. Massey, Douglas S. 2007. The strength of weak ties. In Public Sociology: Fifteen Eminent Sociologists Debate Politics and the Profession in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Dan Clawson, Robert Zussman, Joya Misra, Naomi Gerstel, Randall Stokes, Douglas L. Anderton, and Michael Burawoy, 145–57. Berkeley: University of California Press. McCall, Leslie, Gabriel Hetland, Arne Kalleberg, Alondra Nelson, Sarah Ovink, Amy Schalet, Laurel Smith-Doerr, Michèle Lamont, Annette Lareau, and Mary Wray. 2016. What counts? Evaluating public communication in tenure and promotion. Washington, DC: American Sociological Association. www.asanet.org/sites/default/ files/tf_report_what_counts_evaluating_ public_communication_in_tenure_and_ promotion_final_august_2016.pdf. Mills, C. Wright. 1959. The Sociological Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press. Nyden, Phil. 2008. Update on Task Force on Encouraging Public Sociology. Sociological Practice Newsletter. Winter. https://sspps .files.wordpress.com/2010/09/sppsnews_w08 .pdf Oh, Hans. 2015. Publics, we need you! Social work researchers and educators as public sociologists. Social Work Education 34 (1):125–29. Orwell, George. 1949. 1984. San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Pateman, Carole. 1989. The Disorder of Women: Democracy, Feminism, and Political Theory. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Piché, Justin. 2016. Assessing the boundaries of public criminology: On what does (not) count. Social Justice 42(2):70. Piven, Francis Fox. 2007. Public sociology and the end of society. In Public Sociology: Fifteen Eminent Sociologists Debate Politics and the Profession in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Dan Clawson, Robert Zussman, Joya Misra, Naomi Gerstel, Randall Stokes, Douglas L. Anderton, and Michael Burawoy, 158–66. Berkeley: University of California Press. Rhoades, Lawrence J. 1981. A History of the American Sociological Association. Washington, DC: American Sociological Association.

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www.asanet.org/about-asa/asa-story/asahistory/history-asa-1905-1980. Richardson, Laurel, and Elizabeth Adams St. Pierre. 2008. Writing: A method of inquiry. In Collecting and Interpreting Qualitative Materials, edited by Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln, 473–500. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Ritzer, George. 1996. Sociological Theory. 4th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill. Ritzer, George, and Douglas J. Goodman. 2004. Classical Sociological Theory. Boston, MA: McGraw-Hill. Roby, Pamela Ann. 2009. The Women’s 1969 Sociology Caucus, Sociologists for Women in Society and the ASA: A forty year retrospective of women on the move. www .socwomen.org/history-of-sws/. Rock, Paul. 2014. The public faces of public criminology. Criminology and Criminal Justice 14(4):412–33. Rogers, Everett M. 2003. Diffusion of Innovations. 5th ed. New York: Free Press. Schuyler, Kathryn Goldman. 2008. A practical vision for the section. Sociological Practice Newsletter, Summer. Smith-Lovin, Lynn. 2007. Do we need a public sociology? It depends on what you mean by sociology. In Public Sociology: Fifteen Eminent Sociologists Debate Politics and the Profession in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Dan Clawson, Robert Zussman, Joya Misra, Naomi Gerstel, Randall Stokes, Douglas L. Anderton, and Michael Burawoy, 124– 34. Berkeley: University of California Press. Stacey, Judith. 2004. Marital suitors court social science spinsters: The unwittingly conservative effects of public sociology. Social Problems 51(1):131–45. 2007. If I were the goddess of sociological things. In Public Sociology: Fifteen Eminent Sociologists Debate Politics and the Profession in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Dan Clawson, Robert Zussman, Joya Misra, Naomi Gerstel, Randall Stokes, Douglas L. Anderton, and Michael Burawoy, 91–100. Berkeley: University of California Press. Stinchcombe, Arthur. 2007. Speaking truth to the public, and indirectly to power. In Public Sociology: Fifteen Eminent Sociologists Debate Politics and the Profession in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Dan Clawson, Robert Zussman, Joya Misra, Naomi

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Gerstel, Randall Stokes, Douglas L. Anderton, and Michael Burawoy, 135–44. Berkeley: University of California Press. Touraine, Alain. 2007. Public sociology and the end of society. In Public Sociology: Fifteen Eminent Sociologists Debate Politics and the Profession in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Dan Clawson, Robert Zussman, Joya Misra, Naomi Gerstel, Randall Stokes, Douglas L. Anderton, and Michael Burawoy, 67– 78. Berkeley: University of California Press. Treviño, A. Javier. 2012. Presidential address: The challenge of service sociology. Social Problems 59(1):2–20. Tucker, Robert C., Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels, eds. 1978. The Marx-Engels Reader. New York: W. W. Norton. Uggen, Christopher, and Michelle Inderbitzin. 2010. Public criminologies. Criminology & Public Policy 9(4):725–49.

UIS. 2016. University of Illinois Springfield Boyer Model of Scholarship. www.uis.edu/ academicstaffhandbook/academic-staffand-faculty-responsibilities/boyermodel/. US President. 2017. Executive Order. Executive Order 13769 of January 27, 2017, Protecting the nation from foreign terrorist entry into the United States. Code of Federal Regulations, title 3: 8977–82. www.gpo.gov/fdsys/ pkg/FR-2017–02–01/pdf/2017–02281.pdf. Zussman, Robert, and Joya Misra. 2007. Introduction. In Public Sociology: Fifteen Eminent Sociologists Debate Politics and the Profession in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Dan Clawson, Robert Zussman, Joya Misra, Naomi Gerstel, Randall Stokes, Douglas L. Anderton, and Michael Burawoy, 3–22. Berkeley: University of California Press.

CHAPTER 8

Service Sociology and Social Problems∗ A. Javier Treviño

Abstract The sociology of social problems has failed to develop an analytical framework for meeting the urgent needs of people. A new type of progressive thinking, couched in the culture of interpersonal service, demands that we reconceptualize the role of civil society and of sociology for the express purpose of helping people with their social, economic, and environmental hardships. In this chapter I argue for the formulation and implementation of a neoprogressive sociology of service for addressing problems of social life. A democratically oriented emancipatory sociology of action and alleviation, service sociology is a problem-solving endeavor that relates to individuals as real people. The task of service sociology is to help people deal with the injustices and inequities in their own lives and those of their neighbors.

Since the early twentieth century, sociologists have developed several theoretical perspectives in the study of social problems: from social pathology to social disorganization, from the conflict approach to social constructionism (Rubington and Weinberg 2010). These perspectives have disagreed not only on what causes social problems and what, if anything, can be done about them, but even in their very conceptualizations of what constitutes a social problem. This is understandable given the complex and ∗

Much of the information for this chapter is taken from three previously published sources: Treviño (2012), Treviño (2013), Treviño and McCormack (2016).

paradoxical nature of the human experience, to say nothing of the power relations that determine which societal conditions are deemed undesirable and troublesome and in need of rectification. However all this may be, of greater significance to sociology’s empirical utility is that sociologists have not been able to alleviate the suffering of real people. This glaring deficiency in the theory and practice of the sociology of social problems not only constitutes a “scientific crisis” (Kuhn 1962) that has made the field intellectually deficient, but also, and more gravely, a “legitimation crisis” (Habermas 1975) that threatens to make it professionally irrelevant. 133

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Social problems theory has done a poor job of offering practical remedies that pertain to useful diagnosis and control. The sociology of social problems has failed to develop an analytical framework for meeting the urgent needs of people. The sociological approach, which is the only viable approach to understanding social problems, will remain cloistered in academia and inconsequential to policy makers, civic leaders, planners, and the general public unless it engages in a real effort at relieving human suffering. The aim of the sociology of social problems should not only be to increase knowledge of definitions, causes, and conditions, but also to render assistance to those who need it and to insure and promote the welfare of the community. A theory of social problems with reallife application can only emerge in the context of a beneficent politics of transformative change. Thus, as was the case with the social gospel, settlement sociology, and charity sociology that flourished during the Progressive Era of social activism and political reform in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a serviceoriented social theory for today requires a new progressivism. For Amitai Etzioni (1993) this neoprogressivism must engender a set of reforms that reduce the role of special interests in the government of our local and national communities. For Anthony Giddens (2003) neoprogressivism requires, among other things, strengthening civil society by having the state (as well as nonstate agencies such as voluntary associations) provide social services – education, health care, welfare, and so on – in a way that helps people, as citizens, to help themselves. A new type of progressive thinking, couched in the culture of interpersonal service, demands that we reconceptualize the role of civil society, the state, citizens, and communities – and of sociology itself – for the express purpose of helping people with their pressing social, economic, and environmental hardships. This reconceptualization can produce a theory and practice of social service that engages with a reformist philos-

ophy that is informed by the three moral imperatives of justice, equality, and neighborliness. In this chapter I argue for the formulation and implementation of a neoprogressive sociology – a sociology of service – that not only directly address problems of social life, but that will enhance its professional relevance.

The Culture and Structure of Service On his travels through the United States during the early nineteenth century, Alexis de Tocqueville, in his reflections on its civil society and in his attempts to capture the essence of its culture and values, famously remarked on the American spirit of voluntary cooperation. In Democracy in America Tocqueville (1899) observed that “the Americans, who are always cold and often coarse in their manners, seldom show insensibility; and if they do not proffer services eagerly, yet they do not refuse to render them” (185). Proffering helpful services to others in the context of civil society has been a core American value since the beginning of the republic. But more than a cultural value, Talcott Parsons (1934) argued that, in a differentiated society like the United States, service (which he defined as “any act of an individual in so far as it contributes to the realization of the ends of other individuals”) that is “mutual,” is a structural necessity. In such a society, the content of mutual service is particularistic (situationally specific and limited), while its goal is universalistic (proffered impersonally and indefinitely to a category of persons, say, “citizens”). According to Parsons, mutual service, at least in the context of Western society, had historically been grounded in and motivated by the ethical principles of Christianity. This disinterested service of God and one’s fellows was by the early twentieth century replaced by such secular doctrines of service as rationalistic humanitarianism and social utilitarianism that, contrary to Christian-inspired service, were incapable of controlling individual self-interest. Moreover, Parsons (2016,

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144) identified the paramount value pattern of American society, with its neutralization of religion, to be “instrumental activism.” This shared value to which Americans are morally committed, compels them to treat society as an instrument in pursuit of their interests and goals. Because Americans possess a cultural attitude of active mastery, they typically want to proactively change their life-conditions, if for no reason than to reduce the gap between their experienced actuality and their idealism. Parsons (2016, 151) goes on to note that in reference to the societal community of American society, participation is based on citizenship, with its legal rights (based on self-interest) and obligations (based on a public spirit of self-donation). And though Parsons does not say so, we may surmise from the aforementioned that, given the importance of instrumental activism in the context of the American societal community, it is the mutual proffering of helpful service among citizens that helps them strive to achieve the ideals of American civil society – to orient themselves to the universal goal of improving the commonweal by taking selfless measures in alleviating collective hardship. Turning to the current world of late modernity, Anthony Giddens (1990, 1991) maintains that it is fraught with sundry risks and dangers that threaten our ontological security: our confidence in the continuity of our self-identity. This state of social precariousness – currently actualized and experienced in the United States as a fearful and divided nation – has fostered what Giddens describes as a “politics of self-realization” and compels people, as biographical selves, to ask the existential question, How shall I live? In endeavoring to answer this question, they frequently turn to a variety of reflexive therapeutic resources: from selfhelp manuals to psychotherapy, from life coaches to career development professionals. But Giddens juxtaposes the politics of self-realization, which is a politics of life decisions affecting self-identity, against emancipatory politics, which is a politics of liberating individuals and groups from

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social exploitation, inequality, and oppression. This political orientation, I contend, inspires people, as citizens, to confront the Tolstoyan question, What then must we do? The value and practice of voluntary cooperation and proffered service that Tocqueville observed in 1830 now calls for a neoprogressivism that regards helpful activity as the agency of emancipation – what Erik Schneiderhan (2015) refers to as “the politics of helping others.” In other words, it is through various forms of civic engagement and community service that citizens can work together to ease or mitigate the predicaments and uncertainties created by poverty, hunger, racism, sexism, xenophobia, epidemics, calamities, and so on. But the politics of self-realization and the politics of helping others, the inner life of the individual and the social life of the community, are not antithetical pursuits. Indeed, as Robert Wuthnow (1991) has found, one of the main reasons teenagers give for becoming involved in volunteer work and in caring for the needs of others is, in fact, self-realization – both in the sense of the volunteer’s personal growth (including developing new skills and feeling a sense of accomplishment) as well as in helping people in need realize their potential. Pursuant to the sociological observations of Tocqueville, Parsons, and Giddens, social scientists and concerned citizens can promote the development of a distinctly new phase of late modern US society; a phase that is characterized by a politics of selfactualization, that turns inward for shaping, altering, and sustaining self-identity, as well as by a culture and structure of mutual service that turns outward for realizing, protecting, and strengthening civil society. In situations of inequalities and prejudices, of disasters and catastrophes, where their ontological security is threatened, people not only engage in the self-help act of writing and rewriting their personal narratives for themselves, they also participate in collective activities (viz. civic involvement, community service, and volunteerism) as a way of

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helping their fellows maintain their human dignity and sense of communal identity. In his final weekly address to the nation in January 2017, President Barack Obama enjoined all US citizens to partake of this social sentiment and civic duty: All of us, regardless of party, should throw ourselves into the work of citizenship. Not just when there’s an election, not just when our own narrow interest is at stake, but over the full span of a lifetime . . . Our success depends on our participation, regardless of which way the pendulum of power swings. It falls on each of us to be guardians of our democracy; to embrace the joyous task we’ve been given to continually try to improve this great nation of ours. Because for all our outward differences, we all share the same proud title: Citizen. (Obama 2017)

Needed today is a sociology that resonates with this message; one that creates opportunities for citizens, stakeholders, activists, and academics, to play active roles in the amelioration of injustices and inequalities. The sociology of service provides an applied–humanist ethos that is practically and conceptually distinct from other sociologies of social problems. It is an ethos that Albion W. Small (1903), writing at the dawn of the twentieth century, urged the field to acquire as its normative objective: “to enrich average life.” It reflects a postulate that Charles Horton Cooley (1910) articulated a few years later: “If each of us chooses some disinterested form of public service and puts himself thoroughly into it, things will go very well” (416). Finally, it is a sociology whose primary task is, to continue with Small’s conception, “to work out correct statements of social problems and valid methods of solving them” (Small 1903, 477).

The Sociology of Service The sociology of service creates opportunities for sociologists and nonsociologists to play active roles in addressing social life problems. Dedicated to the welfare of people in community, service sociology allows

sociologists to employ their special skills, acumen, and intellectual vigor in realizing a more just, equitable, and robust community. A democratically oriented emancipatory sociology of action and alleviation, service sociology is a problem-solving endeavor that relates to individuals as real people. Motivated by care and compassion, a service-oriented sociology is a sociology of social problems aimed at meeting human needs, values, and aspirations as they are popularly defined. The service sociologist equates the personal needs of an individual with the collective needs of others in similar life circumstances. This is why service sociology treats individuals as people in community with each other and focuses on considerations of eudemonia and commonweal. The core activity of service sociology is to help people by meeting their essential needs and concerns through service. Typically, these are people who are disenfranchised and poor, who have experienced patterns of exclusion and subordination. It is also concerned with people and communities who are victims of natural disasters and man-made catastrophes. Included are people in physical discomfort, emotional distress, and in financial crisis, but also in psychological and even spiritual anguish. The sociology of service, however, is not only about meeting the pressing needs of individuals but also about meeting shared communal needs, such as improving the environment and beautifying the land. Serving means providing material relief necessary for physical survival (money, food, clothing) or more likely, nonmaterial services such as counseling (employment, parenting), dispute resolution (peace talks, mediation, restorative justice practices), education (instruction and encouragement), and professional consultation (on a specific troublesome issue). Consider, as an example, the kind of helpful service that may be involved in professional consulting for handling a particular community problem. Here, the service sociologist offers not so much previously unknown facts of the situation (which would be already known to the stakeholders), but previously

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unknown relations between the facts. Thus, the main service provided by the sociologist, as Zetterberg (2002) points out, is presenting the facts of the problem differently, that is, in new relations to each other. In this way “the commonplace is re-examined in view of its not-so-commonplace causes and consequences brought to the fore” by the service sociologist. Familiar events cast in a new light arouse the stakeholders’ curiosity, “and routine ways of doings things do not appear as self-evident as before” (161). In sum, the chief task of service sociology is to alleviate and ameliorate social problems by helping communities promote sustainability and helping people to achieve selfdetermination in order to better cope with their own lives. Service sociology’s first goal is to diminish, abate, relieve, and assuage human hardship and suffering; its second is to improve those social conditions that cause that hardship and suffering. Such a palliative approach evokes a humane and ethical response to social problems, not one that is strictly or primarily instrumental and explanatory. Service sociology is reformist. Its end results are generally attentive to quality-oflife reforms from the neighborhood to the national level. As such, it is focused on what Karl Popper (2003) described as “piecemeal democratic engineering” over and against “utopian social engineering” (xviii). Grandiose schemes of wholesale political and economic transformation, such as the oft-repeated platitude that it is only necessary to take everything from the “haves” and redistribute it “fairly” and all would be well, have largely lost their appeal and meaningfulness. A major sociological challenge for service sociology is to find practical solutions to local problems in such a way that leaves options and strategies available for the resolution of those larger in scale. While service sociology’s focus is primarily on the more immediate troubles of people’s daily lives as well as on the problems of communities and neighborhoods, the operations of political and economic systems are also of concern. The old saw, “Teach a man to

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fish and you feed him for a lifetime,” does aptly describe the philosophy and procedures of the sociology of service. But it is also important to recognize that such simple solutions frequently have impediments to practical success. Providing skills, resources, and knowledge are helpful only in situations appropriate for their serviceability. Fishing skills are of limited value in a polluted lake – the lake may have to be cleaned up before any instruction in fishing can take place. Service sociology first attempts facilitating actions on a small scale, usually at the community level. But it must also quickly scale up solutions that work to address social problems in the relations between society at large, what Etzioni (1996) calls the “community of communities,” and its member communities and subgroups, and among societies. Such an approach enables each community to resolve its social problems while still working with other communities to solve their social problems. What is more, service sociology tries to move toward better systems that are sensitive to local conditions and that liberate the dynamism of individuals. The fact is that the dynamism of the people at the bottom has much more potential than plans at the top (Easterly 2006). A bottom-up approach is more democratic and contributes to community self-governance. It is necessary for service sociology to appraise the intended effect of any actions on the well-being of recipient partners, which is to say, the people in need of the services of sociology. The facilitating actions – those effective practices of service sociology that are informed by sociological knowledge – that are implemented must improve the well-being of recipient partners. Here, each of the parties involved has equal status and in their own way contributes time, energy, and knowledge to addressing the problem at hand. Through this inclusive approach service sociologists and recipient partners are engaged in a collaborative effort to address common social problems. In the context of service sociology, “social problems” encompass a wide variety of troublesome and deleterious

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situations that directly impact communities and that impinge upon the lives of individuals in community: substance abuse, police brutality, food insecurity, gang-related violent crime, racism, environmental disasters, and so on. In this sense, such problems are chiefly communal and include everything from arduous aspects of a life-condition, to crises of social structure, to emergencies associated with humanitarian catastrophes. The social problems of utmost concern to service sociology are those that threaten or damage civil society. The recipient partners of facilitating actions must acquire those assets and capabilities needed to sustainably support their improved living conditions as well as those of their families and communities. Service sociology encourages community reciprocity, or “the open-ended mutual support among neighbors” (Etzioni 1993, 145). This means that, “each member of the community owes something to all the rest, and the community owes something to each of its members” (Etzioni 1993, 263). As Jane Addams (1961) noted long ago, nothing brought Hull-House “so absolutely into comradeship with its neighbors as mutual and sustained effort” (222). It is through this methodological focus on the “neighborly relation” (Lengermann and Niebrugge-Brantley 2002, 2007) through which service sociology facilitates the ability of people to cooperate for mutual assistance and, in the process, builds their selfreliance. Above all it is necessary that the service sociologist provide expertise and opportunities through which people may solve their own problems as autonomously as possible and in their own ways. As Etzioni (1993) contends, there is “something deeply degrading about being dependent on others. It is respectful of human dignity to encourage people to control their fate the best they can – under the circumstances” (144).

Facilitating Actions At the heart of sociological service are those applied assistance activities, or facilitating

actions, that involve a variety of sociologically informed, solutions-oriented practices in neighborly support and cooperation. Service sociology provides direct services that facilitate and assist recipient partners in solving their own problems. These facilitating actions include benevolent errands and deeds as well as verbal expressions and helpful consultations. They are aimed at addressing people’s genuine needs, interests, and concerns and are provided by the service sociologist to the community in the spirit of self-donation. The facilitating actions of service sociology include a broad range of activities: from providing charity to rendering solace and relief; from civic engagement and volunteerism to philanthropy. They include activism, grassroots organizing, planning, mentoring, and various forms of community service. They also involve more technical forms of intervention such as consultation, service-needs assessment, program evaluation, and grant writing. Much of this community-based activity requires some degree of training: from skills-based technical training for task-specific volunteerism to high levels of professional education and certification; others can be provided by untrained but informed sociologists and laycitizens in the community. One example of a facilitating action that involves neighborly activities is the idea of giving circles. A form of collective giving, giving circles are groups of individuals who pool their own money, time, and skills and decide together how these should be distributed to charities and community projects. Giving circles take a variety of forms, ranging from small groups meeting around kitchen tables, to formal organizations, to loose networks that raise money primarily through fundraisers. Giving circles are philanthropic mechanisms that are highly democratic, working to meet social needs and mitigate community problems, while enhancing the civic education and participation of their members (Eikenberry 2009). Eikenberry and Bearman (2009) found that giving circles influence members to give more, more strategically, and

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to a wide array of organizations. They also found that giving-circle members are highly engaged civically and are more knowledge about philanthropy, nonprofits, and the community. Service sociologists, with their unique knowledge and skills, can contribute in a variety of ways to giving circles. They may, for example, conduct a pilot study to initially assess the feasibility of a giving circle. They can help start, develop, manage, and maintain the giving circle. Additionally, they can contribute to its operational design and provide training on civic engagement to giving-circle members. Four distinguishing features of facilitating actions include the following. First, facilitating actions are limited. They are meant to aid recipient partners and their communities for attenuating troublesome situations, but cannot deal with the scale of social problems like that of national unemployment, global poverty, and international terrorism. Second, because service sociology regards community stakeholders as capable, resourceful, and effectual, facilitating actions are intended to help recipient partners solve their own problems. Service sociologists allow recipient partners, community members, and other citizens to decide together which problems they think are particularly important and troublesome to their community. It also allows them to identify which facilitating actions they can implement and which strategies they can support that make a difference while empowering people in need. Third, facilitating actions are endowed with the tripartite notions of duty, compassion, and knowledge. They must be tendered to those in need, not as almsgiving, but as a matter of sociological – and moral – duty. Service sociology answers in the affirmative John F. Galliher’s (2002) “real” question: “Does our special expertise and information as sociologists give us a special obligation to act?” Indeed, service sociologists are professionally obligated to offer solutions. But in addition to the socioethical imperative that motivates them, facilitating actions must be proffered with

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the sentiment of compassion. True service is derived from the two interrelated virtues of duty and compassion; without one the other is meaningless. As communitarian sociologist Hans Joas has put it, “A Kantian understanding of ‘duty’ without compassion would be insufficient and condemn us to being cold moralizers” (as quoted in Etzioni 1996, 249). Regardless of their compulsory nature, however, facilitating actions would amount to no more than simple charity if not for the concepts, theories, methods, and research studies of sociology, to say nothing of its unique cognitive orientation that considers the individual in the context of historical social structure. This then is the reason why facilitating actions must be briefed by sociological knowledge that takes the form of intellectual work, which is to say, solutions-oriented teaching, research, and scholarship. Finally, the facilitating actions must lead to long-term demonstrated outcomes based on well-being. While defining, measuring, and assessing successful outcomes is difficult, it is important that service sociologists use “well-being” as the general standard in determining the efficacy of the facilitating actions implemented. Reflective, corporeal, and communal contentment is the benchmark against which well-being is assessed. Moreover, while determining what is regarded as a solution (beyond the prosaic response of “having positive results”) is itself problematic, it is nonetheless important for service sociology to appraise the intended effect of the facilitating actions on the recipient partner’s and the community’s well-being.

Eleven Precepts Sociology’s intellectual and humanitarian knowledge has now progressed to where we can confidently move toward a standardized format of knowledge and practice. As such, several social-scientific postulates can be identified that will guide, morally and pragmatically, service-oriented sociologists in implementing facilitating actions. While

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these precepts have instrumental utility, they also reflect service sociology’s moral ethos. 1. Facilitating actions must be implemented with care and compassion. As a consequence of the caring and compassionate aspect of facilitating action, service sociology is empathetic to the needs of people. Indeed, according to Alfred McClung Lee (1978), the service sociologist must possess a sufficient sense of empathy through joining in the emotions and activities of the people to be served. An illustrative example of facilitating action endowed with empathy is that of the counselor whose explicit role in the therapeutic relationship is to listen – interestedly, closely, and nonjudgmentally – but most importantly, with care and compassion. 2. Facilitating actions must be implemented with caution. Facilitating actions can harm or unsettle a recipient partner if given or withheld without due diligence. The prudent implementation of facilitating actions typically comes from intimate knowledge of people’s life situation. This notion was conveyed by settlement sociologist Mary Simkhovitch (1938) when she wrote that “before any help can be given, the situation must be felt, realized, and understood at first hand . . . Only that which is lived can be understood and translated to others” (39). As a consequence of the caution aspect of facilitating action, service sociology is anticipatory. This means that it is alert to unintended and undesired consequences. The service sociologist can make community stakeholders aware of the positive and negative outcomes that might arise when the reforms are implemented. Such a facilitating action can help them better understand the problematic situation, and it can give them useful ideas for solutions. 3. The facilitating actions implemented must have maximum efficiency and efficacy. It is important to recognize that a par-

ticular facilitating action that may be beneficial for one person or group is not necessarily beneficial for another person or group, or for society as a whole. The service sociologist must be cognizant of the beneficial, neutral, and detrimental consequences of each facilitating action. 4. Facilitating actions must be flexible and adaptable to the changing exigencies of the social situation. The social situation under consideration is complex and the service sociologist recognizes that even the most basic social problem is a complicated tangle of political, social, and historical factors. Service sociologists must not only propose creative responses to specific problems, these responses must also be sufficiently flexible resourceful to be fully effective. 5. The facilitating actions implemented must be adequate and sustainable. Facilitating action must be dispensed adequately or not at all. Nothing is more demoralizing to those in need as the giving of doles or pittances and the distribution of aid in dribs and drabs that alleviate suffering for the moment, but leave them uncertain and insecure as regards their future prospects. As charity sociologist Charles A. Ellwood (1988) noted at the fin de siècle, it is far better to assist a few and assist adequately than to assist many and help none permanently. 6. Facilitating actions must be characterized by nonmaleficence. Service sociologists have a duty to “do no harm.” An intelligent and responsible service sociology considers whether it is sometimes best to withhold aid rather than provide it. Intelligent giving and intelligent withholding are both equal measures of true service (Ellwood 1988). 7. Only facilitating actions that are wanted must be implemented. While service sociology is motivated by moral conviction it is not a type of moral entrepreneurship. It involves helping only those who want to be helped. Minors and incapacitated victims, however, who require help and

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assistance may not be able to articulate their desire for help. 8. Facilitating actions that are unneeded must not be implemented. Before facilitating action is implemented it must be “preceded by carefully ascertained facts” about the situation (Addams 1961, 101) and the service sociologist must have accurate, intimate, and genuine knowledge of the community’s needs and desires. By conducting a service-needs assessment the sociologist can determine the type and level of service needed. Sociologists must recognize that it can be difficult for people to admit, to others and even to themselves, that they need of help. As Robert Coles (1993) has noted, to be helpless and in need is not a feeling many people want to have. 9. Only ethical and humane facilitating actions must be implemented. The proposed solutions to any social problem must be considered within the context of its moral consequences. Associated with this principle is the responsibility of stewardship. What Amitai Etzioni says about community stakeholders applies equally to service sociologists: they must “at the very least leave their communities no worse off than they found them” (Etzioni 1993, 28). 10. Facilitating actions that will encourage the recipient partner in some wrong or vicious course of life must not be implemented. This is particularly the case when some personal dysfunction – such as addictions and compulsions – is the cause of distress for the recipient partner and their family, workplace, or community. People in need should be helped only in proportion as they show a disposition to change their behaviors for the better. 11. Service sociologists must not patronize their recipient partners. Service sociology must be practiced with a spirit of deep humility. It is this spirit that Jane Addams had in mind when she exhorted settlement house workers to “be emptied of all conceit of opinion and all self-assertion” (Addams 1961, 98).

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Types of Service In reference to its functional expression we may say that, simply put, service means serving. It means to serve, which itself means what we extend ourselves on behalf of others. But this rather recursive description can hardly stand as a definitive statement. Thus, in the absence of an authoritative characterization I turn to the typologies identified by Robert Coles (1993) in The Call of Service (31–67) to represent and illustrate the various motivations and deeds of what I mean by service. Social and political struggle is the defining compass through which people engage in civic acts of service intended to improve the welfare of others. The initiatives frequently employed in social and political struggles – civil rights activism, voter registration drives, grassroots organizing, mass demonstrations and protests – are typically taught in classes conducted by various community organizations and by the chapter offices of social movements such as, for example, the Industrial Areas Foundation, the Gamaliel Foundation, and Citizens UK. Much more common in today’s service culture is community service, which comprises a broad range of assistance activities including tutoring the young, helping the elderly in nursing homes, and volunteering at a local food pantry or homeless shelter. Coles also identifies a type of helpful activity that is not typically regarded as service. This involves personal gestures and encounters, that, whatever the prompting circumstances, whether chance encounters or contrived co-minglings, involve one human being reaching out to another in private (and unassuming) remarks and expressions. These caring encounters entail making a social-emotional, or neighborly, connection in support of a fellow human being. The type of social service that makes concern for people in need concrete and generous, is charity. Facilitating actions performed directly by individuals, like reading to a visually handicapped person, visiting the sick in hospitals, and serving food in a soup kitchen, are charitable deeds, as are

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those facilitating actions conducted under the aegis of charitable organizations such as the National Alliance to End Homelessness, the Red Cross, and Big Brothers/Big Sisters. One of the earliest forms of service, and indeed it was at the core of the social gospel influence on early American sociology, is expressed as religiously sanctioned action. As practical manifestations of religious beliefs this type of service is performed by staff and volunteers working for such faith-based charity and relief organizations as Catholic Charities, Lutheran World Relief, World Vision, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, Islamic Relief, and others. Government-sanctioned action consists of volunteer nonprofit programs sponsored by governments. Examples include the Peace Corps, AmeriCorps VISTA, City Year, Servicio Social (Mexico), National Youth Commission (South Africa), Servicio País (Chile). Similarly, service to country includes not only military service but also those facilitating actions that contribute to the improvement of a community or the country as a whole: cleaning the grounds of a town’s post office, volunteering to fight fires in national parks, volunteering in USO programs that assist the troops and their families (e.g., Families of the Fallen Support, Wounded Warriors, and the Sesame Street Workshop), and sending money or lending a hand to people hit hard by disaster. Along these lines, Williams and MacLean (2015) propose that sociologists along with universities support, a program of national service – a natural venue of praxis for young sociology graduates. Baring national inscription, many students would eagerly “settle” in geographic or social communities as interns or residents if opportunities for service were made available . . . Our professional societies and universities could actively build community partnerships as postgraduate training through service-learning appointments. Government incentives such as student loan pay-offs or forgiveness programs attached to community service

would appeal to many humanisticallyoriented liberal arts and social science students and have pragmatic appeal in today’s economy. (369)

Another form of service, not identified by Coles, that not only embodies the imaginative spirit of service sociology but that also identifies the main impetus behind academic sociology is intellectual work. Through the promulgation of information and knowledge, academic sociologists as intellectual workers can enliven the people they assist – recipient partners – to appropriately analyze social problems and think through their solutions. Thus, of relevance to the sociology of service is impartation of the sociological imagination so that people can better understand the interplay of their personal troubles and those public issues at the level of historically located social structure. The sociological imagination enables recipient partners to understand themselves fully – to “know where they stand, where they may be going, and what – if anything – they can do about the present as history and the future as responsibility” (Mills 1959, 165). In sum, the intellectual work of service sociology is to define personal and social realities truthfully and in a publicly relevant way so as to lead to social problem solving. The service sociologist does this primarily through the facilitating actions of teaching, learning, researching, debating, studying, and writing. Intellectual work as service echoes the humanist concern – championed by Alfred McClung Lee’s (1973, 1978) humanist sociology and by Joe R. Feagin and Hernán Vera’s (2008) liberation sociology – that provides people with greater self-understanding, participation, and responsibility and as well as with a quality of mind for coping with the personal and social problems impacting their daily lives. Intellectual service work is also reflective of Michael Burawoy’s (2005) public sociology, which involves taking sociology to “publics,” or various groups of politically alert and civically active people, and engaging them in informed dialogue about the values and goals of importance to civil society.

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Situationally Based Expressions of Sociological Service As a further articulation of typologies relevant to service, we may identify two forms of service whose practical expression is determined by the immediacy and urgency of the problematic situation: fast sociological service and slow sociological service. Fast sociological service is typically involved with facilitating actions that provide emergency aid, frequently in arduous and dangerous environments that require immediate relief of suffering, whether physical or emotional. These conditions of existential threat (having to do with starvation, disease, injury, exposure, physical and sexual abuse, mass shootings, terrorist attacks, etc.) are matters of urgent, and perhaps at times even desperate, survival. This means that the sociology of service should be involved with disaster preparedness and relief. It requires readiness when catastrophe strikes. A portion of sociology must therefore be designated as being on standby to respond to the humanitarian crises created by natural or technological disasters, violent mass tragedies, hazards, epidemics, and outbreaks. There are numerous social-scientific studies that can inform sociological service in better understanding responses to calamities and disasters. For example, sociologists Liesel Ashley Ritchie, Duane A. Gill, and J. Steven Picou (2011) stated that if the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon environmental disaster followed a similar trajectory as that of the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, similar problems could be anticipated for residents of those communities along the Gulf of Mexico that were affected. Given that much has been learned from the Exxon Valdez disaster, as well as from, for example, Erikson’s (1976) research on the Buffalo Creek flood, Klinenberg’s (2002) study of the Chicago heat wave of 1995, and Brunsma et al.’s (2007) sociological analyses of Hurricane Katrina, to name just three of the many different studies on catastrophes, there is now available the sociological knowledge needed to implement effective and relevant

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facilitating actions in service to future victims of radiological accidents, environmental disasters, and natural hazards. Service sociology must therefore set as its central task to work out correct sociological insights into social emergencies and valid facilitating actions for aiding the victims of those emergencies. Indeed, there is a wide variety of activities that sociologists may undertake in regard to fast sociological service including providing consultation, advice, and education to crisis-affected people and disaster relief organizations; partnering with longterm recovery committees to help ease the trauma experienced in the aftermath of a tragedy; making available special counseling for first responders and victims; conducting disaster assessments; administering advocacy services to assist victims and survivors in finding long-term solutions to their community-related crises; helping to draw up disaster preparedness plans and then to manage these programs in communities; organizing volunteer groups, and so on. By contrast, slow sociological service, typically involves gathering and organizing all the facts of a problematic situation before assessing the basic needs of the vulnerable, the disempowered, and the disadvantaged, and formulating a plan to meet those needs. Here the service sociologist provides the means through which the social and biographical facts of people in community can be made available to all those interested in helping. Slow sociological service can play a proactive and preventative role in dealing with social problems. A couple of caveats are in order in reference to these situationally based forms of sociological service. First, it is a cardinal principle of service sociology that, except in emergency cases that require fast sociological service, facilitating actions with constant and durable results should be preferred. Service sociology is to focus on short-term improvements with constructive longer-term implications. Because social problems have their origins in social structure and their persistence in culture, it

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is important that large-scale changes are implemented for the long term. The second cautionary note is the admonition that service sociologists must take care to avoid the “bureaucratic ethos” about which C. Wright Mills (1959) warned. Service sociology should not become a bureaucratic social science carried out by specialized technicians who cede their moral and political autonomy to the nondemocratic organizations for which they work. In this regard, Alfred McClung Lee (1973) poses the eminently relevant questions: “Can and should sociologists conduct research under subsidies from those in power or should they be investigators committed solely to their humanist goals? Can they do both?” (ix). To avoid the bureaucratic ethos, it is best that service sociologists contribute their time, effort, and expertise to locallevel projects and community-based movements – including neighborhood associations, social clubs, labor unions, action leagues, municipal committees – rather than to profit-making organizations.

The Promise of Service Sociology As noted previously, the chief task and promise of service sociology is to alleviate and ameliorate social problems by helping people in community. The following programmatic statements may be used as a starting point toward the fulfillment of this promise. Service sociology helps people help themselves. The service sociologist provides expertise and opportunities through which people may rectify their own problems as autonomously as possible and in their own ways. Regardless of their disadvantaged situation all people should take responsibility for themselves. For the sake of their own dignity, they should be expected to do for themselves the best they can. Service sociology is inter- as well as intracommunity oriented. Because every member of a community is a stakeholder in that community, it is imperative that every person, family, business, and organization has

some connection and involvement with the problems afflicting their community as a whole. Moreover, each community must be expected to reach out to members of other communities that are less well-endowed and thus less able to deal with their own problems. Service sociology endeavors to first work through public benevolent institutions and charitable organizations and alongside other professionals dedicated to social welfare activities. Service sociologists should provide fast sociological service for immediate relief. But they should also partner with other organizations that are effective at longer-term problem alleviation. Except in emergency cases that require fast sociological service, facilitating actions that provide momentary relief should always be eschewed in favor of those that effect a more permanent or longer-lasting cure. The idea is to focus on short-term improvements with constructive longer-term implications. Charity sociologist Charles R. Henderson pointed out long ago that temporary, emergency relief is only “a preliminary step in a carefully thought out and often longcontinued course of treatment” (as quoted in Kusmer 1973, 661). As the emergencies recur with greater frequency and increase in scope, larger, more far-reaching strategies need to be employed. Service sociology is proactive and preventative. As with physical maladies, prevention is the cure to all social problems. As such, service sociology engages in educating society about ways to forestall problems through, for example, conservation, utilization of public transportation, recycling, mediation, deterrence, and so on.

The Place of Service Sociology The practical endeavor of service sociology is to render help and assistance to those who need it in a way that is more efficacious than can be done by folk wisdom, religious inspiration, speculation, or by simple charity. The service sociologist contributes sociologically informed interventions in

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alleviating problems of human hardship and suffering through such skilled activities as teaching, researching, writing, dialoguing, facilitating, listening, coaching, training, aiding, and tutoring. Service sociology provides a vital counterbalance to offset erroneous or ill-informed conventional wisdom, common sense, and organizational policy. Informing the facilitating actions that service sociology provides are the methods, themes, and theories derived from academic sociology. Service sociology is intended to be complementary with other forms of service, and the best way to ensure more and bettertargeted facilitating actions requires working in tandem with other people (residents, volunteers, activists), professionals (educators, community leaders, first responders), and institutions (schools, community agencies, religious organizations), who as stakeholders have similar interests in rectifying the troubling situation in question. Indeed, many are quite ready to end social afflictions like hunger, poverty, and illiteracy in their own communities. It is eminently clear that sociology’s unique approach, which is also its greatest contribution to other forms of service, is to consider private troubles in the context of social structure. In its mandate to help people through various planned, informed, and durable interventions, service sociology navigates a path between serving clients, which is the task of clinical sociology, and talking to publics, which is task of public sociology. Service sociology responds to the needs of people in community. And these needs are best articulated by stakeholders on the ground who know what is really going on and who have been grappling with the problems for far longer than the sociologist. Service sociology is democratic in that facilitating actions may be requested by the community or, perhaps more commonly, initiated by the sociologist as volunteer. Each of the parties, and in their own way, contributes time, energy, and knowledge to resolving the problem at hand. The effort is reciprocal and cooperative. We find the sociology of service anywhere the sociolo-

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gist is assisting people in need of assistance. It involves working with ailing poor and elderly people, with children, immigrants, and the un- and underemployed, as well as with the marginalized, the displaced, the injured, and the victimized.

Conclusion The service tradition in sociology traces its heritage to the three fin de siècle reformist sociologies of the Progressive Era: the social gospel, settlement sociology, and charity sociology. For it was at this cusp of societal transformation that was afflicting many American cities at the turn of the twentieth century – driven by the dynamic forces of urbanization, industrialization, and immigration – that an extraordinary burst of problem-solving activities occurred within sociology (Williams and MacLean 2015). This stressed, above all, dealing with the problems of communities in the spirit of neighborliness, and their contribution was to bring service work into the amelioration of social problems. It is in this lineage that the sociology of service places itself as a sociology for helping people devise creative solutions to their life problems. Additionally, service sociology is influenced by the three contemporary sociologies – humanist/liberation sociology, communitarianism, and public sociology – with their commitment to strengthening civil society and communal life. This influence makes service sociology a sociology of emancipatory politics, of a new progressivism, that works to ensure the moral imperatives of justice and equality to all citizens. The main lesson to be drawn from all of these sociologies of involvement and reform is the need of enhanced neighborly service in meeting the basic needs – for life, health, liberty, and hope – of the vulnerable and the disadvantaged. As one of the important leaders of the social gospel movement, Richard T. Ely (1896), maintained in his small book The Social Law of Service, “every improvement in your own character and in

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your own surroundings is an improvement for every [social] circle, large and small, of which you form a part. Every helpful word, every kind deed, is a contribution to the perfection of society” (252).

Glossary Facilitating actions Those effective practices of service sociology, informed by sociological knowledge, intended to improve the well-being of recipient partners. Fast sociological service Typically involved with facilitating actions that provide emergency aid, frequently in arduous and dangerous environments that require immediate relief of suffering, whether physical or emotional. Neoprogressiveism A new type of progressive thinking for civil society that is couched in the culture of interpersonal service. Recipient partners The people in need of the services of sociology. Service sociology A service-oriented sociology of social problems that is aimed at meeting the essential needs and concerns of people in community. Slow sociological service Involves gathering and organizing all the facts of a problematic situation before assessing the basic needs of the vulnerable and the disadvantaged, and formulating a plan to meet those needs.

References Addams, Jane. 1961. Twenty Years at Hull House. New York: Macmillan. Brunsma, David L., David Overfelt, and J. Steven Picou, eds. 2007. The Sociology of Katrina: Perspectives on a Modern Catastrophe. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Burawoy, Michael. 2005. For public sociology. American Sociological Review 70(1):4–28. Coles, Robert. 1993. The Call of Service: A Witness to Idealism. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Cooley, Charles Horton. 1910. Social Organization: A Study of the Larger Mind. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

Easterly, William. 2006. The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good. New York: Penguin Press. Eikenberry, Angela M. 2009. Giving Circles: Philanthropy, Voluntary Association, and Democracy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Eikenberry, Angela M., and Jessica Bearman. 2009. The Impact of Giving Together: Giving Circles’ Influence on Members’ Philanthropic and Civic Behaviors, Knowledge and Attitudes. Omaha: Forum of Regional Associations of Grantmakers, The Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University, and University of Nebraska at Omaha. Ellwood, Charles. A. 1988. Sociology and charity: The 1899 lectures. Mid-American Review of Sociology 13(2):21–30. Ely, Richard T. 1896. The Social Law of Service. New York: Eaton and Mains. Erikson, Kai T. 1976. Everything in Its Path: Destruction of Community in the Buffalo Creek Flood. New York: Simon & Schuster. Etzioni, Amitai. 1996. The New Golden Rule: Community and Morality in a Democratic Society. New York: Basic Books. 1993. The Spirit of Community: Rights, Responsibilities, and the Communitarian Agenda. New York: Crown. Feagin, Joe R., and Hernán Vera. 2008. Liberation Sociology. 2nd ed. Boulder, CO: Paradigm. Galliher, John F. 2002. What they said and what they did: Some early SSSP presidents. Social Problems 49(1):1–10. Giddens, Anthony. 1990. The Consequences of Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 1991. Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ed. 2003. The Progressive Manifesto. Cambridge: Polity Press. Habermas, Jurgen. 1975. Legitimation Crisis. Boston: Beacon Press. Klinenberg, Eric. 2002. Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kuhn, Thomas S. 1962. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kusmer, Kenneth L. 1973. The functions of organized charity in the progressive era: Chicago

service sociology and social problems as a case study. Journal of American History 60(3):657–78. Lee, Alfred McClung. 1978. Sociology for Whom? New York: Oxford University Press. 1973. Toward Humanist Sociology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Lengermann, Patricia Madoo, and Jill NiebruggeBrantley. 2002. Back to the future: Settlement sociology, 1885–1930. The American Sociologist 33(3):5–20. 2007. Thrice told: Narratives of sociology’s relation to social work. In Sociology in America: A History, edited by Craig Calhoun, 63– 114. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mills, C. Wright. 1959. The Sociological Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press. Obama, Barack. 2017. Weekly address: The honor of serving you as president. https:// obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-pressoffice/2017/01/14/weekly-address-honorserving-you-president. Parsons, Talcott. 1934. Service. In Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, vol. 13, edited by Edwin R. A. Seligman and Alvin Johnson, 672–74. New York: Macmillan. 2016. American Society: A Theory of the Societal Community. Edited byGiuseppe Sciortino. New York: Routledge. Popper, Karl. 2003. The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. 1, The Spell of Plato. New York: Routledge. Ritchie, Ashley Liesel, Duane A. Gill, and J. Steven Picou. 2011. The BP disaster as an Exxon Valdez rerun. Contexts 10(3):30–35.

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Rubington, Earl, and Martin Weinberg, eds. 2010. The Study of Social Problems: Seven Perspectives. 7th ed. New York: Oxford University Press. Schneiderhan, Erik. 2015. The Size of Others’ Burdens: Barack Obama, Jane Addams, and the Politics of Helping Others. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Simkhovitch, Mary Kingsbury. 1938. Neighborhood: My Story of Greenwich Village. New York: W. W. Norton. Small, Albion W. 1903. What is a sociologist? American Journal of Sociology 8(4):468–77. Tocqueville, Alexis de. 1899. Democracy in America. Vol. 2. Translated by H. Reeve. New York: Colonial Press. Treviño, A. Javier. 2012. The challenge of service sociology. Social Problems 59(1):2–20. 2013. On the facilitating actions of service sociology. Journal of Applied Social Science 7:95– 109. Treviño, A. Javier, and Karen M. McCormack, eds. 2016. What is service sociology? In Service Sociology and Academic Engagement in Social Problems, 1–24. New York: Routledge. Williams, Joyce E., and Vicky M. MacLean. 2015. Settlement Sociology in the Progressive Years: Faith, Science, and Reform. Boston: Brill. Wuthnow, Robert. 1991. Acts of Compassion: Caring for Others and Helping Ourselves. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Zetterberg, Hans L. 2002. Social Theory and Social Practice. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.

CHAPTER 9

Astrosociology: Social Problems on Earth and in Outer Space Jim Pass

Abstract The field of astrosociology, founded by this author in 2004, examines the relationship between outer space and society. Sociologists, other social scientists, and humanists have failed to recognize the impact of space on daily social life – a relationship that requires attention and serious scientific analysis. In the area of social problems, astrosociology examines the various ways in which space assets can mitigate troubling situations. Of course, space assets can also contribute to social problems, such as when a national government or private corporation militarizes space. Every scientific discovery or technological achievement can result in positive or negative consequences, or more typically in mixed uses and outcomes. This chapter examines both types of impact on society and establishes a firm foundation for future astrosociological theory and research into the relationship between space and social problems. The consideration of social problems on Earth, and their comparison with outer space environments, provides a preliminary examination of social concerns that can be expected in human space ecosystems.

Introduction to Astrosociology Astrosociology is a developing social science field that focuses on the human dimension of outer space. It includes the social and behavioral sciences, the humanities, and the arts. Futurist Allen Tough (1998) first suggested the term, which was ignored by social scientists until it was discovered by this author in late 2003. Defined as the scientific study of astrosocial phenomena (i.e., the social, cultural, and behavioral patterns related to outer space), astrosociology provides a social-scientific approach

to the complex relationship between space and human society. Harrison (2015, 11–12) explains it well: Astrosociology encourages interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research on space exploration and settlement, searches for extraterrestrial life, defending Earth from space-borne threats, and other topics at the juncture of space, life, and humankind. Astrosociology has both academic and applied components, promoting the development of new theories and finding practical solutions to the problems associated with interacting with 149

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space ecologies, establishing ourselves as a multi-planet species, and redefining our place in the universe in light of a succession of new discoveries.

A multidisciplinary field, astrosociology embraces the study of multiple topics and issues related to the human dimension of space, though it started out briefly as a subfield of sociology as one can readily discover in this author’s early writings (Pass 2004a, 2004b, 2004c). A core strength of astrosociology is that it binds social and behavioral scientists, humanists, and artists in the quest to develop space education and to research from this combination of perspectives. A new scholarly community now exists that complements the traditional space community, which has historically consisted almost entirely of natural and physical scientists and which now brings in the “other” branch of science into space education and research. Bringing the social sciences into the space age represents a key goal. Astrosociology fills a void (Pass 2006) that had lasted the entire space age. Astrosociology had its official founding in 2004 with this author’s posting of a two-part inaugural essay (Pass 2004a, 2004b). Astrosociology has important implications for addressing various types of social problems (Pass 2006a). The social sciences had failed to focus on issues related to outer space, and certainly did not conceive of the concept of astrosocial phenomena, which represent a link between space and society. Examples include technology transfers and spinoffs from NASA (the National Aeronautics and Space Administration), the use of satellites for communications and other purposes, and knowledge acquired through space-related research. These phenomena are ubiquitous in contemporary industrial and postindustrial societies. However, before the establishment of astrosociology, little support existed in the social sciences and humanities for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) research and other space-related topics (Harrison

et al. 2000). Today, the number of social scientists participating still remains relatively low. The few social scientists who did conduct relevant research on outer space unknowingly laid the foundation for what later became astrosociology’s jumping-off point. This small collection of social-scientifically oriented space pioneers conducted their research amid the majority of their peers who generally viewed it as beyond their purview, or worse, failed even to consider outer space as a serious topic. Some of them believed that studying space issues was a death knell to their careers (Pass 2004c). Many of these social scientists knew of each other’s work and even collaborated on publications and projects, often with the support of NASA. However, even they represented a very small number compared to the sociologists in mainstream subfields such as the family, social inequality, and deviance. “Disciplinary biases that define some [other] areas as ‘hot’ are likely to discourage some sociologists from entering the field” (Harrison 2005). Examples of these pioneers in the social sciences and humanities before the advent of astrosociology include sociologists B. J. Bluth (1983), William Sims Bainbridge (1991), and Alvin Rudoff (1996); anthropologists Ben R. Finney and Eric R. Jones (1984; Finney 1992); former NASA historian Steven J. Dick (2000), psychologists Douglas A. Vakoch and Yuh-shiow Lee (2000), and a seminal book by social psychologist Albert A. Harrison (2001). Mary M. Connors et al. (1985) took part in an early NASAsponsored research project that considered the social-scientific issues related to living in space. Another early study by Billingham et al. (1999) concerned the societal implications of contact with an extraterrestrial civilization. Sociologist Diane Vaughan (1996) completed an influential study that demonstrated the potential of sociology to contribute meaningfully to the study of space-related issues by uncovering how cultural deviance within NASA resulted in the fateful decision to launch the space

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shuttle Challenger under unsafe weather conditions that resulted in its tragic explosion in 1986. Additionally, a few physical and natural space scientists, such as astronomer Iván Almár (2011), who studies societal issues related to SETI, also contributed to the eventual development of astrosociology by pointing out that important social-scientific issues are complementary to work in astronomy. Likewise, astronomer Jill Tarter (2001) devoted her career to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence and often mentioned social-scientific and philosophical considerations such as, Are we alone in the universe? Popular SETI astronomer Seth Shostak (2009) often touches on socialscientific aspects of SETI research. Finally, astronomer Carl Sagan (1994) had much to say about the relationship between the space sciences and society, and successfully humanized the study of outer space for his public audience. Currently, Neil deGrasse Tyson, an astrophysicist, covers similar ground as Sagan and updated Sagan’s 1980 Cosmos television series in 2014. Not surprisingly, then, social scientists and physical scientists have collaborated since the 1960s, and continue to do so. Though these examples do not directly address social problems, they demonstrate that both “soft” scientists and “hard” scientists have provided important socialscientific insights and evidence regarding space-related issues. For example, the focus on the relationship between humanity and the cosmos, the fact that all humans are made of “star-stuff” (Sagan 1973), has contributed to making science more palatable to the public. Making space more relevant to social life has required such collaboration, which in turn has inspired young people to pursue science and often contribute to solving social problems as adult professionals. Impressively, there exists much astrosociological knowledge that has multiple designations and concepts, and is underutilized and unknown. Indeed, many have studied astrosocial phenomena without specifically conceptualizing them. Despite the

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foregoing contributions, astrosociology has yet to find a foothold in academia (Pass 2009). Astrosociology was established in order to (1) benefit from past research contributions on the relationship between socialscientific issues and the study of space and (2) move forward this research and understanding in an organized, formalized, and publicized manner. The goal was to establish a specialized academic field with a recognizable literature, and to attract to it scientists, scholars, and students. Astrosociology is not a space advocacy movement. Rather, it represents a knowledge field with a social-scientific orientation. Tying the study of social problems to space research is uncommon. However, this general approach can unite the natural and social sciences in ways that can bring about new theoretical and empirical breakthroughs. Astrosociology’s multidisciplinary approach involves a formal collaboration with the STEM subjects and advocates, particularly those that involve space education and research. Sociologists, for example, are well acquainted with the relationship between culture, scientific applications, and technological inventions that involve the acceptable and forbidden ways of using them (Ogburn 1942). The more the social and natural sciences converge, the greater will be our knowledge of the relationship between outer space and social problems. Astrosocial phenomena link the study of space and the study of society. In fact, these phenomena have, to some extent, been pervasive in all human societies, past and present (Harrison 2007). Astrosocial issues will undoubtedly become more impactful in the future, whether on Earth or in outer space environments. As ancient cultures have revealed, celestial phenomena observed by peoples with virtually no scientific knowledge or understanding incorporated their own ideas about them into their cultures, which strongly influenced their norms and values. Much of their material culture (Ogburn 1922), that has survived

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demonstrates their connections to the cosmos. But are such culture-cosmos connections always positive for society? Today, we not only have a better understanding of celestial phenomena, we can also travel and have an influence beyond the Earth’s atmosphere. Many observers predicted that a benefit of NASA’s Apollo program of the 1960s, for example, would be the application of advancements in technology to help solve certain social problems on Earth (Sadeh, forthcoming). For instance, the Apollo program accelerated technology beyond the average rate, which affected all segments of society and including innovations in medicine, firefighting, and environmental protection. Yet even such triumphs of the human spirit and technological progress as landing on and exploring the moon caused some cultures to fear the negative repercussions of these activities on their daily lives and blamed bad luck and natural disasters on space exploration. Some cultures have equated space exploration events with natural disasters that happened to coincide with them (Pop 2011). Thus, while some people may focus on the benefits of space exploration, others do not regard these accomplishments as worthwhile, affordable, or even positive for society. Such differing evaluations necessitate investigation. Contemplating the Benefits of Space Exploration When considering issues related to social problems and outer space, it raises the question about the wisdom of exploring outer space when so many troubling issues plague terrestrial societies. Given the many problems of poverty, social inequalities, criminality, epidemics, and so on, why waste precious time, effort, and resources in studying human settlement in space? Scholars and advocates have provided numerous reasons for space exploration and settlement. These include the need to ensure the survival of the human species in case of an extinction event on Earth, to alleviate overcrowding and natural resource deple-

tion, to reduce environmental stress. In addition, there is the argument that pursuing the exploration of outer space produces social conditions that improve the human condition beyond what it might achieve otherwise due to spinoffs and technology transfers to other segments of society from NASA and other space agencies (Lin 2006). Even a few of these reasons should encourage a greater number of social scientists to take space exploration and settlement more seriously in their work. This includes constructing theories and conducting research on issues such as how space exploration affects social problems on Earth as well as how social problems manifest themselves in space environments. Accordingly, one could argue that space exploration and settlement make more sense than doing nothing at all. The problem of crime, for example, will continue to exist, so waiting for its resolution will doom space exploration. Space exploration and migration are inevitable (Finney and Jones 1984) and they will have an influential and sustainable impact on Earth and in outer space environments. Furthermore, the effects of astrosocial phenomena are likely to be more positive for humanity if social scientists contribute to space-related education and research because then the human dimension is taken into account rather than focusing only on rocket science and planetary science, for example. This chapter is meant to motivate social scientists to take seriously the study of outer space. Furthermore, its purpose is to encourage scientists, engineers, and scholars to collaborate in making future space missions more successful by identifying, predicting, and mitigating potential social problems prior to launch. For example, premission training could focus on minimizing social inequality and value conflict in a concerted effort to construct a shared culture for crewmembers or long-duration settlers. One of the benefits of space exploration involves the experimentation with new and reconfigured social systems in true isolation, which may benefit humans living in terrestrial societies through the application

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of newly discovered social structures and policies. While a significant level of space exploration and settlement may seem like an unattainable goal, humanity is already on course for such a reality. A major issue is that we are behind in our understanding of the social and cultural forces that will likely force expansion of humankind into the solar system and beyond (Pass 2015). Overcrowding and resource scarcity are two significant drivers for migration, yet politicians and policy makers still tend to focus on Earthbased solutions. More individuals need to participate in astrosociology education and research to understand and take advantage of these types of emerging patterns so that humanity will focus on the larger picture.

Social Space versus Outer Space (and Other “Spaces”) The concept of social space has garnered much attention among social scientists over the years, especially among sociologists. Social space consists of a physical or virtual location in which individuals congregate and become involved in social interactions and therefore, space involves social production; that is, it is socially produced through interaction (Lefebvre [1974] 1992). A social space is a social construction that affects the perceptions and behaviors of individuals and relationships within it. Within the space habitat (or the physical environment), the social space includes all areas in which humans can access, interact, and survive (Pass 2006b). Thus, social space exists wherever human beings interact, whether on Earth or anywhere else in the cosmos. In contrast to terrestrial social space, outer space has received very little attention in social science. Historically, it seems that the focus on terrestrial social space has reduced social scientists’ interest in outer space. From an anthropocentric standpoint, outer space consists of the physical universe beyond the Earth’s atmosphere. More generally, it includes the void (which is not empty) between celestial objects. Even the

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various definitions associated with the concepts of inner space, which pertains to the subconscious, and cyberspace, which pertains to communication over computer networks, have received more attention than outer space among social scientists. There is no incompatibility between the study of social space and the study of outer space. The study of deep space remains devoid of theoretical and conceptual social analysis. What social structures are necessary to live in harsh space environments. What social problems will they produce? How will various forms of social space affect outer space habitats? What types of social spaces will characterize human life in outer space environments? Will humanity replicate the social forms of imperialism, capitalism, and social inequality in outer space (Dickens and Ormrod 2007, 2008)? Alternatively, will humankind destroy these social systems and create something new and more hospitable to the human spirit? Social and natural scientists must pay greater attention to both types of space, and especially to their interactive effects. The small number of humans currently in outer space is not an indication of the importance of astrosocial phenomena to humanity’s future.

Social Problems and Astrosocial Phenomena Social problems such as the rate of mental disorders and crime frequently interact with astrosocial phenomena such as the repurposed use of space technology for treating mental illness and for combating deviant behavior. For example, repurposed space technologies implemented thus far include a biofeedback video game that helps improve the overall mental awareness of patients with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. There is also the development of software that can identify and manage depression and stress, both of which were originally designed for astronauts on long missions. Additionally, NASA-based

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software applications have aided in improving crime investigations by improving facial recognition capabilities and by improving the clarity of grainy crime scene photos. Technological and scientific developments in the space community such as the examples provided above often contribute to social change in other parts of society (e.g., medicine and law enforcement) through the encouragement of convergences among normally isolated fields and disciplines (Pass and Harrison, forthcoming). Thus, astrosocial phenomena contribute to “astrosocial change” (Pass 2006a), a form of social change that becomes more influential as space exploration influences society. For example, predicting severe weather, global positioning, and communicating on a worldwide scale became much more effective once satellites were placed into Earth orbit. Imaging technologies in medicine are traceable to space program technology transfers. These capabilities arose because space technologies advanced over time. Moreover, new space technologies will continue to inspire terrestrial applications that predictably result in unforeseeable new solutions to social problems. Ecosystems in different outer space environments will experience social problems along with the positive conditions brought about by astrosocial change, which consists of the social and cultural forces created through space-related activities – that is, astrosocial phenomena – such as human spaceflight, astronomical research, and the search for extraterrestrial life, which all affect individuals and societies on Earth. The study of astrosocial change involves a specific attention to the relationship between space and society. One can conceptually divide society into two interactive sectors: a space-related (astrosocial) sector and a non-space-related (nonastrosocial) sector. Astrosocial change occurs when activities in the astrosocial sector produce change in the nonastrosocial sector (Pass 2004a), or when the opposite occurs. Of course, change can also occur within the astrosocial sector as well. For example, the research findings of astronomers involving

the atmospheres of other planets can provide insights about severe weather patterns in Earth’s atmosphere that can save lives. In these cases, astronomical research that involves astrosocial phenomena has a positive effect on Earth’s space environment. On other planets in the future, astrosocial change will shift to the new social ecosystem within a different space environment such as that involving Mars. Changing Martian weather patterns would cause a future population to adapt, and that in turn would drive social change in the space society on Mars. Astrosocial phenomena can affect space societies strongly from the time of their inception. New dangers, for example, such as life support compromises require rapid reactions in order to protect the population. Some social problems can be mitigated before launch. For example, the selection of candidates for space missions or expeditions may be influenced by attempts to reduce potential racism and sexism in space environments. Similarly, social and cultural patterns that may lead to disagreements or fear, such as ideological differences based on religious beliefs (e.g., Islam vs. Christianity) and family structure preferences (e.g., same-sex marriage), can result in conflicts and therefore social problems. Policies made in the planning and training stages for missions to space that foster mutual respect and understanding may minimize such conflicts (Pass 2015). Social deviance in a space settlement will require an official response. Health and safety violations occur when conditions become too stressful and oppressive, or when the leadership loses its authority (Pass 2011b). Deviant behavior in space environments and spacecraft represents a special case in which violations of official standards and regulations can threaten the well-being of an entire population. Minor forms of deviance of this sort can result in harm to individuals, laboratories, spacecraft, or the entire mission. For example, pressures from supervisors that result in workers taking shortcuts in maintenance procedures to shorten repair times technically violate regulations in favor of expediency.

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Astrosociology and Social Problems Astrosociology’s focus on astrosocial phenomena, such as social adaptations to new living conditions and their relationship to social problems, relates to societies whether on Earth or in outer space environments. Throughout human history migrant populations on Earth, such as the Pilgrims who came to the New World, faced many harsh and dangerous challenges. However, they did not have to worry about breathing in their environment or needing protection from radiation and other harmful conditions. In contrast, settlers in ecosystems other than on Earth possess no air and no protection from radiation as provided by the Earth’s magnetic field. Space environments such as Mars present additional hardships. These include the lack of breathable air, no natural resources providing food or water, and a much more difficult journey if they wish to return home (if this is even an option for some commercially sponsored proposals). Responses to physical conditions in other space environments require new and adapted technologies, which result in social and cultural changes needed to meet these various challenges. Thus, technical problems result in social problems that must be solved in order to ensure survival or to improve living conditions. Furthermore, there is currently not a single permanent human outpost beyond Earth’s atmosphere. Several countries have space programs, but they are not spacefaring in the sense popularized in science fiction (Pass 2011a). The following comparison makes this point quite clearly. Consider the rough comparison of a contemporary space-capable nation’s level of space exploration to that of a European nation at a similar stage of sea exploration (long preceding its glory days of discovery). Such a nation would be floating in slow leaky boats near the shoreline where it is relatively safe and assistance remains readily available. It is not a seafaring society because its crude technologies, inadequate resources, and underdeveloped sailing skills make it extremely hazardous to

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move further out into the vast unknown oceans. Until substantially improving such conditions, land-based social phenomena dominate everyday life. Similarly, space capable societies possess only a rudimentary space exploration capability. Earthbased social phenomena dominate as the hazards of space travel currently overwhelm our abilities to move very far away from our shores (i.e., the Earth). (Pass 2004b, 15)

The Russian Mir space station and the International Space Station (ISS) are analogous to those leaky and crude boats that ventured into the oceans before seafaring became sophisticated enough to venture into the analogous “deep” waters in space. Meaningful ventures beyond cislunar space will require new technologies and new outlooks concerning acceptable risks and the value of pioneering exploration. Current understanding about human life in outer space remains extremely limited. Knowledge about the effects of space conditions on the human body, which differ in various space environments, is speculative, and will remain so until humans settle there. It is unlikely that humans will establish long-term settlements in micro-gravitational conditions. Likewise, the effects of astrosocial phenomena that will include adapting to, and perhaps suffering from, dangerous conditions in outer space are currently conjectural, and no more than projections about the characteristics and types of social problems to be encountered in outer space environments; they represent only educated guesses based on terrestrial history and the limited experiences of astronauts living in space. Linking astrosociology to the socialscientific study of social problems couples the space community of scientists and engineers to troubling social conditions. Advancements in scientific and technological knowledge contribute to structural and cultural changes in which some type of social harm may result to a subset of individuals. Existing social problems may increase or decrease in intensity as well as which segments of the population they affect most

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strongly. The impact of astrosocial phenomena change over time and their effects may be negative. They may, in fact, manifest themselves as social problems. On the positive side, the production of space probes, rockets, and survival systems, has applications for addressing terrestrial social problems. These activities possess dual advantages for society in the short term, given that they promote space exploration and research while also facilitating future scientific and technological advancements in multiple industries. This can result in coping with scarce resources on Earth by mining asteroids and relieving overpopulation through human migration to other locations in space. Current important benefits include better medical technologies for diagnosing and treating illnesses (Bainbridge, forthcoming), aiding law enforcement with technologies such safely deflating tires of fleeing suspects’ vehicles, improving airline safety, and better protection for firefighters based on polymer fabrics adapted from spacesuits.

Space Assets and Their Effects on Social Problems on Earth There is no doubt that space assets, such as satellites used for weather forecasting, GPS navigation, or for spying on enemy troop movements, affect life on Earth. Such space assets can yield beneficial applications to addressing threating conditions that never existed prior to the space age, such as the delivery of nuclear weapons made possible by rocketry and the introduction of killer satellites. The creation of new technologies is often made necessary due to the invention of harmful technologies. In fact, space exploration that leads to the migration of a large percentage of the Earth’s population may lessen competition for limited resources and social conflicts, and alleviate a number of social problems. While this ultimate impact may take decades, the potential exists for the mitigation of pressing needs on a small scale. For

example, having fewer people to feed will reduce the pressure to increase agricultural production and result in less need for fresh water. In general, less competition for dwindling resources will improve life on Earth for the majority of people who remain. As we progress closer to the ideal type spacefaring society, astrosocial phenomena, such as space technology for faster transportation, will increasingly impact our everyday lives (Pass and Harrison 2007). Changing social conditions and cultural ideas produce new social problems and cause old ones to reconstitute themselves. For example, will capitalism and class inequality persist even as astrosocial phenomena of all types increasingly affect societies, or will a more equitable political economy replace it? Additionally, common types of deviance are likely to adapt to new spacebased technological innovations, which may redefine which social behaviors are deemed most profitable. Positive Effects on Terrestrial Societies Space-based scientific breakthroughs and innovations that emerge from research into new propellants and propulsion technologies, for example, can have positive outcomes for society. Convergences among two or more disciplines create new social realities (Pass and Harrison, forthcoming) such as the transfer of new chemical processes in the development of new fuel cells that could revolutionize automobile and household applications. Human spaceflight can spawn solutions to social problems through the work carried out in space agencies that is adapted into new products such as firefighting technologies including an improved breathing apparatus offering better protection from smoke inhalation. Even greater progress is made when knowledge gained for space exploration is used in addressing social problems (Pass 2015b) such as fighting wildfires, feeding the poor, and locating scarce resources such as water and valuable minerals via remote sensing. Developing countries have benefited from space science and technology. In fact,

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astronaut Ron Garan (2013) points out that “engineering for the developing world and engineering to break the bounds of lowEarth orbit have much in common.” Technology transfers and spinoffs provide solar powered refrigerators, technology to produce safe drinking and bathing water, methods to increase crop yields, telephone services to remote areas, drought and weather advisories from satellite imaging, and lights to areas traditionally without electrical services. These contributions to developing nations result in life-changing conditions; they also involve educational programs on technology maintenance. These applications of space technology save lives and make social life more bearable Applications of advancing satellite capabilities continue to improve weather forecasting, communications, television and Internet access, and navigation (Whalen, forthcoming). Studies of soil erosion, droughts, deforestation, environmental protection, and climate represent other applications of satellite surveillance. Remote sensing is conducted from the International Space Station. Additionally, experiments aboard the ISS, such as determining how plants, mice and rats, and fire behave in microgravity, provide implications for advancements in outer space and on Earth. Remote sensing has also assisted physical and natural scientists conduct research that in the past was impossible to carry out aboard the ISS. Studies conducted on their behalf of scientists on the ground by astronauts having to do with drug development, crystal formation in space, and how insects and small mammals as well as plants adapt to microgravity, improve social conditions in direct and indirect ways. The outcomes of these studies have already resulted in innovations in the pharmaceutical industry, materials industry, and the biological community, respectively. A celestial catastrophe, such as a meteorite strike, may affect one or several societies. Planetary defense as an area of research requires knowledge of the social sciences, because much societal preparation will be required (Pass 2006c). Defense pro-

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cedures could fail and a major impact event can occur with no warning, such as the nineteen-meter-wide, 500-kiloton meteor airburst over Chelyabinsk, Russia in 2013 (Grant 2013). Preparing a potential impact by an asteroid or comet, includes evacuating neighborhoods or entire cities, coping with the aftermath of large-scale destruction, injury, and loss of life, and rebuilding. Social planning and implementation will be required (Race et al. 2012). There is always an interaction between science and government, which involves politics and thus policy makers. On the one hand, politicians may negate good science as well as technological recourse and social response efforts, which could increase the scope of the disaster. On the other hand, when informed by social scientists and humanists politicians can minimize suffering and destruction, or at least improve the recovery period. Another area to consider is extraterrestrial contact, or worse, an alien invasion, which requires the implementation of risk management research (Neal 2014). Some social scientists, SETI researchers, and astrobiologists have long taken this issue seriously. For example, some have considered how radio contact with an extraterrestrial intelligence may affect social groups and subcultures (Vakoch and Lee 2000). Some religious communities might disbelieve discovery of intelligent life beyond Earth because it is incompatible with their faith doctrines. Conversely, new cults could spring up that designate extraterrestrials as deities. Conditions would be worse if extraterrestrials visited Earth. Contamination of alien microbes could result in an infectious disease epidemic or in the transformation of human DNA. Global politics would be affected as each government may try to gain favor with the visitors. Conversely, governments might form a coalition to combat the extraterrestrials should they be deemed malevolent. Economies could collapse due to uncertainties about the future of the human race. While such scenarios may not likely occur, it is nonetheless scientifically prudent to consider their conceptual implications.

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Thus, while NASA and other space organizations such as the European Space Agency and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency conduct space exploration activities, they also provide solutions that contribute to the mitigation of the various social problems commonly found on Earth. In addition, they uncover issues about which social scientists can provide assistance through theory and research. For example, the field of astrobiology in part searches for extraterrestrial life, as does SETI, but astrobiologists do not generally understand how cultures and subcultures may react to the discovery of alien life. Engineers can build spacecraft to ferry people to new space settlements and construct bases for them to live in, but they do not know about the intricacies of social interaction, generally, and about the causes of cooperation and conflict, specifically. Because problems such as deviance, class inequality, racial discrimination, and religious conflict will likely manifest themselves in space societies, it is important to understand them as well as possible on Earth and to share the knowledge gained with all those involved with space-related research and policy. The application of this knowledge to space communities and societies can result in fewer problems through better planning before launch (Pass 2015). In turn, the research conducted in space societies will undoubtedly provide insights to mitigate social problems on Earth. Negative Effects on Terrestrial Societies Astrosocial phenomena can unleash social forces that contribute to positive and negative social conditions. Focusing on the negative effects, dangerous technologies such as “space age” weapons and ever more capable satellites provide the powerful with tools that favor their agendas. The powerful benefit most from the humanization of the cosmos (Dickens 2010). Technologies designed for the peaceful exploration of space and the beneficial surveillance of Earth have found new applications that may well harm particular segments of the popu-

lation. Secret military missions taking place in low-Earth orbit – such as those conducted by the X-37B space plane funded by taxpayer dollars – take place on a regular basis, without the public’s knowledge about what it is actually doing. The military’s activities in space may be violating the Outer Space Treaty regarding its ban on the militarization of space. The Chinese have conducted an antisatellite missile test that added space junk in low-Earth orbit. Sociologists Peter Dickens and James Ormrod (2007, 10–11) elaborate about the negative aspects of space assets: Satellites certainly enable the development of global economy. At the same time, they are central to the exercise of political, cultural, and economic power. This includes surveillance: the monitoring and regulation of “deviant” populations, including even labour processes. They constitute an “orbital panopticon” in which subjects felt to be in need of discipline and control are continually monitored by unseen and powerful observers.

Following this argument, to the extent that the power elites in government, the military, and corporations wish to control societal resources, including people, they can create social problems for other groups they see as threats. For example, they can institute new laws that target the poor, such as the vagrancy laws of the past, or those that authorize surveillance, targeting whatever groups or categories of citizens they deem problematic. Many bureaucrats may not even notice that they participate in institutional-level discrimination; they simply follow the rules established by elites without realizing their harmful effects on others. Thus, remote spying, the militarization of space, and other uses of satellites and space weapons also have negative effects. Satellites “have been used as a way of exerting economic and political authority and creating the neoliberal experiment” (Dickens and Ormrod 2008). Attempts to reinstitute laissez-faire capitalism and the free market reduce the US government’s

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ability and inclination to protect workingclass and middle-class workers and small time investors, as government interference is reduced. Space technology such as satellites allows for the monitoring of citizens without their knowledge. This argument takes the position that large corporations and especially conglomerates profit from space travel and exploration while most private citizens do not benefit much. The powerful, the elites that make up just a tiny percentage of the populations of societies – including the largest stockholders in companies such as Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrup Grumman, and General Dynamics – gained the most from the space race and continue to benefit most. For example, while a large number of workers in the aerospace industry received salaries and employee benefits, the corporations and their stockholders derived a much greater outlay. In much the same way, politicians benefited through campaign donations based on their support for programs that maximize profits in the aerospace industry. Outer space represents a new frontier to pursue profits and opportunities for increased power (Valentine 2012). NewSpace companies such as Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries have begun to develop technologies to mine asteroids and infrastructure such as fueling depots in our solar system. The governments of the United States, European countries, and Japan are pursuing regulations that benefit them and take advantage of space resource exploitation. The wealthy will benefit tremendously, although society as a whole could also benefit depending on the ultimate objectives of the billionaires investing in these new and risky technologies. Leaders of NewSpace companies such as SpaceX and Orbital ATK may possess more altruistic ideas about space exploration. Military threats from North Korea, China, and Russia, cause the United States to build and maintain a large military. The military-industrial-space complex experienced a remarkable revival following the attacks of September 11, 2001 (Dickens and Ormrod 2008). It uses satellites to attack

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enemies and to defend the homeland. Satellites can control and target of weapons as well as provide GPS navigation for a family driving home from a vacation. The former use is employed in wars and other military actions, and it is possible they could be used against US civilians in the future.

Social Problems in Space Societies Historically, planning for space missions focused on the launch phase, cruise phase, orbital insertion phase, and sometimes the landing phase. The missing component was always the human element. Human missions, which thus far have only occurred in cislunar space, have demanded special attention to keeping humans alive throughout a rather short time period. Longer stays on the moon and journeys to Mars will present new challenges. Living in space is stressful and exposes crews and future settlers to a variety of difficulties in confined and isolated – and otherwise extreme – environments. Complications demonstrated among astronauts and cosmonauts on orbital and analog missions include psychosocial difficulties produced by the lack of timely communication with Earth; lack of support from family, friends, and mission control; monotony during a long spaceflight, and homesickness (Kanas 2009; De la Torre et al. 2012). If left unchecked, interpersonal problems such as irritability caused by interacting with the same people including the difficulties mentioned above become inevitable as the duration of a spaceflight increases (Stuster 1996). These types of difficulties that arise during social interactions can escalate over time to become social problems including discrimination and unfair resource allocation of food, water, and other essentials. Confirmation of social conflict and behavioral difficulties comes from research of space analogs at the North and South Poles, in submarines, Mars simulations, and life and work aboard naval ships. Studies of polar expeditions have demonstrated that confinement and isolation can serve as serious

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stressors, which can worsen when resources, such as psychological counseling, do not exist (Palinkas and Suedfeld 2008). Other resource-related issues such as the need to ration and recycle water and clean clothes – and ration food – is also likely to place stress on the crewmembers. Adding to complications is the fact that habitability is an interactive and subjective condition in which individuals interpret their physical surroundings and social situations differently from each other (Lockard 2014). In long-duration missions and in permanent human ecosystems in outer space, social inequality and deviance will prove inevitable. This brings up several questions. Are we likely to replicate our problems in space societies? Alternatively, what can be done to prevent them? What new troubling social conditions will emerge that are unique to the developing space society? The best course of action is to plan thoroughly before launch (Pass 2015), which will require a thorough review of how the space society should be constructed, including its social structures and culture. This will not obviate social problems, but it can result in taking countermeasures to mitigate them, and it can also help to anticipate the creation of problems not common on Earth. Extraterrestrial environments provide astrosociologists with theoretical and practical areas of theory and research. The argument that it is premature to worry about social problems in space, when we have so many to address here on Earth, engenders three responses. First, human migration to space environments will likely occur in the near future. Second, thinking about social problems in extraterrestrial ecosystems can contribute insights to those problems on Earth due to the different set of challenges that apply to space societies. Comparative analyses of terrestrial and extraterrestrial human societies will yield much socialscientific knowledge (Harrison 2011). There is enough commonality to make such exercises useful to both contemporary terrestrial societies and the ecosystems humans will construct in uncharted space environments. A third argument relates to the ill-advised

notion of keeping all of humankind on a single planet (Lin 2006). The basis of this argument relates to the potential extinction of humanity by a catastrophe or a series of global-scale cataclysms, such as super volcanoes or a thermonuclear exchange among superpowers. Clearly, social scientists who study social problems do not understand them well enough to offer solutions that really matter, and policy makers have even less understanding about how to combat them. Why not try a new approach? It is conceivable that space settlers in hostile and harsh environments meet their challenges in ways that shed understanding of social problems on Earth. Space societies provide opportunities to design new social systems and new avenues for human progress. These social experiments provide much less interference from politicians and corporate leaders. Their isolation and distant proximity from Earth allows for a great deal of autonomy. Carrying Astrosociology into Space Societies Though many scientists and engineers in the space community may think it represents wasteful use of resources to include psychologists, psychiatrists, sociologists, and other social scientists in the population of the space society, it is essential. They need to study social interactions to understand the social-scientific issues that arise in the space society. On Earth, we need more astrosociologists to pay attention to the relationship between astrosocial phenomena and social problems. In other space ecosystems, the need exists to study the social changes and therefore conditions of the space society over time. Only then, can one identify and address social problems in meaningful ways. Non–social scientists may well identify problems, but it is unlikely that they will know how to mitigate their effects. Astrosociological research conducted to plan for long-duration space missions and settlements will prove invaluable to their successful implementation. However, social and cultural change will occur as social

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interactions produce new norms and values, which alter structural elements of their social system aboard their spacecraft even while astronauts are en route to the destination or completing their mission objectives. Therefore, it makes scientific sense to include social scientists, humanists, and artists on these voyages. Social, cultural, and psychological problems will inevitably transpire. These problems will require research and recommended interventions that will drive social policy. Fragile, isolated, and confined environments in space societies require social scientists, even if the space community does not currently acknowledge it.

Cultures and Social Institutions in Space Ecosystems With the mass migration of humans into space environments, each social system that is developed will need to regulate behavior through the construction of institutions and create a collection of shared cultural values. The question then becomes, does a particular space community replicate terrestrial social institutions, or does it modify old ones or invent new ones? It is likely that a combination of the three will happen. In keeping with the theme of this chapter, the following questions relate to social and cultural change. What new social problems will develop? How will a given space society respond to the probable mixture of new and old social problems? While some of the problems are predictable, others must be addressed during the voyage and upon settling, which requires the expertise of social scientists and humanists. As already emphasized, new space communities should begin planning various elements of their future society long before launch (Pass 2015). Proper anticipation of social needs ahead of time allows for incorporation of social and cultural patterns into the fabric of these [space] communities from the beginning. Any new society must be built upon a solid foundation. Its organization and

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functioning must be guided by ideas and a sense of purpose (provided by culture). Colonists must learn the values and norms of their new society before they depart. A new colony in space, or anywhere else, cannot sustain itself as intended without detailed planning of its overall social structure and the social institutions that are part of that structure. (Pass 2006b, 6)

How does the space society adapt when plans deviate from their original intentions? The social change that occurs will demand creative responses and adaptations. Social isolation and the absence of realtime audio and video communication may contribute to a space society’s self-reliance and ethnocentrism. Decision-making processes and outcomes in the space society intended to ameliorate social problems such as crime and socioeconomic inequality, may not serve the best interests of the nations or corporations sponsoring the space mission. An important part of the equation involves the level of self-reliance of the space society. Interplanetary relations could result (Lin 2006; Pass 2015b), coupled with interplanetary conflict, so that diplomacy is required. Revolutionary movements – that is, social movements that seek sovereignty and thus cutting ties to terrestrial societies or corporations – may occur in order to establish the space settlement as an independent nation. The establishment of interplanetary commerce is likely to occur. These relationships can produce new problems in both the terrestrial and extraterrestrial societies. For example, what if corporations mined an asteroid for a vital mineral and demanded outrageous prices for it? Conversely, what if a space settlement was not self-reliant in terms of vital resources, such as medicines, water, and food, and the supplier on Earth demanded unreasonable payment?

Applied Astrosociology and Social Problems According to Elizabeth Neeley (2008, 39): Applied sociology uses sociological knowledge and research skills to gain empirically

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based knowledge to inform decision makers, clients and the general public about social problems, issues, processes, and conditions so that they might make informed choices.

Similarly, applied astrosociology seeks empirical knowledge to inform decision makers, but its focus is on the application of space assets, including space science, to resolve or at least mitigate social problems on Earth. Prominent is the notion that knowledge gained on Earth should be applied to the planning and monitoring of human societies in space (Pass 2006c). Incontrovertibly, applied astrosociology – defined as the purposeful application of astrosociological knowledge to solve practical problems and other issues – will become more relevant in the future as humans begin to create a permanent presence in space . . . In addition to solving spacerelated problems, then, applied astrosociologists employ the same knowledge gained for space research toward solving real issues related to astrosocial phenomena that exist in space or on the Earth. (Pass 2015b, n.p.)

The creation of stable social systems is a vital area of research because it will have implications for the survival of a population in space. For example, new technologies invented for surviving harsh conditions on Earth can have applications on Mars and other outer space locales. Conversely, power plants and new materials for warm clothing adapted for the atmospheric conditions on Mars could be applied in cold locations on Earth. Applications will flow in both directions between terrestrial and extraterrestrial societies. Utopias, Dystopias, and Subjective Visions What types of social structures will humans construct in outer space environments? NewSpace entrepreneurs are likely to impose the goals and values of their aerospace companies on people who populate their space habitats. They will likely

replicate a capitalist economy resulting in socioeconomic inequality. An important area of concern relates to how those in lesser prestige occupational statuses such as cooks, sanitation workers, and barbers are treated by the leadership. Treatment of these workers by powerful members of a community in space should be a vital concern. Caroti (2011) points out that the study of science fiction stories about utopian or dystopian social conditions can provide social scientists and social planners with important insights about positive and negative aspects of society construction. Much of this literature offers potential solutions that include methods of coping with conflict and inequality. They also portray unsuccessful scenarios that exacerbate them. Thus, by offering new ways of looking at common societal problems, we may arrive at beneficial solutions for individuals and society. It is not surprising that many individuals with hard science backgrounds, such as Gregory Benford (physics), Alastair Reynolds (astrophysics), Isaac Asimov (biochemistry), and Fred Hoyle (astrophysics), are also science fiction writers. Astrosociologists can benefit from this speculative literature, even if it is only used for analytical purposes. Minimizing social problems in space societies can result in dystopic scenarios in which a leader or a small group of elites takes control and implements a vision that is harmful to the masses. Classic examples on Earth are the charismatic religious or political leader who persuades people to follow them and the dictator who rules through threats and brutal force. One can only strive to build near-perfect societies, but it is a subjective vision of the future that will guide their construction. “We should hope and plan for [someone’s version of] utopia, but remain prepared to deal with dystopian conditions” (Pass 2006b, 8, emphasis original). Social planning cannot anticipate all troublesome situations that may arise in space societies, but every society will create social problems for part of its population. A flexible and adaptable social system can perhaps anticipate and cope with many social problems. Adaptability is key to the

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long-term thriving of any society, and thus social planners and social engineers must consider these conditions that go beyond mere survivability (Lockard 2015) and that have livability as the goal. The consideration arises as to who decides which strategies are to be implemented in reducing social problems. Someone’s vision of a utopian society must be implemented. Those in power shape the social environment so that certain subpopulations or categories of people benefit from a leadership’s instituted set of social and cultural patterns, while others do not. It is impossible to construct a utopia for everyone. For example, the type of government implemented will impact strongly on which social problems arise. Possible governmental structures include a democracy, an authoritarian system, or a company outpost. David Valentine (2012, 1065), anthropologist and NewSpace advocate who supports commercial involvement in space-related activities, argues that both conservative and liberal perspectives of the future deserve attention: But where NewSpacers see the commercial exploitation and settlement of space as inevitable and as necessarily revolutionary, and where critical scholars may understand commercial space enterprise as mere fantasy obscuring profit motive and/or the imminent end of capitalism, I argue that we should attend to both these imaginaries because they naturalize what the future should look like and what the past has taught us.

Valentine, for one, favors a serious public dialog regarding commercial exploration and settlement between NewSpacers and critical scholars. He sees NewSpace entrepreneurs as determining the future for space settlers and for Earth’s inhabitants. It is important to determine if neoliberalism will drive astrosocial advancement. Which social problems manifest in extraterrestrial environments represents another important avenue of research in the future. How mitigations of social problems on Earth can be adapted to improve conditions in extrater-

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restrial societies, and vice versa, serves as another important consideration. Social scientists need to take these issues seriously and demand participation in the space community.

Conclusion The astrosociological approach to the study of social problems focuses squarely on the impact that outer space has on society, whether that society is on Earth, in a spacecraft, on a planet, moon, or an asteroid. Studying the effects of astrosocial phenomena – that is, space activity that affects societies – on Earth makes sense since they already affect the daily lives of millions, and much of this knowledge will prove helpful with the construction of social systems in other space environments. Astrosocial phenomena such as space scientific discoveries and technological innovations affect all segments of society including medicine, automobile and airline safety, firefighting, criminal justice, and consumer goods. Preparatory research for the advent of space societies should attract social scientists and humanists. Because space habitats, including space stations and surface dwellings on other planets, and spacecraft, are isolated and confined environments, social problems are likely, especially on long space missions. For example, group cohesion could suffer and factions could form. Teamwork could suffer and thus mission success may be compromised. Isolation and confinement represent stressful living conditions and therefore demand efforts to ensure cooperation based on organic solidarity. The capacity of astrosocial phenomena to affect social life on Earth and in outer space is unmistakable. These phenomena can mitigate social problems and also contribute to their creation and persistence. A satellite, for example, may be used to monitor dangerous weather patterns or spy on citizens. Humans will soon have the opportunity to create social systems beyond the Earth’s atmosphere, so focusing on positive effects and minimizing negative ones is important.

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What mix of social systems will emerge in various space environments and what can we learn from them? There is little question that the social problems of space societies will have roots in terrestrial problems. Therefore, as emphasized throughout this chapter, addressing ways to minimize disruptions, conflicts, and strains in social systems beyond Earth during the planning and training stage prior to launch is a primary objective. Whatever lessons regarding the mitigation of social problems that have been learned on Earth must be heeded in efforts to avoid them in outer space. The readiness of the crew is as important as the functionality of the equipment within the spacecraft or habitat. As such, behavioral simulations are vital. As much as is practically possible, providing future spacefarers with living conditions that simulate their destinations will provide them with important familiarity. While not perfect, it will allow them to learn what to expect and develop coping mechanisms. Self-reflection on meaning, purpose, and consequences of emotional, existential, and social problems may prevent increased levels of stress and as such suggest the value of self-monitoring and intervention techniques in training programmes. We have to distinguish between simulations and real space missions. We can use simulations to test these methods and systems although experimental conditions are quite different. (De la Torre et al. 2012, 595)

The use of simulations coupled with what is learned on shorter missions in orbital space stations and Earth analogs, such as living in polar bases and on submarines, that mimic traveling and settling in space, will serve as important training tools. Accumulating knowledge is a positive activity in its own right. Hearsey (2011, 36) states the academic potential of astrosociology quite well: As resources and individuals move farther away from Earth, we will see changes in

society. At the same time, decision-makers will need the best information when designing missions or developing the necessary infrastructure in which to support society’s appetite for outer space . . . Therefore, scholars must endeavor to embrace all avenue of inquiry and be able to provide the proper context to outer space’s influence on human civilization. Scholars of astrosociology will thus be able to explain and predict the occurrence of astrosocial phenomena, and thereby, fill in the missing gaps of knowledge that is endemic in other fields and disciplines.

The aforementioned reference to decision makers moves the focus to utilizing space assets to make space exploration more capable and successful and to endeavor to solve social problems. The former goal is the province of the STEM disciplines while the latter requires the participation of social scientists. Sociologists and other social and behavioral scientists interested in space issues need to work together. The multidisciplinary aspect of astrosociology provides a platform from which to study terrestrial and extraterrestrial social problems, and suggest and implement solutions. Knowledge gained in coping with terrestrial social problems can help anticipate problems in space societies. Reduction of the negative effects of social problems such as crime, social inequality, and inadequate adaptations to dangers in the local space environment, is vital for achieving livability, not just survivability in outer space. Astrosocial phenomena involving human interaction with space technology and science – including the application of space hardware for combating deviance and terrorism – are likely to increase their impact on Earth. Devoted study of these phenomena can help respond to the social problems discussed here Furthermore, devoted astrosociological research can provide tools for mitigating social problems in space-based societies. The future calls out for more astrosociologists, and the expectation is that academia will respond accordingly.

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Acknowledgments This chapter is dedicated to Albert A. Harrison who passed away in February 2015. He represents a giant in the social sciences who helped pave the way for the creation of the field of astrosociology, which this author introduced in 2004. He worked with this author right away in 2005 to promote astrosociology. A social psychologist, Dr. Harrison also became involved with the Astrosociology Research Institute almost immediately upon its inception in 2008 by becoming the first member of its Advisory Board. He spent decades during his career studying such topics as SETI (or the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), astrobiology, planetary defense, and the problems and potential solutions related to living in space aboard spacecraft and in space habitats. A tribute page exists at the following URL: www.astrosociology.org/AAHInMemoriam.html, which includes a list of his many works that represent a good starting point for anyone interested in pursuing astrosociology or simply becoming familiar with it.

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trial societies; and it can also include multiple nations negotiating with each other over one or more issues. Social environment The social space inside the spacecraft or habitat in which social interaction occurs (in contrast to the space or physical environment). Space assets Science, technology, and knowledge originally created or used for space exploration or space-related purposes. Space ecosystem The environment where humans reside along with animals, plants, other living things, and inanimate objects. Space environment All the elements that exist outside of the space habitat or spacecraft including the radiation, gravitational field; and if stationary, the surface features and effects of the moon, planet, comet, or asteroid (in contrast to social environment). Space habitat The physical structure in which the social environment exists. Space society The social system that exists in an extraterrestrial environment or location, which includes a population large enough to require a dominant culture and social institutions.

Glossary Applied astrosociology The use of space assets, including knowledge, in an attempt to mitigate social problems. Astrosocial change A subset of social and cultural change that relates in some way to forces associated with outer space that contribute to alterations in terrestrial or space societies, whether created by human beings such as conducting space exploration or created by “nature” such as space weather or a threatening asteroid. Astrosociology The scientific study of astrosocial phenomena (i.e., the social, cultural, and behavioral patterns related to outer space). Interplanetary relations The relationship between two societies separated by outer space, whether between a terrestrial and extraterrestrial society or two extraterres-

References Almár, Iván. 2011. SETI and astrobiology: The Rio scale and the London scale. Acta Astronautica 69(9–10):899–904. Bainbridge, William S. 1991. Goals in Space: American Values and the Future of Technology. Albany: State University of New York Press. Forthcoming. Societal impact of NASA on medical technology. In Historical Studies in the Societal Impact of Spaceflight, edited by Steven J. Dick. Washington, DC: National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Billingham John, Roger D. Heyns, David Milne, Stephen Doyle, Michael Klein, John Heilbron, Michael Ashkenazi, Michael A. G. Michaud, Julie Lutz, and Seth Shostak. 1999. Societal Implications of the Detection of an

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Extraterrestrial Civilization. Mountain View, CA: SETI Institute Press. Bluth, B. J. 1983. Sociology and space development. In Space Social Science, edited by T. Stephen Cheston. www.astrosociology.org/ Library/PDF/Sociology%20and%20Space %20Development.pdf. Caroti, Simone. 2011. Defining astrosociology from a science fiction perspective. Astropolitics 9(1):39–49. Connors, Mary M., Albert A. Harrison, and Faren R. Atkins. 1985. Living Aloft: Human Requirements for Extended Spaceflight. NASA SP-483. Washington, DC: NASA. De La Torre, Gabriel G., Berna van Baarsen, Fabio Ferlazzo, Nick Kanas, Karine Weiss, Stefan Schneider, and Iya Whiteley. 2012. Future perspectives on space psychology: Recommendations on psychosocial and neurobehavioural aspects of human spaceflight. Acta Astronautica 81:587–99. Dick, Steven J., ed. 2000. Many Worlds: The New Universe, Extraterrestrial Life, and the Theological Implications. Philadelphia: Templeton Foundation Press. Dickens, Peter. 2010. The humanization of the cosmos – to what end? Monthly Review 62(6):13–27. Dickens, Peter, and James Ormrod. 2007. Cosmic Society: Towards a Sociology of the Universe. New York: Routledge. 2008. Who really won the space race? Monthly Review 59(9):30–37. Finney, Ben. 1992. SETI and the two terrestrial cultures. Acta Astronautica 26:263–65. Finney, Ben, and Eric M. Jones, eds. 1984. Interstellar Migration and the Human Experience. Berkeley: University of California Press. Garan, Ron. 2013. Why spend money on space exploration when we have so many problems here on Earth? http://unreasonable.is/ why-spend-money-on-space-explorationwhen-we-have-so-many-problems-hereon-earth/. Grant, Andrew. 2013. Large meteor strikes underestimated. Science News 184(11):6. Harrison, Albert A. 2001. Spacefaring: The Human Dimension. Berkeley: University of California Press. 2005. Overcoming the image of little green men: Astrosociology and SETI. Paper presented at the annual California Sociological Association Conference, Sacramento, CA,

November 11. www.astrosociology.com/ Library/PDF/Submissons/Overcoming %20LGM_Harrison.pdf. 2007. Starstruck: Cosmic Visions in Science, Religion, and Folklore. New York: Berghahn Books. 2011. The search for extraterrestrial intelligence: Astrosociology and cultural aspects. Astropolitics 9(1):63–83. 2015. Astrobiology: Where science meets humanistic inquiry. The Journal of Astrosociology 1:11–30. www.astrosociology.org/ Library/PDF/Journal/JOA-Final/JournalOf Astrosociology-Vol1.pdf. Harrison, Albert A., John Billingham, Steven J. Dick, Ben Finney, Michael A. G. Michaud, Donald E. Tarter, Allen Tough, and Douglas A. Vakoch. 2000. The role of the social sciences in SETI. In When SETI Succeeds: The Impact of High-Information Contact, edited by Allen Tough, 71–86. Bellevue, WA: Foundation for the Future. Hearsey, Christopher M. 2011. The nexus between law and astrosociology. Astropolitics 9(1):1–5. Kanas, Nick. 2009. The psychology of space travel: Analog. Analog Science Fiction and Fact 129(10):33–41. Lefebvre, Henri. (1974) 1992. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald NicholsonSmith. New York: John Wiley. Lin, Patrick. 2006. Space ethics: Look before taking another leap for mankind. Astropolitics 4(3):281–94. Lockard, Elizabeth S. 2014. Human Migration to Space: Alternative Technological Approaches for Long-Term Adaptation to Extraterrestrial Environments. New York: Springer Theses. 2015. Beyond habitation in space: The need to design for human adaptation. The Journal of Astrosociology 1:69–79. Neal, Mark. 2014. Preparing for extraterrestrial contact. Risk Management 16(4):63–87. Neeley, Elizabeth. 2008. Doing sociology: Applied sociology for justice system policy reform. Sociological Origins 5(2):39–44, 47. Ogburn, William F. 1922. Social Change: With Respect to Cultural and Original Nature. New York: B. W. Huebsch. 1942. Inventions, populations, and history. In American Council of Learned Studies, Studies in the History of Culture. Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press.

astrosociology Palinkas, Lawrence A., and Peter Seudfled. 2008. Psychological effects of polar expeditions. Lancet 371(9607):153–63. Pass, Jim. 2004a. Inaugural essay: The definition and relevance of astrosociology in the twenty-first century (Part One: Definition, theory and scope). www.astrosociology.org/ Library/Iessay/iessay_p1.pdf. 2004b. Inaugural essay: The definition and relevance of astrosociology in the twenty-first century (Part Two: Relevance of astrosociology as a new subfield of sociology). www .astrosociology.org/Library/Iessay/iessay_p2 .pdf. 2004c. Space: Sociology’s forsaken frontier. Paper presented at the annual California Sociological Association Conference, Riverside, CA, October 16. www.astrosociology .org/Library/PDF/submissions/Space_ Sociology%27s%20Forsaken%20Frontier.pdf, 2006a. The potential of sociology in the space age: Developing astrosociology to fill an extraordinary void. Paper presented at Pacific Sociological Association Conference, Universal City, CA. www.astrosociology .org/Library/PDF/submissions/Potential %20of%20Astrosociology.pdf. 2006b. The astrosociology of space colonies: Or the social construction of societies in space. Space Technology and Applications International Forum (STAIF) Conference Proceedings, 813(1):1153–61. College Park, MD: American Institute of Physics (AIP). www.astrosociology.org/Library/PDF/ submissions/STAIF_Astrosociology%20of %20Space%20ColoniesPDF.pdf. 2006c. Applied astrosociology: The new imperative to protect the earth and human societies. Paper presented at the AIAA Space and Astronautics Forum and Exposition, San Jose, CA, September 20. www.astrosociology.org/Library/ PDF/submissions/Potential%20of %20Astrosociology.pdf. 2009. Pioneers on the astrosociological frontier: Introduction to the First Symposium on Astrosociology. Paper presented at the 1st Symposium on Astrosociology; Space Propulsion, and Energy Sciences International Forum (STAIF), Huntsville, AL. www.astrosociology.org/Library/PDF/ Pass2009_Frontier_SPESIF2009.pdf. 2011a. An astrosociological perspective on space-capable vs. spacefaring societies. Paper

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Sadeh, Eligar. Forthcoming. Impacts of the Apollo Program on NASA, the space community, and society. In Historical Studies in the Societal Impact of Spaceflight, edited by Steven J. Dick. Washington, DC: National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Sagan, Carl. 1973. The Cosmic Connection: An Extraterrestrial Perspective. 1st ed. Norwell, MA: Anchor Press. 1994. Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space. New York: Random House/ Ballantine. Shostak, Seth. 2009. Confessions of an Alien Hunter: A Scientist’s Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Washington, DC: National Geographic Society. Stuster, J. 1996. Bold Endeavors. Lessons from Polar and Space Exploration. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press. Tarter, Jill. 2001. The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics 39:511–48.

Tough, Allen. 1998. Positive consequences of SETI before detection. Acta Astronautica 42(10–12):745–48. Vakoch, Douglas A., and Y.-S. Lee. 2000. Reactions to receipt of a message from extraterrestrial intelligence: A cross-cultural empirical study. Acta Astronautica 46(10–12):737– 44. Valentine, David. 2012. Exit strategy: Profit, cosmology, and the future of humans in space. Anthropological Quarterly 85(4):1045–67. Vaughan, Diane. 1996. The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Whalen, David J. Forthcoming. Societal impacts of applications satellites. In Historical Studies in the Societal Impact of Spaceflight, edited by Steven J. Dick. Washington, DC: National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

CHAPTER 10

Prospects for the Sociological Study of Social Problems∗ Joel Best and Donileen R. Loseke

Abstract Although there is a large body of research examining aspects of specific social conditions that are evaluated as “social problems,” social constructionism is the only coherent theory of the concept of social problems. Therefore, while it is both possible and desirable that rival social theories may emerge and be useful in understanding one or another condition called a “social problem,” discussion of the prospects for social problems theory and the sociological study of social problems must concentrate on opportunities to extend the constructionist perspective. We explore differences between objectivist theories of social problems and social construction perspectives as well as varieties of constructionist perspectives. We then focus on the future: constructionism emerged within the particular historical and social context of American sociology during the 1970s, and these roots shaped the evolution of the theory. In order to become less ethnocentric and be capable of addressing the consequences of changing social and political conditions, constructionist studies of social problems must expand their geographic and temporal range, seek opportunities for collaboration across disciplines, develop new methodologies, build grounded theories upon existing research, be responsive to changes in the culture and social structure, and strive to reach publics beyond the confines of academia.

Prospects for the Sociological Study of Social Problems Our chapter title might be understood in two ways. First, it could be interpreted ∗

Much of this chapter appeared as “Pasado, presente y posibles futuros de las teorías construccionistas de los problemas sociales,” in Problemas sociales: una mirada desde la Sociología, edited by A. Trinidad and M. Sanchez (Madrid: Los Libros de la Catarata, 2015).

as predicting the societal conditions sociologists – or people generally in society – will consider social problems in the future: we might describe a dystopian future in which all manner of problematic chickens come home to roost – an overpopulated, polluted world sweltering under rising temperatures, and so on. In comparison, we will follow a second interpretation of the chapter title: our focus will be on how social problems theory, and the sociological study of social problems, 169

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should evolve in order to be a sound basis upon which to study social problems in the future. When we speak of social problems theory, we mean something specific. Sociologists in particular, citizens in general, evaluate many specific conditions as “social problems,” and sociologists often choose to study those conditions. For example, many people consider income inequality to be a social problem, and there is a large sociological literature examining the nature of income inequality, its causes and consequences, how various measures of income inequality show that there has been more or less income inequality at different historical moments, and so on. Such work might be published in the journal, Social Problems, and be cited in textbooks for social problems classes. However, our chapter is not concerned with such research because it does not show how it is that income inequality (or any other particular condition) is evaluated as a social problem, and therefore does not frame the topic within any theory of social problems. Although sociologists have been speaking of “social problems” since the late nineteenth century, the concept of “social problem” has not been important to sociological analyses (Schwartz 1997). That is, researchers have conducted countless studies of conditions evaluated as social problems, but the term has been applied to such a wide range of conditions – in our current era we hear about the social problems of racism, terrorism, unemployment and obesity – that it is difficult to imagine what the various phenomena called social problems have in common. This is why Malcolm Spector and John Kitsuse (1977) famously began Constructing Social Problems with the declaration: “There is no adequate definition of social problems within sociology, and there is not and never has been a sociology of social problems” (1). This was not a new criticism because there had been complaints about the utility of the social problems concept for decades

(Case 1924; Fuller and Myers 1941; Blumer 1971). The work of Spector and Kitsuse stands out, however, because they offered more than a comprehensive critique of the ways sociologists had failed to take the notion of social problems seriously: they also offered a detailed proposal for developing a theory of social problems. Their focus was on social construction and they argued that the only thing all of the diverse conditions described as “social problems” had in common was the subjective definition. What all diverse conditions shared was a common evaluation, an evaluation that the condition was a “social problem.” Hence, Spector and Kitsuse (1977, 75) offered a definition of the concept of social problem: “we define social problems as the activities of individuals or groups making assertions of grievances and claims with respect to some putative conditions.” This definition shifted attention away from the diverse conditions labeled social problems and onto the processes by which people defined some conditions – and only some conditions – as social problems. This perspective has led to hundreds of studies of different aspects of the social processes whereby some conditions are identified as addressed as “social problems.” Through the years, constructionism has evolved as the first coherent, elaborated theory of social problems, the first approach that tries to understand the definitional processes that all social problems have in common. In order to support our argument that the future of social problems theory most likely will continue to revolve around social constructionism, we will begin by discussing differences between theories attending to troublesome conditions in the environment and constructionist theories centering on subjective definitions. We will continue with describing two primary variations in constructionist frameworks and the theoretical issues raised by each of these. We then will identify a series of theoretical problems that require attention to move constructionist perspectives into the future.

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Conceptual Frameworks, Empirical Questions, and the Production of Knowledge It is most common for sociologists to examine the characteristics of particular conditions evaluated as “social problems.” Theories focusing attention on conditions often are called “objectivist” because they begin with assuming a reality (an objective nature) of troublesome conditions. There are multiple variants of objectivist conceptualizations of social problems: theories associated with structural functionalism, social disorganization, and value conflict were dominant when Spector and Kitsuse were writing, while conflict, critical (including versions of Marxism and feminism), and postmodern theories are currently dominant. While very different from one another, these theories are similar in that each approaches social-problemsas-conditions in the social environment and each contains a vision of what conditions are morally preferred and which are morally intolerable. Such frameworks lead to empirical questions with seemingly objective (measureable) answers: Who or what is causing this condition? Who is harmed? What harm is created? How can the condition be eliminated and the harm ended? In contrast, constructionist approaches bracket (ignore, put to the side) objective conditions and conceptualize moral intolerability as a subjective evaluation, rather than as a characteristic of a condition. Most clearly, constructionists do not argue that there is something wrong with studying social conditions that are designated social problems; this is an appropriate and important focus for sociologists’ energies. However, constructionists do argue that the only way to understand what all the phenomena called social problems have in common is to focus on the underlying definitional processes that lead some conditions – and only some conditions – to be evaluated and responded to as “social prob-

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lems.” This framework leads to questions about: r Meaning production, about who makes meaning and when and where meaning is authored: Where, when, and by whom can claims be made? What are the social/political/organizational characteristics of those who make claims about social problems? How do these characteristics influence the forms and contents of claims they make? How do groups of claimsmakers support or oppose the work of others? r Claim process, about the organizational and political foundations and the practical activities involved in producing and disseminating claims: What forms of organizational/political backing support claim production and dissemination? In what ways and with what consequences does this process depend upon established sources of power? What sorts of activities in what sorts of places produce claims likely to be evaluated as believable and important? r Claim circulation, about which claims circulate most widely and about where claims circulate: What are the characteristics of claims that circulate most widely? Where do particular kinds of claims circulate? What are relationships between where, when and how claims circulate and their ability to persuade audience members that a social condition exists, that it is morally intolerable, and that it must be changed? r Claim consumption and evaluation, about how audiences evaluate the believability and importance of particular claims: What particular social members are targets of which particular claims? What are the social/political/organizational characteristics of people who consume/ evaluate particular claims and how do these influence their evaluations of claim believability and importance? In what ways and with what consequences does information technology

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influence claim consumption and evaluation? r Claim contents: What social/political understandings do claims reflect, perpetuate, or challenge? What varying rhetorical forms are used in what arenas and for what audiences and with what consequences? In what ways and with what consequences do claims make visible a particular ideology? What cultural resources are drawn upon? In what ways and with what consequences do claim contents show the influences of other claimsmaking campaigns? While combinations of such questions can guide empirical studies, the theoretical interest in the social processes surrounding meaning making can lead to more general knowledge about social life. Studies informed by constructionism can lend insight to more abstract and complicated questions about social life such as: Why do publics worry about only some conditions creating objective harm and not worry about others that create as much – or more – harm? Why do publics sometimes worry about conditions not creating objective harm? Why does social policy often fail to eliminate social problems? How do public images of social problems reflect and perpetuate inequality? What kinds of conditions are associated with public worry and what kinds of conditions are associated with public apathy? In other words, studying the social problems process offers windows on broader questions about culture and social structure. In brief, objectivist and constructionist approaches to social problems lead to different sorts of questions and these, in turn, lead to different sorts of knowledge about the social world. Our primary point is that although the constructionist focus on meaning-making activities might seem esoteric, these approaches can lead to important knowledge about how meaning is created and what this meaning does in social life.

Varieties of Constructionist Frameworks In practice, constructionists interested in social problems were – and remain – united only in agreeing that examining social problems as objective conditions is theoretically troublesome. Within this agreement there were – and continue to be – major differences in both theoretical understandings as well as in the characteristics of research that follow from theoretical frameworks. When constructionist perspectives on social problems emerged in the United States in the 1970s, they appealed to two varieties of sociologists. First, there were those who thought of themselves as phenomenologists or ethnomethodologists (the intellectual descendants of Alfred Schutz, Harold Garfinkel, and Melvin Pollner). These sociologists were less interested in concrete settings than they were in examining social actors’ underlying reasoning. Second, constructionism appealed to ethnographers, symbolic interactionists, and qualitative researchers (reflecting the perspectives of George Herbert Mead, Herbert Blumer, Erving Goffman, and Howard S. Becker) who were most concerned with understanding the social processes involved in concrete settings (see the chapters in Holstein and Miller 1993 for examples of these divides in interests and their multiple theoretical consequences). It is not necessarily troublesome, nor even important, when a theoretical perspective attracts people for different reasons who use the perspective to pursue different intellectual agendas. In the case of constructionist perspectives on social problems, however, these differences did matter because they guided responses to Woolgar and Pawluch’s (1985) argument that actual constructionist studies involved ontological gerrymandering, meaning that analysts made assumptions about objective realities. According to Woolgar and Pawluch, empirical work failed to put into practice the central constructionist mandate to focus

prospects for the sociological study of social problems

on meaning-making activities and ignore objective conditions. Because Woolgar and Pawluch cited examples of how empirical work by even the most respected constructionists relied on references to objective conditions underlying the subjective processes of meaning making, they speculated that it was not possible to offer convincing constructionist arguments without referencing objective realities. This critique, coming from supporters of constructionist perspectives on social problems, led to many lively sessions at professional meetings and to a considerable number of publications. In the end, constructionists divided into two camps. The first, called strict constructionism, was promoted by those with phenomenological interests and forbade any reference – implicit or explicit – to objective reality (a key statement for strict constructionism is Ibarra and Kitsuse 1993). In contrast, the most popular variety of constructionism became known as contextual constructionism, a term for constructionism that remains tightly focused on the processes of meaning construction, yet which allows careful references to objective reality to enter into the analysis (a key statement for this perspective is Best 1993). While the debate between strict and contextual constructionists was lively, it eventually faded into the background as it became increasingly apparent that Woolgar and Pawluch were correct – it was not possible to actually do empirical sociological research that abided by the constraints of strict constructionism (Holstein and Gubrium 2008; Thibodeaux 2014). Empirical work following strict constructionist principles simply was not possible. In addition, the popularity of contextual constructionism also came from its capability to ask questions that were of obvious practical relevance. Within strict constructionism, for example, it is not possible to doubt the validity of a claim such as “each year, 2,000,000 children go missing,” and only a contextual constructionist could ask how, in the face of massive evidence, some people

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nonetheless believe that the “Holocaust did not happen.” Yet it remains: contextual constructionism leads to theoretical perplexities. In particular, once we argue that it is acceptable for analysts to incorporate some statements about “reality,” where do we draw the line on how many and what kind of statements will be allowed? If we allow analysts to compare claims and assess their truth value, what guidelines will determine “truth”? Observers continue to explore these questions. Harris (2010), for example, sketches a dimension stretching between two ideal types: interpretive social constructionism (essentially the strict constructionist stance) and objective social constructionism (essentially the contextual position). While drawing this distinction he nonetheless concedes: “Any report and any scholar will almost certainly exhibit both objective and interpretive tendencies” (138). Similarly, Weinberg (2014) seeks to “describe and defend a middle road between [strict] constructionist’s principled denials of any causal relationship between claimsmaking activities and the conditions those activities presumably concern and the theoretically moribund brands of objectivism . . . ” (115). Yet he ultimately adopts a contextual stance: we must acknowledge that provisionally objectivist efforts to identify the relevant social structural contexts of social problems theorizing is indispensable to the work of making sense of social problems theorizing. Social problems theorizing, then, cannot be understood as an ethereal, merely symbolic activity sealed off from the casual interactions that constitute objective social reality. (128)

These recent works by sociological theorists have tended to concede that contextual constructionism – the path actually adopted by most researchers – is a theoretically justifiable stance, whereas the strict constructionists’ goal of divorcing their analyses from all assumptions about reality, while a good idea in theory, is unattainable in

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reality. Hence, the continuing questions: In what ways does it matter if constructionism in practice cannot meet standards needed to be theoretically pure? Can theoretical consistency (as found in strict constructionism) and analytic possibilities and practical value (as found in contextual constructionism) be simultaneously achieved?

Prospects for a Hybrid Social Problems Theory In our current era, sociologists study social problems both as subjective definitions and as objective conditions. While each of these perspectives examines different aspects of social problems, some sociologists believe these two perspectives are in competition. Some argue that constructionist examinations should be completely abandoned and social problems should be examined only as objective conditions (Dello Buono 2015), while others have tried to develop synthetic theories of social problems that combine studies of social conditions with constructionist insights about social problems processes (e.g., Jones, McFalls, and Gallagher 1989; Jamrozik and Nocella 1998). With an interest in the ontology and epistemology of realist and constructionist philosophy, for example, Lau and Morgan (2014) explore possibilities for combining insights from constructionism, discourse theory, and the pragmatist critique of realism. Thibodeaux (2014) offers a recent example of an attempt to integrate constructionism with social conditions. He argues that constructionism “suffers from a lack of theoretical integrity” in that it cannot “clearly distinguish ‘claims-making activities’ from ‘objective social conditions,’” that are the topic of claims, concluding that “social conditions must be formally brought back into the study of social problems” (829–30). He specifically criticizes contextual constructionism: if the context in which an actor resides leads to the particular timing, forms, or influence of claims-making activities, claims-making activities are no longer the

causal variable in how social problems are defined. The form of the social environment and/or the contextually produced motivations (i.e. social conditions) are now the indirect causal variables of the definitions of social problems. (831)

This argument is not nearly as devastating as Thibodeaux seems to imagine, in that it confuses two distinct meanings of social conditions. Traditional definitions of social problems equated them with harmful conditions (e.g., poverty is social problem because it is harmful). Contextual constructionists do not deny the existence of a condition such as poverty, rather, they focus on how poverty is a social construction, a term defined and applied by particular people at particular times and in particular ways. Furthermore, the claim that poverty is a social problem is itself a social construction; people might agree on a definition of poverty, yet some might argue that poverty is not problematic, that it is an inevitable condition, whereas others might declare that is a problem that ought to be solved, yet have competing visions of what, exactly, should be done to resolve the problem. In other words, constructionists do not deny the reality of the condition of poverty, they simply focus their attention on the ways people make sense of this condition. Thibodeaux confuses this traditional view of social-problems-as-conditions with the conditions that underpin claimsmaking. To be sure, contextual constructionists seek to explain how and why claims emerge; they do not take claims for granted. When he speaks of the conditions that lead to claims, Thibodeaux assumes that this refers to the social-problem-as-condition, so that claims about poverty are caused by the condition of poverty. Yet this ignores the sorts of questions contextual constructionists actually ask about who makes claims, where and when claims are made and what characteristics lead claims to be evaluated as believable and important by particular audiences. The answers to these questions are all conditions in Thibodeaux’s second sense; they are “causal variables in

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the definitions of social problems,” yet none of these require examining the “objective characteristics” of the social condition of poverty. Understanding a campaign to construct poverty as a social problem (such as the War on Poverty in the 1960s in the United States), might lead an analyst to invoke several of these factors, any and all of which are likely to loom much larger in a constructionist explanation than any claims about poverty-as-a-social-condition. While there have been attempts to combine perspectives on social problems, these attempts have not attracted many adherents: constructionists see the effort to simultaneously evaluate social problems both as conditions and as processes as unworkable and unnecessary, nonconstructionists have little use for these models because their research almost never actually incorporates the concept of social problems. This is why we believe that future studies of “social problems” must rest upon the theoretical framework of social constructionism.

Moving Forward: Paths for Developing Constructionist Social Problems Theory Constructionism seems likely to remain the principal theory of social problems, yet this theoretical framework must continually develop because, without challenges and new ideas, scholarship – of all types – risks becoming stultified, failures to account for social change results in scholarship becoming irrelevant. The rest of this chapter focuses on ways to develop constructionist theories. With an analytic focus remaining squarely on understanding the definitional processes surrounding constructing public consciousness of social problems, we believe the future of constructionism lies in locating claimsmaking activity within its various social and political contexts. We begin by asserting that the constructionist perspective on social problems is limited due to the contexts of its origins and development in terms of place (United

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States), time (1970s), academic discipline (sociology), and methodology (qualitative case studies). We will discuss those and also our belief that constructionism would benefit from more attention to technological changes as well as to advancing the practical relevance of constructionist perspectives. Constructionist theories of social problems can be enriched by considering how each of these limitations can be overcome. Expanding Contexts of Place Most clearly, our current world increasingly is global and there is considerable evidence that images of social problems spread from one nation to another (see, e.g., the articles in Best 2001 and the discussion of various theories of global diffusion in Dobbin, Simmons, and Garrett 2007). It goes without saying that all the processes surrounding constructing images of social problems are contextualized within particular social and political environments. There are, for example, examinations of how the construction of abortion differs in the United States and Sweden (Linders 1998) and comparisons of United States and Australian domestic and family violence policy (Murray and Powell 2009). More distinctly comparative work is necessary and it is particularly important to examine how social constructionist theories developed in the United States reflect Western, democratic biases, as well as the theoretical consequences of these biases. For example, the natural history models favored by American constructionists (Blumer 1971; Spector and Kitsuse 1977; Best 2013) tend to envision social problems as beginning with social movements’ campaigns to influence policy makers, often by first gaining media attention. These models portray this process as a competition among claimsmakers to capture the limited attention of audiences, and they sometimes speak of a social problems marketplace (Best 2013; Hilgartner and Bosk 1988). These assumptions about the social problems process fit the political and social contexts of Western, democratic countries and they are less applicable in other countries

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where the state is stronger, the media less independent, and/or the social movement sector weaker. In Japan, for instance, state agencies are less responsive to social movements than to legal pressures. Japanese citizens seek internal change through lawsuits, and the government is also responsive to the obligations of international treaties (Ayukawa, 2001, 2015). As a consequence, constructionist analyses set in Japan often focus on the sequence of official redefinitions of problems and policies (Akagawa 2015). Thus, even though Japan is an established democracy, its social problems process is distinctively different from the model favored by American constructionists. As an authoritarian state working to minimize social protest, China offers a second example that calls into question American theorists’ ethnocentric assumptions. Far from having a lively social problems marketplace of competing claims, the Chinese state exerts a near monopoly on the power to make claims, and Chinese media coverage is highly controlled. Thus, to a large extent, analyses of social problems construction in China must seek to understand how claimsmaking operates despite state prohibitions (Adorjan and Yau 2015; Xu 2015). Of course, there also are many other subtle and not so subtle differences among nations that influence the social problems process. For example, different national bureaucratic structures and cultures for policy makers and social problems workers shape claimsmaking (Nissen 2015): while French claimsmakers often contrast their conceptions of social problems with American discourse (Saguy 2003, 2013), the American concept of “crisis” has migrated from the United States to Sweden where it influences the understandings of human service work˚ ers (Jacobsson and Akerström 2015). Analyses find that the diffusion of social problems is fostered by similarities in language, culture, and social structure, and made more difficult when differences between nations are greater (Best 2001). In brief, differences in the national cultures and social structures inevitably shape how social problems are constructed.

Because social problems theory developed in the United States, ethnocentric assumptions such as the importance of social movements in launching the social problems process, and competition among claims in the public arena, are embedded within the theory. Expanding constructionist research to a broader range of societies enriches theory by making visible the importance of structural and cultural influences on the social problems process. In addition, such research will offer interdisciplinary opportunities for constructionists to collaborate with specialists in geography, area studies, and so on. Expanding Contexts of Time The importance of structure and culture in the social problems process also can be examined by exploring the significance of time in the social problems process. So, for example, not only did constructionist social problems theory emerge in the United States (a particular place), it emerged in a particular time – the 1970s. This was in the immediate aftermath of the civil rights and antiwar movements, when movements for gay rights and women’s rights were gaining momentum, and an era when claimsmaking by social activists was especially visible. At a time when activists were bringing long-neglected issues to public attention, it was easy to argue that social problems were socially constructed. For example, some of the earliest case studies of social problems construction focused on the campaigns against drunk driving (the target of the well-publicized campaign by Mothers Against Drunk Driving) and rape and domestic violence (Gusfield 1981; Loseke and Cahill 1984; Rose 1977). Exploring the importance of historical contexts allows analysts to investigate the ways structural and cultural differences shape social problems processes. Yet the value of historical research is often obscured, because analysts tend to focus on current issues. Earlier constructions may be assumed to be irrelevant, sometimes the past has fallen out of the collective memory. Yet the past yields incredibly important

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information about the social problems process. Furedi (2015), for example, offers an examination of how the concept of authority has been constructed from early Greek civilization to the present; his analysis helps in understanding the prevalence and importance of claimsmakers’ references to “science” as authoritative support for claims. Once we recognize the importance of studies of the past, another possibility becomes visible: examining claims about the future. Becoming less ethnocentric requires examining social problems processes across both space and time. Here, there are opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration with historians and futurologists. Expanding Social Change Contexts While social constructionist scholars continue to cite Spector and Kitsuse’s (1977) book as the primary theoretical scaffolding for their analysis, the world of 1977 is not the world of 2017. Of the myriad social changes in the past several decades, changes in communications technology most certainly affect the social problems process. Foundational social construction theory and the earliest constructionist empirical work date from the late 1970s and early 1980s, a time when printed newspapers and newsmagazines were leading sources of news, when cable and satellite television were in their infancy, when personal computers were a novelty, and the Internet and smart phones did not exist. The communication channels on which claimsmakers depended were very different from those that operate in today’s world of smartphones, social media, tablet computers, and televisions receiving hundreds of channels. There are now far more arenas (Hilgartner and Bosk 1988) where social problems claimsmaking can occur. Thus, the assumptions that have guided constructionists’ thinking about how claims spread may be increasingly dated. Constructionists have not been oblivious to these changes. Case studies frequently derive their data from new media, such

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as online discourse (Best and Bogle 2014; Adorjan and Yau 2015). Maratea (2014, 2015) has called for more systematic attempts to assess the Internet’s effect on claimsmaking. But clearly, there is a great deal more to be done. For instance: while there are many more media outlets, traditional media – particularly print journalism – has been shrinking, there are fewer professional reporters following events and creating news. At the same time, there are a growing number of outlets that entertain and editorialize (Letukas 2014). How will this shape the abilities of the public and policy makers to assess social problems claims? Social change also is evident in that as the number of media outlets swells, the audience attracted to any particular outlet is likely to shrink, and to become more homogeneous. Audience segmentation leads to targeting particular audiences, defined by age, gender, ethnicity, religion, political orientation, and so on. This raises the prospects of claims being increasingly tailored for specific types of people thought likely to share some concern. How will claimsmaking change in this new media environment? Technologies also influence social activism. For example, in recent years, there have been reports of youth movements using social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, to organize, even in nations where the authorities seek to limit dissent (Adorjan and Yau 2015). As the computing power of smartphones grows, it will be possible to obtain immediate information about almost any topic, anywhere, at any time. How will more interconnected societies affect social problems claimsmaking? These are just examples of how social change influences the social processes of meaning making. As it becomes easier and faster to disseminate information, the social problems process cannot help but change and these changes will demand attention from analysts. Here, there will be rich opportunities for constructionists to collaborate with scholars in communications. Exploring the consequences of social change also leads to making use of developments within sociology. One of the ways

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sociology evolves is to focus closely on previously neglected topics. Recent examples include the rise of research specialties in the sociology of emotion and in animals and society. As these new research areas emerged, social problems analysts have found ways to combine studies of the construction of problematic emotions (e.g., Berns 2011) and animals (e.g., Jerolmack 2008). Remaining attuned to such developments within sociology offers a way to extend work on social problems. Expanding Disciplinary Contexts Academic disciplines tend to insularity and this certainly is true for sociological scholars of social problems who invariably cite the 1977 publication of Constructing Social Problems by Spector and Kitsuse as the beginning of the perspective. Yet that same year, Murray Edelman, a political scientist, published a distinctly constructionist vision of politics titled Political Language: Words that Succeed and Policies That Fail (Edelman 1977), followed a decade later by Constructing the Political Spectacle (Edelman 1988). These books are foundational texts for political scientists who, while rarely using the term “social problems,” are most certainly engaged in examining conditions evaluated as troubling and in need of repair. The insularity of academic disciplines leads to the unfortunate situation that sociologists rarely draw upon the insights of Edelman (and other political scientists), and political scientists rarely draw upon the work of Spector and Kitsuse (and other sociologists). In the same way, there is a vital community of scholars within academic disciplines such as political science and social policy who have developed constructionist approaches to policy development. Scholars such as Deborah Stone (1997), Frank Fischer (2003), and David Rochefort and Roger Cobb (1994) have written foundational works for political scientists and policy analysts. Yet, again, the insularity is mutual: sociological constructionists rarely draw inspiration from these works, and

these works rarely incorporate Spector and Kitsuse or the empirical studies deriving from their theory. Nor is political science the only example of disciplinary insularity. Social construction perspectives are found throughout a wide range of scholarly disciplines. Constructionist work is being done in social work, psychology, communications, public health, and a variety of other disciplines (for examples of the variety of constructionist frameworks associated with various disciplines, see Burr 2015; Hjelm 2014). Clearly, there are opportunities to deepen the perspective by moving outside the disciplinary bounded knowledge of sociology. Expanding Methodological Contexts While the logic of inductive, qualitative sociological research is that analysts can build grounded theory by comparing multiple studies (Glaser and Strauss 1965; Charmaz 2013), there have been relatively few efforts to link the findings of countless social problems studies in ways creating more general theoretical insights (Best 2015). The literature on the social construction of social problems contains a few textbooks that offer broad, synthetic overviews of the perspective (Best 2013; Loseke 2003), and hundreds of case studies, but very little intermediary work attempting to link particular case studies findings to establish more general theoretical knowledge. As a consequence, case studies generally go no further than demonstrating what already is known about the social problems process. It is time to extend the constructionist perspective by building upon the existing body of case studies. In the same way, we discussed how changes in communication technology have changed the social problems process. These new data also should be exploited for understanding the social problems process. These new forms of data also raise new questions. For example, “big data” can be used as data, it also can be explored as a topic: Sanders, Christensen, and Weston (2015), for example, explore how criminal justice

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organizations use “big data” to construct the problem of crime. Many of the same changes in communication technology have given constructionists new analytic tools. In 1977, when Constructing Social Problems appeared, researchers were essentially limited to printed resources such as card catalogs, periodical indexes, and the like. Research was slow and it was difficult to gain access to more than a limited range of sources. The emergence of digital media has made possible many kinds of methodological innovations, and we find different methodologies being applied in different studies. There are clearly opportunities for identifying a set of best practices for constructionist research.

the public has never been more aware of and interested in the nature of claimsmaking. Beginning in the aftermath of the Second World War, critics began offering analyses of the organization of political campaigns and social movements, showing how public issues were constructed. Fascination with efforts to shape claims – the work of pollsters, spin-doctors, and the like – continues to grow. Access to detailed information about how issues are promoted has never been greater. Obviously, most people outside the fairly narrow circle of scholars of social constructionism do not know of these discussions. It is the task of sociologists to develop forms of communication that are accessible to general citizens.

Expanding Relevance Contexts

The Need for Developing Constructionist Social Problems Theory

As the new century began, the American Sociological Association’s president, Michael Burawoy (2005), called for a public sociology, a sociology that would work more diligently to be relevant to publics and politics. While this inspired lively debate (Christensen 2013), Adorjan (2013, 2) laments that “social constructionism has remained absent from the debates over public sociology.” He continues by imagining a variety of reasons why constructionists might hesitate to enter public debates: “Sociologists routinely under-estimate the ability of publics to appreciate the often complex forms of knowledge that emerges from interpretive approaches within sociology . . . [constructionists] should not be surprised by either liberal or conservative usurpation of their insights . . . sociologists [may] become more explicitly activists and besmirch their professional credentials” (18). Certainly most contributions to social problems theory are aimed at audiences of academic professionals, the dense and highly abstract language found in many constructionist writings makes them unavailable to all but the already initiated. Yet, this hardly means that nonsociologists are incapable to understanding and benefiting from constructionist analyses. If anything,

Scholarly activity depends upon momentum. Theories need to keep developing, for when researchers stop asking new questions, it becomes difficult to make scholarly contributions to a specialty, and analysts will shift their attention to more promising topics. Every scholarly discipline’s history reveals once-prominent topics that have since fallen out of intellectual fashion. It is not enough that the constructionist perspective offers sociology’s only coherent theory of social problems, or that it has inspired hundreds of case studies of social problems processes. To continue to thrive, the perspective must continue to develop. This chapter has sketched some ways this might occur. The point is that there is no reason for the constructionist theoretical framework to stop developing. Constructionism offers a relatively large tent, big enough to accommodate both those who remain committed to phenomenological principles and microsociology, and those who adopt varieties of symbolic interactionism to study larger social processes. It offers analysts opportunities to develop both sympathetic appreciations

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and critiques of claimsmaking campaigns. It can – but need not – be used to address audiences outside sociology. There are, in short, multiple ways the approach might be extended. Constructionism has demonstrated that there are good reasons to take the concept of social problems seriously, that social problems is indeed a fruitful research topic for sociologists, but we must not be afraid to expand our theoretical and methodological boundaries. Constructionists should welcome the emergence of rival theories of social problems. Competing theoretical paradigms often inspire advances. For instance, the sociology of social movements has benefited from interactions among adherents of the theories of resource mobilization, framing, and identity politics. Unfortunately, in practice, constructionists continue to be the only sociologists interested in developing and applying a theory of social problems, so there is too little cross-fertilization of ideas. While constructionism seems likely to remain the principal theory of social problems, this should not justify complacency. Constructionism needs to continue to develop because, without challenges and new ideas, scholarship – of all types – risks becoming not relevant.

Glossary Constructionism, contextual Constructionist analysis that focuses on the social process of meaning making yet which allow careful and limited references to social conditions. Constructionism, strict Constructionist analysis that seeks to avoid any and all references to social conditions. Social constructionism Theoretical approach that focuses on the social processes by which meanings and moral evaluations of objects, events, and people in the world are created. Social problems process The activities of individuals and groups that create public understandings of particular conditions as social problems.

Social problems theory Theory that seeks to understand what phenomena considered social problems have in common.

References Adorjan, M. 2013. Igniting constructionist imaginations: Social constructionism’s absence and potential contribution to public sociology. American Sociologist 44(1):1–22. Adorjan, M., and A. Yau. 2015. Resinicization and citizenship in Hong Kong: Youth, cyberspace and claims-making. Qualitative Sociology Review 11(2):160–78. Akagawa, M. 2015. Regulating pornocomic sale for juveniles in Japan: Cycles and path dependence of a social problem. Qualitative Sociology Review 11(2):62–73. Ayukawa, J. 2001. The United States and smoking problems in Japan. In How Claims Spread: Cross-National Diffusion of Social Problems, edited by J. Best, 215–42. Hawthorne, NY: Aldine de Gruyter. 2015. Claims-making and human rights in domestic and international spheres. Qualitative Sociology Review 11(2):110–21. Berns, N. 2011. Closure: The Rush to End Grief and What It Costs Us. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Best, J. 1993. But seriously folks: The limitations of the strict constructionist interpretation of social problems. In Reconsidering Social Constructionism: Debates in Social Problems Theory, edited by J. A. Holstein and G. Miller, 129–50. Hawthorne, NY: Aldine de Gruyter. ed. 2001. How Claims Spread: Cross-National Diffusion of Social Problems. Hawthorne, NY: Aldine de Gruyter. 2013. Social Problems. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton. 2015. Beyond case studies: Expanding constructionist frameworks. Qualitative Sociology Review 11(2):18–33. Best, J., and K. A. Bogle. 2014. Kids Gone Wild: From Rainbow Parties to Sexting, Understanding the Hype over Teen Sex. New York: New York University Press. Blumer, H. 1971. Social problems as collective behavior. Social Problems 18(3):298–306. Burawoy, M. 2005. For public sociology. American Sociological Review 70(4):4–28.

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Holstein, J. A., and G. Miller, eds. 1993. Reconsidering Social Constructionism: Debates in Social Problems Theory. Hawthorne, NY: Aldine de Gruyter. Ibarra, P. K., and J. I. Kitsuse. 1993. Vernacular constituents of moral discourse: An interactionist proposal for the study of social problems. In Reconsidering Social Constructionism: Debates in Social Problems Theory, edited by J. A. Holstein and G. Miller, 25– 58. Hawthorne, NY: Aldine de Gruyter. ˚ Jacobsson, K., and M. Akerström. 2015. The crisis model: A socially useful psychologism. Qualitative Sociology Review 11(2):232–45. Jamrozik, A., and L. Nocella. 1998. The Sociology of Social Problems: Theoretical Perspectives and Methods of Intervention. New York: Cambridge University Press. Jerolmack, C. 2008. How pigeons became rats: The cultural-spatial logic of problem animals. Social Problems 55(1):72–94. Jones, B. J., J. A. McFalls Jr. and B. J. Gallaher III. 1989. Toward a unified model for social problems theory. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 19(3):337–56. Lau, R W. K., and J. Morgan. 2014. Integrating discourse, construction and objectivity: A contemporary realist approach. Sociology 48(3):573–89. Letukas, L. 2014. Primetime Pundits: How Cable News Covers Social Issues. Lanham, MD: Lexington. Linders, A. 1998. Abortion as a social problem: The construction of “opposite” solutions in Sweden and the United States. Social Problems 45(4):488–509. Loseke, D R. 2003. Thinking about Social Problems. 2nd ed. Hawthorne, NY: Aldine de Gruyter. Loseke, D. R., and S. E. Cahill. 1984. The social construction of deviance: Experts on battered women. Social Problems 31(3):296– 310. Maratea, R. J. 2014. The Politics of the Internet: Political Claimsmaking in Cyberspace and Its Effect on Modern Political Activism. Lanham, MD: Lexington. 2015. Online claims-making: The NRA and gun advocacy in cyberspace. Qualitative Sociology Review 11(2):144–59. Murray, S., and A. Powell. 2009. “What’s the problem?” Australian public policy

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constructions of domestic and family violence. Violence against Women 15(5):532–52. Nissen, M. 2015. Social workers and the sociological sense of social problems: Balancing objectivism, subjectivism and social construction in social work practice. Qualitative Sociology Review 11(2):216–31. Rochefort, D. A., and R. W. Cobb, eds. 1994. The Politics of Problem Definition: Shaping the Policy Agenda. Kansas: University of Kansas Press. Rose, V. M. 1977. Rape as a social problem: A byproduct of the feminist movement. Social Problems 25(1):75–89. Saguy, A. C. 2003. What Is Sexual Harassment? From Capitol Hill to the Sorbonne. Berkeley: University of California Press. 2013. What’s Wrong with Fat? New York: Oxford University Press. Sanders, C., T. Christensen, and C. Weston. 2015. Constructing crime in a database: Big data and the mangle of social problems work. Qualitative Sociology Review 11(2):180– 95.

Schwartz, H. 1997. On the origin of the phrase “social problems.” Social Problems 44(2):276– 96. Spector, M., and J. I. Kitsuse. 1977. Constructing Social Problems. Menlo Park, CA: Cummings. Stone, D. 1997. Policy Paradox: The Art of Political Decision Making. New York: W. W. Norton. Thibodeaux, J. 2014. Three versions of constructionism and their reliance on social conditions in social problems research. Sociology 48(4):829–37. Weinberg, D. 2014. Contemporary Social Constructionism: Key Themes. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Woolgar, S., and D. Pawluch. 1985. Ontological gerrymandering: The anatomy of social problems explanations. Social Problems 32(3):214–27. Xu, J. 2015. Claims-makers vs. non-issue makers: Media and the construction of motorcycle ban problems in China. Qualitative Sociology Review 11(2):122–41.

Pa r t I I

HISTORICAL AND THEORETICAL ISSUES IN THE STUDY OF SOCIAL PROBLEMS



CHAPTER 11

Settlement Sociology Patricia Lengermann and Gillian Niebrugge

Abstract This chapter introduces the reader to settlement sociology, a school that grew out of one of the most radical inventions of the Progressive Era (1880–1920) – the social settlements. We develop our analysis of this school of sociology in two parts: one, the invention of the social settlement as a response to witnessing human pain; two, the development of settlement sociology as a system of theory, research, and advocacy whose project was to understand and reform the structures that produced this pain. The chapter explicates this theory in terms of key concepts from the work of Jane Addams (1860–1935) and Robert A. Woods (1865–1925) – disconnection, the neighborly relation, the power to combine, ethics, belated ethics, and the social ethic. It overviews the extraordinary body of research the settlements produced following this theory. Settlement sociology was the creation of one of the most radical social inventions of the Progressive Era (1880–1920) – the social settlements, voluntary organizations developed by citizens in response to what was widely understood as “the social problem,” and typically organized as residences where privileged class individuals “settled” for extended periods of time in disadvantaged urban neighborhoods, participating as neighbors in the concerns, values, and occasions of the area, providing help to individuals and support addressing community problems. While individual settlements would study and seek to ameliorate many specific social problems (hunger, alcoholism, old-age destitution, overcrowded

and unsanitary housing, worker exploitation, child labor, recurring health epidemics), the settlement movement united in seeing these problems as flowing from an overarching “social problem”: a growing fragmentation of society, arising from capitalist industrialization and its concomitant features of rapid urbanization and dramatic, highly visible inequalities in the distribution of the wealth. Together these changes posed a practical and ethical crisis characterized by sociologist Beatrice Webb as “poverty amidst riches” (Webb 1926, 216). This view of the social problem, as one of an extreme stratification in wealth distribution and consequently, in standards of living, locates the settlements’ discussion of 185

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social problems squarely in what contemporary social problems scholarship would describe as the structural and materialist explanatory framework rather than in that of the constructionist emphasis on group processes and contested vantage points that result in phenomena being defined as social problems (Schneider 1985; Weinberg 2009). Above all, as we shall see, the settlement sociologists offered a focus on sociology as the study of social problems, understood as socially produced and thus reversible, ameliorable causes of human pain. We develop our analysis of this school of sociology in two parts: one, the invention of the social settlement idea as a response to witnessing human pain; two, the development of settlement sociology as a system of theory, research, and advocacy whose project was to understand and reform the structures that produced this pain.

The Invention of the Social Settlement Encounters with the Social Problem The invention of the social settlement began in Great Britain and the United States in the mid-1880s in response to widespread concerns about what was termed “the social problem,” widely understood as the horrific living conditions among the poorer classes in the industrializing economies of the West – even as this new capitalist economy was working very well for others. That response in many cases was triggered by a visceral, that is a deep, physically experienced emotional shock at the repellent conditions in urban slums, that was felt by middle class and privileged class visitors – government officials, novelists, journalists, and academics, some of whom went on to become leaders for reform. One evidence of this repellence may lie in the focus, which appears in many accounts, on the lack of provision for bodily functions like eating and defecating. One of the earliest such responses was Friedrich Engels’s The Conditions of the

Working Class in England 1844 which makes its way into settlement literature through its standard English translation by Florence Kelley (1892), a resident at both Hull-House in Chicago and the Henry Street Settlement in New York City. Engels writes of one section of Manchester, “Right and left a multitude of covered passages lead from the main street into numerous courts, and he who turns in thither gets into a filth and disgusting grime, the equal of which is not to be found . . . In one of these courts there stands directly at the entrance . . . a privy without a door, so dirty that the inhabitants can pass into and out of the court only by passing through foul pools of stagnant urine and excrement” (45). Seven decades later, Chicago settlement sociologists Edith Abbott and Sophinisba Breckinridge reported equally squalid conditions in “Housing Conditions in Chicago, Ill: Back of the Yards” (1911). Similar horror is present in the memoir of Henrietta Barnett, co-founder with her husband the Reverend Samuel Barnett, of the world’s first settlement, Toynbee Hall, in London’s East End. She writes, “I can still recall my emotions when summoned to a sick woman in Castle Alley . . . where the houses three storeys high, were hardly 6 feet apart” and the woman was lying “on a sacking covered with rags . . . in this stinking alley, in a tiny, dirty room, all the windows broken and stuffed up; . . . the sanitary accommodation, pits in the cellars.” Barnett’s recoil intensifies on discovering that “a fat, beer-sodden woman” was holding up a tiny newborn and demanding “the mother comforts like” for it and its mother (Barnett and Barnett 1909, 241–42). While some visitors surely retreated from the experience they encountered, others, including Mrs. Barnett, managed over a lifetime to carry the memory with them as an impetus to action rather than a caution to avoidance. Jane Addams (1910) recalls, in her classic statement of settlement life Twenty Years at Hull-House, her 1885 tour of the poverty-ridden East End of London when she saw from the top of an omnibus poor

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people waving their arms, bidding frantically for spoiled cheap food. She writes, “I have never since been able to see a number of hands held upward, even . . . when they belong to a class of chubby children who wave them in eager response to a teacher’s query, without a certain revival of this memory, a clutching at the heart reminiscent of the despair and resentment which seized me then” (68). Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch, founder of the Greenwich House Settlement in New York City, recounts how in the late 1880s the shock of an encounter with poverty changed her life course, when as an undergraduate at Boston College, as part of a volunteer activity of outreach to the poor, she was assigned: a club of girls called the Primrose Club. This was my first opportunity to know colored people well and also my first chance to lead a club. The members invited me to their homes, and when I saw the primitive wooden houses in the rear of Beacon Hill, with yard toilets and no bathing facilities, I was amazed. “Who owns this house?” I asked the mother of one of the club girls, and in reply I discovered that the owner was a senior warden in one of Boston’s oldest parishes! . . . How could this be? I now began to be more interested in social studies and less absorbed in classical literature . . . [I] had to find out for myself as best I could what was the matter with my colored friends’ houses. (Simkhovitch 1938, 40–41)

Simkhovitch went on to graduate work, to study Spencer and Marx, and to form collegial relationships with Beatrice and Sidney Webb. The issue of improving the housing of the poor would be for her a lifelong project. Collective Responses to the Social Problem The decisions that led to the invention of the settlement as a means for ameliorating the social problem was, in large measure, a rejection of normative understandings of and practical responses to poverty.

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In the 1883 address in which he first publicly formulated the idea of a social settlement, the Reverend Samuel Barnett offered a candid assessment of current public apathy toward the problem: “‘SOMETHING must be done’ is the comment which follows the tale of how the poor live. Those who make the comment have, however, their business, their pieces of ground to see, their oxen to prove, their wives to consider, and so there is among them a general agreement that the ‘Something’ must be done by Law or by Societies” (Barnett [1883] 1915, 96). In other words, the public had assigned the handling of the poor to the state and to private charity groups. But by the mid-1880s, both the state and the charity societies were increasingly invested in developing strategies for controlling the poor and restricting the amount of aid. This approach stands in marked contrast to what Walter Trattner (1979, 47) describes as the attitudes of humankind toward poverty for literally hundreds of years, when beginning in “the Middle Ages, evidence of need overrode all else. It was generally assumed that need arose from misfortune for which society, in all justice, should assume responsibility. The individual’s right to public assistance was firmly established. The Elizabethan Poor Law of 1601 endorsed that right . . . and acknowledged the existence of involuntary unemployment.” But with the new prosperity of the Industrial Revolution that began in England in the mid-1700s, people came to feel that productivity was a possibility for everyone and, therefore, people who did not make enough to support themselves and their families were deficient in character. This attitude was much exacerbated by urbanization which segregated the poor in the cheapest housing, creating ghettos or slums, transforming what in a village would have been “a poor neighbor” into an anonymous “beggar.” The State, at all levels, passed stricter and stricter measures to control and limit poor relief. In the United States in particular these controls and limitations took the form

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of vastly reducing and almost forbidding “outdoor relief,” that is, relief given to persons who remained at large in the society, and of vastly increasing the percentage of “indoor relief,” that is, relief given to persons who were forced to reside in state-run institutions – poorhouses, workhouses, asylums, orphanages. Here expenditures could be controlled, aid recipients forced to work, and the truly disabled warehoused out of sight. Similarly, voluntary charity societies began to adopt the principles of “scientific charity,” a practice based in distinguishing between the “deserving” and the “undeserving” poor, directing the latter to cultivate self-reliance and matching the former to appropriate charity providers. This effort was coordinated and supervised by the Charity Organization Societies begun in London in 1869 and started in the United States in Buffalo, New York in 1877. By 1900 there were some 138 charity organizations in the United States, the core of their work carried out by a volunteer “friendly visitor” whose job was to investigate the person in need, in their home, to assess what kind of aid they could use and deserved. Yet despite these efforts by governments and voluntary groups at classification and control, poverty continued to increase and become more visible, partly because of urban congestion. It was out of this complex of contradictory, ineffectual and punitive policies, that the settlement was born, as a new approach to “the social problem.” Toynbee Hall: The First Social Settlement In 1883, the Reverend Samuel Barnett first formally proposed the idea of the settlement in a paper read at St. John’s College, Oxford in which he stated its basic principle of reconstituting a relation between rich and poor, a principle which remained foundational to all subsequent iterations of the settlement worldwide: “Many have been the schemes of reform I have known, but, . . . I would say that none touches the root of the evil which does not bring helper and helped into friendly relations” (Barnett

[1883] 1915, 104). To effect this relationship between helper and helped Barnett then called for the creation of “settlements” in poor districts where privileged individuals might have extended periods of residence and social interaction with poor neighbors. Led by a director familiar with the neighborhood, the “residents,” composed of college men and professional men from the City, would use their specific talents to better the lives of the poor neighbors by serving in local government; offering classes, organizing clubs and discussion groups; bringing people together through a variety of entertainments and offering assistance to people in trouble with law or sickness or personal distress. This experience would give the privileged class person a clearer knowledge of the lives of the poor, making them an informed voice in civic discussions about reform, and the settlement’s disadvantaged neighbors, in turn, would acquire a greater knowledge of the world beyond the neighborhood, and the possibility of a more enriched life. Barnett’s idea took form as he and his wife Henrietta encouraged Oxford University students in the founding of “Toynbee Hall” named in honor of Oxford economic historian Arnold J. Toynbee whose study of economic change convinced him that the conditions of the working class were not the result of “economic laws” but of specific actions that could be reversed by other actions – a conviction that led Toynbee to become personally involved in the plight of workers living in the Whitechapel area of East London and to encourage university students to teach classes there. When the search for a director failed, Barnett and his wife agreed that he should take that office and they moved quickly, through a committee of Oxford students, to raise money for the acquisition of the large Industrial School next to St. Jude’s church, converting it into housing for settlers and rooms appropriate for classes, meetings, and parties. With advice from Barnett, the residents found ways to be of service – as teachers, committee members, counselors,

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and friends to their neighbors in the district, achieving in the first two decades many of the goals Barnett had originally envisioned: a range of classes for adults (which would become the Workers’ Education Association, the largest system of university extension lectures in Britain); weekly “Tuesday” debates on current events; dinner parties where residents and people from the district mingled as neighbors, a Poor Man’s Lawyer Service, providing free legal aid; art exhibits (the Whitechapel Art Gallery would open in 1901 with an exhibit that drew 206,000 people); trips abroad with neighbors (which led to the Toynbee Travelers Club); and a steady flow of privileged class residents who would go on to make social policy in Britain including William Beveridge, author of the 1942 report that laid the blueprint for the British welfare state and Clement Atlee, later leader of the Labor Party and Prime Minister. Settlements in the United States From its beginning, Toynbee Hall attracted international interest and imitation (see Koengeter and Schroeer 2013), most notably in the United States. In 1886, two years after Toynbee Hall opened, Stanton Coit, after a brief stay there, started the first American settlement known first as The Neighborhood Guild and later as University Settlement in New York City’s Lower East Side. In 1889, also impressed by Toynbee Hall, Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr opened what became the archetype and dominant US social settlement, Hull-House, in Chicago’s desperately poor nineteenth ward. Other settlements followed rapidly: Vida Scudder, Jean Fine and other Smith College graduates, opened the College Settlement at 95 Rivington Street, in New York City (1889); W. J. Tucker and Robert Woods, Andover House (later South End House) in Boston (1891); Lillian Wald, the Henry Street Settlement on the Lower East Side (1893); Graham Taylor, The Chicago Commons on that city’s West Side (1894). By 1897 there were 74 American settlements; 103 by 1900; 204 by 1905; and 413 in 1910.

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In 1911 Robert A. Woods and Albert J. Kennedy published The Handbook of Settlements which attempted to “present an outline of the material facts about every settlement in the United States” (Woods and Kennedy 1911, v). They claimed to have visited most of them, discussing “their development and program . . . with their leading representatives” (v). The Handbook shows the 413 US settlements were in 33 states and Hawaii, with particularly dense concentrations in the major cities – New York, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, San Francisco. Toynbee Hall’s organization seems to have been roughly followed – a designated building housing residents and community activities, a director and residents supported in a variety of ways – jobs, independent incomes, stipends donated by wealthy donors. Poorer settlements may have had volunteer staff rather than residents. The American settlements developed their action along five lines of effort: informal activities of neighborliness – parties, conversations, loaning and borrowing of household items, sharing news, helping out person-to-person; more formal arrangements like classes for all ages and outings; the development of permanent structures – both organizations and buildings – within the neighborhood, like cooperative housing or a café offering nutritionally balanced meals; the creation of structural arrangements beyond the neighborhood – building national organizations (like the Consumers’ League), lobbying for government action through laws and through the creation of positions (like the Children’s Bureau or the Juvenile Court System), and research to document and analyze painful conditions of the neighborhood, the city, and the society. Their achievements in these efforts are voluminous. Some sense of them is given in the engaging memoirs and biographies of the major leaders (Addams 1910; Simkhovitch 1938; E. Woods 1929) and the 1911 Handbook. There were important differences between the American settlements and Toynbee Hall (see Reinders 1982), especially

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in their gender composition. Toynbee Hall was a basically masculine undertaking, despite the important presence of Mrs. Barnett, who seems to have accepted traditional gender roles. American settlements were an enterprise undertaken largely by women. The Handbook of 1911 shows 1,077 women residents and 322 men; 5,718 women volunteers and 1,594 men; 216 women as head residents and 85 men. The women who shaped the American settlements were upper-middle-class women – with some working-class women who had somehow fought their way to a college education. This situation held true for both white and black women in the settlement movement – but racism’s effects on material resources meant for black women, like Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Anna Julia Cooper, the settlement was a volunteer activity rather than a career (Cooper 1913; Deegan 2002). US settlements offered this first generation of college-educated women the possibility of meaningful civic activity in a world which had both educated them and denied them any sphere in which to use that education (Fitzpatrick 1990). Addams describes the women’s situation, in her senior essay at Rockford Female Seminary in 1881, interpreting the story of Cassandra as a problem for all women: “to be in the right and always to be disbelieved and rejected.” She argues that women must find a way to attain “what the ancients called auethoritas [sic], right of the speaker to make themselves heard” (Addams 1881, 37). For settlement women, this quest for auctoritas meant that not simply the settlement but settlement sociology, with its focus on both the practical and analytic dimensions of “the social problem,” was the path to public recognition. American settlements also differed from Toynbee Hall in the ways that class differences played out. The Barnetts and Toynbee Hall residents brought to their work with people poorer than themselves an acceptance of privilege, while American settlement workers were ill-at-ease with what they experienced as unearned advantage. This difference is further complicated by

the fact that US settlements with large immigrant populations, navigated across differences in nationality, ethnicity, race and language while Toynbee Hall ministered primarily to the English poor, who shared a sense of national heritage and a common language. Perhaps the most fundamental consequence of the different class configurations shaping Toynbee Hall and the American settlements can be seen in the ways they leveraged the state for changes on behalf of the poor. Toynbee Hall residents came from the British elite class, the students and alumni of Oxford and Cambridge, who could through their networks shape national legislation directly. In a more differentiated political system, middle-class women leading American settlements had no such political access. Their strategy for change required an appeal to public opinion, based on empirical accounts of poverty’s effects – in other words in social movement mobilization. Finally, as the next section explains, the American settlements were more oriented to sociological interpretation of the social problem than were the British.

A Settlement Sociology In the United States, the settlements’ engagement with “the social problem” led them to the development of a distinctive and fully elaborated sociology. Indeed, between 1890 and 1920, as sociology took form in the United States, the settlements were as likely as the academy to be seen by the public as the primary base of the new discipline. For it was the settlement residents who produced research on poverty and its consequences in a steady stream of formal reports, journal articles, monographs and public addresses (see “Research and Advocacy” below). This turn to sociology differentiates American settlements from their British counterparts and can be accounted for by six factors: (1) the rapid expansion of American higher education in this period, often in co-educational new universities; (2) the openness of these

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colleges and universities to new fields of inquiry, including all of the newly emerging social sciences; (3) the predominance of college-educated women as settlement residents and directors, women who sought to be seen as full-fledged professionals; (4) the proximity of the leading settlement, HullHouse, to the leading academic program, the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago; (5) collegial relationships between the women of Hull-House and some of the men of the Chicago Department (Deegan 1988), that, among other benefits, opened the pages of the fledgling American Journal of Sociology to publications by settlement workers; and (6) the presence of Addams and Woods as leaders, both of whom had a distinctly theoretical bent. Settlement sociology grew directly out of the lived experience of settlement workers confronting “the social problem” and incorporates a reflective theme as its creators – especially the women – sought to make sense of the unusual lives they had chosen. (Settlement men’s lives were less unconventional but still a departure from the skills rewarded in masculinity in the late-nineteenth-century capitalist societies.) That sense-making project, traced through their theoretical writings over time, shows their growing emphasis on social structure over individual action as the explanatory variable in theory and the lever to be pulled to bring about change. In studying how these two elements, the social problem and the lived experience, became sociology, we draw primarily on the analytic writing of Addams (1860–1935), its major theorist, and other settlement leaders, most notably Woods (1865–1925), Kelley (1859–1932), and Simkhovitch (1867–1951). These theorists and countless other settlement workers collectively created a sociology deeply grounded in a standpoint epistemology, often verging on autoethnography and the awareness that they are part of their own research. This section of the paper describes settlement sociology in terms of its central problematic, first principle, general social theory, research and advocacy, and reflexivity.

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In all these aspects, settlement sociology was focused on the problem of social inequality, thus, creating, for the discipline as a whole, the possibility of a primary commitment to social justice. The Central Problematic A “central problematic” is the driving concern motivating intellectual work. The central problematic of settlement sociology was a revisioning of “the social problem,” understood in North Atlantic societies, since the rise of capitalism, to refer to an expanding range of material inequities between rich and poor, that, as industrialization and urbanization accelerated, led to increasingly dire consequences for the latter. The urgency of this problem produced an array of responses. One such response, as described in the previous section, was “scientific charity” which explained poverty as the result of problems in individual personalities, habits and lifestyles – slothfulness, drunkenness, family dysfunctionality, petty criminality – that made the pursuit of even a modest livelihood impossible. The other major response was a structural argument, made by Marxists, Fabian socialists, including the Webbs, and others, that blamed the capitalist economy and growing class conflict for producing both extreme poverty and excessive wealth. A third response may be seen as a movement away from thinking about “the social problem” and toward a discussion and analysis of “social problems,” an approach that Hillel Schwartz (1997) traces to the rise of the social sciences in the middle of the nineteenth century. The settlements emerge amid these debates. Their opening stance is essentially sociological in its skepticism about scientific charity’s individualistic approach. Though sympathetic to the socialist interpretation of the social problem, they felt that it was insufficient in explaining, or even describing, the gross inequities in people’s lives. And while in practice settlement houses tackled particular “social problems,” they traced the cause of these to “the social problem” which they saw as more than

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capitalism and class conflict. “The social problem” was profoundly a sociological problem: the problem of nonrelation or disconnection among people, communities, and institutions, which produced a maldistribution of goods and services, with a hording at one end and a dearth at the other. Furthermore, over time, they came to locate the source of this disconnection in social structures rather than individual action and to balance a material orientation in the identification of social problems with a standpoint epistemology in assessing pain and the sources of pain in social life. Two early analyses of disconnection are given in 1892 by Addams and Woods at The School of Applied Ethics in Plymouth, Massachusetts (later published in the volume Philanthropy and Social Progress [1893]), with agreement on the problem but interesting and important differences in tone and emphasis. Woods concentrates on the loss of a unifying civilization (or culture) that leaves some people, because of the intersection of geography and economic class, “cut off” from the good things that new technologies of production now make so plentiful. He argues that societal values and goods should be available to all: The task is to make provision so that every part of society shall not only have a full supply for its fundamental human wants, but shall also be constantly refreshed from the higher sources of happier and nobler life. The great social evil is that the resources of society are so illy applied to the supplying of its needs. (Woods 1893, 58–60)

Addams’s presentation portrays disconnection in several forms. Subjectively, she appeals to her audience’s own emotional sense of loss, using a brief personal narrative, one of her frequent theoretical strategies: You may remember the forlorn feeling which occasionally seizes you when you arrive early in the morning a stranger in a great city. The stream of laboring people goes past you as you gaze through the plate-glass window of your hotel. You see hard-working men lifting great burdens; you hear the driving and jostling of

huge carts. Your heart sinks with a sudden sense of futility. The door opens behind you and you turn to the man who brings you in your breakfast with a quick sense of human fellowship. You find yourself praying that you may never lose your hold on it all . . . You turn helplessly to the waiter. You feel that it would be almost grotesque to claim from him the sympathy you crave. (11–12)

This argument rests in part on a direct appeal to emotion, on her audience’s sharing similar experiences of seeking connection to ward off the anxiety of isolation, an ever-present possibility in the modern city where her story is placed. It is based in her belief that emotion and reason are complementary paths to truth. Moving from the personal, she explores disconnection among people of the same class and especially in poorer neighborhoods and looks at the role of structures of class and employment in creating these disconnections. The social organism has broken down through large districts of our great cities. Many of the people living there are very poor, the majority of them without leisure or energy for anything but the gain of subsistence. They move often from one wretched lodging to another. They live for the moment side by side, many of them without knowledge of each other, without fellowship, without local tradition or public spirit, without social organization of any kind. (4)

She concludes that these disconnections arise from America’s only limited understanding of what it considers its primary structure, democracy, which Addams argues has been too narrowly limited, applied only in the political arena to the act of voting and not in the social or economic spheres: “Democracy has made little attempt to assert itself in social affairs. We have refused to move beyond the position of its eighteenth-century leaders, who believed that political equality alone would secure all good to men” (2–3). But that “good” will only be achieved if democracy is “socialized,” producing a world in which

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social goods are available to all people. Here, she has a materialist understanding of “goods” – leisure, parks, sanitation, friendship are socially produced goods determined by social structures of employment, distribution, stratification. Society must correct these structures because “the good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain, . . . until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life” (7). First Principle: The Neighborly Relation Seeing the root of the social problem in relational disconnection, settlement sociology proposed as a first step toward its solution the practice of “the neighborly relation,” developing a nuanced description of that relation, focused on requirements for a neighborly relation – proximity, time, tact, and reciprocity; the quality of knowledge neighborliness engenders, and the neighborhood in the context of the larger social system. The settlement enterprise was based in the belief – wonderfully expressed by Woods (1914, 58) – that by virtue of living next to someone a person acquires a particular relation, a particular knowledge, a particular sense of duty toward, and a particular claim on, that person: “It is surely one of the most remarkable of all social facts that, coming down from untold ages there should be this instinctive understanding that the man who establishes his home besides yours, by that very act begins to qualify as an ally of yours and begins to have a claim upon your sense of comradeship.” Neighbor is a more open relation than friendship or coworker or family member in its first criterion for admission, proximity. Proximity affords the possibility that over time one may grow into a relationship. And as Woods suggests, that relationship is in its default mode one of “ally,” a transition that requires of both parties a sense of reciprocity, which Addams (1893, 1–2) takes as the essence of the connection promised by the Settlement which is “opened on the theory that the dependence of classes on each other is recipro-

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cal”; and that as “ the social relation is essentially a reciprocal relation, it gave a form of expression that has peculiar value.” Reciprocity requires a fundamental orientation to and respect for the other as someone who like oneself is an independent subjectivity. This becomes more difficult when one is seeking to communicate across lines of difference and those differences are not just cultural but material. Addams offers many accounts of the problems of relating across material lines of difference, like the humorously recounted failure of a HullHouse attempt to provide nutritious meals to its neighbors because as one neighbor explained “the food was certainly nutritious but that she didn’t like to eat what was nutritious, that she liked to ‘eat what she’d ruther’” (Addams 1910, 131). The actions of reciprocity over time involve restraint as well as active engagement: “residents must be . . . content to live quietly side by side with their neighbors until they grow into a sense of relationship and mutual interests” (Addams 1893, 22–23). Simkhovitch (1938, 39) argues that the methodology undergirding settlement sociology must be based in the neighborly relation which gives one feeling knowledge of the situation into which one had moved and wished to act: “The realism of the settlement [is] its understanding that, before any help can be given, the situation must be felt, realized and understood at first hand . . . Only that which is lived can be understood and translated to others.” Settlement sociology requires that knowledge gained from the neighborly relation be placed in the larger context – neighborhood, city, and society: the settlement “insists that . . . problems are not confined to any one portion of a city. It is an attempt to relieve, at the same time, the over-accumulation at one end of society and the destitution at the other” (Addams 1893, 21). Woods suggests the possibility of the city being “reclaimed” by settlements revitalizing connections within individual neighborhoods; these neighborhoods, then, connect to others and gradually draw the whole city together.

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A General Social Theory: Material Interests and the Ethical Imperative As settlement sociologists grow into the position of neighbor, they become as Woods has suggested an “ally” to those who share life in the same space with them and this gives them a particular kind of knowledge so that the experiences of being a neighbor move them toward an understanding of the role of structure in social life. Addams makes this claim in “The Settlement as a Factor in the Labor Movement,” a defense of one of Hull-House’s most radical actions, its support of labor unions, in a passage where she suggests that the neighborly relation and the knowledge gained thereby are the basis for social activism: by virtue of its very locality [the settlement] . . . has put itself into a position to see, as no one but a neighbor can see, the stress and need of those who bear the brunt of the social injury . . . If the settlement, then, is convinced that in industrial affairs lack of organization tends to the helplessness of the isolated worker, and is a menace to the entire community, then, it is bound to pledge itself to industrial organization . . . And at this point the settlement enters into what is more technically known as the labor movement. (Addams 1895, 183– 84, italics ours)

Addams here specifically identifies the social problem with the social injury – the problem is the production of human pain through social arrangements. Addams embeds the neighborly relation in a general social theory that centers on two major structures which she typically speaks of as “ethics” and “industry” (by the latter she means the arrangement of material production) and sees as typically in balance with each other. The idea of material interests is a well-established point in social science but the idea of an equally potent ethical imperative is a distinguishing feature of settlement sociology. For Addams, the explanation of disconnection in her time is that ethical structures appropriate to the relationships generated

by the capitalist organization of production have not yet been realized. Addams understands human beings are marked by two kinds of interests – material and emotional. Materially people seek safety, livelihood, sustenance, power. They typically do this by working with their fellows under conditions of production determined by the technological and organizational possibilities of their time. They do this in various settings – neighborhoods, cities, homes, factories, schools, union meetings, political party headquarters, social gatherings, courts, shops. These settings are sites for realizing material interests. They are also sites infused with emotion, most importantly, a desire for “sociability” – the wish to find positive connection in relationship with others. The proof of this interest is in the ways that people seek relationship when it is not materially needed or even contradicts material interests: as with “‘aesthetic sociability’ that impels any one of us to drag the entire household to the window when a procession comes into the street or a rainbow appears in the sky” (Addams 1916, 6); or “loneliness” that moves a domestic servant to leave what otherwise seems to be a perfectly satisfactory position because lacking democratic companionship, she “‘feels so unnatural all the time’” (Addams 1896, 548); or a desire for domination when the experience of sociability eludes one and one must fall back on commanding the other’s attention (an explanation Addams applies to industrialist George Pullman in the Pullman Strike of 1894 [1912]). Ethics arise originally out of and are sustained by emotion. Addams adopts the “evolutionists’” proposition that “the instinct to pity, the impulse to aid his fellows, served man at a very early period, as a rude rule of right and wrong” (Addams [1902] 1907, 22). Thus, she gives ethics a firm basis in the human socio-emotional make up apparently biological in origin – the desire for sociability produces the desire to be in right relation and manifests itself through emotions like pity. She extends this desire for right relationship and that first impulse to pity into contemporary life:

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In the midst of the modern city which, at moments, seems to stand only for the triumph of the strongest, the successful exploitation of the weak, . . . there come daily . . . accretions of simple people, who carry in their hearts a desire for mere goodness. They regularly deplete their scanty livelihood in response to a primitive pity, and independent . . . of the fixed morality they have been taught, have an unquenchable desire that charity and simple justice shall regulate men’s relations. It seems sometimes . . . as if they continually [seek] an outlet for more kindliness, and that they are not only willing and eager to do a favor for a friend, but that their kindheartedness lies in ambush, as it were, for a chance to incorporate itself in our larger relations, that they persistently expect that it shall be given some form of governmental expression. (12–13)

The challenge to society was that the organization of material production or “industry” had outpaced the evolution of ethics. The major fact of organized material production was “the discovery of the power to combine” (Addams 1895, 184) – large-scale aggregation of labor and materials to process and distribute goods, an achievement seen in the development and growth of factories, corporations, department stores, and systems of interlocking railroads. Increasingly effective practices of association had made possible capitalism’s capacity for industrial and commercial expansion; the absence of such associative power in any group would render it incapable of responding in its own interest. But while material production was “socialized,” no corresponding development in ethics had yet emerged; ethics remained in what Addams called a “belated” state. The disconnection caused an intensifying social problem because material relations created by socialized industry were still permeated with belated ethics. The alignment between material interests and emotional interests was increasingly incoherent. Addams focuses on three belated ethics still guiding people’s sense of appropriate relating: the militaristic ethic in which individuals judge themselves in right relation

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to others when obeying orders to defend one’s group against all others, even to the point of self-sacrifice and of participation in group-approved collective violence; the family claim in which individuals judge themselves in right relation to others when taking responsibility even to the point of self-sacrifice for the well-being of kin and friends; and the individual ethic in which a person judges himself or herself in right relation to others when he or she is following his or her own convictions, unswayed by the opinion of other people. These ethics were serviceable at past moments and represent standards of conduct that individuals may still need in their interactional repertoire, but they are no longer sufficient in themselves. The times now call for a “social ethic” in which individuals understand themselves and work to achieve projects through association with others as members of a larger, heterogeneous community. A major work of settlement sociology was the definition and enactment of that social ethic, for which they offered five tenets. First, the desire for connection with “others” must mean the larger community including people one does not know directly. Second, those others must be understood and accepted as independent subjectivities with lives and wants of their own. Third, this recognition both emerges from and demands the practice of personal experience of these others. Fourth, this personal experience should include both instances of sociability and of practical action seeking common solutions to common problems. Fifth, it is possible and desirable to translate an ongoing awareness of others into concern for the common good into public policy. Learning the social ethic is done through ongoing processes of relating one’s individual projects to the needs of the larger community and having ongoing and direct social experience of the larger diverse community that is the modern world; this means working with others across lines of difference. Settlement sociology sought to build institutions that would provide opportunities

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for such interactions and saw the settlement itself as an embodiment of a structure where residents and neighbors learned reconnection through practice of the social ethic. Research and Advocacy The best evidence that the settlements created a school of sociology is in the ways its theory was integral to the extraordinary body of empirical work settlement residents produced. These works were of three broad types – systematic investigations of the conditions of life of the settlement’s neighbors which typically identified particular social problems and frequently invented new methods for collecting and presenting data; advocacy papers proposing a solution to a social problem – often drawing on or proposing future research; and combinations of the two. These works translated theory into practices that (1) took the facts of connection and disconnection as the fundamental condition of social life in individual interactions, in and between macro social structures, and between those structures and individual lives; (2) emphasized ethics as a separate causal factor in social outcomes; (3) recognized (and used) emotion, like rationality, as a way for researcher and audience to test the validity of an argument; (4) chose and approached research projects from the perspective of the neighborly relation; (5) made the power to combine a central point in proposing solutions to social problems, urging the formation of new associations and suggesting paths for government intervention; and (6) promoted interaction across lines of difference. While few settlements did no research, the 1911 Handbook shows that some had only annual reports; others, unspecified pamphlets, while some like The Chicago Commons, a profusion of research (some sixty-five separate articles and reports – Hull-House’s contribution was even larger). This research was published as monographs and articles in a range of journals and magazines, from the academic American Journal of Sociology, to settlement-inspired publica-

tions like The Southern Workman, and The Survey, to popular media like Collier’s and Ladies Home Journal (Table 11.1). Many of the settlements’ empirical studies pioneered new methods of data collection and presentation, again focused on being able to capture the connections, sometimes unseen, among actions and policies initiated by one group in order to pattern the work experience for another. Settlement sociologists were concerned with creating accounts that were authentic, accurate, and accessible. The test of authenticity was that the account reflected the lived experience of the people it reported on In the effort to achieve an accurate reflection of these lives, settlement sociologists were enormously inventive in their data collection strategies (pioneering methods now taken for granted in academic sociology): the survey, the interview, the questionnaire, personal budget keeping, participant-observation, key informants, and secondary data analysis (which included the census, legislation, memoirs and diaries, wage and cost of living records, court reports, social worker reports, tax rolls, nursery rhymes, industrial accident reports). Similarly, in trying to produce empirical reports accessible to a broad readership, they pioneered new techniques for presenting data, using photographs, detailed colored maps of neighborhoods, tables, bar charts, graphs, statistical analyses, narrative accounts, and extended quotation from subjects. These accounts gave settlement sociologists a power base in knowledge – at a time when, as historian Allen F. Davis notes, “little reliable information on social problems was available” (Davis 1967, 96). A good example of an advocacy article is Florence Kelley’s “Aims and Principles of the Consumers’ League” published in AJS in 1899; it describes, and publicizes, the new voluntary organization of the title. Kelley’s argument for the consumers’ league is based in the settlement principle of the connectedness of people whether intended or not: “in a civilized community every person is a consumer. From the cradle (which may be of wood or metal, with rockers or without

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Table 11.1. Examples of Settlement Sociology Research from Lengermann and Niebrugge-Brantley (2002) Date 1895

1898

Author or principal researcher Residents of Hull-House, directed by Florence Kelley Robert Woods

Title

Settlement

Hull-House Maps and Papers by the Residents of Hull-House

Hull-House Chicago

The City Wilderness: A Settlements Study by Residents and Associates of the South End House Boston The Philadelphia Negro

South End Boston

1902

W. E. B. Du Bois with Isabel Eaton Robert Woods

1904

Frances Kellor

1905

Lillian Brandt

1909–14

Paul Kellogg

Five Hundred and Seventy Four Deserters and Their Families: A Descriptive Study of Their Characteristics and Circumstances The Pittsburgh Survey in 6 vols.

1909

Elizabeth Butler

Women and Trades: Pittsburgh 1907–1908

1910

Margaret Bynington

Homestead: The Households of a Milltown

1910

Crystal Eastman

Work-Accidents and the Law

1910

Emily Green Balch

Our Slavic Fellow Citizens

1911

Mary White Ovington

1914

Paul Kellogg

Half a Man: The Status of the Negro in New York The Pittsburgh District Civic Frontage

1914

Paul Kellogg

Wage-Earning Pittsburgh

1917 1923

Grace Abbott Robert Woods and Albert J. Kennedy

1936

Edith Abbott

The Immigrant and the Community The Zone of Emergence: Observations of the Lower Middle and Upper Working Class Communities of Boston 1905–1914 The Tenements of Chicago 1908–1935

1899

Americans in Process: A Settlement Study by Residents and Associates of the South End House–North and West Ends Boston Out of Work: A Study of Unemployment

them) to the grave (to which an urn may be preferred) throughout our lives we are choosing, or choice is made for us, as to the disposal of money” (Kelley 1899, 289). These decisions about money are critical because they determine how other people

College Settlement Philadelphia South End Boston

Henry Street Settlement, New York City Greenwich House Settlement New York City Kingsley House Pittsburgh Kingsley House Pittsburgh Kingsley House Pittsburgh Kingsley House Pittsburgh Denison House Boston Greenwich House New York City Kingsley House Pittsburgh Kingsley House Pittsburgh Hull-House South End House Boston Hull-House

shall be employed: “As we do so, we help to decide, however unconsciously, how our fellow-men shall spend their time in making what we buy.” Kelley calls for a consumers’ league in terms of both ethics and practical interest. Ethically, an individual’s

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choices do determine what happens to other people and, therefore, one must try to choose responsibly. Practically, while individuals wish to buy goods that are safe, that is, manufactured under recognized standards of purity of materials and cleanliness in production, they lack the knowledge and power to guarantee businesses provide such goods. Given the complexity of manufacture and trade, it is essential to have an organized effort requiring manufacturers take responsibility for the safety of their product. (Kelley illustrates the difficulty of tracing the provenance of a particular good with a story from her experience as an Illinois Inspector of Factories wherein she saw how smallpox in a garment sweatshop in Chicago could make its way, through publicly unrevealed connections, to a Helena, Montana consumer who had ordered a coat through a catalog.) Kelley extends this sense of connection to the needs of the manufacturer, noting that a national consumers’ league would reduce the risky strategy of guessing what people will be likely to buy. Kelley’s solution is to harness the power to combine in an organization with paid inspectors to warrantee for consumers the safety of goods and provide for manufacturers a predictable market of consumers who will shop for goods bearing the National Consumers’ League label. Further this organization will be able to publicize news about workplace practices now buried in government reports. Kelley argues that only the “socialization” of consumption can achieve the individual goal of being an ethically responsible consumer. Crystal Eastman’s (1910) study WorkAccidents and the Law combines both advocacy and empirical research to present ways of preventing and compensating for industrial accidents (see Reinharz 1992 for a discussion of Eastman’s work as a feminist methodology). The study was part of The Pittsburgh Survey, a multivolume effort, undertaken between 1907 and 1914, to produce a systematic account of Pittsburgh as a picture of urban industrial life. The Survey was headquartered at Kingsley House settlement (Greenwald and Andersen 1996),

directed by Paul Kellogg and sponsored by the Russell Sage Foundation. Work-Accidents and the Law exemplifies many of the theoretical, methodological and practical/political accomplishments of settlement research. Eastman combines careful and clever data collection and analysis with an insistence on the organic nature of society to arrive at the thesis that people must accept collective responsibility for workers injured while producing the goods needed by society. The study, widely praised when first published in The Survey (1910) and then as a monograph (1910), led to Eastman’s appointment as the first woman member of the New York Employer Liability Commission in 1909, where she drafted the first workmen’s compensation law which led other states to pass similar laws so that workmen’s compensation emerged as a foundational right in US labor relations. Woods and Kennedy in the The Settlement Horizon (1922) hailed the passage as a highwater mark of the settlement approach to social problems. Guided by the principle of connection, the study uses and integrates quantitative and qualitative data as Eastman reports on 294 cases of nonfatal work injuries (a sample selected by focusing on the months of April, May, June 1907 and the 529 work-related fatalities in the year July 1, 1906, to June 30, 1907). Her analysis of the qualitative data integrates primary records obtained by access to coroner’s notes and hospital records with interviews with people variously located in the life of the injured workman – fellow employees, supervisors, medical personnel, friends, family. This analysis is enriched by Eastman’s accounts of actual conditions of production learned from company-guided tours of industrial sites – Carnegie Steel, American Tube Company, and American Steel and Wire. She sets her assessment of responsibility for accidents in the context of the basic process and dangers of the work: The crane “hook-ons,” – the men on the ground who arrange the chains, and hook and unhook the load, – run greater risks

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than any other men connected with the operation of cranes. The hook-on must stand by, to steady the load and keep the chains in position, until the crane has actually begun to lift and the chains to straighten. There are three dangers therefore for the hook-on: the load may slip out as it is being raised and crush him; it may strike him as it swings; or a chain may break and let it fall . . . When a hook-on is killed by a load slipping from the crane chains, the accident is always laid to his carelessness in fastening the load. But the justice of this judgment is questioned. An engineer told me that it is next to impossible to insure a grip of the load under the thousand and one conditions which obtain, particularly in the handling of irregular shapes. On our list four hook-ons were killed in this way; once it was a heavy roll that slipped, once the side of a steel car, twice a load of steel bars or “angles.”

Eastman connects this qualitative account of job-related accidents to a statistical overview of the industry and the kinds of accidents that occur, fitting the accident numerically into the business of production and translating accidents into financial losses – for workers, business, Pittsburgh. She shows that no one living in the area is unconnected from the effects of these accidents and reminds readers of their own connection: if the work is dangerous, it is danger the society wishes some to risk because of benefits to the whole, as with railroads that “serve all, from the humblest to the most exalted, so constantly, so faithfully, that they have become to society what the power of motion is to a human being. Suddenly deprived of them, the nation would lie nerveless and paralyzed” (Eastman 1910, 17). Eastman builds, stroke by stroke, a picture of various industries, how the work is done, how accidents occur and what happens to workers and families after accidents – the last a series of particularly painful accounts done with great economy: John Lyman, a spike maker who had worked four months for Jones and Laughlin, was thrown off a car and run

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over . . . He left a wife and two children, aged nine and four. His earnings had been from $8.00 to $15 a week, and he carried no insurance. The Company gave her $100 toward the funeral, which cost $135. She consulted a lawyer, who told her that she could not get anything by suing. Fortunately, Mrs. Lyman had a father and mother living, who owned a small house . . . She left the three rooms for which her husband had paid $9.00 a month, and moved with her children into two back rooms of her father’s house. Then she got a job cleaning offices at a dollar a day. She must pay her car-fare – ten cents a day – out of this, so that, although she works six full days a week she makes but $5.40. On this she must support her family, for the father is not able to help her financially. In another way, however, her parents are a great help, for they look after the children while she is at work. This is important, because she has to go to work a little after five in the morning, and sometimes does not get home until nine at night. (Eastman 1910, 183)

Eastman concludes with a call for shared responsibility for the causes and consequences of industrial accidents: “What is his ‘work’ then? Is it any concern of society? First of all, to be sure, it is his way of making a living, but it is also necessary to his employer’s way of making a living, and finally it is necessary to society’s way of making a living” (Eastman 1910, 203–4). And therefore she argues society needs to take some responsibility when the worker is injured – society must compensate. Reflexivity Settlement sociologists consciously sought and maintained a reflexive attitude toward themselves and their work – a stance that made them uneasy about their research. They frequently reminded themselves and others that the only thing that justified this research, with its almost unavoidable intrusion into people’s lives, was that it was done only for the purpose of creating structures that would make those lives better (Eastman 1910; Holbrook 1895). Addams

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(1910) reports always taking a member of the neighborhood with her when she gave an address to serve as a break on exaggeration or misstatement. This same confidence in the neighborly relation leads them to a critique of practices in academic social science, which Woods sees as limited by the fact that its practitioners are so typically members of “the unneighborly classes” – “highly educated persons . . . snatched out of neighborhood experience at an early age”; the “opportunity for experimental, pragmatic study of typical human relations” as they occur in a neighborhood is “lost so” early that the practitioners “forget suffering the loss” and “are inclined to think of the neighborhood as offering little more challenge to scientific inquiry than our almost faded-out neighbor remembrances would suggest” (Woods 1914, 582). But their most passionate concern was that they not let the settlement become so institutionalized that it failed in its original mission, that they stay alive to their founding focus, as Vida Scudder wrote: the settlements must continue as “hot centres of new thought,” determined to bear witness to and to change “the conditions of life forced by our civilization upon vast numbers of the working classes, especially upon the poor in our great cities, [that] are undemocratic, unChristian, unrighteous; that only the surrender of life itself, probably of many lives of more than one generation can change them; but that in the name of American democracy, changed they must be” (Scudder [1900] 1970, 72).

Conclusion For the student of social problems, settlement sociology offers both advice and questions. It advises that students (1) have a clear understanding of their relation to the problem they study and that, ideally, that relation should be as a neighbor not as a careerist; (2) focus research and practice on establishing connections among the parts of the social system; (3) weight ethics as heavily as material organization in seek-

ing change; (4) practice the power to combine by building structures that bring people together across lines of difference; and (5) balance a material assessment of situations with a respect for the way members of a community construe that situation – remember they might say the settlement offers nutritious food but they would prefer to eat what they’druther. But it also raises questions about the settlement as an instrument for social change: (1) what happened in the smaller settlements that Woods and Kennedy record? (2) what happened to the settlement movement generally? where are the settlements today? what are they doing? (3) is balance possible between materialist and constructionist approaches in defining social problems? (4) what is the ethic that is needed to match today’s organization of material production? (5) how important is the neighborly relation – has our society now passed it? Settlement sociology of the Progressive Era has left a legacy of challenge and achievement. The challenge is to find ways as successful as theirs to pursue the goals A. Javier Treviño has described as “service sociology,” the profession’s opportunity to “work in communities to improve lives while simultaneously acting to change the structures that impede progress” (Treviño and McCormack 2014). The achievement of settlement sociology may be summarized in Clement Atlee’s tribute to Beatrice and Sidney Webb: “millions are living freer and fuller lives today because of [their] work” (www.webbmemorialtrust .org.uk/beatrice-webb/).

Glossary Central problematic The driving concern motivating intellectual work. Disconnection A problem of nonrelation among people, communities, and institutions, which produced a maldistribution of goods and services, with a hording at one end and a dearth at the other.

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Indoor relief Relief given to persons who were forced to reside in state-run institutions – poorhouses, workhouses, asylums, orphanages. Neighborly relation The quality of knowledge that neighborliness engenders. Outdoor relief Relief given to persons who remained at large in the society. Social ethic A culture through which individuals understand themselves and work to achieve projects through association with others as members of a larger, heterogeneous community. “The social problem” Widely understood as the horrific living conditions among the poorer classes in the industrializing economies of the West.

References Addams, Jane. 1881. Cassandra in Essays of Class of 1881, Rockford Seminary. DeKalb, IL: “News” Steam Press. 1893. The subjective necessity for social settlements. In Philanthropy and Social Progress, edited by Henry C. Adams, 1–26. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell. 1895. The settlement as a factor in the labor movement. In Hull-House Maps and Papers by the Residents of Hull-House, A Social Settlement, 183–204. New York: Crowell. 1896. A belated industry. American Journal of Sociology 1:536–50. (1902) 1907. Democracy and Social Ethics. New York: Macmillan. 1910. Twenty Years at Hull-House. New York: Macmillan. 1912. A modern lear. Survey, November 2. Barnett, Henrietta. 1918. Canon Barnett: His Life, Work and Friends. 2 vols. London: John Murray. Barnett, Samuel. (1883) 1915. Settlements of university men in great towns. In Practicable Socialism – New Series, by Canon S. A. Barnett and S. A. Barnett, 96–106. London: Longmans, Green. Barnett, Samuel, and Henrietta Barnett. 1909. Towards Social Reform. New York: Macmillan.

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Bernard, Luther, and Jessie Bernard. 1943. The Origins of American Sociology: The Social Science Movement in the United States. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell. Breckinridge, Sophonisba, and Edith Abbott. 1911. Housing Conditions in Chicago, Ill. Back of the Yards. American Journal of Sociology xvi:433–68. Cooper, Anna Julia. 1913. The social settlement: What it is and what it does. In The Voice of Anna Julia Cooper, edited by Charles Lemert and Esme Bhan, 21–223. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Davis, Allen F. 1967. Spearheads for Reform: The Social Settlements and the Progressive Movement, 1890–1914. New York: Oxford University Press. Deegan, Mary Jo. 1988. Jane Addams and the Men of the Chicago School 1892–1913 New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books. 1991. Women in Sociology: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. 2002. Race, Hull-House and the University of Chicago. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Eastman, Crystal. 1910. Work-accidents and employers’ liability. The Survey, September 3. Fitzpatrick, Ellen. 1990. Endless Crusade: Women Social Scientists and Progressive Reform. New York: Oxford University Press. Greenwald, Maurine W., and Margot Andersen, eds. 1996. Pittsburgh Surveyed: Social Science and Social Reform in the Early Twentieth Century. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Holbrooke, Agnes Sinclair. 1895. Map notes and comments. In Hull-House Maps and Papers, by Residents of Hull-House, 3–23. Boston: Cromwell. Kelley, Florence, trans. 1892. The Conditions of the Working Class in England in 1844, by Friedrich Engels. New York: L. Weiss. 1899. Aims and principles of the consumers’ league. American Journal of Sociology 5(3):289–304. Koengeter, Stefan, and Wolfgang Schroeer. 2013. Variations of social pedagogy – explorations of the transnational settlement movement. Education Policy Analysis 21(42):1–18. http:// epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/1309.

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Lengermann, Patricia, and Gillian Niebrugge. 1998. The Women Founders: Sociology and Social Theory, 1830–1930. New York: McGraw-Hill. 2002. Back to the future: Settlement sociology 1885–1930. The American Sociologist 33:5–15. 2007. Thrice-told: Narratives of sociology’s relation to social work. In Sociology in America: A History, edited by Craig Calhoun, 63–114. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. MacLean, Annie Marion. 1899. Two weeks in department stores. American Journal of Sociology 4:721–41. Noyes, William Horace. (1899) 1970. Institutional peril of the settlements. In The Development of Settlement Work, edited by Lorena M. Pacey, 60–68. Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries. Reinders, Robert C. 1982. Toynbee Hall and the American settlement movement. Social Service Review 56(1):39–54. Reinharz, Shulamit. 1992. Feminist Methods in Social Research. New York: Oxford University Press. Schneider, Joseph. 1985. Social problems theory: The construction view. Annual Review of Sociology 11(1):209–29. Schwartz, Hillel. 1997. On the origin of the phrase “social problems.” Social Problems 44(2):276–96. Scudder, Vida. (1900) 1970. Settlement past and future. In The Development of Settlement Work, edited by Lorena M. Pacey, 69–73. Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries.

Simkhovitch, Mary Kingsbury. 1938. Neighborhood: My Story of Greenwich House. New York: W. W. Norton. Taylor, Graham. 1930. Pioneering on Social Frontiers. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Trattner, Walter L. 1979. From Poor Law to Welfare State. New York: The Free Press. Treviño, A. Javier, and Karen McCormack. 2014. Introduction: What is service sociology? In Service Sociology and Academic Engagement in Social Problems, edited by A. Javier Treviño and Karen McCormack, 1–26. Surrey, England: Ashgate. Webb, Beatrice. 1926. My Apprenticeship. London: Longmans, Green. Weinberg, Darin. 2009. On the social construction of social problems and of social problems theory. The American Sociologist 40(1):61–78. Williams, Joyce, and Vickie MacLean. 2015. Settlement Sociology in the Progressive Years: Faith, Science and Reform. Leiden: Brill. Woods, Eleanor. 1929. Champion of Democracy. New York: Houghton Mifflin. Woods, Robert A. 1893. The university settlement idea. In Philanthropy and Social Progress, edited by Henry G. Adams, 57–97. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell. 1914. The neighborhood in social reconstruction. American Journal of Sociology xix(5):577–98. Woods, Robert A., and Albert A. Kennedy, eds. 1911. The Handbook of Settlements. New York: The Russell Sage Foundation.

CHAPTER 12

Chicago School: City as a Social Laboratory Roger Salerno

Abstract From its inception, the University of Chicago became an important center of higher learning in the United States and drew from its environs subjects of urban social research. The City of Chicago was emblematic of the modern metropolis and the problems that seemed to emerge from rapid urbanization and associated demographic change. The Chicago school constituted a scholarly approach to the study of the modern city and its challenges by a group of scholars whose work epitomized progress in both social science and social reform. Through the efforts of a small group of researchers, the city became a social laboratory that yielded deeper understandings of social problems confronting American society at the beginning of the twentieth century.

When sociologists speak of the Chicago school, they are primarily referring to the group of scholarly studies on urban life as well as the sociologists who conducted them at the University of Chicago in the years between the two world wars. The notion of a “school” is used loosely and is intended to describe those particular value orientations, topics addressed and methodologies employed, which were reflective of liberal pragmatism, the use of ethnographic research methods and descriptive empiricism. Therefore, what became known as Chicago school sociology, was not a cohesive set of studies and theories that were confined to objective protocols of scientific positivism, but rather it was a more eclectic collection of descriptive statistics and a

set of interpretive studies that yielded narratives of urban social life that captured the imaginations of those interested in the form, structure and processes of urbanization (Bulmer 1984). Founded as a Baptist institution in 1892 and heavily endowed by the Rockefeller family, the University of Chicago was to achieve its prominence by developing a number of outstanding academic departments that challenged the dominance of not only the so-called Ivy League colleges of the American Northeast, but also by establishing quality graduate programs that competed with renowned centers of learning throughout the United States, Europe and Great Britain. Among its important early achievements were its programs in 203

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philosophy and the social sciences, particularly sociology, anthropology, political science, and economics. This particular “Chicago school” should not be confused with the Chicago school of economics that was characteristic of the work of Frank Knight (1885–1972), Friedrich Hayek (1899– 1992), Milton Friedman (1912–2006) and others who also worked out of the University of Chicago and had their most profound influence in the last quarter of the twentieth century on US global, neoliberal economic policies. This later school had its philosophical roots in Scottish moralism and Austrian economic thought and was heavily indebted to the writings of Adam Smith (1723–90) and Ludwig von Mises (1881–1973).

Urban Problems in Chicago With the opening of the twentieth century the city of Chicago became emblematic of the growing pains of every American city. Sanitation and health issues, overcrowded and dilapidated housing, the rapid advance of crime as well as racial and labor unrest was worsened by the inflow of poor immigrants from around the world and from the rural South seeking a better way of life. Between 1870 and 1900 the city population rose from under 300,000 to over 1.5 million people Just as the city of Chicago was coming to epitomize the modern America metropolis at the beginning of the twentieth century, the Chicago school of sociology was beginning to represent an innovative approach to the study of social problems. It was developed as a well-funded nerve center for the production of cutting-edge empirical research that focused on the problems associated with urban growth, population unrest and city development. The Department of Sociology became synonymous with the study of American cities. It advanced particularly unique approaches to examine the social challenges of urban life. These scholars viewed the city as a “social laboratory” and conducted studies

and speculative research that was to gain world acclaim. The City, published in 1925, was a collection of such work and signaled the birth of a truly American urban sociology (Park and Burgess 1925). The Chicago school of sociology was not only an important source of research on urban problems, it became emblematic of the pragmatic nature of twentieth-century sociology in the United States. Its eclectic methods applied to social investigation, observation, data collection and creative analysis had a lasting impact on the way sociologists saw the world and it provided a basis for promoting programs of social amelioration based upon the principles of American liberalism (Smith 1988). Space and place became important structural themes at Chicago, but so too did the lives of the people who occupied those unique spaces and places. Macro-order theory at Chicago often focused on human ecology, wherein the city was seen as a living organism with its own life cycle and growth patterns. The City spoke of the morphology of cities and the systems and subsystems that composed them. While some researchers collected descriptive data and plotted graphs of urban growth, others focused on marginalized groups of people who occupied unique enclaves of the city. Nevertheless, the over-riding emphasis of this work was an attempt to understand the dynamics of urban development to address the difficulties associated with urban life.

The Founders Albion W. Small (1854–1926) must be credited with providing the intellectual foundation for the emergence of Chicago school sociology. He had been educated both in the United States and in Germany and had graduated from a Baptist theological seminary in Maine. He held a doctorate in political economy and served as president of Colby College before being brought to Chicago to establish the first department of sociology in the United States. He

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was appointed the first chair in sociology by the university’s first president, William Rainey Harper (1856–1906), who had been hand-picked by John D. Rockefeller to head the institution. Small and Harper helped to organize the social science disciplines there. Not only did Small design and establish both undergraduate and graduate programs in sociology, he simultaneously organized the American Sociological Society and founded the American Journal of Sociology as an outlet for scholarly work in the field. Along with George E. Vincent (1864– 1941), who studied sociology with Small as a graduate student there, he authored the first American textbook in sociology. Small was key to bringing to the field of sociology, especially as it was taught at the University of Chicago, an orientation that some saw as both empirical and ameliorative. He was very impressed by German sociologists, was familiar with the work of Georg Simmel and Max Weber, and brought to the new department German academic sensibilities. He surrounded himself with like-minded male academics many of whom had clerical credentials or were prone to viewing sociology as having a moral purpose, much in keeping with the sentiments of social gospel movement of that era. Charles R. Henderson (1848–1915) who studied for the ministry at Union Theological Seminary in New York and received his doctorate in Germany at the University of Leipzig, also served as the university chaplain while teaching in the sociology department at Chicago. Eventually, W. I. Thomas (1863–1947) came to the university to complete his second doctorate, this one in sociology; his first having been in classical languages. Thomas had already served as a literature professor at Oberlin College. Small, Vincent, Henderson and Thomas represented the core of the burgeoning sociology program at the turn of the century. However, President Harper made it a point to also strengthen the humanities and liberal arts. He hired world-renown historians, philosophers, and political scien-

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tists away from established academic programs, enticing renowned scholars with large salaries and the lure of the big city. John Dewey (1859–1952) and George Herbert Mead (1863–1931), both of who studied with William James at Harvard and had backgrounds in psychology, were hired away from the University of Michigan. Not only would they have a profound influence in the shaping of American philosophy, but also directly affected the training and outlook of those studying sociology at the University of Chicago. Pragmatism associated with the work of Dewey and German idealism associated with Mead were to be combined in a truly unique way and helped give the Chicago school of sociology its distinct focus. Dewey and Mead developed a close association with Jane Addams and the women at Hull-House. Dewey’s progressive ideals, his focus on the liberating power of education and his notion of the importance of knowledge through activism were values shared by Addams. It was through the frequent associations of these three that much of the Chicago school gained its character.

The Women of Chicago While men occupied important administrative and teaching posts at the University of Chicago, its classrooms were also opened to women. This was unusual for a research institution of this stature. However, as Mary Jo Deegan (2005) has observed, women were both discouraged from doing advanced graduate training in sociology and were never invited in as equal players into the sociological profession. Instead they were often channeled into the field of social work. If they were accepted into the teaching ranks, it was usually in ancillary programs such as the Department of Household Administration, which was loosely affiliated with the mainstream research program in academic sociology. Jane Addams (1860–1935), who was renowned as a social worker, feminist and

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political activist, had a profound impact on sociology in Chicago. Her work with HullHouse and with poor immigrant populations, her research studies and knowledge of social problems in that city deeply informed the development of Chicago school sociology. She was influenced by the work of Mead, Thomas, Dewey, Small, Henderson and others who were constant visitors to Hull-House just as they were affected by her work. She had already done groundbreaking urban research into urban problems before the University of Chicago opened its doors. The connections between Addams and the Chicago school were very significant. In fact many women whose names are not given much visibility in the sociological literature were critical to the development and advance of Chicago school sociology. Patricia M. Langermann and Gillian Niebrugge (1998) identified what they referred to as the Chicago Women’s School of Sociology, which included many of the women who received their graduate training in sociology at the University of Chicago including Sophonisba Breckinridge (1866–1948), Florence Kelley (1859–1932), and Edith Abbott (1876–1957). Many of these women worked with state and city agencies and notfor-profit foundations in Chicago. They conducted funded research on problems ranging from housing the poor to juvenile delinquency. The notion of juvenile justice and the establishment of the family court system were products of their work. It was Breckinridge and Abbott, who had been affiliated with what was called The Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy, which through their efforts and dedication became the School for Social Service Administration within the University of Chicago in 1924. Thus the professionalization of social work at the University of Chicago was a product of both the exclusionary academic policies that affected women and the recognition that social work was a credible academic discipline that could stand on its own. Many feminist academics were well acquainted with the work of Thomas, Mead

and Dewey, who not only sympathized with the suffrage movement, but also recognized the academic glass ceiling. Many male graduate students in sociology found employment in the social service organizations in the City that were managed by women. Their ability to do graduate study and have successful academic careers were often the result of women who had worked to establish well-funded community-based associations that required their services and which became sources for both financing these men’s educations and, at times, supporting their thesis research.

The Journalistic Turn Women, through their leadership in social welfare, had already brought to public attention the many of the problems plaguing American cities. Child poverty, crime, juvenile distress, prostitution, poor housing conditions, immigrant marginalization and racial discrimination were being dealt with before the University of Chicago opened its doors. Many of these issues were also being examined in the press by what was called the New Journalism. While scholars calmly collected data to analyze, muckraking journalists exposed veiled social problems to the light of day and in the process increased newspaper circulations. Like their academic sisters, women were discouraged from entering the field of journalism as a career. There was concern by some newspaper editors in the City Room that they were “putting themselves in harm’s way,” which was not seen as a proper place for women. While a few found ways to make a living as urban journalists, men dominated this field as well. Robert E. Park (1864–1944) was among that group. Park is perhaps best known for his work in developing Chicago school sociology during the 1920s and his research into cities and urban social change. The son of a prosperous business man, Robert Park was raised in a small town in Minnesota. After completing his degree at the University of

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Michigan where he took courses with John Dewey and studied German, Park began a ten-year-long career as a newspaper reporter digging into life at the margins of cities (Matthews 1977; Linder 1990). He worked at several newspapers in big cities around the United States before returning to complete his graduate education at Harvard, where he studied with William James and then traveled to Germany, where he studied with Max Weber’s brother and was influenced by Georg Simmel. On his return to the United States, he taught briefly at Harvard and then left to work as a personal secretary for Booker T. Washington at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. It was through their mutual work with Washington on a conference on race relations that Park and W. I. Thomas met. Thomas, who was teaching at Chicago invited Park to lecture there. W. I. Thomas and Robert Park, who shared similar backgrounds and interests, grew fond of one another and admired each other’s work. They socialized and frequently corresponded. By now, one of the hardest working sociologists at Chicago, Ernest W. Burgess had become a part of the department. Burgess’s emphasis was on social change, deviance and the use of ethnographic studies. His broad ranging interest in urban social life complemented the work of both Thomas, his former professor at Chicago, and Park, whom he admired greatly. Where Thomas and Park assumed senior roles at the university, Burgess remained the central dynamo of scholarly production. He worked closely with outstanding graduate students on projects that reflected the themes present in the popular press, the subjects which had influenced Robert Park as a journalist (Linder 1990). Park knew how to promote scholarly studies so that they grabbed the attention of the urban newspapers as well as government policy makers and funding sources. The sensationalistic nature of some of the studies conducted by graduate students dealing with crime, prostitution and racial conflict grabbed media headlines. It did not hurt that Park had written his doctoral thesis

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on the nature of the newspaper industry. The University of Chicago became one of the first elite institutions of higher education to focus on race relations and immigration studies. The academy had become a wellspring of urban ethnographic narratives told by the people who were the objects of study, those who were marginalized, not the reserved social scientist. Subjects of research were given voice and power in this way. Louis Wirth’s The Ghetto (1928), which studied the history and social development of the Jewish Quarter along Maxwell Street, Harvey Zorbaugh’s The Gold Coast and the Slum (1929), which examined social transitions taking place in neighborhoods of Chicago, and E. Franklin Frazier’s The Negro Family in Chicago (1932), which looked at the transition of black families from the rural South to urban centers like Chicago, became important sources of information without losing the humanity of those who were studied. The methodology of the Chicago school was not limited to urban ethnography. It was brilliantly eclectic and most often based on a collection of data taken from surveys and charted on maps. While there were no calculators or computers to make data easily manageable, there were adding machines and young men with green eyeshades. Ernest Burgess (1886–1966) worked diligently to make the flow of work seem simple. He developed predictive statistical regression models that identified discrete empirical indicators of social outcomes. Although crude and simple in comparison to today’s algorithms, these were some of the first statistical models developed by sociologists. The concentric zonal model of urban growth was used by urban planners and policy makers in projecting social change. In such demographic studies, maps and charts would often accompany human interest stories revealing both personal human drama and data for the establishment of ameliorative service programs. William F. Ogburn (1886–1959), a social statistician, was hired away from his teaching position at Columbia University to

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assume a post in the sociology department. The head of sociology at Columbia was Franklin H. Giddings, an avowed Social Darwinist and one of Albion Small’s major detractors. Ogburn brought a greater degree of mathematical sophistication to the department at Chicago and attempted to take the department in a different course from that of Robert Park, it was one more characterized by neopositivism. By the time he was hired in 1927, he had already held posts with the National War Labor Board and the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. In 1930 he headed President Herbert Hoover’s Research Committee on Social Trends and later served as director of the Consumer Advisory Board of the National Recovery Administration. Politically, Ogburn appeared indifferent to eradicating social injustice, and was rather unmoved by Hitler’s rise to power in the early 1930s and refused to join other faculty in their condemnation of Nazism and anti-Semitism on the grounds that his colleagues were being too emotional (Bannister 1987, 225–26). His hiring at Chicago marked the end of the so-called moralistic phase of sociology that was criticized by Park himself and others as too connected to feeling than to intellect. But Ogburn’s focus on efficiency, rationality and objectivity, displaced the humanistic sensibilities often associated with earlier Chicago research. His presence in the department was eventually to cause a major departmental schism. At a dissertation defense by one of his students, Louis Wirth was supposedly opening and reading his mail while the student went on and on with numbers, statistical formulas and a display of charts. Many present viewed Wirth’s behavior as disrespectful to both the committee and to the student. At the end of the presentation Wirth is supposed to have gotten up and said with some distain in his voice, “This is all well and good, but where are the people you are supposedly studying?” (Dietrich Reitzes, personal interview with the author, July 7, 1981). This notion of giving voice to those who otherwise would remain voiceless was central to the early urban ethnographic studies.

Scholarship in the Service of Reform The reform tradition which had been strongly established by people like Small, Henderson and Addams was carried on by Louis Wirth and Burgess. Before giving way to “objective” statistical analysis by men such as Ogburn in the 1930s, the Chicago school of sociology was to have a deep impact on framing the problems of cities. Many people who studied there took up posts in private foundations and governmental agencies, which in turn supported research of Park, Burgess and their students. Women who were trained in sociology at Chicago produced cutting-edge research on urban problems and developed an innovative social work curriculum in some part informed by the ideas of their professors. They also took up leadership positions in philanthropic organizations throughout the city and ushered in progressive social reforms. Park, Burgess and their closest students constituted a who’s who in twentiethcentury sociology. Louis Wirth (1897– 1952), Herbert Blumer (1900–1987), Edward Shils (1910–95), Morris Janowitz (1919–88), Charles S. Johnson (1883–1956), E. Franklin Frazier (1894–1962), Everett C. Hughes (1897–1983), Albert J. Reiss (1922–2006) Erving Goffman (1922–82), Howard S. Becker, and many more became world-renowned scholars. Together they produced hundreds of books and thousands of groundbreaking articles. Many took up positions in organizations outside of the University of Chicago, in universities like Harvard, Yale, and Berkeley. Some became public figures and others college presidents (Kurtz 1984). The sociologist-as-activist tradition in the United States can be traced back to the Chicago school. While Robert Park tolerated public and political involvement and was frequently involved in nonprofit organizations such as Hull-House and the Urban League, Burgess worked in the tradition of Charles Henderson, who was brought on by Small to replace in 1916. Burgess, who received his PhD from Chicago in 1913, developed a close, personal relationship

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with Jane Addams and others at HullHouse, who were in the process of conducting their own comprehensive studies of urban life. In fact, as early as 1895, under the guidance of Florence Kelley and her colleagues, Hull-House conducted expansive door-to-door surveys of social and economic characteristics of residents in the most congested districts of Chicago and assembled social survey maps of a variety of urban immigrant groups. At the same time they directed important research into sweatshop and labor issues (Residents of Hull-House 1895). Burgess and Park, as well as Addams, did for Chicago what Charles J. Booth (1840–1916) had done for London. Booth, a successful businessman turned activistphilanthropist, was instrumental in conducting systematic social surveys of the city, its poor and marginalized peoples as well as the social problems associated with their conditions. The importance of his work in the late nineteenth century, not only influenced the work done later by the Chicago school, it was a model for many of the earlier settlement house studies of communities. It was also the impetus for W. E. B. Du Bois’s famous study, The Philadelphia Negro, published in 1899. There were important connections established by University of Chicago sociologists with local, state and national leadership. Charles Merriam (1874–1953), a professor in the political sciences at Chicago, joined in with various members of the sociology department to promote interests of social reform. The organization of the Social Science Research Council owed much to his work and that of the sociologists at Chicago. Together, Merriam worked with Ernest Burgess, Jane Addams and others to secure research funding that addressed a variety of issues these scholarreformers believed governments needed to take on for the good of society. The influence of the Chicago school on programs of local, state and national planning were significant. Shortly after the opening of the University of Chicago, the country’s first juvenile court system with guidelines for the pro-

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cessing and treatment of juvenile offenders was put into place. It was through the work of Jane Addams and women at Hull-House that enough influence was brought to bear on reforming the way children were dealt with by the courts. Chicago became the first city to establish a juvenile court system that took into consideration the child’s domestic situation. With the advent of the Great Depression in 1929, social scientists at Chicago were looked to by state and federal officials to help find ways to promote public employment opportunities. Works Progress Administration (WPA) funding was often funneled through university channels and used to help conduct studies that would lead to ameliorative programs directed at housing reform, urban renewal and poverty reduction. The National Resources Planning Board, especially its Urbanism Committee, was headed and staffed by Chicago sociologists who not only collected and analyzed data, but also helped to design innovative programs for urban reform (Salerno 1987).

Race and the City In 1919, Chicago had been the scene of a major urban “race riot.” More than 500 people were injured and 38 people killed, the vast majority of whom were African Americans. With the Great Migration of thousands of African Americans from the South and the tensions developing between newly arriving immigrants from the poorest sections of Europe, great pressure was placed on the social and physical infrastructure. The years following World War I were characterized by economic distress and a spike in unemployment. The rioting lasted over a week and ended only when 6,000 members of the National Guard were called in to quell the violence. A renowned expert in race relations, Robert E. Park arrived in Chicago in 1913 but only for a fall semester term and returned during the summers to teach. As an activist in the National Urban League, Park helped to establish the Chicago Urban League in

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1916 to promote housing and employment for the large number of African Americans migrating from the South to the city. The first board of directors were to include local African American leaders such as T. Arnold Hill, and white reformers like Jane Addams. In 1919 Park came to Chicago to live and teach year round. Park’s orientation to race issues was unsettling to many of the students of color who attended his classes, and a number of white professors working within the department. Park frequently borrowed from Herbert Spencer in looking at cities and societies as living organisms. He saw social evolution as a “natural” process guided by natural laws of competition and survival of the fittest. He frequently quoted Adam Smith and subscribed to his notion of “an invisible hand.” He saw social change as slow, progressive and linear; also, he believed in homeostasis as opposed to radical social change. His conceptualization of the city was through the lens of ecological processes. Neighborhoods went through naturalistic processes of invasion and succession. This reification of urban life he referred to as “urban ecology.” Park had little patience for social activists who pushed for immediate political change to remedy the existing system of discrimination and inequality. Like his former employer, Booker T. Washington (1856–1915), it was his belief that African Americans needed to be patient. Like Washington he had considerable antipathy for leaders like W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963) and for organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). He believed the market would naturally remedy race issues and he purposely kept himself away from advocating for programs of social change and government intervention in civil rights. His black graduate students like Charles S. Johnson, E. Franklin Frazier, Oliver Cox and Horace Cayton, found little in the way of support for programs promoting racial equality. Also, while Park “cherished” black people, his race theory was based on his conservative political ideology. Vernon Williams (1996) and John

Stanfield (1985) have observed that Park’s “cycle theory” of black-white race relations was a reflection of Washington’s race relations model. He described an “inevitable chain” of initial contact, followed by competition, leading to accommodation and finally assimilation. For his time, this was the liberal, politically correct view. It coincided with the views of many in power who called for greater patience on the part of black people who were experiencing brutality, lynchings, and all sorts of legalized discrimination in housing, voting, education and employment under Jim Crow laws. Louis Wirth, however, took a very different position on these issues. Many African American students gravitated toward him. While not a flaming radical, he believed in the need to address racial problems immediately. As a Jew he experienced discrimination himself at the university. There were quotas on the admission of Jewish students to the various professional schools, and outright racial segregation in university dorms when he was admitted (Hutchins 1950; Holmes 1948). The Quadrangle Club, the University of Chicago’s elite faculty club, was originally closed to women, Jews and people of color. He was frequently surrounded by figures such as Robert E. L. Faris, who chaired the sociology department in 1925, and William F. Ogburn who were open in their dislike for most Jews. Wirth became a leader in the National Council for Race Relations, which sponsored demonstrations in various state capitals and an early march on Washington. He frequently participated in many labor and civil rights demonstrations with his friends. He became an expert witness in state and federal courts and helped to draft the Brown v. Board of Education (1954) legal brief shortly before his death (Salerno 1987). While the University of Chicago produced a wealth of great African American scholars, most of whom made important contributions to the study of racial problems in the United States, there is minimal attention paid to these people (Salerno 2013). However, Pierre Sainte-Arnaud (2009) has brilliantly captured the lives and work of

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some of these pioneers and their accomplished careers. There can only be speculation about the types of contributions they would have made if a place was provided for them in mainstream academic sociology at the time.

Crime and the City The legacy of the Chicago school of sociology would be incomplete without examining the important contributions made by these sociologists to the study of criminal behavior and juvenile delinquency. Most of the crime theory reflected progressive values of the time. Crime was an action or behavior that violated the law. It had less to do with the innate qualities of the criminal than it did the social influences that shaped criminal behavior. Under the auspices of the Russell Sage Foundation, Sophonisba Breckinridge who held both a doctorate in political science and a law degree from the University of Chicago, and who worked alongside of Jane Addams at Hull-House, and Edith Abbott, another associate and resident of HullHouse who held her doctorate in economics and did postdoctoral studies at the London School of Economics, produced one of the most comprehensive studies on juvenile delinquency ever done in Chicago or elsewhere. Their book, The Delinquent Child and the Home (1912), provided a detailed account of the extent of juvenile crime in the city. It examined the domestic and social factors associated with the problem. It also set the bar high for other scholars who would follow them. It was these two women who helped to professionalize the study of social work at University of Chicago and were responsible for the creation of the Cook County Bureau of Public Welfare in 1926 (Gerard 2007). While the women of Hull-House were instrumental in establishing the country’s first juvenile court system and working with the problems of the poor in 1899, another Chicago woman, Ethel Sturges Drummer, was responsible for delving into the social

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and psychological factors that led these children to be processed through the court, which at that time comprised judges who knew little if anything about the problems they were addressing. It was Drummer, a woman of considerable affluence, who took on the task of reforming the court. She recognized that the decisions being made by judges did not reflect a particularly enlightened view of the troubled child. Working with the women who helped establish the courts, she invested her own resources into organizing and staffing the Juvenile Psychopathic Institute, and hired John Healey, a young physician, to help judges establish better means for assessing the problem of children being dealt with by the court. Healey and Drummer gained the assistance of Chicago school sociologists in their work (Tanenhaus 2004). The institute became the basis of for the Institute for Juvenile Research. It was Healey who understood the importance of getting each child’s story from the child him or herself. It was a method that both served as a therapeutic method as well as a basis for the collection of important data on the scope and nature of children who were in trouble (Bennett 1981). Scholarship of men in this area was built on the groundbreaking efforts of women who came before them and who also taught at the University of Chicago. Edwin H. Sutherland (1883–1950), who became a renowned American criminologist, was educated by Small, Mead and Thomas like many of the women of Hull-House who studied there at the same time. While he found himself writing about crime only after receiving his doctorate, he published his first text, Criminology, in 1924. The book became a classic in the field. After teaching at the University of Minnesota in the 1920s, he came back to teach at Chicago in the 1930s. Sutherland was among the first criminologists to fully reject the notions put forth by the Italian physician, Cesare Lombroso, who saw criminal behavior as a biologically inherent abnormality. Sociology, as well as the work of Breckinridge and Abbott had

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taught him to look at social surroundings and the various social and familial influences to understand criminal deviance. Sutherland integrated many of Thomas’s ideas into his own theories. His notions of “cultural transition theory,” “white-collar crime” and his outspoken opposition to the death penalty were hallmarks of his work. The Chicago school produced some of the nation’s most renowned criminologists. In their work rich and evocative first-person narratives mingled with a wealth of dispassionate social data. Ernest Burgess served as thesis advisor on many graduate student theses that were turned into books. His interest in family, sexuality, social deviance and marginalization guided the work of some of his best students. But even more essential were his connections to funding sources, such as the Laura Spellman Rockefeller Memorial Fund, his association with Hull-House, and his connections to a variety of governmental agencies. Under his guidance, Walter Reckless (1899–1988) wrote The Natural History of Vice Areas in Chicago in 1925 as his doctoral thesis, which was published in 1933. Reckless is credited today with being the architect of what has been called “containment theory” of crime and delinquency, associating causality with the breakdown of social and moral forces that function to restrict criminal behavior. This was in keeping with Park’s notion of “social disorganization” and cultural assimilation. Frederic Thrasher wrote The Gang (1927) a major work on Chicago street gangs. In it he described the urban origins, forms and functions of gangs in the city. Thrasher, unlike many who came before him, rejected the gang-animal hypothesis that suggested that gang membership was instinctual for boys. For Thrasher gangs appeared in cities under certain conditions, which had to do with familial dysfunction and unmet social needs. For him, the formation of gangs had nothing to do with what some promoted as the innate savagery of young boys. John Landesco (1890–1954) wrote Organized Crime in Chicago in 1923, which was published in 1929 as part of the Illinois Organized Crime Survey. Burgess secured funding

for him both through his foundation contacts as well as the university’s Social Science Research Committee. Landesco, like his classmates, was sent out into the field to do site research and collect narratives from criminals, themselves. Landesco’s work was a major turning point in the study of organized crime. While he saw Prohibition as a catalyst for increasing organized criminal activity, especially as the economy was collapsing, he showed its early history in the nineteenth century as well as its connection to ward politics and business in Chicago. Unlike many of his contemporaries who promoted the phenomenon as inspired by dangerous foreign and ethnic elements, he saw organized crime as a way of those who were poor, powerless and discriminated against to find extralegal avenues to the American Dream. He was far from “soft” on organized crime and the bloodshed and problems it caused. But he placed much of the responsibility at the doorstep of corrupt politicians and police officials. Clifford R. Shaw (1896–1957) has received considerable attention for his work in juvenile delinquency. As a graduate student at Chicago, he supported himself as a parole officer working with the Illinois State Training School for Boys, and had the opportunity to meet numerous boys who were going through the juvenile justice system at the Saint Charles School for Boys. He was hired as a probations officer for Cook County Juvenile Court in 1924. He resided in the neighborhood where many of these boys had homes, and got to know many of them personally while working on his graduate degree. Because of Ernest Burgess with whom he worked closely on his thesis, Shaw was given the position of director of sociology for the Institute for Juvenile Research. Burgess suggested Henry D. McKay (1899– 1980), one of his other graduate students known to Shaw, for his assistant. It was from there that Shaw and McKay launched their long-term scholarly partnership as well as advanced their careers. They coauthored a classic text on juvenile delinquency in 1942 titled Juvenile Delinquency in Urban Areas, which looked demographically at juvenile

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crime not only in Chicago but in other cities as well. Shaw used cartographic techniques to show the relationship between neighborhood, education, health, mental health, poverty and crime. Aside from writing a popular text together, Shaw and McKay wrote several important books on juvenile crime, but the book that gave Shaw and the Chicago school considerable visibility was The Jack Roller, which was published in 1930 by the University of Chicago Press. The Jack Roller was a first-person narrative told by a boy with whom Shaw had worked for many years. The autobiographical tale is told as a narrative of a distressed and displaced young person, “Stanley,” who is led into a life of crime at a very early age and spends much of his life on the streets of Chicago or in jails and the juvenile detention center, St. Charles, just outside of the city. This is a tale of domestic abuse, poverty and violence. It deals with typical Chicago school themes such as urban marginalization, poverty and loneliness. Shaw and McKay were to dedicate their lives to the study of juvenile delinquents. Shaw was often seen in the street speaking with young people, inviting many of them into his home to meet his wife and family. He and McKay were responsible for organizing the Chicago Area Project, a community organization that provided recreational services and educational counseling to young people. The study of crime and social deviance at Chicago took another turn in the 1950s and 1960s. Howard S. Becker, who had studied with Park, Burgess and other departmental luminaries published an important study of marijuana users called The Outsiders. While maintaining some of the methods of his teachers, particularly the ethnographic approach, Becker incorporated a more contemporary theoretical understanding of deviance as a social construction wherein the most powerful and influential establish the boundaries between acceptable and unacceptable behavior. Written as a brilliant narrative with impressive character development, Becker’s theoretical position is in some ways a precursor to Michel

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Foucault’s work and very much removed from the Small and Henderson notion of what sociology should be about.

Immigrants in the City The notion of the immigrant experience as a focus of academic study has its deepest roots in Chicago school sociology. Chicago itself was a city of immigrants. Although the work of Jane Addams and the settlement house surveys of immigrant populations and their problems have a deeper history in the United States, the University of Chicago was to give the study of the immigrant experience broader scholarly importance. While people from the university worked hand-and-hand with Addams, Robert Park and his colleagues attempted to theorize the immigration process. The work at Chicago was significantly different from the work of other sociologists at that time, such as Edward A. Ross, Franklin Giddings, and Lester F. Ward (Schwendinger and Schwendinger 1974). While Park’s writings contained racist overtones and sometimes racist language, he distanced himself from those who spoke of the biological inferiority and superiority of races. For many people, Park’s position was more than adequately progressive. Edward Ross, for example, who chaired the sociology department at the University of Wisconsin at Madison between 1906 and 1937, called for a national program of eugenics directed at avoiding white “racial suicide.” It was his contention that white Anglo-Saxons constituted the most superior race and he called for strict limits on immigration of Asians, Eastern and Southern Europeans. He had particular disdain for Jews. In a reference to a gathering of European immigrants he noted: “There were so many sugar-loaf heads, slit-mouths, lantern jaws, and goose billed noses . . . that one might imagine that a malicious jinni had amused himself by casting human beings in a set of skew molds” (Ross 1914, 286). Before assuming the chair of sociology at Wisconsin, Ross was dismissed from Stanford University for having made

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derogatory comments about Chinese “coolies” taking jobs that Americans should have had in constructing the railroads in California. But there is ample evidence that his remarks most offended some of the Stanford trustees, businesspeople who were invested in building the railroads by importing cheap labor at the time. This included members of the Stanford family. Park spoke about the need for assimilation rather than segregation as an ultimate goal. Both he and Jane Addams believed in what was referred to as the Americanization Project where immigrants would benefit by becoming assimilated, which to them meant becoming more Americanized. By leaving behind their old cultural values and languages and taking on more AngloSaxon characteristics displayed by middleclass Americans, there would be far greater social order and much less prejudice. Such a focus on the value of assimilation was appealing to Anglo-Saxon “white” middleclass Americans who were uncomfortable with the throngs of “racially” diverse and “dangerous” poor immigrants flooding their cities. Education was a means of bringing this about. For many people, it was the tool for re-stabilizing society and addressing the clash of cultural values that sociologists referred to as “social disorganization,” crime and unrest. Immigrants were seen as not knowing any better. Addams and Park were people who promoted a course of “tolerance,” which many contemporary liberals continue to follow. Of course Hull-House barred people of color from taking up residency there because of Jim Crow laws, as did the University of Chicago exclude African Americans from its student housing. The problem with the Chicago school analysis was its avoidance of issues of class and the economic system that promoted inequality and the powerful entrenchment of the very wealthy. It was by and large the Carnegie and Rockefeller foundations that supported their studies. There was no discussion of cultural relativity, and little mention of class conflict despite the powerful influence and civil unrest related to labor-capital conflicts. Rather there was a

clear articulation of fair competition imbedded speeches and writings. The immigrant had to be made more competitive and therefore needed to assimilate quickly. The “tolerance” for otherness at the University of Chicago was seen by many, including the local press, as a form of radical antiAmericanism. And there was fear on the part of some that young student minds were being corrupted by some of their liberal professors there. W. I. Thomas’s study of the Polish peasant diaspora was years ahead of its time. If one were to look at the writings of early social reformers, such as Jacob Riis, there was only a glimmer of the notion that the immigrant was the victim and not the victimizer. But only with the cooperation of Florian Znaniecki, who had a strong understanding of Polish culture and subcultures, was Thomas to construct a sympathetic portrait of the Polish émigré. His use of Polish newspapers and letters written in Polish captured the sentiment of the people who authored them and not simply an Anglosociological interpretation. Yet, Thomas knew that perception was everything. One’s subjective definition of the situation was what determined that person’s social and cultural reality. Znaniecki was a person closer to that specific human experience and understanding than Thomas himself. The Polish Peasant in Europe and America was published, not by the University of Chicago Press, but supported by private funders and released by Alfred Knopf in New York and the Gotham Press in Boston. It was produced in five volumes between 1918 and 1920. Today this work stands as a classic representation of Chicago school sociology. The study set into place a qualitative methodology for urban investigation that was unique for its time. And it looked at immigrants and their historical transition from the Polish countryside to American cities, especially Chicago, through their own experiences, through their own words as well as a wealth of descriptive historical data. Park spent considerable time using ecological models to capture the essence of

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what he saw as social change, neighborhoods going through processes of “invasion and succession.” What was an area previously occupied by the Irish immigrants might become an Italian enclave. There were charts to depict such movement in space across urban, suburban and rural landscapes. The conflict, accommodation and assimilation model appeared to work better for some groups than for others. But the most efficacious quality of this model was its sense of naturalism. Marginality became an important element in Park’s ecological paradigm. There was the center of assimilated people sharing a common American culture, and a periphery of those who did not fit in because of where they were from or how they looked or both. These were people living on the social margins. People who were not fully part of either their culture of origin or their newly adopted one. Park’s classic paper on marginality published in 1928 has many parallels to Georg Simmel’s classic paper, “The Stranger,” which was first published in 1908. This paper gives the reader Park’s utopian understanding that the marginal person has the ability to synthesize two conflicting worlds. In fact he, like Simmel, sees particular value in the outsider status. This quality of his work is greatly appreciated by his student Howard Becker whose study The Outsiders saw social deviance in a positive light signaling progressive social change. On this Hegelian note, he gives his reader every indication that he truly believes that the cultural hybridization of society is in keeping with his evolutionary view of progress through integration: “It is in the mind of the marginal man-where the changes and fusions of culture are going on that we can best study the processes of civilization and of progress” (Park 1928, 893).

Subjective Sociology and Chicago School Symbolic Interaction While the research conducted by members of the sociology faculty at Chicago was important, a new theoretical paradigm

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took shape as components of German idealism were merged with John Dewey’s pragmatism. Symbolic interactionism was an American means of coming to terms with Kant’s notion of subjective understanding and Edmund Husserl’s concept of intersubjectivity. Mead and Thomas, whose ideas often paralleled each other, understood from their knowledge of German idealism that social reality was a product of human perception and interaction. While most sociologists were still looking at the world as a set of finite reified social structures that adhered to natural law including ecological processes of growth and homeostasis, Mead and Thomas argued that social structures were products of perception and interaction. Furthermore, they believed the social world was in a state of flux as it was in a constant state of becoming. These ideas were very much in line by those developed by Charles Horton Cooley (1864–1929) at the University of Michigan. Michigan had been a place where many of the elements of symbolic interactionism were germinating. Mead had been a professor there before going to Chicago. He met both Cooley and Dewey there and the three shared many of their ideas (Miller 1973). After Mead and Dewey left to teach at Chicago, they kept in touch with Cooley. W. I. Thomas’s famous aphorism or theorem: “If men perceive a situation as real, it’s real in its consequence” spoke to the power of human interaction to imagine the social world into existence (Thomas and Thomas 1928). Thomas and Mead worked closely after Dewey left Chicago for a position at Columbia University in 1905. It was frequently difficult to discern where Mead’s ideas left off and Thomas’s began. Both exerted a profound influence on the sociology students moving through their classes. Thomas had been highly influence by anthropologists such as Franz Boas in terms of his later views on race, language and ethnography. In fact, Boas was brought to Chicago to teach a summer course in 1908. Thomas was developing as a cultural relativist as he delved into the subjective nature

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of understanding the place where one found oneself in the social environment (Murray 2013, 163–77). Thomas, Small, and their Chicago school colleagues helped introduce Max Weber to English speaking sociologists in America. Small had welcomed Weber to Chicago in 1904 and arranged for him to speak at the Congress of Arts and Science in St. Louis. It was Weber who understood through his particular notion of Verstehen, that one can only comprehend the actions of another by putting himself or herself into the place of the other. This was a central hermeneutic principle that would not be fully developed in American sociology, not even Chicago sociology, for several more decades, but emerged early on in German Romanticism, which privileged the subjective. While complete understanding of another’s subjectivity is not considered possible by most symbolic interactionists, it is nevertheless seen as important to recognize this subjectivity as having validity for each person’s subjective point of view and understanding it as the basis of all interaction. Verstehen in this way speaks to the multiplicity of truths and the creation of one’s reality through social interaction. It frequently stands in opposition to the notion of an objective empiricism and the Enlightenment notion of one universal truth. This notion was an important element of German Romanticism. For these sociologists perception was a key to understanding the internal dynamics of social problems. While empirical evidence was necessary to support pragmatic programs aimed at addressing social ills, it was felt that one could not fully understand them without exploring the personal experiences of those whose lives were affected by poverty, alienation and the deteriorating urban environment. Case studies and personal interviews not only supplemented empirical data, but also animated it. Throughout the 1920s and well into the 1930s and early 1940s, the Chicago school produced a series of monographs based on graduate student research and published by the University of Chicago Press. The press, which came into existence with the birth of

the university itself, became a major conduit for the dissemination of work done by its own scholars on urban social problems including crime, delinquency and rapid immigration. The topics of studies, such as The Hobo by Nels Anderson, The Taxi Dance Hall by Paul Cressey, and The Gang by Frederic Thrasher were works that resonated with the changing climate of the city. Newspaper and magazine reviews of these scholarly books were common and brought publicity to the studies undertaken by university students under the supervision of leading Chicago school scholars and public attention to the problems they explored. The interactionist perspective, a term coined by Herbert Blumer, informed much of this work. People were examined not as objects or social subjects but as human beings who had stories to tell. At times, the studies would comprise a series of firstperson narratives based on personal interviews that reflected a very subjective and personal way of understanding phenomena that most social scientists took for granted. In this way the Chicago school monographs dramatically reflected the conditions of the city. There was no way that a chart with numbers could more vividly illustrate this. The feeling of people, their unique sense of reality was expressed in their personal use of language. Social problems, particularly problems associated with cities, such as alienation became important objects of Chicago school investigation. The city represented the dynamic processes of change taking place in society as well as in each individual. Immigration, crime, deviance, poverty, race and alienation became elements of a new motif that was also reflected in the literature of the day.

The Decline and Legacy of Chicago School Sociology Chicago school sociology had a tremendous impact on urban planning in the United States as well as on the field of social work. Connections of Chicago sociologists

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to Hull-House and other community organizational ventures helped to refine a particularly American liberal social policy. These sociologists worked closely with government officials, particularly during the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt to established programs in public housing, labor reform, racial integration and urban renewal. Louis Wirth led the urban research division of the National Resources Planning Board that helped design work programs and plan for postwar development (Salerno 1987, 33–35). It was also the research of Wirth and his graduate assistants, including Edward Shils, that provided some of the basis for the challenge to educational segregation in the Brown v. Board of Education US Supreme Court decision in 1954 (Clark 2004). While the scholarly importance of the Chicago school of sociology can certainly be measured by the numerous contemporary citations to these works, this is not be a scale of analysis that would sit well with these researchers themselves. Nor would the ratings of the journals in which we find their citations. What contributors to the Chicago school appeared to share in common was a type of humanism uncommon to most urban sociology today. It was an approach to social problems that valued the object of study, people. While ideas are transformed by time, this type of research and analysis has been absorbed into new paradigms throughout the Chicago school diaspora (Low and Bowden 2013). We might find traces of its urban ethnography in the research being done by anthropologists into the lives of female street artists in Beirut, or in the study of junk collectors in the poorest quarters of Beijing. Any sociological examination of the life and death of neighborhoods, of human marginalization, displacement and exodus, which requires the researcher to be out in the street observing and talking to people owes a debt to the work of scholars like Park and Burgess. The model of qualitative research that they employed helped to soften the hard statistical edge often associated with that discipline.

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Most social historians trace the ending of Chicago school sociology at the University of Chicago to the 1950s or before. Its decline or disappearance after the departure of Park, Burgess, Blumer and Wirth was rapid. Under the leadership of Robert M. Hutchins criticism directed at this type of research was intensified. Hutchins whose appointment of philosopher Mortimer Adler over the protests of university faculty symbolized a scholarly shift in focus away from what he and Adler viewed as work that better belonged in the language and literature department (Darnell 1990, 249). There was no place for cultural relativism in the Great Books seminars or in Cartesian systems-oriented sociology. It was after World War II that a greater emphasis was placed on “objective” and mathematical approaches. These were seen by some as more sophisticated, more logical, more lucrative. Foundation money found comfort in the construction of charts and mathematical aggregates. It was not surprising that a new type of sociology would arise from Harvard and Columbia that would be a throw-back to the old grand narrative structuralism of Spencer and Durkheim and move further away from the subjectivity of the streets. Talcott Parsons (1902–79), a trained economist, set a new course for sociology’s development that was seen by many as a poor substitute for the study of people (Wirth 1939; Wrong 1961; Gouldner 1970). But Chicago-style studies were able to maintain some degree of popularity in the 1950s and 1960s thanks to Herbert Blumer’s focus on symbolic interaction. The books by Erving Goffman on the methods of presenting oneself to others, works by Howard S. Becker on social marginality, and the ethnomethodology of Harold Garfinkel, owed a significant debt to those who helped develop ethnographic sociology the generation before. They came to examine social problems as a product of subjective understandings and misunderstandings. Today, large databases are maintained by marketing firms like Facebook, Verizon, and Google. The digitization of the US Census

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and UN demographics replaces young men with green eyeshades and adding machines. The growing and ever-expanding wealth of data collected by governments on the personal habits of its citizens can produce volumes of reports, many of which can be customized and sold in the marketplace. Geographic Information System (GIS) can run all sorts of demographic studies, for a price. And so any need for this type of statistical analysis is well served. Still, the Chicago school’s emphasis on social construction, the importance of human perception and interaction, and its focus on helping us to understand what makes people human remains an important part of its legacy. As Andrew Abbott (1999, 22) noted in his anniversary commemorative to the department in which he served as chair: “That work provides a foundation and example of where sociology should go. There is no need to write a valediction of the Chicago tradition. One eulogizes only the dead.”

Glossary American liberalism An ideology that is supportive of capitalism, democracy and the methods required to preserve both. Ethnographic research Reports based on the direct observation of small groups of people and their ways of life. Human ecology The study of humans, their environments, and the ways in which environment and behavior are connected. Marginality A term developed by Robert E. Park referring to the sense of existing between two distinct cultures and not fully belonging to or accepted by either. Pragmatism Philosophical orientation associated with William James and John Dewey that suggests meaning and truth are judged as consequences of practicality, usefulness, and workability. Symbolic interaction A theoretical orientation in sociology that proposes all meaning is derived from intersubjective interaction.

Verstehen A German word meaning “understanding,” but used by Max Weber and other social theorists to mean that human behavior can only be understood through a position of empathetic understanding.

References Abbott, Andrew. 1999. Department and Discipline: Chicago Sociology at One-Hundred. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Anderson, Nels. 1923. The Hobo: The Sociology of the Homeless Man. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bannister, Robert. 1987. Sociology and Scientism: The American Quest for Objectivity, 1880– 1940. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Becker, Howard. 1963. Studies in the Sociology of Deviance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bennett, James. 1981. Oral History and Delinquency. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Breckinridge, Sophonisba, and Edith Abbott. 1912. The Delinquent Child and the Home. New York: New York Charities Publication Committee. Bulmer, Martin. 1984. The Chicago School of Sociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Clark, Kenneth. 2004. Toward Humanity and Justice. Westport, CT: Praeger. Cressey, Paul. 1932. The Taxi-Dance Hall. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Darnell, Regina. 1990. Edward Sapir: Linguist, Anthropologist, Humanist. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 2010. Edward Sapir: Linguist, Anthropologist, Humanist. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Deegan, M. J. 2005. Jane Addams and the Men of the Chicago School, 1892–1981. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Du Bois, W. E. B. 1899. The Philadelphia Negro. New York: Lippincott. Frasier, E. Franklin. 1932. The Negro Family in Chicago. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Fritzsche, Peter. 1996. Reading Berlin 1900. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

chicago school: city as a social laboratory Gerard, Gene C. 2007. Abbott, Edith. In Encyclopedia of American Urban History, edited by D. Goldfield, 1–2. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Gouldner, Alvin. 1970. The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology. New York: Avon Books. Holmes, Jack. 1948. Jim Crow at Chicago University. The Nation, January 3. Hutchins, Robert M. 1950. The world picture as it affects discrimination in U.S. colleges. A presentation given at The Midwest Educators’ Conference, November 3–4, Chicago. Jabzinsek, Dietmar, Bernward Joerges, and Ralf Thies. 2001. Berlin Grosstadt-Dokumente: A Forgotten Precursor of the Chicago School of Sociology. Wissenschaftszentrum: Berlin fur Sozialforschung. Kasler, Dirk, and Stephen Turner. 1992. Sociology Responds to Fascism. London: Routledge. Kurtz, Lester. 1984. Evaluating Chicago Sociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Landesco, John. 1929. Organized Crime in Chicago. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Langermann, Patricia, and Gillian Niebrugge. 1998. The Chicago women’s school of sociology (1890–1920) – Research as advocacy. In The Women Founders: Sociology and Social Theory, edited by P. Langermann and G. Niebrugge, 229–52. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press. Linder, Rolf. 1990. The Reportage of Urban Culture: Robert Park and the Chicago School. New York: Cambridge University Press. Low, Jacqueline, and Gary Bowden. 2013. Chicago School Diaspora: Epistemology and Substance. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press. Matthews, Fred. 1977. Quest for an American Sociology: Robert E. Park and the Chicago School. Montreal, CA: McGill-Queens University Press. Miller, David. 1973. George Herbert Mead, Self, Language and the World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Murray, Stephen. 2013. American Anthropology and Company: Historical Explorations. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Park, R. E. 1928. Human migration and the marginal man, American Journal of Sociology 38:881–93. Park, Robert, and Ernest Burgess. 1925. The City. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Reckless, Walter. 1925. The Natural History of Vice Areas in Chicago. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Residents of Hull-House. 1895. Hull-House Maps and Papers. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell. Ross, Edward A. 1914. The Old World in the New: The Significance of Past and Present Immigration to the American People. New York: The Century Company. Saint-Arnaud, Pierre. 2003. African American Pioneers of Sociology. Translated by F. Feldstein. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Salerno, Roger. 1987. Louis Wirth. Westport, CN: Greenwood Press. 2013. Was There a Black Chicago School? In The Chicago School Diaspora, edited by J. Low and G. Bowden, 47–60. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press. Schwendinger, Herman, and Julia Schwendinger. 1974. The Sociologists of the Chair. New York: Basic Books. Shaw, Clifford. 1930. The Jack Roller: A Delinquent Boy’s Own Story. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Shaw, Clifford, and H. McKay. 1942. Juvenile Delinquency and Urban Areas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Simmel, Georg. 1908. Exkurs über den fremden. In Soziologie: Untersuchungen über die Formen der Vergesellschaftung, 1–22. Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot. Smith, Dennis. 1988. The Chicago School: A Liberal Critique of Capitalism. New York: Palgrave. Stafford, John. 1985. Philanthropy and Jim Crow in American Social Science. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Sutherland, Edwin. 1924. Criminology. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott. Tanenhaus, David. 2004. Juvenile Justice in the Making. New York: Oxford University Press. Thomas, W. I., and Dorothy Swaine Thomas. 1928. The Child in America. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Thomas, W. I., and Florian Znaniecki. 1927. The Polish Peasant in Europe and America. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Thrasher, Frederic. 1927. The Gang: A Study of 1,313 Gangs in Chicago. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Williams, Vernon. 1996. Rethinking Race: Franz Boaz and His Contemporaries. Louisville: University of Kentucky Press. Wirth, Louis. 1928. The Ghetto. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1939. The structure of social action, a review. American Sociological Review 4:100. Wolff, Kurt. 1950. The Sociology of Georg Simmel. Translated and edited by Kurt H. Wolff. New York: Free Press.

Wrong, Dennis. 1961. Our over-socialized concept of man in modern sociology. American Sociological Review 26:183–93. Yeager, Matthew. 2015. On the importance of being John Landesco. Trends in Organized Crime 18:143–56. Zorbaugh, Harvey. 1929. The Goldcoast and the Slum. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

CHAPTER 13

Luhmann’s Sociological Systems Theory and the Study of Social Problems Werner Schirmer and Dimitris Michailakis

Abstract This chapter discusses social problems from the perspective of Niklas Luhmann’s sociological systems theory. We argue that his theory provides a rich framework to gain relevant insights for the study of social problems. The key element of systems theory is the concept of functionally differentiated society, that is, a heterarchical arrangement of social systems such as the economy, polity, religion, science. Luhmann’s theory connects core ideas from both realist and constructionist epistemologies without ending up in inconsistencies or contradictions. The theory gives justice to realism insofar as it takes the systemic nature of social phenomena seriously and it defies simplistic models of causality, steering, planning, and intervention. Systems theory is constructionist insofar as it takes the multiperspectivity of modern society seriously: many social systems construct their own definitions of social problems including underlying causalities and values. The same social problem appears differently from different systems’ perspectives.

Introduction This chapter will approach social problems from the perspective of the systems theory as advanced by Niklas Luhmann. There is a long history of theories and theoretical approaches in the social sciences that distinctly considered themselves systems theories or draw heavily upon the notion of systems (Easton 1967; Habermas 1992; Parsons 1951; Wallerstein 1974; Waltz 1979; Watzlawick, Beavin, and Jackson 1967; Weick 2001). There are several reasons for why Luhmann’s theory can and should be added

to this list as there is substantial overlap between them, for example the idea of emergent properties of systems that cannot be explained by properties of constituent elements or the circumstance that systems, in order to reproduce, need to differentiate from their environments. On the other hand, there are a lot of reasons to see a discontinuity between Luhmann and others of which we can only deal with a few throughout this chapter. Readers familiar with the work of Talcott Parsons and Jürgen Habermas may recognize some notions which have been

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incorporated into the Luhmannian framework (such as communication, media of interchange, structure, function systems, evolution), only to find their meanings heavily transformed and put in a context of concepts from biology (autopoiesis: Maturana and Varela 1980), cybernetics (secondorder observation: Von Foerster 1984), or mathematics (laws of form: Spencer-Brown 1994). Luhmann (1927–98) was a social theorist whose work has strongly influenced mainstream sociology in the German-speaking regions. His theory also gained some popularity in Hispanic, Italian and Scandinavian sociological communities. However, Luhmann’s impact in the English-speaking worldwas rather moderate, although the number of English translations of original work, the secondary literature (Brunczel 2010; King 2009; Lee and Brosziewski 2009; Moeller 2005, 2012), and in sociology and neighboring disciplines (Andersen 2003; Beyer 2009; Gibson and Boiko 2012; Hagen 2000; King and Thornhill 2003; La Cour and Højlund 2008; La Cour and Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos 2013; Schirmer 2008; Schirmer and Hadamek 2007; Schirmer and Michailakis 2011, 2015a, 2015c; Vanderstraeten 2004) has steadily grown. We need to mention that Luhmann has written dozens of monographs and hundreds of articles on social issues of all kinds, from organizations to face-to-face interactions, from traditional to modern societies, from families to education, from economy to religion and science, from stratification to globalization and world society. Yet, “social problems” does not seem to be a major topic in his work; not even did the notion appear as a keyword in the index very often; at some places Luhmann argued explicitly that his theory is not one of social problems (e.g., Luhmann 1995, 114). Against that background one might wonder why we are dealing with Luhmann’s theory in a handbook on social problems in the first place. The answer is that there is considerable work by Luhmann and authors applying this theory on issues that the litera-

ture on social problems normally deals with, for instance inclusion/exclusion, inequality, environmental pollution, financial crises, mass migration, without explicitly calling these issues “social problems.” This literature demonstrates the usefulness of Luhmannian systems theory and has delivered surprising or unconventional insights, some of which we will discuss later in the chapter. We argue, furthermore, that Luhmann’s theory is built in a way that it gives justice to both realist and constructionist stances without ending up in inconsistencies or contradictions. On the one hand, it is realist insofar as it takes the systemic nature of social phenomena seriously, i.e., it defies simplistic models of causality, steering, planning and intervention that are often underlying traditional approaches to social problems. On the other hand, Luhmannian theory is constructionist insofar as it takes social systems seriously as observers who construct their own image of reality, also their own (and varying) definitions of social problems including underlying causalities and values. This chapter consists of two major parts and one concluding section. First we need to introduce Luhmann’s general way of thinking that sets him apart from much of mainstream sociology, some basic concepts and a brief sketch of the theory of modern society. Building upon this framework, we scrutinize the potential of Luhmann’s theory of society for the study of social problems. Next we focus on the “realist” aspects of systems theory and presents issues Luhmann himself understood as problematic consequences of the way modern society is structured: mass exclusion and environmental pollution. In the following section, we focus on the constructionist epistemology developed in Luhmann’s later work and demonstrate how it can be made useful for studying the construction of social problems. Drawing on material from our own empirical studies on suicide of persons with mental illness and loneliness among older people, we will point out connections to and advancements of the constructionist tradition started by Spector and Kitsuse.

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The concluding section sums up the presented argument.

A Theory of Modern Society The main aim of Luhmann’s endeavor was to develop a theory of society which ended in his two volume opus magnum Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft published in 1997, and by now finally issued in English (Luhmann, 2012, 2013). Picking up an idea by the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, Luhmann identifies four obstacles épistémologiques that, in his view, have hindered cognitive advancement in social theory for decades since the classics of Marx, Weber, and Durkheim, and thereby missing much potential for sociological insight that goes beyond common sense. The first epistemological obstacle, according to Luhmann is the widespread assumption that society consists of people and relations between people. According to Luhmann, the anthropocentrism of this stance is not compatible with the classic Durkheimian idea that the social is a reality, an emergent order of its own kind that makes it operationally autonomous from individual consciousness. The – undoubtedly controversial – counterproposal is that the constituent element of society and of all other social systems be communication, not human beings (see the title of King’s introduction to Luhmann: “Systems, not people make society happen”; King 2009). Luhmann argues that only communication is genuinely social; human beings with their mental, neurological, and biochemophysiological components do not belong to society but to its environment. To be sure, Luhmann acknowledges that there would be no society without human beings, and in that regard they are indispensable (as species, not as individuals) but neither would there be a society without water, oxygen, moderate climate etc. Placing human beings in the environment of society does not make them less important. System and environment cannot be thought without the other.

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The second obstacle to progress in social thought is the widely shared assumption that society is integrated by consensus between human beings. This idea goes back to the contract theories of Hobbes and Rousseau and have since been central in many functionalist theories of solidarity from Durkheim to Parsons and life-world approaches (Habermas). Empirically, however, society is not only possible without consensus; dissent is and has been much more likely, as most brands of conflict sociology (Collins and Sanderson 2009; Marx and Engels [1847] 2014; Sanderson 2001) keep on pointing out. Luhmann (1992, 1995) argues that, communication aims at understanding in order to be able to continue its systemic operations, but this understanding does not mean agreement (see also Poggi and Sciortino 2011, 162). As for a theory of society, giving up the idea of consensus allows at least two crucial insights. On the one hand, it means trading in normativity (how society ought to be) with more realism, for example understanding politics as a “dirty business” (Luhmann 2000a) instead of the place to deliberate on common goals with help of the better argument. On the other hand, it allows for conceiving society as a differentiated entity that can bear many conflicting rationalities (like Weber’s plurality of value spheres) instead of one voice that sets the dominant tone. In other words, giving up the idea of society = consensus (at least on some basic values) allows for understanding pluralism and diversity. This is of key importance for the study of social problems as we will show in section 4. The third epistemological obstacle touches the common conceptualization of societies as regionally, territorially limited units. Mainstream sociology often equates states or nations with societies, such as the American society, the Greek society, the German society, or the British society equaling the respective nation-states. But this leads one to wonder whether there is also a Scottish, Welsh or English society distinct from the British, and if yes, why should we call it society (and not community). For Luhmann who, by contrast, understands

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society as a communication system – not as an assembly of human beings – such a view does not make much sense. Luhmann suggests reserving the concept society for the overarching, encompassing social system within which the entire communication takes place. If the constitutive element of society is communication there can only be one society, and so necessarily a “world society” (Luhmann 1997). “World society” does by no means imply unity or uniformity. There are of course many regional differences of all kinds (inequalities, degree of industrialization, population density) but so are there within the territories of individual nation-states, too; so why draw the boundaries of societies at nation-states (Stichweh 2000)? Nation-states are a historically young product of early modernity (Anderson 1991; Clark 2013) and so is the assumption that society and nation-state coincide; society could exist very well without them for many centuries and who knows what is yet to come. As with every social phenomenon the nation-state is contingent and has an expiration date. The systems-theoretical concept of world society goes far beyond that of society = nation-state. According to Luhmann world society is characterized by a structure of functional differentiation: i.e., of a number of globally operating subsystems such as polity, economy, religion, science, arts, law, etc., whose boundaries run along differences of meaning, not of territory. Each of these subsystems fulfills a different function for society, and by doing so, configures communication on a particular societal-reference problem (such as scarcity of resources: economy; collectively binding decisions: polity; stabilization of normative expectations: law; generation of knowledge: science; etc.) and employ function-specific rationalities (economy: profit and competition; politics: power; law: justice and legality; science: objectivity and truth, etc.). Importantly, these function systems each create their own view of social reality: everything in the world can get rendered into prices, costs and profits (economy); into issues of power, and loyalty (polity); into matters of (il)legality (law);

into research objects (science). Importantly for the study of social problems, a functionally differentiated world society does not have a center or an apex. There is no superordinate rationality or viewpoint that transcends those of the functional subsystems that could define and tackle social problems by themselves. Neither can one subsystem take on this role and speak/decide in the name of the others. Even if one, countering Luhmann, assumes the primacy of one function, e.g., the primacy of the economy (as Marxists claim) or the polity (as many political theorists claim), these function systems could hardly define economically what is scientifically true, religiously sacred, artistically aesthetic etc. Nation-states look like they have – or as Luhmann-student Nassehi (2003) puts it: they “simulate” – the ability to represent society and act as center and apex, but sociologists might be better off by not buying into these self-descriptions of the political system (Luhmann 2000a; Schirmer and Hadamek 2007). Finally, the fourth epistemological obstacle touches the question of how to observe society. Understanding society as a world society and as the encompassing social system obliterates the commonsense option that societies, like groups of people and like territories, can be observed from outside. In world society there is no outside – at least no social outside. And this is epistemologically crucial. Observations of society undertaken by human minds are, to be sure, from outside. However, in order to be heard, they need to enter communication, hence enter social systems, hence enter society. Like this, they enter the “mills” of social systems with all their momentums and unpredictability, with meaning turned upside down according to the operative rationalities of function systems and organizations. This is highly relevant for the analysis of social problems, in particular in mind of the constructionist notion social problems as results of claimsmaking activities (Best 1995, see the fourth section of this chapter; Holstein and Miller 1993; Loseke 2003; Spector and Kitsuse [1977] 1987). A prototype example for

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claimsmakers are protest movements, i.e., social systems which criticize society as if it was a system which they do not belong to, for instance capitalist society, and as if the semantics they employ are not supplied by that society.

Social Problems I: Subsequent Problems of Functional Differentiation Due to his death in 1998, Luhmann did not experience the massive changes to society that the digital revolution, Internet and mobile telephony have brought. Consequently, his original work has not much to say about the effects of computers, new media and the like, but by now there is a growing body of literature demonstrating the usefulness of Luhmannian insights on these issues (Baecker 2007; Lee, Goede, and Shryock 2010; Süssenguth 2015). Luhmann’s theory of society is foremost a theory of modern society, and with “modern” he meant anything from early industrialization until the end of his life. This does not make his theory outdated for studies of twenty-first-century society. Today’s readers will find many relevant insights of Luhmann’s work in the same way that they find observations in the works of Durkheim on anomy due to financial crises or Weber on human beings as cogs in giant bureaucratic machineries (think of current waves of managerialism) that seem spot on contemporary debates. Although a theory of modern society, Luhmannian systems theory can hardly be seen as part of “modernization theory” with a genuinely positive attitude toward basic political components of modern society such as democracy, pluralism, separation of powers, secularization, market economy, etc. The latter has often been (more or less rightfully) attributed to the structural functionalism of Parsons and much of mainstream sociology until the 1960s. Due to some Parsonian heritage in Luhmann’s work, this has led to an – in our view – unjustified rejection of Luhmann’s work by many self-appointed progressive,

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radical and critical sociologists (Schirmer and Michailakis 2015c), despite the fact that Luhmann’s theory is anything but an uncritical appraisal of modern society. One key insight of Luhmannian theory of society for the study of social problems is the conceptualization of modern society as a world society whose main structural characteristic is functional differentiation. Luhmann put a lot of effort into demonstrating how the differentiation of selfreferential communication systems based on particular functional logics, such as economy, science, arts, and politics have put pressure on the prevailing vertical orders of premodern societies (such as feudalist Asia, pre-French revolution ancien régime in Europe). The differentiation of profitoriented economy, aesthetics-oriented art and truth/objectivity-oriented science had raised claim to representation of society and ensured that the social order (of emperors and dynasties) could no longer be justified within a religious firmament expressed in the formula “by grace of God.” Functional differentiation as primary structure of society has led to an enormous rise of complexity, knowledge, options, mobility, equality and welfare. However, Luhmann was well aware in many of his writings (Luhmann 1989, 1990b, 1997, 1998) that functional differentiation does not entail unidirectional improvement of society. Similar to theorists of the reflexivity (Beck 1992) and ambivalence (Bauman 1990) of modernity, Luhmann observed that the very way society is structured and how its primary subsystems operate, have potentially destabilizing or even destructive effects on society itself. Once functional differentiation becomes the primary structure of society there is no guarantee that the operations of the subsystems will remain compatible with one another. Luhmann spoke of “subsequent problems” (Folgeprobleme) of functional differentiation, i.e., problems that arise from society, and that pose problems for society insofar as they are direct or indirect threats to the continuance of society in its current form. Although Luhmann himself does not use

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the term “social problems,” we believe it makes sense to discuss these as one contribution of Luhmannian systems theory to the study of social problems. He gives casual examples of subsequent problems such as the expansion of the education system which leads to prolonged adolescence and belated family reproduction; expansion of the welfare state toward many nonfinanceable and unfulfillable promises before elections; economization and increasingly unequal distribution of welfare on a global level (Luhmann 2013). With three subsequent problems Luhmann dealt more in depth, two of which we will discuss in the remainder of this section: mass exclusion (Luhmann [1995] 2005) and ecological self-endangering of society (Luhmann 1989). The third one which we cannot treat here is risk (Luhmann 1993). Exclusion is a phenomenon that has been studied a lot in poverty research and the found causes are manifold, for example neoliberal market order, reactionary power structures, class barriers, racism, or sexism. While a Luhmannian approach does not outright reject these explanations, it argues for a more complex and more abstract analysis based on systems theory, in particular the idea of functional differentiation. In order to understand exclusion, one must first have a look at how inclusion, the conceptual counterpart, works. In a functionally differentiated society, inclusion and exclusion take place in a very different way than in traditional societies. In the latter, human beings were fully included in one subsystem (e.g., a tribe, a clan, social class) while excluded from all others; furthermore they were included in totality, i.e., their whole live was defined and determined by family membership, class or ethnic belonging. Modern society has broken this pattern; with the heterarchy of function systems, human beings are (in principle) included in any primary subsystem = function system: everybody can be a potential buyer and seller, voter, subject of law, student, believer, patient, connoisseur of art, etc. Bommes and Scherr (2000) call this the “universalism of inclusion” that is inherent

in the function systems’ operations. Importantly, inclusion in function systems is not qua birth; it is qua role, and this role is, of course, defined by the functions, not personal traits. Function systems even provide special function-specific performance roles such as traders, politicians, lawyers/judges, teachers, priests, doctors, artists, etc. A consequence of being included in function systems – and this marks a sharp contrast to premodern societies – is the circumstance that human beings are included in several systems simultaneously. Furthermore, status and success in one system do not determine status and success in others. So far, we have only talked about inclusion but as Luhmann notes: “It only makes sense to speak of inclusion if there is exclusion” (Luhmann [1995] 2005, 226). Exclusion happens in two different ways. Firstly, inclusion of functional aspects of a person, as explained in the previous paragraph, means exclusion of the rest-characteristics of the person. When involved in the economic system (as a consumer), an individual’s taste in art, her religious belief, and professional standing are irrelevant – her other social roles excluded – as long as she has enough money to fulfill the purchase. In figurative terms, individuals are included in social systems as “slices,” but as many different slices in many different social contexts, an idea actually familiar to sociology since Simmel’s intersection of social circles (Simmel 1968). The individual as a whole remains excluded in the environment of the function systems. Secondly, there is a type of exclusion that is commonly regarded as far more problematic from a social-problems perspective. This kind of exclusion is a direct consequence of functional differentiation because it is the function systems themselves, with their highly specialized codes and programs that define the criteria of inclusion/exclusion. It is their way of operating that creates – in systems-theoretical terms – positive feedback loops, i.e., it amplifies deviation: good educational credentials will enable entry to better schools of higher education, more economic securities improve one’s chance to get a loan at

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favorable interest rates, and powerful people will attract more allegiance and increase their power. The same is true in the opposite direction: poor criminal track record will decrease one’s chance before future court trials in the law system. In this regard, function systems are generators of inequality, and inclusion is clearly not the same as equality. Exclusion, however, happens when deviances get so strong that human beings lose their relevance for the respective system completely. Given that society as a social system is a system of communication, being excluded means not being considered a relevant participant in communication (Luhmann [1995] 2005, 244). Being excluded from function systems means that human beings cannot benefit from their performances (e.g., legal protection, medical treatment, welfare, education). Due to the interdependence of function systems, being dropped out of one system has serious and cumulative consequences for inclusion in other systems. Without residency, one cannot get formal education; without citizenship documents, one will have difficulties getting a lease for housing, medical care or entrance into the official labor market (Luhmann 2013). In the Western world and many developed countries, the system of social help (largely corresponding to social work practice), can absorb much of the exclusion effects, for example for homelessness or illegal immigration (Schirmer and Michailakis 2015b). However, even in these parts of the world are so-called exclusion areas, for instance, slums and ghettos in Britain and the United States or banlieux in France, where the police has withdrawn, regular legislation and other codes of civility are out of action. Luhmann drew particular attention to this phenomenon of cumulative exclusion after a well-documented trip to Brazil (Luhmann [1995] 2005). He came to the conclusion that exclusion cannot be explained in terms of inequality, oppression and exploitation – there is nothing to exploit from the people who do not appear on the radar of function systems. Luhmann went even as far as discussing whether inclusion/exclusion could evolve as

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a meta-distinction on top of functional differentiation, wherein the latter only prevails in so-called inclusion areas. Whether or not that is (already) the case, important for a social-problems perspective is that this kind of exclusion is an effect that is caused by function systems, but that cannot be solved by function systems. No function system can assume responsibility or can regulate the others in order to plan a more inclusive course. So in consequence, mass exclusion is a problem for society because it threatens the continuance of the present societal structure. This leads us to the other severe subsequent problem of functional differentiation that Luhmann was concerned about, namely society self-endangerment due to environmental pollution. His book Ecological Communication, first published in German in 1986, was partially a response to the impact of Ulrich Beck’s Risk Society that brought the issue of environmental pollution into debates of the sociological mainstream. Luhmann was also under the impression of the success of environmental protest movements, the rise of Green parties in many Western democracies in the 1980s and the culture of fear (Furedi 2002) and moralization they embraced. According to Luhmann, protest movements have an important societal function in drawing attention to certain issues, such as pollution. However, he was highly critical of their simplistic approach toward sociological reality and the accusing/blaming attitude that did not contribute much more than noise. For Luhmann it was crucial to take into account that modern society is functionally differentiated. This means that the only unity of society is the unity of different function systems. There is no center, no top, no central moral authority from which a unilateral and binding decision could be made to stop environmental pollution and protect nature. In contrast to what much protest communication demands, society can only tackle this problem via its function systems. This possible solution, however, is part of the cause as well, just as is the case with exclusion. As

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mentioned earlier, function systems split the world into spheres of relevance; they operate within their own function-specific rationalities, pursue certain values while neglecting others. This entails limitations on how “environmental pollution” can appear on the radar of function systems in the first place. The economic system renders pollution into a market with financial opportunities and hazards: firms can be founded in order to produce environment-friendly products, low CO2 exhausting or fuel-saving cars, “green energy,” filters, a phosphatefree laundry agent, etc. On the other hand, nonsustainable products – cars without catalytic convertors, sprays containing chlorofluorocarbons – turn into shelf warmers and will therefore likely be sorted out. Insurance companies may adjust to environmental issues by increasing premiums for insurances against damages presumably caused by climate change or toxic waste. For the system of science, pollution appears as a promising field for research of causes and consequences of pollution (e.g., climatology, environmental sociology) as well as the search for sustainable or environmentally friendly substances (chemistry, biology, engineering). Political parties need to develop their own program on environmental issues in order to achieve sympathy i.e., votes at elections. As part of governments, they can change the law toward more restrictions against toxic substances and exhaust fumes, they can raise or lower thresholds, they can subsidize environmentally friendly products, fund research, etc. but all in function of maintaining or seizing power. Based on existing and new laws, the legal system can punish environmental “sinners” and reward “angels.” The mass media are happy when they can convey news that achieve high audience rates or newspaper runs. There they have a faible for environmental disasters (such as oil spills) or environmental crimes committed by the industry. These few examples may suffice to indicate how each function system is able to deal with environmental issues, but each in their own way, and there is nothing

in sight that looks like a unified, overarching or transcendental rationality, and even less so a collectively binding environmental ethic of “thou shalt not” – religious attempts notwithstanding. According to Luhmann, there is no address to which claims could be directed (in premodern societies, there was at least God), not even on the level of function systems because the latter are not collective actors but systems of functionally specific horizons of meaning, in which a certain rationality is paramount, and there is no internal inhibitory mechanism for the inner logic (Luhmann 1990b). There is no economic reason for behaving less economic (i.e., less capitalist striving for profit), no legal reason for less law (i.e., less bureaucracy), no political reason for less power (more democracy), no scientific reason for less knowledge (more innocence, romanticism and enchantment). In sum, there is no genuine interest within these systems in less environmental pollution, only as long as it goes along with the systems’ rationalities, and then, as mentioned, depending on what appears on the screen. Against that background it hardly makes sense to attribute environmental pollution to evil or reckless individual behavior – not even that of greedy capitalists who even have pleasure in making profits by destroying the environment (such as Montgomery Burns in the animated television series “The Simpsons”) – but the operational blindness of function systems for everything that is beyond their screen. Against that sociological analysis, occasional calls for more responsibility, environmental ethics and accusations are rather pointless, fears Luhmann.

Social Problems II: How Different Social Systems Construct the Same Social Problem Differently It makes sense to discuss exclusion and environmental pollution as social problems insofar as they are created by the way social systems operate. With Luhmann’s theory, we can understand these problems as results

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of systems’ operations and are therefore less prone to believe in simplistic causal models, linear steering, and intervention. Social systems are not “trivial machines” (in cyberneticist Heinz von Foerster’s sense; Von Foerster 1984), i.e., systems whose output can be predicted on basis of the input, like a vending machine. While with trivial machines, the same input reliably leads to the same output (given the machine is not broken), “non-trivial machines” are complex entities whose inner, recursive network of operations makes it impossible to predict outputs. The same input can lead to lots of different outputs – or none at all. This is so because the inner state of the system changes every time the system operates. For the study of social problems, such systems-theoretical insights are extremely important because they suggest that attempts to fight social problems with interventions based on assumed linear causal “input-output” mechanisms will be flawed or have unpredictable side-effects. This is particularly true if we take into account that society is functionally differentiated in a multitude of systems since the interplay (or lack thereof) between these systems (for instance between the polity, the economy and science) can even less be considered a trivial machine. By respecting the existence of systems and their ways of operating (as nontrivial machines) Luhmannian systems theory basically takes a realist stance. Insofar, the observation and analysis of exclusion and environmental pollution as social problems is also realist. However, this is only one part of the story. Luhmann’s theory is rather recognized by most scholars, and rightfully so, as a constructionist theory. How does this add up? The idea of nontrivial machines helps us to make the link between realism and constructionism. Social systems operate in a specific, nontrivial, nonlinear manner, and by way of operating they create meaning. By operating, social systems also observe their environment. That systems observe opens the stage for constructionism. By observing, systems construct their own reality. What appears on their radar, how they make sense

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of things, what they select and what they ignore, what they see and what they cannot see is the result of their modes of operations and a product of the system’s history: the economic system constructs the world as a big market full of commodities with a price tag; the political system constructs the world as a big jungle of power struggles; the scientific systems constructs the world as a big collection of research objects, etc. A sociological theory, such as Luhmann’s, that studies how social systems observe is, then, genuinely constructionist because it does not take descriptions of systems for granted as objective reality but as a (necessarily biased) construction made by a system. An example would be the claim made by populist politicians that disarmament poses a threat to national security; another the claim made by liberal economists that too much state intervention into markets conjures up the next financial crisis. Whether accurate or not, both claims can, then, be unmasked as descriptions made from a particular function system’s perspective, following distinct rationalities, values and norms that are not shared in other systems. In this regard, one system might observe/construct/portray some social condition as adverse and in need of remedy because it appears so from that system’s observation perspective but not (necessarily) from others. An economic crisis does not immediately translate into a problem for the legal, religious or political system. What appears to be a problem for one system might even be a solution for another system. The affinity to the constructionist in the tradition of Spector and Kitsuse ([1977] 1987; in detail in Chapter 16 of this handbook) is apparent. The latter’s key statement is that social problems are not objectively existing, objectively measurable and objectively harmful social conditions. Instead, they are the result of activities by so-called claimsmakers. Social problems, thus, are the product of communication. Spector and Kitsuse even maintain that there were no social problems, in the first place, if no claimsmaker had raised the

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claim that an allegedly adverse social condition violating core values in society (e.g., too much exclusion) should receive the status of social problems and be fought accordingly. While the realist elements of Luhmann’s theory seem to collide with stricter versions of constructionism at first sight (e.g., Ibarra and Kitsuse 1993),1 there are more overlaps than differences. With systems theory, we can understand social problems as “second-order realities,”2 a term suggested by Paul Watzlawick (1984). Firstorder realities refer to physical qualities of things or situations that can be measured, counted, and that do not need interpretation. Examples are temperatures, sound waves, infrastructures, or the number of copresent human beings in a social situation, the number of people infected by some bacterial disease or the number of aborted teenager pregnancies in a given community (to take an example from a textbook on the constructionist approach to social problems; Loseke 2003). Second-order realities, by contrast, refer to interpretations of firstorder realities, in other words, when meaning is added into the world of first-order realities. Temperatures may be considered just and reasonable, sounds can appear noisy or musical; human beings in a social situation can be considered as agentive interlocutors or as mere bodies; the number of infected people can be interpreted as negligible or epidemic, the number of aborted teenage pregnancies can be seen as an indicator of sinfulness in society, a failure of the educational system or a milestone in medical care. All of the latter are examples of second-order realities on the basis of the first-order reality. Much of commonsense reasoning as well as positivist research treats second-order realities as if they were first-order realities or they even deny the difference. Important for sociologists, and even more so for Luhmannian systems theory, interpretations and descriptions differ depending on who makes them. People have different interests, social positions, education, liveworld experiences, opinions, etc. What is true for individuals is, on a societal level,

even truer for social systems, and this is where the concept of functionally differentiated society comes back in. In the previous section, we saw how every function system makes sense of the world in their own, distinct, function-specific way. If we combine the constructionist idea of social problems as claimsmaking activities (and thereby: second-order realities!) with the Luhmannian version of functional differentiation,3 we can state that function systems construct not only their own (social) problems that other function systems do not have (see above) but also their own versions of the same social problem. The latter does not require the “problem” to be objectively real in a realist sense – it suffices that some successful claimsmaking activity has entered the public arena, and that other stakeholders, for instance business organizations, governments, interest groups, research institutions, have put their call on defining the problem in their own terms. Given that modern society, as world society, is characterized by high levels of pluralization and differentiation, for instance of classes, cultures, subcultures, and milieus, we cannot assume that all involved claimsmakers have the same understanding of the respective social problem. The plurality of involved observers implies a potential plurality of observations of the “same problem.” In the context of systems theory, one can call this phenomenon “multiperspectivity.” The empirical question is to what extent and in what dimensions the definitions of problem constructions vary. According to constructionist author Loseke (2003), a successful claimsmaking activity tells a kind of story that consists of several components. One of them refers to conditions and causal relations: what is wrong (and needs to be corrected), what are the causes and consequences? Second, claimsmaking needs to draw on cultural themes that define why a certain condition is morally unacceptable and why it provokes indignation, in other words: which (culturally and historically specific) values does it violate? A third component concerns people. On the one hand, successful

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claimsmaking needs victims who suffer from the condition, are themselves not responsible and therefore deserve sympathy; on the other hand, there are the villains who actively or passively contribute to the problem, might even gain something from the status quo and therefore are (morally) responsible. The fourth component involves the projection of potential solutions of the problem. Claimsmakers construct a general line of action (what ought to be done) in order to solve the problem and attribute responsibility to those who should solve it (need not be the villains). If we understand these components of claimsmaking as parameters and connect this view on claimsmaking with the reasoning developed above that there is a plurality of potential constructors of a social problem – if we, in other words, combine Luhmann’s theory of functionally differentiated society (here: the constructionist idea of multiperspectivity) with the constructionist approach to social problems – we can derive at a research framework that can be summarized in the question: how do different claimsmakers/social systems construct the (same) social problem differently? The constructionist approach provides some concepts and the explicit focus on social problems that Luhmann’s theory, being a general social theory and a theory of modern society, lacks. On the other hand, constructionists lack what Luhmann’s theory can offer, namely this very theory of society that can explain why certain claimsmakers, due to their function-system background construct a social problem in one way while others in a different way. We have developed a framework for the study of social problems that draws on the combination of constructionism in the Spector & Kitsuse tradition with Luhmannian systems theory with studies on suicide among mentally ill people and the loneliness of older people (Michailakis and Schirmer 2014; Schirmer and Michailakis, forthcoming). In the remainder of this section, we will provide some excerpts from our data to illustrate how different social systems construct the same problem in apparently dif-

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ferent ways, in other words, multiperspectivity in practice. The first example is suicide. We chose this topic because it is a forerunner of the social problems literature insofar as Durkheim (Durkheim 1979) demonstrated that suicide is a social, not an individual issue. According to Durkheim, it has social causes (particularly the way modern society is structured), social effects and calls for social countermeasures. Nowadays many different institutions and stakeholders, such as the welfare state, social workers, psychiatry, the pharmaceutical industry, are involved in preventative initiatives. For our purposes, suicide among mentally ill people is an instructive case to illustrate the variation in constructions of a (given) social problem in different social systems. We present three excerpts from the perspectives of different social systems followed by short analyses to highlight the differences of problem constructions and a variety of claimsmaking. We begin with a short piece from the editorial of the member’s magazine of an interest organization for people with mental illnesses. Excerpt 1: “Scary Statistics” from the Chairman of the RSMH4 Over the past few years, suicide in healthcare has been continuously on the rise . . . an increase of almost 30 per cent within the last four years. It is not news to us at the RSMH, and our youth organisation RUS, that many children, teens and young adults are feeling worse than ever. There are also many reasons for this. As for the youngest, we know that there are major problems at school; classes are getting bigger and bigger while the staff are getting smaller and smaller. The school health services are cutting their activities and in many places there are neither school welfare officers nor school psychologists available in the first place . . . Suicide is a problem that requires extremely powerful measures. We at the RSMH find that the government must begin to work immediately and pro-actively towards a vision zero of suicide which they in fact announced in 2008. (Trevett 2011)

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The RSMH, an interest organization is part of the disability movement (and the faction representing disability due to mental illness). Social movements are social systems (though not function systems) that communicate “protest” (Luhmann 2013), i.e., communication that criticizes social conditions in a blueprint type of claimsmaking activity. Protest communication divides the world into two camps: those who protest and are affected by adverse social conditions; and those who represent, profit from or refuse change to overcome the conditions, the addressees of the protest. The divide is legitimized by reference to ethical principles deemed morally superior to the ethics of the opponents. In the excerpt, we can see how suicide (especially among younger people) is constructed as a social problem violating core values and in need of instant remedy. The author of the text observes a rise in suicide rates among young people over the past few years despite the government’s promise to take action to reduce the prevalent rates. Typical for protest communication there is an almost complete identification with the victims, people represented by the organization. Similarly, protest communication works with simplified causality in terms of causes and solutions. The increased occurrence of suicide is attributed to factors external to the movement and the victims, for instance, changes in the school management, budget cuts, less psychological and medical care. Furthermore, the moral responsibility is directed to the government because of its past failure to keep the promise of efficient policy to reduce suicide rates; the proposed solution is also demanded to be delivered by the government, but the claim of “forceful measures” remains rather vague.

This excerpt is taken from a proposal by a member of parliament and, thus, serves as an example for claimsmaking in the function system of politics. The most obvious differences between political and protest communication is the role of agency. While protest communication presents itself as (or identifies with the) victims and the government as accountable agent both in terms of cause and solutions, agents of the political system usually emphasize their own ability to act even if the causes are outside political action frames, such as biological, psychological or social forces. In this excerpt, suicide among younger people is portrayed as a social problem, too, but here it is the polity itself that can call for action to remedy the adverse effects. Typical for political communication, the solutions proposed are of a bureaucratic nature (national strategy, action plans). Even if the implementation of political measures requires a power-based infrastructure (Willke 1992), the political system (especially modern welfare states) depends on legitimacy granted by the public (Schirmer and Michailakis 2012). Political communication therefore cannot simply ignore protest communication but at least implicitly must aim at (and be sensitive to) public opinion and present itself as capable to solutions.

Excerpt 2: “Proposal from the MPs 2012/13:So330 Suicide Prevention” There are no simple solutions for how to avoid suicide, but it is important that this observation does not paralyse but instead motivates people to find solutions and leads to an understanding about the life situations of young people . . . There

Excerpt 3: “Young People, Gender, and Suicide” [A]lmost all adolescents dying by suicide show evidence of suffering from some form of mood disorder . . . XX argues that while suicide and depression are clearly linked, it is difficult to ascertain whether depression causes or is caused by suicidal thoughts and feeling . . . it is not possible to

is an overarching vision in Sweden that nobody should be in such a precarious position that the only way out is perceived to be taking one’s life. The government has the vision that nobody should have to take his/her life. To ensure that this vision is translated into constructive work in practice, there is a need for a national strategy designed with an appeal to Sweden’s municipalities to develop local action plans. (Carlson 2012)

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determine whether they are a symptom or a cause of suicidal behavior . . . YY reported that a third of the under-25s who killed themselves were suffering from schizophrenia, whilst a fifth were given the primary diagnosis of personality disorder. In addition, they found that most people with schizophrenia were both unemployed and unmarried, with younger suicides also being more likely to have a history of substance or alcohol abuse and violence . . . Although there is a clear link between mental health/illness and suicide risk, the relationship is a complex one. (Smalley, Scourfield, and Greenland 2005, 138, emphases removed)

This excerpt is from a scientific article on suicide in the discipline of social work. According to systems theory, the societal function of science is to produce reliable knowledge (Luhmann 1990a). Scientific knowledge is generated by the application of quality criteria such as precise concepts and methodological and theoretical rigor. There are clear rules for scrutinizing the validity (or falsity) of any scientific claim. The excerpt is representative of what research articles look like when discussing findings or implications on suicide ideation and prevention. Scientific communication differs from the communication forms of the two systems described above (movements, polity) in a couple of aspects. Firstly, there is a strong matter-of-factness in contrast to the emotional heat of protest communication. Secondly, scientific communication emphasizes the difficulties of establishing clear causal relationships. The article argues that there can be interaction effects between mental illness and suicidal feelings, but also reversed causality, suicidal feelings as a cause of mental illness. Causalities observed from science become even more complex because causal chains can be cut at several, different points: is mental illness the ultimate cause of suicide, or is it an intermediate variable between social (such as unemployment) or bio-physical factors (substance addiction, violence)? With its devotion to truthfulness, scientific claims-

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making, then, differs from political or protest-related claimsmaking because it cannot draw on cultural themes with strong moral bearings nor can it point out unequivocal causes, clear-cut villains or apparent solutions, which comes with a reputation of more seriousness (instead of alarmism or activism) at the cost of attention by mass audiences. The second example from our own studies is claimsmaking on loneliness among older people (Schirmer and Michailakis, forthcoming). Both in the popular literature, the media and scientific research, loneliness is portrayed as a growing social problem. While it concerns many groups, older people are particularly prone to experiencing loneliness because, after retirement, they lose much of their social networks; declining physical abilities, illness and death of partner and friends increase the risk additionally. Like the topic of suicide above, loneliness among older people serves as an informative case to illustrate how problems constructions vary from system to system. The first excerpt, taken from a blog written by a doctor, illustrates the perspective of the medical system. Excerpt 4: “Loneliness and the Elderly: Dying of a Broken Heart” Nearly one in seven American adults are living alone and this isolation may provide additional stressors such as depression, anxiety and additional economic pressures. These stressors certainly may contribute to cardiovascular events in susceptible patients. Moreover, social isolation has been associated with changes in health behavior and access to care among patients. Patients who live alone may be less likely to seek care for recurrent symptoms and may not be compliant with drug therapy or other medical recommendations without support . . . Our patients today are sicker and have more limited resources. Financial pressures are forcing physicians to tackle larger clinic schedules with overall increased workload demands. But, as providers of health care, we must assess social isolation and loneliness in our patients. We must identify “at risk” patients and make attempts at

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intervention. Since these studies suggest that living alone is an independent prognostic factor for mortality and CV disease, clinicians must work to counsel their patients about seeking appropriate medical attention when needed and, in appropriate cases, refer patients to programs with psychological intervention. Many of these patients have no families, no adult children and no support group. In these cases, we must do our best to fill in the gaps (yes, all in a busy office full of patients). Healthcare costs in the United States continue to skyrocket and there are no easy fixes in the works. I believe that a simple, although potentially time-consuming, intervention such as talking with lonely and socially isolated patients when they are in the office for a visit, is a low cost preventative measure. By taking time to hold a lonely patient’s hand, we may potentially make a positive impact. Data such as those presented in the Archives this month certainly point out the risks of loneliness and suggest that patients without social support in place do very poorly and develop significant cardiovascular illness. (Campbell 2012)

The system of medicine renders the world into matters of health and illness (Luhmann 2005). Medical observations mainly focus on the individual (with the exception of epidemiology), but the collective level becomes relevant when nonmedical (e.g., political, financial, legal) constraints hamper the execution of medical operations (such as in the case of health care priority setting; Schirmer and Michailakis 2011), or when the occurrence of illness is attributed to social causes. Illness translates into a problem for the medical system either as an effect of social causes, a result of social causes constraining the performance of the medical system or when illness itself is a cause of social problems. In the excerpt, we can see that claimsmaking from a medical perspective has a clear reference to illness. Loneliness gets primarily associated with negative effects on health, and the victim group, lonely older people, are victims because their right to good health is harmed by loneliness. As is often the case with good claimsmaking, the author draws on research

data (presented as objectively true) in order to establish a clear-cut causal link between loneliness and bad health condition (especially cardiovascular diseases), on the one hand, and loneliness to lifestyles that facilitate future illness, on the other hand. The constructed causality of solutions is similarly, straightforward: doctors need to pay more attention to the loneliness of their patients. If untreated, loneliness will make the patients suffer from diseases or die. Though no villain, the medical profession is deemed the group responsible for negative effects of loneliness, and also the agent who can do something to solve the problem. Excerpt 5: “Battling the Siege of Loneliness” Yet for others longing to be with brethren, the lack of handshakes and fellowship can take its toll, sowing the seeds of loneliness. When allowed to germinate, these seeds can sprout into feelings of discouragement, and will eventually mature into a state of despondency . . . This becomes a fertile field for Satan to sow seeds of doubt and a perfect climate for his negative influence. Satan preys on the lonely, who are perhaps his easiest victims. You can be sure he will take every opportunity to heap on more negative thoughts until he has the person so “down in the dumps” that he or she will want to quit altogether. This is at least a part of the reason God intended we all have Christian fellowship . . . We must realize that although human fellowship is important in combating loneliness, it is not the most important. The apostle John wrote, “That which we have seen and heard we declare to you, that you also may have fellowship with us” (I John 1:3). John wanted the brethren to have fellowship with one another, but notice the primary stress: “And truly our fellowship is with the Father and with His Son Jesus Christ.” Without contact with God, you might have friendships, but not true Christian fellowship. Our spiritual closeness with God guarantees that our contact with each other will be profitable and edifying. No human or group of humans can substitute for contact with God. Many of us might like to see our needs met by other humans from what is termed “the human connection.” But the human

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connection is not enough. Simply stated, we cannot and will not be close to each other as members of the Body of Christ unless we are first close to God! As we draw closer to Him, we will inevitably draw closer to each other. Conversely, when we drift away from God we will find ourselves forsaking each other. Recognize that our first line of defense against loneliness and every other negative emotion is our personal contact with our Creator. Fellowship with God is the best kind there is. (Echelbarger 2007)

The last excerpt on loneliness features the perspective of religion. While religion has lost the powerful position as legitimizing instance for authority and social order it had in past societies, it still stakes its share in the structure of modern society. As a function system, it has a view on the world that is distinct from other function systems’ perspectives: the relation between immanence and transcendence (Luhmann 1977), i.e., the relation between this-worldy and other-worldly beings and events. Religion is more ambiguous than other function systems (Beyer 1998, 89) because it offers answers to the paradoxes inherent in modern society: it gives explanations to the unexplainable, it can observe the unobservable, it defines the indefinite, and provides meaning behind the meaningless. Typical for religious communication is the reference to transcendence within an immanent world, i.e., the reference to something beyond, for instance a God, a spirit, a force, the sacred (Luhmann 2000b). The present excerpt, taken from a publication by a religious community called “The Restored Church of God,” is interesting for our purposes insofar as it addresses loneliness in a genuinely religious way. According to the text, loneliness is dangerous because it opens up for influence by the Devil, the supernatural villain in this problem construction. The Devil is said to push “dark thoughts” epitomized by depression and suicide onto the lonely person. As for causality, the solution to loneliness and its consequences of increased exposure to the Devil’s influence is communion with God, expressed in Christian fellowship which

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shall protect lonely people. Communion with God eliminates loneliness both on an individual and collective level, and thereby tackles loneliness as a social problem: if people are willing to find a way to God, they will find a way to each other, thus are lonely no longer. While loneliness can be triggered by different social, medical and other factors, its ultimate cause is insufficient contact with God. More contact with God is the solution to loneliness because it will enable contact with other human beings as a consequence. Important for our argument, such a perspective on loneliness only makes sense from a religious point of view, i.e., a function system which sets the focus on the distinction between immanent and transcendent realms. In the latter, entities such as God and the Devil exert forces beyond human understanding, and one of them – the evil one – can only be countered by submitting to the other, i.e., the good one. Communion with God (no loneliness with God) is portrayed superior to this-worldly human fellowship.

Conclusion The aim of this chapter was to introduce the sociological systems theory by Niklas Luhmann and its relevance for the study of social problems. Luhmann himself was hardly interested in developing an explicit theory of social problems, and accordingly the topic “social problems” is rather absent in his voluminous work. Nevertheless, we argued that his theory of modern society provides a rich framework to gain many relevant insights for analyzing social problems. Most important is the concept of functionally differentiated society. Functional differentiation, the horizontal arrangement of function systems such as economy, polity, science, religion, is the key structural characteristic of modern society. This conceptualization of society has a double relevance for the study of social problems, one for a realist and one for a constructionist understanding. Luhmann starts his groundbreaking book Social Systems with the assumptions that there are

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social systems (Luhmann 1995, 12), and that their operations and observations are real. If we understand society with Luhmann as a differentiated unity of function systems with each operating in its own way, with its function-specifically narrow focus and its blindness for everything else, we can come to more radical analyses of social problems insofar as these problems are direct or indirect consequences (subsequent problems) of the structure of society itself – functional differentiation. These subsequent problems are social problems in an essentialist sense because they are a product of society itself and potentially endanger the continuance of the prevailing societal structure. The two examples we dealt with in detail are environmental pollution as an ecological selfendangering of society and mass exclusion as a social self-endangering. With Luhmann’s theory, one can search for the core of each problem in the systemic nature of society itself, and not merely consider it the outcome of human selfishness, greed or downright evilness. Speaking of systems, it is not merely “the system”, i.e., the capitalist system or the political-economic power complex but precisely the multitude of systems and their horizontal arrangement that is responsible (not morally!) for social problems. Grasping the multitude of social systems when they are understood as observers and constructors of their own realities serves as the bridge to the constructionist component. Due to their horizontal order, there is no privileged, Archimedean, catch-all viewpoint but only function-system specific and limited ones, which see some things while being blind to the rest. Because each of these systems sees something else, we can speak of multiperspectivity – in contrast to one and only one, observer-independent objective reality (as positivists want to trick us into believing). The idea of multiperspectivity is genuinely constructionist, and it is relevant for the study of social problems insofar as the same social problem (understood as a communicative result of successful claimsmaking in the sense of the Spector-Kitsuse tradition) most likely will look different from perspective to perspec-

tive. We illustrated this idea with two of our own studies on suicide and loneliness. Multiperspectivity also reminds us to be prudent toward the putative objectivity of social problems by distinguishing first- from second-order realities (in the sense of Watzlawick). As a result of communication, social problems can only take place on the level of second-order realities, i.e., on the level of observations, interpretations, meaning etc. While this is common sense within the constructionist paradigm, Luhmann’s theory of society gives us the sociological (not merely epistemological) framework to understand and explain why some claimsmakers/social systems construct a given social problem in one and not another way and why others do this differently.

Glossary Functional differentiation The primary structure of modern society, a horizontal order of subsystems such as polity, economy, religion, science, arts, law, etc. Each of these fulfills a different function for society, therefore they are called function systems. Inclusion/exclusion The way how social systems hold human beings relevant or irrelevant in communication. Function systems include only functionally relevant parts of human beings while excluding the rest. Inclusion/exclusion usually takes place via defined social roles such as voters or customers. The exclusion of masses as a consequence of functional differentiation can pose an endangering problem for modern society. Multiperspectivity The circumstance that modern society is a differentiated entity that can bear many conflicting rationalities; several social systems, e.g., function systems, have their distinct view on the world. For the study of social problems, this means that different social systems can construct the same social problems differently than others. Obstacle epistemologique (epistemological obstacle) A term coined by philosopher Gaston Bachelard that refers to

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commonsense assumptions that block scientific progress because they impose. In the case of sociology, Luhmann sees for such obstacles in mainstream sociology: the (faulty) assumptions that (1) society consists of people and relations between people, (2) society is integrated by consensus between human beings, (3) societies are regionally, territorially limited units, and (4) that societies, like groups of people and like territories, can be observed from outside. Social system According to systems theory the unit of sociological analysis. A social system is an emergent order of its own kind operationally autonomous from individual consciousness. The constituent element of society and of all other social systems is communication; human beings with their mental, neurological and biochemophysiological components do not belong to society but to its environment. “Subsequent problems” (Folgeprobleme) of functional differentiation Problems that arise of the way modern society is structured, how its function systems operate and how they interact with each other. The problems, as direct consequences of functional differentiation, have a potentially self-endangering effect on society. The most important examples are mass exclusion, environmental pollution and risk. World Society The encompassing social system within which the entire communication, in other words, all other social systems, takes place. Luhmann rejects the commonsense assumption that societies are the same as nation-states with territorial boundaries. World society is characterized by functional differentiation as primary structure.

Notes 1. The former claims that certain problems, such as mass exclusion, are real and the latter denies the epistemological possibility to assess whether it is real or not. 2. This term should not be confused with the term “second-order observation,” introduced

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by von Foerster and used by Luhmann, which refers to the observation of observations: observing how other observers observe. 3. In contrast to those of Durkheim and Parsons. 4. Excerpts 1–3 are translated from Swedish.

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CHAPTER 14

The Conflict Approach Steven E. Barkan

Abstract The conflict approach calls attention to the many social inequalities that underlie social problems in contemporary society. The roots of this approach lie in the nineteenth-century work of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, which informed the development in the 1960s of conflict theory in the discipline of sociology and the theory’s use in the study of social problems. The conflict approach is often seen as a counterpoint to the functional approach, which dominated sociology before the 1960s. This chapter examines the history of the conflict approach, presents its basic assumptions, and discusses its application to several kinds of social problems. The theme of the chapter is that the conflict approach has made important contributions to the study of social problems and underscores the need for fundamental changes in social, economic, and political arrangements for social problems to be successfully addressed.

The conflict approach stresses that the roots of social problems lie in the many forms of social inequalities that characterize modern society. These inequalities are based on social class, race and ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and age. Social problems both reflect and reinforce these inequalities. A related emphasis of the conflict approach (also called conflict theory) is that fundamental social change is needed to reduce and eliminate social problems. This chapter first discusses the roots of the conflict approach and its basic assumptions and then critically examines several kinds of evidence that bear on these assumptions.

The Roots of the Conflict Approach The origins of the conflict approach lie in the majestic work of Karl Marx (1818– 83) and his frequent collaborator Friedrich Engels (1820–95) during the nineteenth century. Marx and Engels wrote against the backdrop of the Industrial Revolution that highlighted that century and changed social, political, and economic life forever. As the economic systems of Western Europe and the United States changed from agriculture to industry, fundamental social changes occurred (Hillstrom and Hillstrom 2005).

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Perhaps most importantly, the rise of the factory meant that many people moved from rural areas to live near the factories that were built in or near urban areas. Because of this residential change, cities grew rapidly during the nineteenth century. In the United States, the great waves of immigration that began during the 1820s and continued during the rest of the nineteenth century augmented the growth of cities. In both Western Europe and the United States, these cities were filled with human misery. People lived in abjectly poor, overcrowded, and squalid conditions where disease ran rampant, street crime flourished, and rioting was common. Millions of people worked in or on factories, coal mines, railroads, and other industrial settings. These workers toiled for slave wages in dangerous conditions, with many suffering serious injuries and diseases and a considerable number dying from their working conditions (Dubofsky and Dulles 2010). Against this backdrop, Marx and Engels penned a series of essays that blamed capitalism for the abject conditions in which workers and urban residents lived (Marx [1867] 1906; Marx and Engels [1848] 1962, 1947). As is well known, Marx and Engels wrote that the ownership of the means of production (factories, food, etc.) determined a person’s class position. In particular, two great social classes, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, characterize capitalist societies and are based on whether or not someone owns the means of production. The bourgeoisie comprise a small ruling elite, while the proletariat comprise the bulk of society. Marx and Engels wrote that the bourgeoisie oppress and exploit the proletariat in an effort to maintain their position at the top of society. To enhance their profits, the bourgeoisie keep wages as low as possible and working conditions as miserable as possible, since otherwise they would be spending more money. To help keep the proletariat from rebelling, the bourgeoisie also tries to control the dominant ideologies of society so that the proletariat blame them-

selves for their plight or at least accept their plight, rather than blaming the bourgeoisie and rebelling. Marx and Engels believed that this situation was unsustainable. In particular, they felt that the proletariat in the long run would develop class consciousness, or an awareness of the reasons for their oppression, that would lead them to rebel and foment a revolution that would overthrow the capitalist societies in which they lived. The revolution Marx and Engels predicted certainly never occurred in the United States and the nations of Western Europe. Socialist movements did help bring about important social reforms in these nations, but capitalism in all its complexity continues unabated, especially in the United States. Western European nations also continue to be capitalistic, but many feature much more government involvement in their economic and social life than is true in the United States. Although Marx and Engels’s prediction of a proletarian revolution did prove wrong, their basic assumption of social conflict produced from social inequality (in this case class inequality based on the means of production) continues to be an important emphasis in sociology and some other disciplines and is the foundation for the conflict approach to the study of social problems. Conflict theory as a general framework for understanding society was embraced during the 1960s by academics in the United States and some other nations. In the United States, the 1960s were a decade marked by the Southern civil rights movement, the Vietnam antiwar movement, and the beginnings of the women’s rights, gay rights, and other social movements aimed at promoting peace and social justice. In France and other Western European nations, students and workers launched mass strikes and protests against capitalism, working conditions, and other perceived social ills that received wide attention and startled the leaders of government and industry. All these currents affected sociology and some other disciplines in the 1960s. During this decade, a new wave of students

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undertook graduate work in sociology departments around the United States and in other nations. Influenced by the 1960s radical movements, these students were attracted to the work of Marx and Engels and to the work of certain other critical scholars in the decades since Marx and Engels’s era. Young professors during the 1960s were also attracted to this critical work. This new wave of radical or conflict sociologists was especially critical of the theoretical perspective that had dominated sociology before the 1960s. This theoretical perspective was functionalism (also called functional theory). Derived from the great work of French sociologist Emile Durkheim (1858–1917), functionalism stresses the many ways in which social institutions such as the family, religion, and the economy are good for society (Ritzer and Stepinsky 2014). These social institutions contribute to ongoing social stability and make social life possible. According to functional theory, any sudden change in these institutions and in society’s basic structure is dysfunctional, or detrimental, for a society. The theory suggested that society had evolved in the best way for the society, and that any attempt to change society drastically would be counterproductive. As should be apparent, functionalism is a conservative perspective that favors maintaining the status quo. These general assumptions of functional theory led sociologists during the 1940s and 1950s to proclaim that social stratification, or social inequality based on social class, was functional for society because higher incomes are necessary to induce people with uncommon knowledge and skills to become physicians and other important, highly skilled occupations (Davis and Moore 1945). Functional theory’s assumptions also led sociologists to say that families would suffer if mothers worked outside the home, since fathers performed an important instrumental, breadwinning role, by working for an income and mothers performed an important expressive, or emotional role, by taking care of the family’s children. By the 1960s, these and other traditional views had

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started to be seen as antiquated and even flatly wrong. The new wave of young sociologists rightly criticized these views, and this criticism came to envelop functional theory as a whole. This more general criticism of functionalism in turn intensified young sociologists’ embracing of conflict theory. In many subfields in sociology, these young academics developed and expanded theories called radical theory, conflict theory, critical theory, or some other similar term. Despite differences among these theories, these academics all sharply criticized society’s many inequalities, including those based on social class, race and ethnicity, and gender, as being inherently damaging and even evil. They also blamed these inequalities for militarism, racial and social injustice, environmental pollution, and many other perceived social problems. It is fair to say that these academics all thought that the United States needed fundamental social change to reduce its social inequalities and to reduce the harmful effects of its many social problems. As conflict theory developed during the 1960s and 1970s, an important variation, feminist theory, also developed, thanks to the rise of the contemporary women’s movement during this period. Whereas Marx and Engels and many scholars writing in their tradition focused on the causes, dynamics, and consequences of class inequality, feminist theory focuses on the causes, dynamics, and consequences of gender inequality (Lorber 2012). Within this overall perspective, several variants of feminist theory also developed. Liberal feminism attributes gender inequality to gender differences in socialization; Marxist feminism attributes gender inequality to the rise of capitalism; radical feminism attributes gender inequality to patriarchy and sexism regardless of the type of society; and socialist feminism attributes gender inequality to the combined effects of capitalism, patriarchy, and sexism. Since its beginnings a half-century ago, feminist theory in all its forms has made fundamental contributions to the understanding of social

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problems and many other aspects of social, political, and economic life.

Applications of the Conflict Approach Sociologists have used the conflict approach to help understand the full range of social problems. Space considerations preclude a discussion of all these understandings, but discussion of applications of the conflict approach to selected social problems will illustrate the theory’s important contributions to the study of social problems. Using functionalist theory as a counterpoint will help to accentuate conflict theory’s contributions. Poverty Poverty is much higher in the United States than in Canada and other Western democracies. In 2014, 14.8 percent of the US population, equivalent to 46.7 million people, lived in official poverty (DeNavas-Walt and Proctor 2015). Slightly more than one-fifth (21.1 percent) of children under age eighteen lived in official poverty. Poverty rates for African Americans (26.2 percent) and Latinos (23.6 percent) greatly exceeded those for non-Latino whites (10.1 percent). As noted earlier, functionalist theory assumes that more knowledgeable and better skilled people end up in higher-paying occupations. This assumption implies that people who do not end up wealthy or at least comfortable lacked the necessary skills and knowledge and may even not have been trying hard enough to move up the socioeconomic ladder. Americans have long believed that the United States affords people the ability to “pull themselves up by their bootstraps” if they work hard enough to achieve the American Dream of economic success. Given this belief, many Americans blame poor people for being poor. In national survey evidence, almost half of Americans think poor people are poor because they can receive government benefits without having to work (Krogstad and Parker 2014). This belief is consis-

tent with the implications of functionalism’s understanding of social stratification in American society. In contrast, conflict theory assumes that poverty results not from lack of motivation and willpower but instead from a lack of opportunity that begins at birth and continues through childhood and adolescence and beyond. Early critics of the functionalist view of poverty called attention to this lack of opportunity (Tumin 1953; Wrong 1959). Consistent with conflict theory, a vast body of research over the past several decades emphasizes the many problems associated with poverty that prevent poor children from eventually being able to escape poverty (Iceland 2013). Poor children typically lack access to good schooling and often live in conditions that impair their cognitive and neurological development. Although it might sound like a stereotype, their parents often fail to read and talk with them sufficiently and otherwise do not practice good parenting skills. The many problems associated with living in poverty result in chronic, toxic stress for children that may induce cognitive and neurological deficits (Bornstein 2013; DeSocio 2015). All these problems impair their school performance and physical and mental health and lead to problematic behaviors. These dynamics in turn lead to a kind of vicious circle during childhood and adolescence (Payne and Welch 2015). For example, poor children do less well when they enter school (kindergarten and first grade), and their poor school performance causes stress and leads to problematic behavior. These problems worsen their school performance, and this cycle continues into adolescence. They become less likely to graduate from high school and to attend and graduate from college and thus end up in low-paying jobs and face bouts of unemployment. All these factors mean that low-income children are likely (though not inevitably) to grow up to be low-income adults. The American Dream for them is only a dream and sometimes a nightmare, typically through no fault of their own.

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In an interesting twist consistent with the conflict tradition, sociologist Herbert J. Gans (1972) bitingly wrote that poverty continues to exist because it is functional for society. Poverty, he wrote, serves several functions. First, poor people perform jobs that wealthier people do not want to perform. Second, poverty is a source of employment for the many social workers and other individuals employed by the many social service agencies that try to help poor people. Third, poverty is also a source of employment for physicians, attorneys, and other professionals who are not skilled enough to provide services to the wealthy but still provide services to the poor. Fourth, the poor purchase products such as used clothing that other people are less likely to purchase; these purchases by the poor are good for the US economy. According to Gans, all these functions make wealthier people disinclined to support antipoverty programs, because ending or reducing poverty would cause these wealthier classes several kinds of difficulties.

Racial and Ethnic Inequality The United States is a land of racial and ethnic inequality. As the foregoing examination of poverty indicated, people of color are much more likely to be poor. They also have worse physical and mental health overall and are more likely to be victims of crime among other problems. Functionalist and conflict theories again take different positions on why racial and ethnic inequality exists. Functionalist theory emphasizes that racial and ethnic relations must be fairly harmonious for social stability to be maximized. For this to happen, racial and ethnic minorities should not try to hold onto their racial/ethnic identities too strongly. Instead, they should assimilate and adopt the broad American culture instead of maintaining their own cultures. Functionalist theory does not praise racial prejudice, but it would still emphasize that prejudice helps generate shared bonds and a

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feeling of group solidarity among the people who are racially prejudiced. In explaining why racial and ethnic inequality exists and persists, functionalist theory would say that racial and ethnic minorities do not have the needed knowledge and skills to advance up the socioeconomic ladder. These groups, the theory would add, lack certain cultural traits, such as a willingness to work hard and a commitment to strong family ties, that are important for economic success. Because these norms are found in Asian American families, who tend to be economically successful (Danico 2014), other minorities’ lack of success stems from their failure to adopt these traits. The conflict approach takes a very different stance on racial and ethnic inequality. It celebrates America’s racial and ethnic diversity and says that the nation’s many different racial and ethnic groups contribute to the richness of American life. While acknowledging that racial prejudice might create solidarity among prejudiced people, conflict theory would still condemn prejudice in no uncertain terms as betraying American ideals of egalitarian treatment. Conflict theory’s sharpest difference from functionalism concerns its explanation of why racial and ethnic inequality exists and persists. Quite simply, conflict theory argues that racial and ethnic inequality arises because people of color lack full opportunities to achieve the American Dream. Apart from Asians, people of color have important strikes against them because they tend to be poor, as discussed in the preceding section, but they also face additional obstacles because of their race or ethnicity (Feagin 2014; Pager and Shepherd 2008). These obstacles include racial prejudice and outright racial discrimination. For example, racially segregated housing continues to exist even though it is illegal. This form of segregation prevents African Americans from moving to areas with less crime and with greater employment opportunities, and it worsens their health and also subjects them to other kinds of problems (Rugh, Albright, and Massey 2015; Williams and Collins 2001). Employment discrimination

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also persists even though it, too, is illegal, and prevents people of color from being hired into jobs for which they are fully qualified (Pager, Bonikowski, and Western 2009). In short, conflict theory argues that the decks are fully stacked against people of color in the United States, making it very difficult for them to achieve their full potential. Gender Inequality Gender inequality also taints American society. Women continue to earn only about 80 percent of the money that men earn in the workplace; they suffer crude remarks and other everyday indignities because they are female; they are much more likely than men to be victimized by rape and sexual assault, domestic violence, and sexual harassment; and they are more likely than men to have physicians dismiss their health concerns (Kenschaft, Clark, and Ciambrone 2016; Anspach 2010). Although American women have many advantages over their counterparts in many nations of the world, they are still the subordinate sex in American society. As noted earlier, functional theory in the 1950s basically said that women’s place was in the home (Baber 1953). There a woman served an important, expressive role for her family and children by providing emotional nurturance and the other functions that mothers have traditionally served. These theorists warned that the family and therefore the whole society would suffer if women abandoned their traditional mother/homemaker role by entering the workplace. They also said that men’s traditional role as the breadwinner was again functional for the family and larger society and thus must be maintained as well. For these traditional and supposedly important gender roles to continue, traditional gender socialization was needed to help girls and boys develop the traits they would need to be good mothers and fathers and to help ensure that they would in fact wish to continue performing these roles. By advocating that women stay in the home, func-

tionalist theory justified gender inequality because women would therefore have little or no income of their own. In effect, the theory said that any attempt to achieve gender inequality would endanger society by endangering the family. Reflecting feminist theory’s understandings, the conflict approach sharply criticizes this traditional understanding of gender and gender inequality. Rather than saying that gender differences are desirable because they create a functional division of labor, conflict theory attributes gender inequality to patriarchy and sexism. Women were more equal to men many millennia ago, when both sexes had similar economic roles in hunting and gathering societies. As large agricultural societies and especially industrial societies grew over the ages, men’s dominance also grew as they became the primary breadwinners while women were generally confined to mothering and homemaking. Laws developed to ensure that men controlled private property and inheritance and that women in essence were subordinate citizens. In today’s world, traditional gender socialization continues to contribute to gender inequality, as do sexist ideologies that support traditional gender roles. Perhaps the worst manifestation of gender inequality is violence against women (VAW) in the form of rape, sexual assault, and domestic violence. Although VAW is a worldwide phenomenon and has existed for millennia, it was almost never discussed by sociology or any other academic discipline before the 1970s, and it remained a missing topic in the news media back then. VAW was an early focus of the contemporary women’s movement and of feminist scholars. A powerful, influential 1971 essay on rape by feminist writer Susan Griffin began with these astonishing words: “I have never been free of the fear of rape. From a very early age I, like most women, have thought of rape as part of my natural environment – something to be feared and prayed against like fire or lightning. I never asked why men raped; I simply thought it one of the many mysteries of human nature” (Griffin 1971, 26).

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A full discussion of feminist work on VAW is beyond the scope of this chapter. However, it is worth nothing that many people continue to blame women for the rapes, sexual assaults, and acts of domestic violence they suffer. Instead, feminist theory attributes VAW to men’s general dominance in a patriarchal society and to various cultural beliefs that justify VAW (DeKeseredy 2011; Renzetti 2013).

The Family The concept of gender inequality naturally calls attention to the family, perhaps society’s most important institution. As such, an examination of functionalist and conflict theories’ contrasting views of the family will again illustrate the contributions of the conflict approach and of its feminist theory application. In addition to emphasizing the need for the traditional motherly role, as this chapter noted earlier, functionalist theory more generally emphasizes the important functions served by the family for social stability and the other needs of every society. Several such functions exist. First, the family socializes children and is the most important agent of socialization for children. Traditionally, biological parents were the family members who provided most of a child’s family-related socialization, but extended family members also performed this function. In today’s world, children often live with a stepparent or a cohabiting partner to their biological parent (usually their mother); these adults also socialize children. Second, the family ideally provides emotional and practical support for everyone in a family. Children especially need such support, but parents and other family members also benefit in many ways. Although we usually think of a family providing food, clothing, and shelter for its members, emotional support should not be neglected. The best families provide nurturing for children and love and comfort for spouses and other adults.

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Third, families provide a social identity for their members. When children are born, they automatically assume their parents’ social class, race and ethnicity, and religion. Along with their biological sense, these elements give them a healthy sense of identity that is thought to be important for self-esteem and other aspects of one’s personality. The conflict approach acknowledges these functions but says that they are often more idealized than real. Many families do socialize their children in the best way possible and provide wonderful emotional and practical support for all their members. However, many other families fall far short of these standards and are certainly dysfunctional for their members. Parents abuse or neglect children, husbands beat wives, parents fail to raise their children in the way child psychologists and other scholars heartily recommend. Conflict theory adds that families also contribute to social inequality in the larger society. A family’s social class position, race and ethnicity, and other important elements of a child’s social background have lifelong effects. These elements help determine whether a child does well in life in terms of education, employment, and other life chances, or whether a child encounters many challenges that result in negative life outcomes. In this regard, lowincome families face many challenges that impede their children’s chances for economic success (Furstenberg 2010). Because their mothers are more likely to lack good nutrition and health care during pregnancy, these children are more likely to encounter cognitive and neurological problems during infancy and childhood. After they are born, their low-income families are more likely to experience adverse life events that produce toxic stress as discussed earlier in this chapter. These children are also less likely than wealthier children to have parents take them to museums and other cultural activities and to help them develop interaction skills that help ensure success in school during childhood and in the workplace after adolescence (Lareau 2011). These and other

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problems in the family backgrounds of lowincome children help keep these children from achieving educational and economic success throughout the life course. The family as a social institution contributes to social inequality in an additional way: through inheritance. Parents typically bequeath most or all of whatever wealth they have to their children. Because families differ so much in the amount of wealth they have, with many families having little or no wealth, family inheritance aggravates and reinforces existing social inequality. In another conflict theory critique of the family as a social institution, feminist theory says that the family contributes to gender inequality. As noted earlier, traditional parental roles help ensure women’s economic subordination. Many women suffer domestic violence that they would not suffer if they were not married or living with someone. Because the family unit is the ultimate source of this violence, the family contributes to gender inequality in this additional manner. Schools and Schooling Education is yet another social institution for which the conflict approach has enriched our understanding. Here again it is useful to contrast the conflict approach with the functionalist perspective. Not surprisingly, functionalist theory stresses that schools and education serve important functions for society. Perhaps most important, schools teach young children how to read, write, and do arithmetic (the celebrated “three Rs”), and they introduce older children to literature, history and social studies, the sciences, and the arts. In all these ways, schools ideally produce literate, educated individuals who will thus be that much more prepared for employment opportunities and to assume their roles as informed citizens in a complex society. Schools also help socialize children in many ways. For example, children learn in school how to interact with other children in an institutional setting and also how to interact with adults (teachers and staff)

who are not their parents or other family members. They also learn important norms, values, and processes, including cooperation, patriotism (from reciting the Pledge of Allegiance), respect for authority, and punctuality. As well, schools can serve as a “melting pot” for children from different socioeconomic and racial/ethnic backgrounds to spend time together every day, become friends, and learn about all their diverse backgrounds. In addition to these many functions, public schools also provide parents with free childcare during school hours, certainly an important function for millions of parents. A final function of schooling is more subtle: it keeps millions of high school students from seeking full-time employment. This fact lowers the unemployment rate and puts less stress on the economy to provide jobs for these students. All these functions are certainly important for society. However, schools, like the family, do not always operate in the ideal manner that functionalist theory assumes. Emphasizing this fact, the conflict approach points to several ways in which schools are dysfunctional for many students and for society as a whole (Sadovnik and Coughlan 2016). First, and probably most important, many US schools are simply substandard. Their physical plants are in disrepair, classrooms are overcrowded, and teachers lack enough textbooks and other equipment to be able to maximize students’ learning. These schools are typically found in poor urban areas and many poor rural areas. Education critic Jonathan Kozol (1991) terms the striking differences between these schools and wealthier, suburban schools “savage inequalities.” Lamenting the problems that substandard schools create for low-income children, Kozol (1991, 233) observed, “All our children ought to be allowed a stake in the enormous richness of America. Whether they were born to poor white Appalachians or to wealthy Texans, to poor black people in the Bronx or to rich people in Manhasset or Winnetka, they are all quite wonderful and innocent when they are small. We soil them needlessly.”

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Second, man schools are racially segregated even though school segregation is illegal. This segregation persists because of racial segregation in housing and neighborhoods persists. Kozol (2005) calls this problem “apartheid schooling.” Education scholars say that school segregation contributes to the lack of funding, dilapidated conditions, and other problems found in many urban schools (Orfield, Siegel-Hawley, and Kucsera 2011). A third dysfunction is school violence. This violence reached its peak during the 1990s, a decade that ended in 1999 with the fatal shootings by two students of twelve other students and one teacher at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. The amount of school violence has declined since then, and the chances of a student being murdered on school grounds are minuscule even if such murders do occasionally occur. Fewer than 1 percent of students ages 12–18 are victims of other serious violence (aggravated assault, rape and sexual assault, and robbery) at school in a given year. However, almost 7 percent of high school students are threatened or injured with a weapon at school in a given year, and almost 6 percent of public school teachers are threatened or injured by a student in a given year (Robers et al. 2015). These figures indicate that school violence is uncommon but still a problem. A fourth and related school dysfunction is bullying. Almost one-fourth of public schools report that bullying occurs at least daily or weekly, and more than one-fifth of students ages 12–18 report being bullied during the school year (Robers et al. 2015). Because bullying can have serious psychological consequences (Adams and Lawrence 2011), its occurrence at schools is a significant dysfunction for the students who are bullied, for the schools’ learning atmosphere, and for society as a whole. Yet another school dysfunction is the racial discrimination that characterizes school discipline. Several studies find that suspension or expulsion is more likely for African American and Latino students than for non-Latino white students committing

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similar misbehaviors (Payne and Welch 2015). The conflict approach also takes issue with tracking, the process whereby “bright” students are put into faster tracks (more difficult and challenging curricula) and “slower” students are put into slower tracks (less difficult and challenging curricula). Although this approach is meant to help bright students learn as much as possible and slower students learn at a suitable pace, critics say that low-income students and those of color are more likely to be tracked “down,” with negative effects for their learning and self-esteem (Ansalone 2010). Conflict theorists finally call attention to an issue they call the hidden curriculum, or a set of beliefs and values that supports the status quo (Rahman 2013). As noted earlier, schools teach patriotism and respect for authority among other values. While many people no doubt think these are good values for children to learn, conflict theorists say these values support the status quo and its existing inequality and make it less likely that schoolchildren will question whether society needs to be changed to increase social equality and social justice. War and Militarism War and militarism constitute one of the most important social problems of our time and of the past. More than 100 million soldiers and civilians died worldwide during the twentieth century from international and civil wars (Leitenberg 2006). The United States remains at war today in the Middle East and has fought or threatened to fight more than 200 wars and armed conflicts since the colonial era (Collier 1993). Nuclear weapons continue to threaten the planet, and the US total military budget exceeds $1 trillion annually (Friends Committee on National Legislation 2014). In a television broadcast delivered on January 17, 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned that the nation was spending far too much on militarism: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense, a theft from

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those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the seat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.” Perhaps surprisingly, functionalist theory says that war actually serves several important functions for society despite the many evils it also causes. An early president of the American Sociological Association, Robert E. Park (1941), discussed these functions in a provocative essay. War, Park wrote, provides the following benefits for society: (1) war helps resolve international disputes; (2) war strengthens social bonds within the nations at war, since people now have a common goal: to defeat the “enemy”; and (3) war centuries ago led to the rise of nation-states such as ancient Rome, and these nationstates then were large and wealthy enough to produce significant cultural, scientific, and social advances. Wars have also served other functions. For example, some wars have enabled nations to maintain their political freedom, and war also boosts a nation’s economy by providing jobs for soldiers and civilians alike. Military spending and preparations for war have also sometimes led to scientific and technological development that otherwise might not have happened or at least would have happened more slowly. The conflict approach’s take on war and the military is decidedly different and much more negative. In line with President Eisenhower’s concerns, conflict theorists criticize military spending for taking huge sums of money away from important domestic needs. One theorist says, “The war economy, for its part, devours roughly one trillion dollars in material, technological and human resources yearly . . . , ensuring a pattern of waste, destruction, uneven development, eroded public infrastructures, and decimated social programs. Decaying American cities have become a supreme legacy of the warfare system” (Boggs 2011, 17).

Conflict theorists also criticize the military-industrial complex, the cooperation of political leaders, defense contractors, and military officials that leads to excessive military spending on unneeded weaponry (Mills 1956). Some critics say that an interest in corporate profits drives military spending and may even lead the United States into war. As one of these critics put it, “War is business and it is profitable . . . What we learned in the aftermath of World War II is that mass destruction is great for corporate profits . . . War is driven by corporate profits and corporations drive politics” (Worrell 2011, 51). In line with this view, some conflict theorists view US wars as imperialistic ventures designed to gain access to oil and other natural resources of an “enemy” nation, rather than to defend the United States or preserve or bring democracy to that nation. They view the beginning of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq during the early 2000s as illustrating this dynamic. Crime, Law, and Criminal Justice Scholars have used the conflict approach to understand crime, law, and criminal justice perhaps more than any other social problem. Debate continues over how much the research evidence on these issues supports the views of conflict theory. Here it will again be helpful to begin with functionalist theory as a counterpoint. In a famous formulation, Emile Durkheim ([1895] 1962), first mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, argued that crime and deviance are functional for society for several reasons. First, the punishment of deviants reminds people of the norms that were violated and thus increases conformity in the general society. Second, deviance solidifies social bonds among the people who are dealing with a deviant; this social bonding consequence is similar to that claimed for war as discussed in the previous section. Third, deviance may lead to positive social change. Long after Durkheim’s time, Mahatma Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., were considered deviants by the powers they opposed,

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yet their heroic examples led to many needed changes in their societies. Although Durkheim did not discuss it, a fourth function is that crime and deviance, like poverty, create hundreds of thousands of jobs for police, prosecutors, defense lawyers, criminology professors, and the many other occupations that exist primarily because of crime and deviance. If we could somehow wave a magic wand and end all crime, many people would lose their jobs. When applied to crime, law, and justice, a variation of functionalist theory is called consensus theory. This theory assumes that laws in a given society generally represent the interests of all people in that society, who in turn generally agree on what the laws are and should be. When norms are violated, it is appropriate that offenders be apprehended and punished to help preserve social stability. Consensus theory further assumes that any social class, racial, or gender bias in the criminal justice system is rather minimal and not cause for fundamental changes in the operation of the legal system. The conflict approach paints a much more critical, negative view of crime, law, and criminal justice. Conflict theorists say that law represents the interests of powerful social elites and is used by them to reinforce their position at the top of society and to keep other people at the bottom of society (Turk 1969). They also say that disagreement over norms may exist rather than the consensus cited by functionalist theory. An influential essay called Culture Conflict and Crime, by Thorsten Sellin (1938), provided an interesting example of this dynamic. Sellin discussed an episode involving a Sicilian father in New Jersey who shot and killed a teenage boy who had sex with the man’s daughter. The man was surprised when he was arrested, because traditional Sicilian culture approved of a father taking this action to defend his family’s honor. Some radical conflict theorists attribute crime to capitalism. Dutch criminologist Williem Bonger (1916) penned a very influential Marxist analysis along these lines in

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his 1918 book, Criminality and Economic Conditions. Bonger reasoned that capitalism as an economic system emphasizes competition for profit above all else. This emphasis in turn promotes a cultural emphasis on egoism and greed that fosters law-breaking for economic gain. Bonger also thought that the poor commit crime because capitalism causes them economic deprivation, and that wealthy people who commit crimes do not get punished because the law exists to oppress the poor. Supporting Bonger’s view that capitalism helps cause crime, contemporary research finds a positive relationship between nations’ degree of capitalism and their homicide rates (Antonaccio and Tittle 2007). Over the years, several scholars have provided other historical examples that illustrate the basic tenets of the conflict approach. Three such examples are worth discussing here. Beginning with the example that occurred longest ago, sociologist William Chambliss (1964) documented the origins of a new law in England in the fourteenth century (1300s) that made vagrancy a crime. Back then, beggars were allowed to beg without having to fear being arrested, because no law prohibited begging. This changed after 1348, the year that the bubonic plague killed about half the English population. This huge decrease in the population meant that many fewer people would not be able to work on the great estates of England’s rich landowners. The landowners realized that this situation would force them to pay higher wages to these people. To prevent this from happening, Parliament passed the nation’s first vagrancy law in 1349. This law prevented people from begging for a living, and it also made it crime to move to a different location to find employment. Both these provisions increased the “supply of labor,” to use a modern term, and thus helped keep wages lower than what they otherwise would have been. Chambliss (1964, 69) wrote that this new law was “designed for one express purpose: to force laborers . . . to accept employment at a lower wage in order to insure the landowner an adequate supply of labor at a

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price he could afford to pay.” Chambliss’s view on the economic basis for the new law of vagrancy has been challenged (Adler 1989), but it remains a compelling analysis in the conflict tradition. A second historical example comes from legal scholar Jerome Hall (1952), who provided an incisive analysis of how law regarding a certain type of theft developed in England more than 500 years ago. During the fifteenth century (1400s), England was moving from an agricultural economy to a mercantile (trade) economy. Just as UPS or FedEx delivers packages today, people (called carriers) working for merchants would deliver goods in a horse-driven cart to other merchants or individuals who had bought the goods. When this process developed, England had no law that prevented carriers from simply keeping the goods for themselves. The idea back then was that carriers legally possessed the goods while they were transporting the goods. Although they were thus legally allowed to keep the goods, most carriers did not do so because they feared being fired or even assaulted by the merchant for whom they worked and/or by the purchaser of the goods. Yet some did decide to keep the goods they were transporting. England’s poor probably supported this behavior, while merchants almost certainly opposed it. In the 1473 Carrier’s Case, English judges declared it a new crime for carriers to keep the goods they were transporting. Hall wrote that this new law was enacted to protect the interests of the growing mercantile class and to keep the poor in a low-income state. A final historical example concerns Prohibition in the United States. In his classic book Symbolic Crusade, sociologist Joseph R. Gusfield (1963) described how and why Prohibition came about with the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment to the US Constitution in 1919. Rather than reflecting the views of most Americans, Gusfield wrote, Prohibition primarily reflected the views of the rural and small-town white Protestants who dominated state legislatures and the US Congress back then. These citizens were

very religious and considered alcohol use a sin. They also abhorred a major social trend of the time, the rise of large urban cities owing to massive immigration by Irish and Italian immigrants, who tended to drink much more than the rural and small-town Protestants. In the eyes of these Protestants, these immigrants had several strikes against them. First, they were immigrants. Second, they lived in cities and were responsible for the crime and other problems that caused the rural and small-town Protestants to dislike cities so much. Third, they were Catholic. Fourth, they were poor. All these alleged faults, wrote Gusfield, led the dominant Protestants to advocate Prohibition as a symbolic way of putting urban immigrants in their place. The Protestants’ control of state legislatures and the Congress ensured passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. Contemporary conflict theorists writing in the Marxian tradition actually disagree among themselves regarding the degree to which the law is just a tool or the ruling class or, instead, a much more complex process. Instrumentalist Marxists say that the ruling class can easily use the law to oppress the working class and maintain its own position at the top of society. As sociologist Richard Quinney (1977, 45) once explained this view, “The state exists as a device for controlling the exploited class . . . Contrary to conventional wisdom, law instead of representing community custom is an instrument of the state that serves the interests of the developing capitalist class.” Other conflict theorists feel this view is too simplistic by going too far in depicting the law as a mere tool of the ruling class. Structuralist Marxists say that the state and its legal system are relatively autonomous from the ruling class (Chambliss and Seidman 1982). This means that the ruling class sometimes does suffer legal defeats and cannot always use the law as a tool to protect its interests. However, if the poor do win some victories within the legal system, these victories are sham victories because they do little or nothing to upend social inequality. At the same time, these victories and

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the relative autonomy of the law make the law seem that much more legitimate to the poor. To the extent the poor view the law as neutral and legitimate, they are less likely to want to protest and rebel. In the long run, then, the relative autonomy of the law does help preserve the ruling class’s dominant position. Dialectical Marxists in turn critique the structuralist view just presented for denying that the poor can win real legal victories and not just sham ones. The dialectical view says that law can help the poor in many ways and also limit the ability of the ruling class to oppress the poor. This view thus recognizes that the rule of law does indeed exist in capitalist societies. English scholar E. P. Thompson (1975, 263–64) wrote that the law imposes “again and again, inhibitions upon the actions of the rulers. For there is a very large difference . . . between arbitrary extralegal power and the rule of law.” These and other disagreements among them notwithstanding, conflict theorists generally agree that the criminal justice system is biased against the poor and people of color. Much research by criminologists addresses the degree to which such bias exists, with this research focusing on arrest rates, imprisonment rates, and sentence lengths. Some research finds that poor defendants are not treated more harshly than wealthier defendants in these respects. These findings leads some scholars to conclude that conflict theory’s general view on class inequality in the criminal justice system is mistaken (Chiricos and Waldo 1975). However, other scholars say that most suspects and defendants are rather poor, even if there are minor income differences among them. This fact means there is too little income variation among suspects and defendants for meaningful tests of social class bias to exist. When wealthy defendants are occasionally arrested for violent crimes and other offenses, they have many advantages, including the ability to hire expensive, private attorneys and investigators. When celebrity O. J. Simpson was arrested in 1994 for allegedly murdering his ex-wife and

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her friend, he paid some $10 million for his “dream team” legal defense and won a not guilty verdict from his jury (Barkan 1996). When corporations commit whitecollar crime that results in the deaths of dozens of people, typically no one goes to prison. In 2014 and 2015, for example, the US government reached settlements with two motor vehicle companies that illustrate this dynamic. General Motors had suppressed evidence of ignition switch problems that led to dozens of deaths, while Toyota had suppressed evidence of sudden acceleration problems that also led to many deaths (Douglas and Fletcher 2014; Ivory and Vlasic 2015). Although the inaction of these corporations’ executives led many people die, no one went to prison. Much research also focuses on the impact of race and ethnicity on arrest, prosecution, and conviction and sentencing. Here again there is ample evidence of racial bias, although the evidence is not always consistent. Some but not all studies find that African American and Latino defendants are less likely to have their charges dropped or reduced (Wooldredge 2012). Several studies find that prosecutors lodge more serious charges in homicide and rape cases when the victims are white than when they are African American (Myers 2000), suggesting that prosecutors place more value on whites’ lives than on African Americans’ lives. Turning to sentencing, the evidence is again somewhat inconsistent, but many studies do find that African American and Latino defendants are more likely than white defendants convicted of similar crimes to be sentenced to prison and sentenced for longer prison terms (Bales and Piquero 2012; Walker, Spohn, and DeLone 2012). In rape and homicide cases, defendants are punished more harshly (with longer prison terms or the death penalty in homicide cases) when the victims are white than when they are African American (Sorensen and Wallace 1999). Several studies also find more punitive sentencing for African Americans in states and counties that have higher percentages of

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African Americans (Jacobs, Carmichael, and Kent 2005). In the juvenile justice system, racial bias seems even more evident than it is in the adult criminal justice system. Many studies find that African American and Latino youths are more likely than non-Latino white youths accused of similar offenses to receive harsher treatment throughout the juvenile justice process (Shook and Goodkind 2009; Rodriguez 2013). Rather dramatic evidence for the conflict approach is found in the treatment of drug offenders. When the United States intensified its legal war against illegal drugs in the 1980s, its impact was felt most intensely by African Americans, even though African Americans do not use illegal drugs more often than non-Latino whites use these drugs (Alexander 2012). African Americans consequently comprise about half of all state prisoners incarcerated for drug offenses even though they comprise only about 13 percent of the US population (Carson 2015).

makers to follow as they try to address social problems in the United States and other societies.

A Final Word on the Conflict Approach

References

This chapter has outlined the conflict approach and examined its contributions to many types of social problems. This approach reminds us that the functionalist view, while sound in many respects, nonetheless paints too idealistic a view of American social institutions. The conflict approach rests on the basic idea that US society is filled with many types of inequality, and that the origins, dynamics, and consequences of social problems often reflect these underlying inequalities. To reduce the occurrence and impact of social problems, then, the conflict approach suggests that fundamental changes are needed in the structure of American society. Although these changes will not arrive in the foreseeable future, the conflict approach does point the way to a path for activists and policy

Glossary Bourgeoisie The ruling class. Class consciousness An awareness by the working class of the reasons for its position at the bottom of society. Feminist theory The view that women deserve to be equal to men in economic, political, and social dimensions and the belief that women’s inequality stems from patriarchy, sexism, and/or capitalism. Functionalism The view that social institutions contribute to the ongoing stability and well-being of society. Proletariat The working class at the bottom of society. Toxic stress Severe, chronic stress experienced by poor children that may impair their cognitive and neurological development.

Adams, Frank D., and Gloria J. Lawrence. 2011. Bullying victims: The effects last into college. American Secondary Education 40(1):4– 13. Adler, Jeffrey S. 1989. A historical analysis of the law of vagrancy. Criminology 27:209–29. Alexander, Michelle. 2012. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: The New Press. Ansalone, George. 2010. Tracking: Educational differentiation or defective strategy. Educational Research Quarterly 34(2):3–17. Anspach, Renee R. 2010. Gender and health care. In Handbook of Medical Sociology, edited by Chloe E. Bird, Peter Conrad, Allen M. Fremont, and Stefan Timmermans, 229–48. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press. Antonaccio, Olena, and Charles R. Tittle. 2007. A cross-national test of Bonger’s theory of criminality and economic conditions. Criminology 45(4):925–58.

the conflict approach Baber, Ray Erwin. 1953. Marriage and the Family. 2nd ed. New York: McGraw-Hill. Bales, William D., and Alex R. Piquero. 2012. Racial/ethnic differentials in sentencing to incarceration. JQ: Justice Quarterly 29(5):742–73. Barkan, Steven E. 1996. The social science significance of the O.J. Simpson case. In Representing O.J.: Murder, Criminal Justice and Mass Culture, edited by Gregg Barak, 36–42. Albany, NY: Harrow and Heston. Boggs, Carl. 2011. Empire versus Democracy: The Triumph of Corporate and Military Power. New York: Routledge. Bonger, Willem. 1916. Criminality and Economic Conditions. Translated by H. P. Horton. Boston: Little, Brown. Bornstein, David. 2013. Protecting children from toxic stress. New York Times, November 3. Carson, E. Ann. 2015. Prisoners in 2014. Washington, DC: Bureau of Justice Statistics. Chambliss, William J. 1964. A sociological analysis of the law of vagrancy. Social Problems 12:67–77. Chambliss, William, and Robert Seidman. 1982. Law, Order, and Power. 2nd ed. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Chiricos, Theodore G., and Gordon P. Waldo. 1975. Socioeconomic status and criminal sentencing: An assessment of a conflict proposition. American Sociological Review 40:753–72. Collier, Ellen C. 1993. Instances of use of United States forces abroad, 1798–1993. US Navy. www.history.navy.mil/wars/foabroad.htm. Danico, Mary Yu, ed. 2014. Asian American Society: An Encyclopedia. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Davis, Kingsley, and Wilbert Moore. 1945. Some principles of stratification. American Sociological Review 10:242–49. DeKeseredy, Walter. 2011. Violence against Women: Myths, Facts, Controversies. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. DeNavas-Walt, Carmen, and Bernadette D. Proctor. 2015. Income and Poverty in the United States: 2014. Current Population Reports, P60–252. Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office. DeSocio, Janiece. 2015. A call to action: Reducing toxic stress during pregnancy and early

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CHAPTER 15

Radical Interactionism and the Symbolism of Methamphetamine Michael A. Katovich

Abstract This chapter provides a radical symbolic interactionist interpretation and analysis of the television series, Breaking Bad and its representation of a deviant innovator, Walter White, and the crystal methamphetamine he cooks. Using the central concepts of radical symbolic interaction, domination, and specifying its four themes related to categorical identification and competence, partnership, emergence, and self-objectification, I characterize White as one who seeks domination in methamphetamine worlds and discuss methamphetamine as an object defined through the prism of attaining status. While acknowledging methamphetamine as a powerful drug in regard to ingestion, I also characterize it as an inanimate thing that becomes meaningful in regard to specific responses to it. White’s particular brand, blue crystal methamphetamine, becomes significant not so much as a powerful drug ingested but as a drug representing purity in the methamphetamine world through which White navigates. Furthermore, methamphetamine in Breaking Bad gains meaning as linked, specifically, to White’s persona, Heisenberg. In the above light, I link particular scenes to the themes of domination, concluding with brief analogies to other worlds in which deviance or at least being noticeably different relates to domination specifically. Cinematic (film and TV) representations of deviance have varied over the years to the extent that representations of illegal drug dealers, labeled conventionally as deviants, appear as celebrated antiheroic characters with whom audiences can relate. In effect audiences can perceive drug dealers in cinema as sympathetic innovators (Merton 1938). Part of this audience perception derives from techniques that provide sustainable points-of-view whereby the drug dealers’ and innovators’ standpoints

come off as recognizable to audiences who adopt the standpoints of drug dealers’ and innovators’ as they immerse themselves into the narrative (Wiley 2003). In a film such as Blow, for instance, audiences see and hear the rise and fall of George Jung, noted marijuana and cocaine dealer, through the eyes of Jung’s character, accompanied by the actor’s voice (Johnny Depp) who narrates George’s story. On television, Nancy Botwin, in Weeds is a widow with two children. She maintains her lifestyle by 259

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trafficking marijuana after the untimely death of her husband. Audiences relate to the story as they follow Nancy’s path from drug worlds to suburban enclaves and back to drug worlds. The sympathetic innovator in cinema often focused on characters either in the film noire genre or in what viewers sometimes referred to colloquially as “gangster films.” Perhaps the most notable and celebrated films in the latter category, The Godfather (and its sequel, Godfather II) and Scarface articulated the theme most closely identified with innovation, namely “blocked opportunities.” Finding themselves unable to achieve the money to participate in the American Dream owing to institutionalized forms of discrimination, from blatant to subtle, the antiheroes resort to illegal (and sometimes fantastically illegal) means to achieve the ends of which a society approves (Merton 1968). Whether discussing the shadowy figures from film noire, the (mostly) ethnic characters who represent gangsters, or a suburban white female drug dealer seeking to maintain a lifestyle to which she and her children have become accustomed, the plots emphasize gaining a conventional end in the form of monetary rewards that will allow for attainment of an American Dream with its customary accoutrements. One of the more notable portrayals of innovation in the context of drug dealing appears in the recent television series Breaking Bad. From the first until the last episode (spanning five seasons), audiences see and hear Walter White, a high school chemistry teacher in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on an odyssey from an everyman to infamous and famous impresario in regard to methamphetamine cooking. In portraying Walter’s excursion into methamphetamine exchange markets in the Southwest United States and parts of Mexico, the writers, creator (Vince Gilligan), and various episodic directors provide a selective and fictional glimpse into a criminogenic marketplace, complete with images of cartels, “bad-ass” personae, money laundering, and complex,

interlocking exchange processes that create a liminal combination of legitimate business and illegal cargo (see Friedrichs 2010). The portrayal, as expected, takes advantage of a poetic license to distort the everyday reality of the global methamphetamine trade with the fictional narrative of Walter White’s journey. The empirical deviant world associated with methamphetamine becomes grist for a mythological tale of a local Southwestern man transformed as he becomes a key player on a provocative stage whereby deviants and deviant objects become meaningful in their transactions. Walter’s success in the criminogenic marketplace evokes thematic similarities to the aforementioned films and TV series, but also comes off as a portrait of personal redemption beyond conventional success. As the show progresses, what appears as Walter’s modus operandi, to accumulate wealth and maintain a suburban lifestyle while receiving necessary medical benefits, actually becomes transcended by a deeper purpose. Walter, representing the ordinary everyman earning honest money, has subordinated himself to such ordinariness one too many times. In this regard, Walter’s involvement in deviant worlds can be associated with a radical symbolic interactionist perspective (discussed in more detail later) that combines a traditional interactionist emphasis on self-creation with an emphasis on domination (Athens 2007, 2009). One specific and significant indication of Walter’s quest to dominate concerns his unwillingness to assume a subordinate status. The audience finds out that prior to becoming a high school chemistry teacher, Walter sold his interests in Grey Matter Technologies for $5,000. His partner, Eliot, went on to win a Nobel Prize for research at Grey Matter, make several million dollars, and marry Gretchen, Walter’s former lover. This “bargain,” which made Walter virtually invisible in the world of research chemistry, haunted him for years. When Walter discovers that he can earn several million dollars in the methamphetamine trade, he becomes interested in

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applying his skills. But it also becomes evident that instead of conventional wealth and transcending blocked opportunities, Walter gradually becomes seduced by the idea that he can make up for his costly existential choice that denied him a dominant position in the world of chemistry and left him wasting his prodigious talent in an everyday suburban high school classroom (Katz 1998). The money, while serving necessary functions, pales in comparison to Walter’s goal of becoming known as the extraordinary man who achieves dominance in the field of chemistry as he becomes affiliated with an extraordinary product, known as blue crystal methamphetamine (serving as Walter’s infamous brand). The pursuit of dominance associated with Walter’s odyssey represents an improbable character whose rise and fall has more to do with the symbolic reconstruction of his self than a cost–benefit analysis (Katz 1998). Furthermore, his story, while fictional, provides an opportunity to expand a radical symbolic interactionist view of domination as linked to the symbolism of methamphetamine in regard to scientific standards regarding purity rather than, strictly, a highly addictive substance. Walter’s story pertains most explicitly to the radical interactionist issue of domination when Walter takes on a persona of Heisenberg in his methamphetamine lifeworld (Schutz and Luckmann 1973). The obvious allusion to the famous chemist also creates a mysterious look which becomes Walter’s trademark appearance correlated with his particular brand. As Heisenberg who makes pure, blue methamphetamine, Walter becomes the player on a provocative methamphetamine stage defined by his persona and his product. Making and distributing the cleanest, purest, and most potent product eventually becomes more important to Walter than money itself. Walter seeks recognition as the master chemist (Heisenberg) whose persona and brand dominate trade not only in the Southwest United States, but globally

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as well. In short, Walter seeks a symbolic metamorphosis of himself, through his brand and persona that mirrors the underlying premise of chemistry as the science of transformation. Furthermore, Walter’s domination begins and occurs in conjunction with constructing and negotiating particular appearances of himself that serve as strategic enactments and that allow him to negotiate complex acts with vicious, crassly pragmatic, and single minded businesspeople (Stone 1962; Strauss 1978). Such appearances and methods of negotiation provide a cover for his journey into the worlds of methamphetamine production and consumption. In the following pages, I first discuss the premises of radical symbolic interaction. This radical perspective extends the symbolic interactionist perspective of deviance from an emphasis on societal response and symbolic designation to a focus on metamorphosis in the pursuit of domination and the subsequent process of being and becoming a key player defined as deviant. Second, I discuss domination as the central concept of radical symbolic interaction and as a pervasive leitmotif in Breaking Bad, correlated with White’s mythological journey from a routine suburban husband and father to the fabled, celebrated, and despised Heisenberg. Third, I provide an analytical description of Breaking Bad that emphasizes Walter’s metamorphosis in relation to his family and to the people with whom he does business in the methamphetamine world. In providing such description, I discuss the symbolism of methamphetamine as more than simply a dangerous substance. Specifically, methamphetamine becomes a social object representing the correlation between domination and deterioration of primary and secondary social bonds. Fourth, as a way of concluding, I elucidate the symbolism of methamphetamine, and, briefly, discuss how domination from a radical interactionist position can serve as a way to discuss other real-life actors as either deviant or who deviate from standard and expected routines.

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Radical Symbolic Interaction as a Perspective on Deviance Athens (2007) proposed an alternate view of symbolic interaction that incorporated and criticized Blumer (1969) and Mead (1932, 1934). Both advocated views of humans as creative and of human behavior as consensual. Athens acknowledged this romantic and prosocial view of social worlds, but pointed out that its innocence often ignored a less than sanguine underbelly riddled with hidden agendas, opportunistic ploys, and tendencies to control others, rather than merely cooperate with them. In proposing a more radical view of Mead and Blumer, however, Athens did not wish to adopt the more political and economic definitions of radicalism associated with Marx and Marxists. Such radicalism sought to undermine, or at least provide severe criticisms of, previous thinking. Rather, Athens contended that the notion of that which is radical extends established thought (in this case the thought of Blumer and Mead) that challenges and affirms such thought simultaneously. In some significant ways, Athens’s proposals to radicalize symbolic interaction resemble the late modern interactionist critique (see Katovich and Reese 1993) of more structural orientations to deviance and deviant acts, including the aforementioned theory proposed by Merton (see, e.g., Becker 1963; Goffman 1963; Glaser and Strauss 1964; Gross and Stone 1964; Scott and Lyman 1968; Plummer 2003). The discursive bias of institutions (as to what constitutes a deviant or nondeviant act or actor) seemed problematic to the late modern interactionists. Indeed, they regarded discourse itself as potentially problematic (rather than as a method by which to adapt to problematics). Such discourse employs a vocabulary of commerce, reducing actors to particular definitions that institutions take for granted. One’s status as deviant or nondeviant, then, depends on that which any actor can contribute to the maintenance of institutional life, which often becomes

parsed down to economic currency – the basis of Merton’s concept of innovator. Radical symbolic interactionism extends this late modern position, recognizing that deviance poses as a contested term, used by powerful elites to define distinctions between warranted and unwarranted activities within the interaction order (see Goffman 1983). Radical interactionists also draw on particular thinkers implicitly affiliated with symbolic interactionism, but not recognized explicitly as progenitors of the discipline. Going beyond Mead and Blumer, but staying within the framework of pragmatism and qualitative inquiry, Athens and others (Musolf 2013), cite thinkers such as Park (1950), Simmel (1950), and Dewey ([1957] 1922) in noting that particular dynamics of association sustain superordinate and subordinate relationships. Such relationships provide the foundations of dominant-subservient pairings. However, remaining congruent with Mead and Blumer’s voluntarist and constructivist orientations to what interactors create and maintain, radical interactionists also refer to the distinct possibilities that domination, as a problematic, can emerge even amid the most strident and apparently rigid circumstances. Drawing on Park and Dewey, in particular, radical interactionists note that power differentials, established hierarchies associated with gender and race, and the competitive and strategic realpolitik of the world as it is have dynamic, rather than static properties and while apparently real for the time being, can just as easily be suddenly real in much different ways. Furthermore, whereas late modern interactionists regarded particular pejorative labels and identities as enduring symbolic boxes that cut across spatial-temporal boundaries (serving as, in part, self-fulfilling prophesies), radical symbolic interactionists regard the reality of such identities as transformative, making them pejorative in some contexts but legendary or celebrative in other contexts (see Milligan 1998). As mentioned, Walter becomes the villainous Heisenberg, hunted down by the DEA and drug traffickers. While such an

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identity seems to subordinate Walter as prey from an institutional and organizational perspective, it also symbolizes a dominant presence in other symbolically constructed and segregated spaces. For instance, Walter becomes celebrated by a narcocorrido (a Mexican folk song pertaining to the drug trade). While seemingly pessimistic (Walter is described as doomed) it also serves as a tribute to Heisenberg’s dominance in the particular space designated as a methamphetamine world (see Wald 2001). Domination remains central to the radical interactionist stance and pervades the core of its literature. Specifically, Athens’s (2009) notion of domination provides a thickly constructed and nuanced appreciation of fitting together lines of action, as Blumer put it famously, with more crooked alignments that create one-up and one down positions. Importantly, domination, as employed by radical interactionists, implies a less than congruent set of relations that, despite asymmetry, remain in flux. While Mead underestimated how those in superordinate or one-up positions can direct the role of another (rather than merely take such a role) without attempting to empathize with this other, radical interactionists appreciate that Mead also noted that simply because a reality seems obdurate at a particular time, such a reality can be replaced, again without much in the way of antecedent warning, almost immediately (see Athens 2013). The idea of recognizing asymmetry and emergence (that can, possibly transform asymmetry) further distinguishes radical interactionists from their late modern progenitors. The latter interactionists viewed the discursive bias associated with deviance as dependent on societal response. While such response is not simplistic, it does tend to anchor individuals to warranted assertions established by institutions. Radical symbolic interactionists, however, contend that deviant identities become established through an elaborate process of identification that Wiley (2011) described as a semiotic complexity. This complexity, recog-

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nized early on by pragmatists such as Dewey (Musolf 2013) involves, in specific reference to domination, the contrast between the surface meanings of subordinating others via name-calling and the multiple meanings associated with transforming apparent subordination in the moment to a more enduring superordination and domination in the future (Puddephatt 2013; Cook 2011; Gougherty and Hallett 2013).

Domination as a Symbolic Interactionist Concept As mentioned, Athens (2002) proposed that domination, as a central concept in symbolic interaction, could provide a corrective for G. H. Mead’s (1932, 1934) more egalitarian and consensual approach to the study of ongoing interactional patterns. Relying, in part, on Simmel’s (1971) conceptualization of domination as the conjoint construction of a social form, Athens further noted that domination requires a particular sequence of cooperation and recognition of a social system; it comprises subserviencesuperiority that nonetheless differs from tyranny, violence, aggressive violations (of body and mind), and brute force. Those who dominate do so amid and among others who recognize “the purposes” advocated by dominators (Simmel 1950). Domination, then, becomes a relatively stable social form that involves dynamic participation between those who dominate and those dominated. It differs from other asymmetric alignments in that once established, those dominated do not necessarily experience the alienation that, say, those who experience torture, severe economic deprivation, or other untoward acts against their will (Athens 2009). Four themes associated with a subservience-superiority relationship duality occur and reoccur as dominant relationships become refined (Athens 2010). Such themes serve as “defining characteristics” of domination. First, domination pertains to an obdurate reality in regard to one-up and one-down positions. This

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asymmetric reality becomes maintained by and through consensual recognition of superordinate-subordinate statuses on the one hand, and particular skills, talents, and habits that contribute to the appearance of a superordinate’s irreplaceability, at least for the time being (Athens 2002). Second, individuals recognize that domination can allow partnership so that, superordination and subordination provide mutual benefits for participants. Third, superordination and subordination, while stable and anchored to routinized positions, nevertheless represent emergent processes that can involve transformation and reversals. Occupying a superordinate status at time one does not insure, necessarily, the same status in relation to a particular subordinate other at time two. Fourth, individuals engaging in domination do so as they see themselves as involved in the process, becoming objects to themselves (Mead 1934) in that each maintains awareness of their own and the other’s status. As an extension of this fourth theme, those who assume dominant positions can also assume that others see them as dominant as they see themselves. From Athens’s perspective, domination requires a cooperative agreement to create and sustain asymmetry. While the cooperative quality of domination provides immediate benefits to superordinate and subordinate, it does not necessarily ensure mutual satisfaction across time. Subservience implies assuming compromising positions with emotional consequences ranging from dis-comfort to alienation (Athens 2005a, 2007). From an interactionist perspective, however, the main focus has more to do with the symbolic capital (e.g., face saving or maintaining control of the interactional focus) that interactors accrue rather than long-term economic disparities. In effect, the symbolic power afforded to one by others provides a foundation for domination enacted on the spot. Of course, such on-the-spot domination may be maintained by those committed to the maintenance of any asymmetric interactional routine. This point especially applies to Athens’s third criterion in which

superordinate and subordinate relations can become altered, transformed, and reversed via emergent developments. The connection of domination to deviance creates multiple possibilities, ranging from disrupting an interaction order in the proximal present to altering such an order significantly so that a new order emerges in the distal future. Deviant actors enjoined in domination create multiple possibilities patterned over time; while domination represents a basic social form, the specific content established during domination make for a fitting together of social lines of action that increases the chances of a superordinate’s asymmetric control of the future (Blumer 1969). The dominant person as deviant controls the socio-temporal rhythms of the interaction order. For instance, owing to his expertise as a methamphetamine cook, Walter puts himself in a position to dictate when and where mass amphetamine transactions take place. In effect, Walter’s one-up position in the methamphetamine world gives him time to formulate effective strategies to engage in further domination. The relation between domination and a deviant drug narrative differs from how many in the media might use the term. In regard to media images, especially of drug abuse, the drug itself (despite it being an inanimate object) dominates the user. In contrast, the radical interactionist focus on domination provides an explicit and generic description of the relationship between two people, one a superordinate and the other subservient (Athens 2007), in reference to a shared focus, or an object, defined consensually by both, as existing external to each actor (see Miller, Hintz, and Couch 1975). Furthermore, both superordinate and subordinate make use of the object, consensually defined, to project a shared future. This projection reviews and assesses a shared past (Katovich and Couch 1992). The image of methamphetamine as an object of deviant transactions in Breaking Bad represents this shared focus that actors in a dominant relationship bring to light in reference to the future and the past. The drug has no impact

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until activated in regard to maintaining or transforming alignment to others. Indeed, literal methamphetamine use and results of literal use in Breaking Bad have limited consequences. Viewers often see use by those distributing it as sampling the product, creating an abbreviated “test run” as they imagine its impact on regular users. The key problematic regarding methamphetamine in Breaking Bad implies a competitive marketplace in which discerning users, whether addicted or not, choose between substances that they regard as “pure” (symbolized by the blue crystal cooked by Walter). The assumption that requires viewers’ suspension of disbelief proposes that when purity decreases or becomes compromised, sales/use decreases. In regard to this assumption, all who appear as dealers, cooks, distributors, or sellers in Breaking Bad seem to take for granted that purity (at least, what becomes defined as purity) represents a necessary condition for marketability. Furthermore, those responsible for either cooking methamphetamine regarded as pure (such as Walter) or distributing it (such as Gus Fring, one of the main corporate dealers in the show) have the skills that enable them to create dominant relationships. In regard to the problematic of purity then, the realization on Walter’s part that he can become dominant in a relationship and maintain such dominance through his cooking skills and artistry serves as an ongoing thread in the show. Whereas Fring represents the “gangster” in TV and films that transcend blocked opportunities by accumulating and preserving wealth, Walter represents an artiste type, one who can achieve great success in a deviant world on the basis of his skills as a chemist. Money and what money can allow one to obtain does not become irrelevant to Walter, but he neither views it as an opportunity to upgrade his living conditions, pass as a community leader and upstanding citizen, nor buy him political influence (as Fring does, a la the “gangster films”). Achieving dominance in relationships and maintaining such dominance brings a particular status and esteem to

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Walter as one who, as Weber (1947) put it, establishes a charismatic legacy in which anyone affiliated with methamphetamine will pay homage to Walter. Walter’s transformation from meek, humble, and subservient Walter to the charismatic persona of Heisenberg represents a type of self-development that Athens (1994) described as involving an ongoing soliloquy. This soliloquy involves internal conversations within actors who provide themselves with ongoing rationalizations for changing their ways of presenting themselves. In effect, soliloquies often inflate the self, and serve as the equivalent of internal “pep talks.” Walter’s domination is intimately and distinctly linked to his emerging self-concept as a master chemist and artist who has not attained enough recognition, identities that he missed out on when he made the choice to sell his interests to Eliot. The particular soliloquy that Walter seems to repeat as the show goes on is that for once in his life, he can control the outcomes of his work and escape alienation from his own labor. In this vein, then, methamphetamine represents Walter’s emergent image of his self as one who deserves recognition based upon the beauty of his finished crystal blue product. Walter represents the deviant superordinate in specific relation to those who recognize the value of his product. As I will discuss later, Walter becomes unable to fully separate himself from what he has produced, again, making the outcome, money and wealth, less relevant than his ability to present himself as the man who makes the highly sought after blue crystal. Furthermore, Walter’s dominant status provides him with an identity that transcends the material outcome of what he produces and makes his motive for making methamphetamine an opportunity to redeem himself as a superior chemist in the eyes of particular others who can provide external validation. In effect, his motive becomes linked to his public identity as Heisenberg the prodigious and charismatic chemist (see Foote 1951). In this sense, methamphetamine represents and symbolizes a

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product that becomes, while unprotected in legal terms and even a target of hostile law enforcement, the source of Walter’s core definition of himself – a self that heretofore had remained dormant until he became immersed in the methamphetamine world. The four criteria for domination established by Athens emphasize the idea of a symbolic transformation that eventually defines Walter. This transformation works in such a way that Walter can manage, simultaneously, different and contradictory impressions of him in different regions (cf. Goffman 1959). While the management of such contradictions begins to weigh on and wear down Walter to the point that he becomes exposed as the fabled Heisenberg to his family, friends, and the law, he still manages various aspects of his identity work up until the last episode. Even when exposed as Heisenberg, Walter’s vision as one who can escape his mundane world of subservience and crushing ordinariness finds a new life in an identity that represents all that which becomes hostile to an ordinary existence. Walter’s blue crystal methamphetamine, then, becomes much more than an illegal substance that provides a powerful high. It represents a paradoxical type of control in which Walter becomes welded to as his surrounding social network deteriorates. Furthermore, by linking his long term future with a specialized persona, Heisenberg, Walter’s transformation into a reputational genius with substantial assets allows him to move into the deviant world in which he experiences both new found freedoms, but often powerful constraints. Walter’s transformation from conventional everyman to the sought after criminal Heisenberg, allows him to attain more resources than he could ever imagine, but also traps him into a world of deceit, violence, and cold-blooded indifference for his fate. In the following pages I will provide a depiction of methamphetamine followed by a general summary of Walter’s odyssey from ordinary man to Heisenberg. The connection between methamphetamine as problematic to Walter’s identity serves as a

parable of deviance via domination. It also provides a moral to such a parable in that Walter’s escape from his private ordinary hell moves him into virtual imprisonment in a fantastic world that he has created and that he maintains.

Methamphetamine: The World’s Scourge Inciardi (2008) notes that in the course of waging a war on drugs, particular substances become categorized as “the world’s most dangerous” as if bestowing some crown or badge. In conjunction with demonizing the drug, those associated with it, either as users or suppliers, become vilified as public enemies through specific names or an abstract typology (e.g., the immoral dealer). Additionally, the media, especially the news media, provides a situated vocabulary for enemies of drug suppliers, either through visual imagery or the printed word. This vocabulary allows those who wage war on drugs to attack the drug itself or issues allegedly correlated with the drug (e.g., immigration). The vocabulary also allows commentators who link particular drugs, such as methamphetamine, to invasions, take overs, and incapacitation of addicts (Caulkins and Reuter 1997). Critics of a reactionary position regarding the evil of drugs and of those supplying drugs have noted forcefully that attempts to restrict ingestion invite counter measures, on the part of dealers, to invent more sophisticated methods and supplemental weapons to insure the success of such methods (Gray 1998). Furthermore, some, such as Szasz (1974, 1992), argued that by waging war on drugs, the US government not only created criminal dependence on substances, but violated constitutional rights – unlike the prohibition of alcohol, which required an eighteenth amendment, no specific amendment bans the use of other drugs. Nevertheless, the US government has held a firm stance that particular drugs, labeled as Schedule I according to the Controlled Substance Act

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(CSA) represent what Douglas ([1968] 2002) termed extreme danger and something so profane that their mere presence constitutes a cultural taboo. The CSA also assigned particular drugs a Schedule II status. While the federal government considered the private and leisure use, possession, or intent to distribute Schedule II substances as illegal on par with Schedule I substances, it also acknowledged the possibilities that such substances could be regarded as legitimate matter that have a recognized place in medicine. Interestingly, almost as an afterthought, methamphetamine, a Schedule II substance according to the CSA, acquired legitimate institutional status, owing to some of its key ingredients, especially ephedrine and pseudoephedrine. While some of its medical and institutional use became well known, such as use for decongestion, other uses often eluded public recognition (e.g., some doctors prescribed it to treat narcolepsy which did not affect many people and had very little press coverage; Weisheit and White 2009). Additionally, and again, under the popular culture radar, both allied and axis forces during World War II used methamphetamine, as ordered, to keep engaged in nighttime battles (Anglin et al. 2000). After the war, particular subcultural and counter-cultural types devised celebrated methods, such as inhaling, that symbolized their idiosyncratic attachments, such as use among those labeled beatniks or hippies (Jackson 1975) or use among marginal and culturally fascinating gangs, such as Hell’s Angels (Thompson 1966; Reding 2009). Others have noted in general a methamphetamine culture existing in fringe areas (Grinspoon and Hedblom 1975). As the twentieth century came to an end, however, methamphetamine use and abuse became documented in the printed press and in documentaries (Inciardi 2008). The PBS exploration into “The Meth Epidemic” (Frontline 2006) noted an increase in methamphetamine use, not only in terms of numbers of people, but in regional and geographic places, indicating a “spread” of such use (see also Tanne 2006; Kramer

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1969). As methamphetamine became more established in specific places, it also moved beyond ingestion in subcultural contexts to national and international trade (Eck and Gersh 2000). In effect, methamphetamine use, production, and distribution did not merely apply to fads, fashions, and activities of a subculture (Smith 1969). The methamphetamine industry attracted innovators outside of the law as well as those regarded as legitimate businesspeople who viewed the enormous profit potential as worth the risks of legal stigma (Brownstein et al. 2014, 2–5). The effects of methamphetamine have received a great deal of attention and have also served as a reference point for legitimizing laws against personal use (Morgan 1981). Methamphetamine use, especially among those defined as addicted (which remains a contested concept), has become associated with designations such as psychosis, poisoning, physical deterioration (the media has made much of “the meth face”) and overall antisocial dispositions (Espelin and Done 1968; Albertson et al. 1999). In effect, methamphetamine use has created various markets that set the stage for a fictional representation such as Breaking Bad. One aspect of methamphetamine, however, that often gets overlooked or buried underneath the key foci of enforcement, market building, and impact on users, is the relationships established by methamphetamine cooks and by such cooks and distributors (see Eck and Gersh 2000). By looking at particular images of these relationships from the perspective of establishing dominance to engage in deviance, images of methamphetamine shift from a substance that generates cash and has specific effects on users, to a substance that becomes a focal point as particular relations, defined in terms of domination, become constructed.

The Methamphetamine World in Breaking Bad As noted, the premise of Breaking Bad has surface similarities to the role of a

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sympathetic innovator. From the viewers’ perspective, Walter White initially appears as a dedicated high school teacher and family man, professing the values and inherent relevance of chemistry. He and his wife Skyler share a mutual devotion to one another and to a son (Walter Jr.) who attends the high school and who has cerebral palsy, which does not interfere with the playful family life. Skyler is also pregnant with their second child (Holly) and at first glance, all seems in place domestically for the White family. Owing to Walter’s previous decisions, especially selling his interests in a technological business that bestowed Eliot and Gretchen with fame, fortune, and a relationship, Walter appears somewhat dissatisfied even amid a loving family and in conjunction with a job teaching a subject that he loves. Although Walter received credit as a contributor to Eliot’s Nobel Prize–winning research, he remains a virtually anonymous teacher. His students range from generally apathetic to disruptive. To make ends meet, he also works after school at a car wash. In one scene at this car wash, he experiences significant humiliation when two of disruptive students, a boyfriend and girlfriend, recognize him when cleaning the boyfriend’s hubcaps. The girlfriend records him on her smart phone, exclaiming that her friends have to see this act. Skyler, ever vigilant in regard to the family funds, also questions him about the smallest of items that show up on the credit card. In effect, while Walter appears to have settled into an American Dream–like world, viewers also sense that his life resembles a promise unkempt. When Walter notices the details of a methamphetamine bust at his surprise fiftieth birthday party thrown by Skyler at the White household, he shows a spark of intense interest. He asks his brotherin-law Hank, a DEA agent responsible for the televised drug bust (and one who is not shy about calling attention to his job and accomplishments) how much money methamphetamine labs generate. In this particular bust, Hank and his team confiscated $800,000. Hank suggests that

Walter “ride-along” with Hank and his partner Steve (“Gomie”) Gomez so that Walter can “watch us knock down a meth lab . . . get a little excitement in your life.” Walter’s general malaise turns into a catastrophic nightmare after collapsing at the car wash. At the hospital, he learns that he has inoperable lung cancer that has reached Stage Four. He later learns that his insurance benefits at the school will cover only a small portion of the cost of treatment (chemotherapy). Walter initially keeps news of his cancer a secret, but asks Hank if he can ride along during the next drug bust. Hank agrees and Walter observes Hank’s team in action. During the bust, he also observes the main target, one known as “Cap’n Cook,” escaping. The cook, Jesse Pinkman, and Walter exchange eye contact. Both register a shock of recognition as Jesse indicates nonverbally to Walter to keep quiet. Walter watches as Pinkman drives off in a car with the license plate, “THE CAPN.” He does not share what he saw with Hank or Gomez. Later that night, Walter pays Pinkman a visit. Viewers discover that Pinkman and Walter have a history as Pinkman took, and failed, Walter’s chemistry class while in high school. Viewers also see a different Walter, at least superficially, judging by his comportment. As he confronts a less-than-friendly Pinkman in Pinkman’s driveway, Walter gives the impression of self-assuredness, taking a hard-edged and decidedly no-nonsense approach. He also proposes a business partnership by saying, “You know the business and I know the chemistry.” Jesse, who realizes that his money and partner are gone, suspends his initial disbelief to agree on a partnership with Walter. Both agree that cooking in an RV, in the desert, would make for the best option. The following day, Walter withdraws the last of his money, gives what he has to Jesse, and tells Jesse to buy an RV. Viewers then see Jesse and Walter parking the RV and setting up the makeshift methamphetamine laboratory in the desert. From this point on, Jesse and Walter form a partnership that mirrors the resulting

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chaotic excursions into the local and global methamphetamine worlds. The excursions involve several deaths, transform Walter and Jesse into murderers, and link the two to an international cartel that eventually usurps Walter’s identity as a kingpin, allies itself with a white supremacist methamphetamine ring, and enslaves Jesse (as a cook who can re-create Walter’s famous blue brand). Walter’s redemption, in part, occurs as he sacrifices his life to take down specific members of the cartel and all affiliated with the supremacist ring so that Jesse can escape. The narrative structure and attendant descriptive storyline situate the viewers in a position to suspend their own disbelief regarding the improbability of a chemistry teacher becoming a methamphetamine cook-for-profit and to suspend ordinary judgment regarding such decision making. Walter’s first impression (from viewers’ perceptions) as a humble man trying to live an ordinary life, remains strong throughout the series, even when Walter uses the brutal methods of his antagonists. The narrative also plays with the theme of transformation, which, as Walter tells his uninterested class, is the defining theme of chemistry in general. The transformation Walter speaks of in class becomes generalized outside of the classroom as Walter himself changes from his subservient demeanor associated with subordination to a much more assured and competent professional capable of doing quite a bit of damage.

Walter White and the Art of Subversion Every substance becomes encoded symbolically with particular attributes that transform the drug from an inanimate thing to an active agent. The transformation works in pejorative and celebratory ways, depending on the aims of critics or advocates. Wellknown examples of pejorative characterizations include Harry Anslinger’s famous war against marijuana (as an “assassin of youth”),

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Captain Hobson’s campaign in the 1920s against heroin as a filthy vampire-like predator, and an anti-LSD campaign, directed at Timothy Leary in particular and a counterculture in general, which made this drug appear as an alien invader from a hostile galaxy. On the flipside, advocates such as advertisers for particular drugs defined as legal have made cigarettes sublime, alcohol refreshing, and pharmacological medicine miraculous. Whether establishing a hypercritical or celebrative position, the first step appears to involve a mythological frame in which a drug, which literally does nothing in and of itself, takes on the mystique of a blessing or curse, depending on established perspectives. Walter’s creation of blue crystal represents a different image of the drug as it becomes embedded in a particular man’s calling and more than an object of legal or illegal designation. Viewers’ introduction to Walter’s methamphetamine reveals, in part, the methodology of production, evoking a profound work ethic as well as a product. Viewers see Walter’s meticulous approach early on as Jesse (who, at first comes off as the comedic goldbrick but later, develops the ethic and expertise of Walt) spins in a stool. Walt prepares the substance with systematic rigor, using precisely measured ingredients and appropriate technological artifacts, such as burners, glasslike containers, and rubber plugs that stop overflow. When finished, the once detached Jesse looks at the platter of methamphetamine, tinted with a shade of blue, with the sort of awe and inspiration that Goffman (1959) associated with mystification. Walter has not only cooked a sufficient amount of the product, he has made a heretofore unmatched substance of wonder. Jesse partakes as if he takes part in a secular communion. Walter separates production and consumption in ways that the others in the show (aside from Gus Fring, who becomes Walter’s massive distributor) do not. Walter’s separation from production and consumption departs from the more common practice of prosumption (see Ritzer 2015)

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that make up routine practices in methamphetamine worlds (Weisheit and White 2009; Brownstein, Mulcahy, and Huessey 2014). Specifically, Walter never samples the methamphetamine, viewing it more as an extension of his dominant self in the industry than a vigorous product associated with a “high.” This particular image of methamphetamine, as indicating Walter’s dominant identity as Heisenberg, becomes revealed gradually as the first season develops. Walter does indicate that although he considers his brand of methamphetamine special, it also represents a generic substance that requires complex relations of distribution. Such a relationship requires an intense commitment to dominate. Indeed, Walter’s growing sense of domination pervades the first season. When his former friend Elliot and lover Gretchen offer to pay for Walter’s medical bills, he turns them down defiantly, much to their surprise. Later, in the final season, he blackmails both of them (by making it look as if he has hired assassins to perform their jobs if Elliot and Gretchen do not comply with his demands) in order to insure that the money he has (several million) be deposited in a trust fund for his children. Early on, just after Walter gets involved in the business, he has transformed into a dominant lover (surprising Skyler, who at first, welcomes “the new Walter” in the bedroom) and avenger (in one scene, he overpowers a large bully who had taunted Walter Jr. and dares this bully to try and take him on). Perhaps the most dramatic representation of Walter’s transformation occurs in the penultimate episode of season one. By this time, the effects of Walter’s cancer have become noticeable. Walter and Jesse, in need of a new distributor (after having killed their primary distributor) decide that a man named Tuco, a “bad-ass” in a Mexico border town, will fit the bill nicely. Jesse visits Tuco’s office, accompanied by his friend Skinny Pete, who is now one of Walter’s and Jesse’s street sellers. Skinny Pete has a history (however cursory) with Tuco and goes along to vouch for Jesse. Tuco, presenting himself as an unpre-

dictably violent and savvy businessman simultaneously, beats Jesse ferociously after Jesse does not agree to Tuco’s unilateral terms (he will distribute but will not provide cash up front). Skinny Pete calls an anxious Walter from an Albuquerque hospital in which Jesse, severely incapacitated, occupies a bed at the ICU. When Walter sees Jesse, he calmly asks Skinny Pete to “tell me everything you know about Tuco.” When Walter returns home, he decides to go “full gangsta’” by shaving off his remaining hair, donning a black and woolen pork pie hat, and wearing a black jacket. Skyler looks shocked when she first sees Walter, but Walter Jr., much amused, confirms that Walter is indeed “bad-ass!” He then pays Tuco a visit, carrying a pound of his blue crystal and announcing himself, for the first time, as Heisenberg. At first, Tuco seems amused by Walter/ Heisenberg and demands to know Heisenberg’s intentions. Walter/Heisenberg states calmly states that he wants $50,000. To this, Tuco exclaims, “Fifty G? How do you figure that?” Walter answers, “Thirty-five for the pound of meth you stole and fifteen for my partner’s pain and suffering.” Tuco then exaggerates his menacing capacity to give impressions by putting out his cigarette on his tongue, standing up, taking off his jacket so as to appear ready for a brawl, and taunting Walter/Heisenberg. “Let me get this straight,” he begins. “I steal your dope; I beat the piss out of your mule boy; and then you walk in here and you bring me more meth? Boy that’s a brilliant plan, isn’t it?” Unfazed and resolute, Walter states, “You got one part of that wrong.” He then reaches for a small glass container in the bag of blue methamphetamine on Tuco’s desk, shows Tuco the container, and hurls it against the wall. After throwing the vial, a huge explosion results, knocking out the wall, incapacitating Tuco and his gang, and filling the room with smoke. Getting up from the floor, Tuco asks Walter had in the container, Walter states, “Fulminated mercury; a little tweak of chemistry.” Tuco, now shaken and still somewhat disoriented, goes to his safe and puts $50,000

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in the bag viewers had seen Walter carrying back to his car after the explosion. Without hesitating and with his voice rising in anger, Walter, who is holding another container of fulminated mercury as if wielding a gun, exclaims, “Money up front!” Tuco dutifully puts in several more thousand dollars in the bag to pay for his preorder. The scene shifts as Walter/Heisenberg walks back to the car. Once in the car, Walter/Heisenberg is visibly and audibly thrilled, letting out a screaming roar, indicating a profound climax.

Methamphetamine and Themes of Domination I have indicated moments in specific scenes in which Walter assumes a position of domination. Continuing on with such descriptions, I will describe, more systematically, how Walter’s acts, in conjunction with others, apply to domination in specific reference to methamphetamine. Importantly, methamphetamine becomes symbolized as more than an object involved in financial and profitable transactions. Specifically, Walter’s assumption of domination coincides with his involvement in methamphetamine production and distribution, especially as he presents himself in the guise of Heisenberg. The specific symbolization of methamphetamine, as Walter/Heisenberg cooked it, represents liberation from Walter’s past but a perilous chain that anchors Walter/Heisenberg to a doomed future, Viewers’ first impressions of Walter hardly equate the man with domination. Indeed, even when seeing Walter conducting class and assuming the bureaucratically defined position of superordinate classroom teacher, Walter does not appear to show any type of command in relation to his classroom. Students drift off, disrupt the lecture, and generally, seem unimpressed with the topic that defines Walter in profound ways. Even though Walter assumes a superordinate position (literally, as the lecturer and symbolically via identification), he gives off the impression as one who defers to class-

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room behavior, especially in regard to the ones who disrupt the class (Goffman 1959). Walter also occupies a distinct subordinate position at the car wash, his second place of employment. The owner of the car wash shows little regard for Walter’s own time, assuming that Walter will immediately validate his request to double as cashier and car washer. Furthermore, once again, Walter’s subordination in the classroom becomes bolstered when the two student disruptors see him washing the car they drove to the car wash. His symbolic subordination, seen in his relation with his brother-in-law Hank at Walter’s own birthday party, continues, as Hank proceeds to grab the attention at Walter’s expense. In many ways, literally and figuratively, Walter confronts the obdurate world of domination as a subordinate. Regarding first impressions, one could argue within reason that Walter views methamphetamine, in general, and cooking it specifically, as a way to earn necessary money to pay bills and improve his status in an upper-middle-class community. Walter becomes fascinated with the combinatorial images of methamphetamine and rolls of cash; Walter seems to view the money accrued by cooking methamphetamine as a means to the end of independence, especially from Elliot and Gretchen who offer to pay Walter’s medical bills; Walter no longer has to worry about small amounts of money unaccounted for on his credit card bill. However, money gradually becomes secondary to Walter’s reason for being in the methamphetamine world. His product becomes a going concern nationally (in the guise of Gus Fring, a successful businessman who uses his restaurant business as an infrastructure for national distribution of product) and internationally (in the form of Lydia Rodarte Quayle, head of logistics at a transnational industry who supplied methylamine – a complex ingredient – to Gus Fring). Viewers see Walter assume a more dominant posture whenever his links to methamphetamine become apparent, such as his assured posture when reacquainting

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with Jesse and directing the temporal sequences of their upcoming partnership. Walter deflects all of Jesse’s sarcastic, sometimes hostile, and seemingly assertive reluctance to participate in Walter’s plan artfully. Walter’s distinct interactional clarity, analogous to the purity of his product, puts him in a one-up position in relation to Jesse. The money, evenly split, becomes secondary to Walter’s scheme. As he spells out the division of labor to Jesse, Walter also establishes the symbolic high ground. Their partnership will always be defined by Walter’s broader vision. Athens’s first criteria of domination, which involves recognition of skills and expertise that make one claiming a superordinate status seemingly free from expendability, serves as an iterative chain throughout the five seasons. Walter’s skills as the cook of the blue crystal put Jesse in his subordinate place almost immediately. Beyond this, Walter also manages to impress Gus Fring. Fring becomes Walter’s mass distributor after Tuco’s death and viewers get to know him as a very powerful man who often, with teeth clenched, must give in to Walter’s demands and spare his life on occasions (Fring would just as soon kill someone as shake that person’s hand) knowing that no one can match Walter’s skill. Even when Fring brings in a chemist named Dale, who admires Walter with a great deal of passion, Fring knows that he cannot simply replace Walter with Dale until Dale learns the intricacies of Walter’s methodology. This necessary hesitation on Fring’s part gives Walter enough time to plot Dale’s death, carried out by Jesse in the nick of time, right before Fring’s first in command, Mike Ehrmantraut, can get rid of Walter. With Dale gone, Fring must again allow Walter to define the terms of their partnership more so than any other person with whom Fring does business. The extent of Walter’s expertise is often left to the imagination of viewers. For instance, the precise ways in which massive cooking of methamphetamine become represented visually, through depictions of sophisticated technological appliances and

machinery, but are alluded to in very general ways. Viewers learn that making the key ingredients of methamphetamine, ephedrine or pseudo-ephedrine, involve methylamine, which serves various plot developments and the basis for the introduction of even more nefarious characters such as Lydia Rodarte Quayle. However, viewers do not see, systematically, what Walter sees as the blue crystal develops. This disconnect, however, contributes to both Walter’s mystique as the genius without peer and the mystique of methamphetamine itself, as a drug that requires a complex understanding of science and an appreciation of the art of cooking. One of the plot developments associated with methylamine reveals Walter’s explicit rationale for maintaining his Heisenberg persona and remaining in an increasingly dangerous and alienating enterprise. Faced with an opportunity to sell their entire bulk of methylamine (acquired through a complex act of thievery but at the expense of the life of a child), Jesse decides that the time has come to free himself from the torturous side of the business. Walter, however, refuses to sell his share, which derails the deal. The buyer will only purchase the entire quantity of methylamine, largely owing to the assurance that Walter will no longer cook a competitive product. Walter’s refusal befuddles Jesse and he pays a visit to Walter and begs him to sell. Jesse attempts to reason with Walter, reminding him that they have all the money they could ever need or want. Walther, though, maintains that the money remains secondary to his status as an “empire builder.” He shares with Jesse the story of selling his interests to Eliot and how such a sale haunted his soul. He vowed that he would never subordinate himself to any amount of money if such money would cost him the status of a master chemist. Athens’s second criterion of domination, involving a durable partnership based on superordinate and subordinate statuses serves as a consistent thread that defines Walter’s and Jesse’s relationship. It also defines every relationship Walter had prior

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to the pilot episode (e.g., with Skyler, who becomes Walters partner-in-crime by helping him lauder the money) and constructs after the pilot episode (with various distributors who become victims of Walter’s ongoing transformation from meek teacher to the menacing Heisenberg). One by one Walter kills the distributors, including Gus Fring and eventually his most formidable foes, the white supremacists. The partnerships formed by Walter, then, while always based on a negotiated order involving intricate cooperation (see Strauss 1978), also occur against the looming specter of death. The death occurs literally or figuratively, as all of Walter’s primary bonds deteriorate. Specifically, Walter and Skyler’s relationship death serves as one of the more dramatic developments. The weight of living outside of the law and the complications associated with amassing an illegal and “impure” fortune, prove too much for Walter and Skyler as a married couple. The deterioration of the Walter’s and Skyler’s relationship, however, does not totally destroy their commitment to mutual secrecy. Skyler does remain loyal to Walter as a partner-in-crime and does not betray their secrets. However, just as Jesse could not understand Walter’s reluctance to sell his share of methylamine to be free from the business, Skyler cannot comprehend Walter’s seeming indifference to the cash accrued. After she acquires the car wash and rents a storage facility to hide the cash, Skyler becomes overwhelmed with stacks that she cannot launder or even count with any sense of accuracy. Skyler eventually takes Walter to the storage facility to show him the staggering stacks of money. “How much more do you want? How much more do you need?” she asks. Walter cannot answer but he seems unconcerned with the virtual impossibility of laundering so much cash. Athens’s third and fourth criteria of domination become evident in Breaking Bad in the course of depicting how superordinate and subordinate roles become activated through the dynamics of a relationship. In the course of such activation, the interac-

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tors become objects to themselves as participants in creating, however fleeting, a social transaction involving domination. The complexity of these criteria especially apply to the relationship between Hank and Walter, which begins with Hank, the boisterous DEA agent, assuming a superordinate position in regard to the humble Walter. However, this arrangement reverses as Walter becomes more emboldened as Heisenberg and Hank becomes terrified by what his seemingly innocuous and egg-headed brother-in-law can accomplish as Heisenberg. When Hank finally discovers, to his terror, that Walter is Heisenberg, he realizes his conundrum, pointed out by Walter, that every bit of evidence he has accumulated could make him appear complicit with Walter’s involvement. Hank sees himself as subordinate to Walter after having enjoyed, based on all appearances, a seemingly oneup status with regard to Walter. The complexity of superordinate and subordinate positions and the necessity of reflection, or of seeing one’s self as occupying one or the other positions, becomes noticeable dramatically after Hank finally puts pieces of evidence together. In a chilling confrontation in Hank’s garage, after Walter makes it known to Hank that he knows about Hank attaching a GPS tracker to Walter’s car (signifying that Walter is Hank’s chief suspect), Hank physically assaults Walter after staring daggers at him (Walter says to Hank, before being punched, “I got to say, I don’t like the way you’re looking at me now”). After punching Walter, Hank indignantly goes through a litany of events that Walter created, putting Hank in serious jeopardy. Hank tells Walter, “I don’t know who you are anymore!” However, even though this scene shows Hank as the more physically dominant, Walter reveals his domination with the last words, “If you don’t know who I am, then maybe your best course is to tread lightly.” Upon saying this warning and promise, Hank’s face turns from righteous anger to fear and doubt. The symbolic transformation within superordinate-subordinate relations indicates

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a significant alteration in the meaning of domination as it applies to particular actors. Walter’s transformation to Heisenberg the cook and empire builder coincides with other transformations that signify the high price one pays to dominate. In this depiction, methamphetamine becomes related to what Simmel (1950) defined as the poison pill of secrecy associated with his conception of secret societies. Methamphetamine in Breaking Bad begins as the substance of Walter’s secrecy and gradually, as Walter’s dominance becomes more significant and profound, becomes the spotlight on Walter’s character, perceived by almost all in the show as not only flawed, but lacking in any moral virtue. Walter will protect his secrecy at any cost. In one painful scene at the end of Season Two, for instance, Walter watches Jesse’s girlfriend, Jane Margolis, die from an overdose (of heroin). Jane had threatened to expose Walter and in so doing, became one who Walter did not seem necessary to save. Even Skyler, one of Walter’s ongoing defender’s, becomes disgusted with Walter. At the end of the series, in the finale, when she and Walter come face-to-face for the last time, she appears more than weary of Walter. She can hardly bear to remain copresent with him. The rise of Walter in the methamphetamine world and his ascension to a position of domination compensates for a decision to sell his interests in a chemical company and subordinate his status as a master chemist by becoming the most infamous cook in local and global methamphetamine scenes. Walter, as Heisenberg, dominates the industry through his skills, through his manipulation of partnerships, through turning the tables, as it were, on those who had dominated him, and through the persona itself, that provided Walter with a new vocabulary to define his existence and his core being – one who will not make decisions based on money alone. In the process, however, everything gained in terms of domination becomes costly in terms of sentimental attachment. As Walter becomes the most notorious methamphetamine cook in the legal radar, his relationships, his fam-

ily, his attendant home, and his friendship with Jesse deteriorate. Sensing that he has built his own prison based on his determination to succeed as a chemist, Walter can only envision one way out – death. But his death salvages his association with Jesse, leaves a monetary legacy for his children, and even garners a respectful, although nonverbal, show of respect from Skyler. During their last encounter, Skyler begins to admonish Walt for claiming that he got involved in the methamphetamine world for the sake of his family. Walter interrupts her by saying, “I did it for me. I liked it. I was good at it . . . I was . . . really . . . I was alive.” Walter’s moment of honesty with Skyler serves as a gentle good-bye, represented by Skyler allowing Walter to have one last look at their baby girl, Holly. As Skyler looks on, sympathetically, her look of disgust and anger seemingly in the distal past, Walter strokes Holly’s hair gently, his sense of domination also distant, even forgotten. Soon, Walter will have avenged several wrongs with one final nod to his capacity to create wonder. He has rigged up the trunk of his car with an oscillating machine gun that will stream bullets into a compound, killing the very stereotypical white supremacists that had killed Hank and Gomez, made Jesse a slave (as he cooks the way Walter taught him), and taken over Walter’s empire. In this last achievement, which causes Walter to die of a bullet from the machine gun as he protects Jesse, Walter has defined his end on his terms. No longer dominant, but no longer enslaved, he dies with a smile on his face. In some key ways, Walter as deviant innovator shares the same fate as other celebrated innovators in film, experiencing the isolation associated with a social death and the end of his literal life as well. As with other cinematic innovators, Walter also resembles a mythological hero who, while fatally flawed, manages to triumph over others who seem to exhibit even more odious characteristics than this flawed hero. Tragically, again as seen with other antiheroic innovators, Walter begins to assume the deeper flaws of those he has

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vanquished. The saving grace for Walter, however, emerges as he defeats what is perhaps an all too convenient evil group (white supremacists). Walter can find redemption as he avenges Hank’s death and frees Jesse from his bondage while he sacrifices his life and kills off the “super-antagonists.” Whether or not this inclusion of a final, dastardly group represents a facile fictional devise, Walter’s evolution as he destroys one antagonist representing a bigger threat than a previous antagonist mirrors the evolution of the methamphetamine portrayed in the show. What begins as the product of uneducated street cookers who make a brand short on purity becomes blue crystal that in turn, becomes the product associated with the breakdown of a micro social system, or Walter’s particular web of association. Its final imagery, the product affiliated with Jesse’s bondage, introduces the slave imagery alluded to earlier. While no leading or significant character in this show becomes enslaved by methamphetamine through ingestion, all of the leading characters, in some way, become enslaved and or destroyed by its growing popularity and aesthetic purity. The central theme of domination as employed by radical interactionists in regard to deviance can go beyond the methamphetamine trade. Methamphetamine, as an object of value, compares with other social objectives that represent opportunities to dominate. Achieving domination through knowledge monopolization (Innis 1951) and becoming known as deviant through such an achievement defines, in part, the statuses of alleged enemies of the state such as Julian Assange and Edward Snowden. Information, in the world of global politics and economics, becomes a complex “drug” that requires systematic expertise and precise understanding, not unlike what made Walter such an impresario. In the world of sports, players such as Juan Canseco, Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens, while not officially deviant, remain seen as having deviated from “the purity” of the game through suspected steroid use. However, baseball fans recognize that while playing, they

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achieved dominant statuses at their respective positions. Even political candidates, at least as represented most provocatively via television, often become defined by the character contests (Luckenbill 1977; Athens 2005b) associated with violent crimes. While not deviant in any conventional sense of the term, a successful politician’s presence as one who dominates (a debate, an interview, a crowd) in a noticeable different way from others becomes one of the key sources of his/her popularity. Whether discussing deviant worlds represented by the methamphetamine market as portrayed in Breaking Bad or grayer areas (in regard to deviance) represented by information technology, athleticism, and political discourse, symbolic interactionists view objects as having meaning in human responsiveness to such objects (Mead 1934; Blumer 1969). From a radical interactionist perspective, creating deviant worlds or creating selves that either deviate or stand out as noticeably different involves not only the creation of sustainable meaning, but also the intention to dominate a particular circumstance or a sequence of circumstances. In Breaking Bad methamphetamine represents a particular problematic object that Walter, as one who cooks the best product, defines in regard to his conception of himself as one who can finally take advantage of opportunities and avoid the self-subordination that has plagued his life. Seduced by a definition via his persona of Heisenberg, Walter becomes doomed but also becomes the person who up until his involvement in deviant worlds, he has suppressed for too long, at least from his perspective.

Glossary Blue crystal methamphetamine A particular image of methamphetamine that represents purity associated with a strong work ethic. Domination The central concept in radical symbolic interaction characterizing relationships defined by mutual recognition of superior/subservient positions.

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Radical symbolic interaction A branch of symbolic interaction that combines an emphasis on sociality and self-creation with superordinate-subordinate relationships. Representations of methamphetamine A metaphorical and symbolic depiction of the substance in question rather than the inherent chemical meaning and its impact on users. Sympathetic innovators but whose point of view is readily accessible to audiences innovators Antiheroic characters in cinema and TV who resemble deviant.

References Albertson, T. E., R. W. Derlet, and B. E. Van Hoozen. 1999. Methamphetamine and the expanding complications of amphetamines. Western Journal of Medicine 170:214–19. Anglin, M. D., C. Burke, B. Perrochet, E. Stamper, and D. Dawud-Noursi. 2000. History of the methamphetamine problem. Journal of Psychoactive Drugs 32:134–41. Athens, L. 1994. The self as soliloquy. The Sociological Quarterly 35:521–32. 2002. Domination: The blind spot in Mead’s analysis of the social act. Journal of Classical Sociology 2:25–42. 2005a. Mead’s lost conception of society. Symbolic Interaction 28:305–25. 2005b. Character contests and violent criminal activity: A critique. The Sociological Quarterly 26:419–31. 2007. Radical interactionism: Going beyond Mead. Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior 37:139–65. 2009. The roots of radical interactionism. Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior 39:387– 414. 2010. Human subordination from a radical interactionist perspective. Journal for The Theory of Social Behavior 40:339–68. 2013. Mead’s conception of the social act: A radical interactionist’s critique. Studies in Symbolic Interaction 41:25–51. Becker, H. 1963. The Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance. New York: Free Press. Blumer, H. 1969. Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Brownstein, H. H., T. Mulcahy, and J. Huessy. 2014. The Methamphetamine industry in America: Transnational Cartels and local Entrepreneurs. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Caulkins, J. P., and P. Reuter. 1997. Setting goals for drug policy: Harm reduction or use reduction? Addiction 92:1143–50. 2010. How drug enforcement affects drug prices. Crime and Justice 39:213–71. Cook, G. 2011. Revisiting the Mead-Blumer controversy. Studies in Symbolic Interaction 36:16–38. Desroches, F. 2007. Research on upper level drug trafficking: A review. Journal of Drug Issues 37:827–44. Dewey, J. (1922) 1957. Human Nature and Conduct: An Introduction to Social Psychology. New York: Modern Library. Douglas, M. (1966) 2003. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. New York: Routledge. (1968) 2002. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. New York: Routledge Classics. Eck, J. E., and J. S. Gersh. 2000. Drug trafficking as a cottage industry. Crime Prevention Studies 11:241–71. Espelin, D. E., and A. K. Done. 1968. Amphetamine poisoning: Effectiveness of chlorpromazine. New England Journal of Medicine 278:1361–65. Foote, N. 1951. Identification as the basis for a theory of motivation. American Sociological Review 16:14–21. Friedrichs, D. 2010. Trusted Criminals: White Collar Crime in Contemporary Society. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. Frontline. 2006. The meth epidemic. February 14. Glaser, B., and A. Strauss. 1964. Awareness contexts and social interaction. American Sociological Review 29:669–79. Goffman, E. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. 1963. Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. Englewood Cliffs, NY: Prentice Hall. 1983. The interaction order. American Sociological Review 48:1–17. Gougherty, M., and T. Hallett. 2013. Revisiting learning to labor: Interaction, domination, resistance, and the grind. Studies in Symbolic Interaction 41:123–60.

radical interactionism and the symbolism of methamphetamine Gray, M. 1998. Drug Crazy: How We Got Into This Mess and How We Can Get Out. New York: Random House. Grinspoon, L., and P. Hedblom. 1975. The Speed Culture: Amphetamine Use and Abuse in America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gross, E., and G. Stone. 1964. Embarrassment and the analysis of role requirements. American Journal of Sociology 70:1–15. Inciardi, J. 2008. The War on Drugs IV: The Continuing Saga of the Mysteries and Miseries of Intoxication, Addiction, Crime, and Public Policy. Boston, MA: Pearson. Innis, H. A. 1951. The Bias of Communication. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Jackson, C. O. 1975. The amphetamine democracy: Medicinal abuse in the popular culture. The South Atlantic Quarterly 74:308–23. Jenkins, P. 1994. The “Ice Age”: The Social Construction of a Drug Panic. Justice Quarterly 11:7–31. Katovich, M. A., and C. J. Couch. 1992. The nature of social pasts and their use as foundations for situated action. Symbolic Interaction 15:25–47. Katovich, M. A., and W. A. Reese. 1993. Postmodern thought in symbolic interactionism: Reconstructing social inquiry in light of latemodern concerns. The Sociological Quarterly 34:391–411. Katz, J. 1998. Seductions of Crime: Moral and Sensual Attractions of Doing Evil. New York: Basic Books. Kramer, J. C. 1969. Introduction to amphetamine abuse. Journal of Psychedelic Drugs 2:1–16. Luckenbill, D. 1977. Criminal homicide as a situated transaction. Social Problems 25:176– 86. Mead, G. H. 1932. The Philosophy of the Present. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1934. Mind, Self, and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Merton, R. 1938. Social structure and anomie. American Sociological Review 3:672–82. 1968. Social Theory and Social Structure. New York: Free Press. Miller, D. E., R. Hintz, and C. J. Couch. 1975. The elements and structure of openings. The Sociological Quarterly 16:479–99. Milligan, M. J. 1998. Interactional past and potential: The social construction of place attachment. Symbolic Interaction 21:1–33.

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Morgan, J. P. 1981. Amphetamine. In Substance Abuse: Clinical Problems and Perspectives, edited by J. H. Lowinson and P. Ruiz, 167– 84. Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins Press. Musolf, G. R. 2013. Domination and resistance: The political theory of John Dewey. Studies in Symbolic Interaction 41:83–121. Park, R. 1950. Race and Culture: Essays in the Sociology of Contemporary Man. New York: Free Press. Picart, C. J. S. 2013. Reflections on power and intersectionality. Studies in Symbolic Interaction 41:191–214. Plummer, K. 2003. Queers, bodies and postmodern sexualities: A note on revisiting the “sexual” in symbolic interactionism. Qualitative Sociology 26:515–30. Puddephatt, A. J. 2011. Language and mind in the thought of G.H. Mead: Challenges from Chomsky’s linguistics. Studies in Symbolic Interaction 36:75–106. 2013. Toward a radical interaction account of science. Studies in Symbolic Interaction 41:53– 82. Reding, N. 2009. Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town. New York: Bloomsbury. Ritzer, G. 2015. Prosumer capitalism. The Sociological Quarterly 56:413–45. Schutz, A., and T. Luckmann. 1973. The Structures of the Life World. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Scott, M. B., and S. M. Lyman. 1968. Accounts. American Sociological Review 33:46–62. Simmel, G. 1950. The Sociology of Georg Simmel. Edited by Donald Levine. New York: Free Press. 1971. On Individuality and Social Forms. Edited by Donald Levine. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Smith, R. C. 1969. The world of the HaightAshbury speed freak. Journal of Psychedelic Drugs 2:172–88. Stone, G. 1962. Appearance and the self. In Human Behavior and Social Processes, edited by A. Rose, 86–118. Boston: HoughtonMifflin. Strauss, A. 1978. Negotiations: Varieties, Contexts, Processes, and Social Order. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Szasz, T. 1974. Ceremonial Chemistry: The Ritual Persecution of Drugs, Addicts, and Pushers. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press.

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1992. Our Right to Drugs: The Case for a Free Market. Syracuse, NY: University of Syracuse Press. Tanne, J. H. 2006. Methamphetamine epidemic hits middle America. British Medical Journal 28:982. Thompson, H. 1966. Hell’s Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga. New York: Ballantine. Wald, J. 2001. Narcocorrido: A Journey into the Worlds of Guns, Drugs, and Guerrillas. New York: Harper.

Weber, M. 1947. The Theory of Social and Economic Organization. New York: Free Press. Weisheit, R., and W. L. White. 2009. Methamphetamine: Its History, Pharmacology, and Treatment. Center City, MN: Hazelden Press. Wiley, N. 2003. Emotion and film theory. Studies in Symbolic Interaction 26:169–87. 2011. The Chicago School: A political interpretation. Studies in Symbolic Interaction 36:39– 44.

CHAPTER 16

Social Constructionism Peter R. Ibarra and Michael Adorjan

Abstract This overview of social constructionism begins with a consideration of the influential work of Malcolm Spector and John I. Kitsuse, whose book Constructing Social Problems inspired a wide variety of studies addressing how social problems are “constructed.” Ensuing epistemological and methodological controversies are discussed, and three key scholarly works are reviewed for the insights they offer into exemplary analytic practice in a constructionist vein. The exemplars pivot around the notion that “understanding understandings” is essential to executing constructionist analysis and does not entail subscribing to reified conceptions of objective conditions. The chapter concludes by discussing three promising directions for extending the constructionist purview, namely, through the study of (1) cyberspace (including social media) as an emerging but essential venue for the construction of social problems; (2) claimsmaking in national contexts beyond the Anglo Global North, especially in countries that challenge the liberal democratic assumptions upon which constructionist scholarship usually rests; and (3) a broadened, more quotidian conception of the social spaces and forms through which social problems–related expression is advanced.

Introduction Dissatisfied with extant approaches to the study of social problems, and taking heed of the course encountered by the sociology of deviance during the preceding decade, John Kitsuse and Malcolm Spector in the mid1970s developed a distinctively sociological formulation of social problems, one that

made social interaction and the definitional processes attendant therein the focal point of analysis, referred to as “claimsmaking.” A series of articles, published over a threeyear period in the journal Social Problems, became the basis for Constructing Social Problems (CSP) (1977), whose provocative first sentence announced, “there is not and never has been a sociology of social

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problems” (Spector and Kitsuse 1977, 1). Sociologists, they argued, had failed to fully develop a specifically sociological conceptualization of social problems. CSP was written in response to a social problems “literature” that was largely defined by ad hoc groupings of what textbook authors regarded as society’s most pressing ills, often framed theoretically through a normative (Wilson 1970) (e.g., structural-functional) lens (e.g., Merton and Nisbet 1971). CSP proposed a distinctively sociological framework dedicated not to the characterization, etiology, and impact of objective social conditions, but rather the investigation of how conditions are socially constructed as social problems. Spector and Kitsuse did not argue that social problems are “just” or “mere” social constructions, nor imply that people do not experience social problems and their effects, including forms of harm. They simply sought to develop a perspective whose gaze is set upon questions distinct from those encouraged by approaches that rest on objectivist assumptions, taking the content and forms of definitional processes as the analytic object. They identified the study of how social problems are formulated, as well as how those constructions are sustained and change over time (Spector and Kitsuse 1977, 76), as the thrust of their conception. The value of Spector and Kitsuse’s strategy, as well as its off-shoots, lies in illuminating the complex, sometimes ambiguous and often unpredictable permutations taken by claimsmaking about social problems. The present chapter proceeds as follows: first, we elaborate on the objectivist, normative paradigm to which Spector and Kitsuse were responding, and delve into the early development of the social constructionist framework. The epistemological debates that ensued during the 1980s and 1990s are then characterized before we turn our attention to three exemplars of constructionist analysis. We conclude with a discussion of directions that promise to advance constructionist insights into social problems.

The Emergence of Social Constructionism as an Approach to the Study of Social Problems Kitsuse and Spector’s effort in CSP, influenced by Herbert Blumer’s (1971) notion of “social problems as collective behavior,” represents an extension of Kitsuse’s careerlong emphasis on the sociological analysis of social control. He rose to prominence in the 1960s as a member of a group of scholars involved in the development of what came to be known as “labeling theory,” a perspective in the sociology of deviance (e.g., Lemert 1951; Becker 1963; Goffman 1961; see Ibarra 2008). The writings of these sociologists emphasized the ways in which social control constitutes (and reifies) deviance, rather than vice versa (Holstein 2009, 58). Kitsuse’s vision was “stridently agnostic – analytically indifferent – to the notion of ‘real deviance’” (57), holding that “societal reaction to deviance” could be studied strictly from the perspective of the reactant. As early as 1962, for instance, he articulated the goal of “shift[ing] the focus of theory and research from the forms of deviant behavior to the processes by which persons come to be defined as deviant by others” (57). In this early work Kitsuse employed “careful talk” about “putative” and “alleged” conditions (Rains 1975). Doing so refocused analysis away from the problem of accounting for “actual” deviance, and toward the process of understanding imputations of deviance and the logic of resulting organizational responses. Kitsuse did not argue that ‘real’ deviance did not exist; rather, he argued for an approach that was not contingent on assuming that deviance is objectively verifiable. From Kitsuse’s perspective, there was “no theoretical rationale” (Ibarra 2008, 358) for examining “actual deviance” inasmuch as societal reaction constitutes deviance. Societal reaction to deviance, rather than deviance itself, was the focal point of Kitsuse’s conception. Kitsuse’s stance was at odds with existing formulations of deviance, including those of his mentor, Edwin Lemert, and colleague, Howard S. Becker, whose statements subtly

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latched onto anchoring points of objectivity (Kitsuse and Spector 1975). Lemert’s (1951) work, for instance, is an early and significant influence on the focus away from “actual” conditions (primary deviance, i.e., socially unmarked) toward societal reaction (secondary deviance, i.e., socially marked) (see Ibarra 2008, 358). Yet Lemert’s own term “putative condition,” applied to the examination of secondary deviance, is concerned with “that portion of the societal reaction which has no foundation in . . . objective behavior” (quoted in Rains 1975, 3; see also Holstein 2009, 56). Similarly, with respect to Becker’s work on labeling, including his influential statement that deviant behavior is wholly that which is “labeled as such,” Kitsuse problematized the categories of “secret” and “falsely accused” deviant, which retained assumptions about the objectivity of deviance (i.e., societal reaction ceased to matter in whether the analyst considered something to be constructed as deviant) (see Ibarra 2008, 360; see also Pollner 1978). Becker’s distinctions were not only theoretically and epistemologically problematic (i.e., contradicting his maxim that “deviance is not a quality that lies in behavior itself”; Becker 1963, 14), but placed the analyst in the position of positivist arbiter, equipped with “inside knowledge regarding the ontological status of the putative deviance,” a stance that conceded “the limits of constructionism itself” (Ibarra 2008, 362). Kitsuse’s theoretical goals were arguably less expansive when compared to Becker or Lemert. Drawing from symbolic interactionism as well as ethnomethodology, Kitsuse’s seemingly “modest” (Holstein 2009) mission was to hew as closely to the members’ perspective as possible (Gubrium and Holstein 2011; Pollner 1987). Appropriating a variant of “ethnomethodological indifference,” this perspective does not ignore social structure (including culture, class, and status) but places analytic attention on how members “themselves use such constructs in interpreting their lives and actions” (Gubrium and Holstein 2011, 94). Importantly, Kitsuse’s writings presume constructionists’ willingness to reflexively consider

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their role “in the very construction of those social problems under investigation” (Ibarra 2008, 363). Consequently, his social constructionism offered not a substantive theory of society but rather a set of methodological strategies to discern and comprehend definitional processes. In applying his analytic stance to the sociological examination of social problems, Kitsuse, alongside his collaborator Malcolm Spector, took issue with prevailing etiological approaches in the literature on social problems. They noted that such approaches were concerned with “identify(ing) conditions or behaviors that impede the fulfillment of society’s goals, that interfere with the smooth functioning of society, or that throw society into disequilibrium” (Spector and Kitsuse 1977, 23). In a decisive break from the normative paradigm, Spector and Kitsuse (1973, 145) argued that “in basing the study of social problems on the analysis of ‘objective conditions,’ . . . the sociology of social problems becomes merely the analysis of dysfunctions within the functionalist or social systems paradigm.” CSP took issue with Merton and Nisbet’s functionalist definition of social problems, which held that social problems could be identified where there prevailed “a substantial discrepancy between widely shared social standards and actual conditions of social life” (Merton and Nisbet 1971, 799, cited in Spector and Kitsuse 1977, 32). Spector and Kitsuse considered the “substantial discrepancy” criterion unworkable and rejected the notion that “assertions about widely shared social standards” could be “a fruitful way to build a sociology of social problems” (32). Moreover, they argued that the normative paradigm “reflected a common belief that social problems should be diagnosed by the sociologist as conditions that are destructive to society” (24). The role of the sociologist was thus to identify conditions that the public might recognize as social problems (“manifest”), but also those that went unrecognized as such (“latent”), as well as to reject the popular characterization of some conditions as social problems altogether (“spurious”) (36). Spector

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and Kitsuse demurred from assuming that the sociologist’s role entailed distinguishing between “actual” and “false” social problems, and instead treated the naming of conditions as social problems (or not) as an activity taken up by ordinary members of society (i.e., nonsociologists), viewing sociologists and other experts who would do likewise as participants in the constructive process requiring explication. The value-conflict approach, a theoretical orientation at variance with the normative framework advocated by Merton and Nisbet, emerged during the 1920s (Spector and Kitsuse 1977, 40) and made consideration of subjective aspects (“value judgments”) central to the study of social problems. Spector and Kitsuse (1973, 408) recognized the contributions of this approach, which they linked to symbolic interactionism. They cited Willard Waller, one of the formulators of the value-conflict school, as issuing a representative statement in arguing that “various attempts to treat social problems in a scientific manner have proved useless because they have dealt only with the objective side of social problems, and have failed to include the attitude which constituted those problems” (cited in Spector and Kitsuse 1977, 42). They also cited Fuller and Myers (cited in Spector and Kitsuse 1977, 42, emphasis added), who argued that conditions do not assume a prominent place in a social problem until a given people define them as hostile to their welfare . . . it is not enough that people are being or will be affected by objective conditions. Their behavior must indicate that they think the condition threatens cherished values.

While acknowledging that the valueconflict approach challenged objectivist theories of social problems, Spector and Kitsuse argued it did not go far enough. They noted that value-conflict theorists subtly re-introduced objectivist assumptions within their theoretical statements, and continued to be concerned with the root causes of social problems. Asserting

that “every social problem . . . consists of an objective condition and a subjective condition” whereby the former is a “verifiable situation” that can be assessed by a “trained [observer],” Fuller and Myers (cited in Spector and Kitsuse 1977, 44–45) advocated the study of “subjective” value judgments in addition to objective conditions. Value-conflict theorists thus became simultaneously concerned with “explaining the causes of the objective conditions and the process by which they become defined as social problems,” a fusion that unwittingly “deflects the originality and thrust of the value-conflict formulation” (Spector and Kitsuse 1973, 146). Spector and Kitsuse’s focus on the subjective processes by which behaviors and conditions come to be seen as problematic sidelined etiological explanations, considering them only insofar as they are invoked via “claimsmaking and responding” activities. Thus, the processes through which social problems are formulated, contested, accepted as “social facts” and institutionalized become the object of social constructionist analysis. Such constructive processes could be studied, they argued, by observing the “activities of individuals or groups making assertions of grievances and claims with respect to some putative conditions” (Spector and Kitsuse 1977, 75) as well as the responses that those claimsmaking activities generate (76). The study of claimsmaking entails documenting definitions, including the assumptions, categories, distinctions, interpretations, evaluations, and directives for action that are embedded within claims and counter-claims. Spector and Kitsuse’s use of “putative” announces that the theory remains agnostic as to whether such conditions and behavior exist. It restricts our interest and attention to how those involved in making such claims deploy these “grounds” in the arguments, claims, and activities that they pursue . . . The social reality that this approach addresses, then, is limited to these empirical matters and not what might “really exist” independent thereof and from an untheorized, somehow

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Archimedean (e.g., scientific, religious) certainty. (Schneider 2015, 139)

The constructionist conception ought to be distinguished from apparently similar theoretical frameworks, such as moral panic and moral regulation scholarship. (See Harris 2010 and Weinberg 2014 for comprehensive overviews of approaches taken by constructionist scholars.) Sociologists who document the rise and long-standing effects of moral panics share with each other an interpretive emphasis on demonization and correlate the social construction of threats with the interests and values of particular groups (Cohen 2002; Hunt 1999; Hier 2003). Moral panic scholars often discern disproportionate and unwarranted responses to social conditions by “moral entrepreneurs,” and their framing of guiding questions is instructive of how the analyst’s role is understood. Glassner (1999), for instance, in the subtitle of his book The Culture of Fear, promises to explain “why Americans are afraid of the wrong things” (emphasis added). So phrased, the analyst is behooved to address what people should be afraid of or explain whether fear is an appropriate response in the first place (Cohen 2002). Similar approaches have been taken by those drawing from other interpretive traditions in sociology (e.g., Altheide 2009). The goal of moral panic scholarship is laudable, of course, aiming ultimately to shape social policies so that they are not besmirched by the fear-laced emotions driving penal populism or other neoliberal responses to various public issues, such as youth crime (Hay 1995; Schissel 2006). Social constructionists, however, warn against the analyst’s “taking a side” on the issues being problematized. Gusfield (1984), for instance, suggests that constructionists should endeavor to remain “on the side[lines]” with respect to their inquiries into social problems. “Vulgar debunking” (see Best 1995) of some claims, effectively legitimating others, places the analyst in the tenuous position of being a participant in the very definitional activities that are the object of investigation (see also Ador-

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jan 2013). Consistent with phenomenological bracketing (Schutz 1967), the social constructionist analyst (as envisioned by Spector and Kitsuse) aims to be at the very least agnostic (Holstein 2009, 57) regarding “the ‘reality’ of the social condition(s) that may be seen by people to be the ‘basis’ of the claim/s” (Kitsuse 2001, xii), treating as a topic that which members construe as a resource (Kitsuse 2001, x) in order to make observable how objectconstituting formulations are rendered and received. The analyst thus defers to members’ “first-order constructs,” developing theoretical insights (i.e., “second-order constructs”) into the constructive process as a consequence (Ibarra and Kitsuse 1993). In this view, maintaining an agnostic attitude toward the objective status of the conditions at issue cultivates appreciation of how claimsmakers variously reify social problem categories.

Discord and Debate: Epistemology and Ontological Gerrymandering Remaining on the sidelines and keeping objective conditions out of the analysis has proven easier to espouse than successfully accomplish. Indeed, ensuing debates in the 1980s and 1990s converged around the possibility of the analyst’s remaining consistently constructionist, with discussion centering on how and whether constructionists should incorporate the objective conditions under dispute, with some even suggesting it was unavoidable. Despite Spector and Kitsuse’s call to move away from objectivist formulations of social problems, Woolgar and Pawluch (1985a) influentially observed that constructionists often continued to inadvertently and subtly introduce objectivist assumptions in their analyses. Specifically, Woolgar and Pawluch argued that in focusing attention on the shifting definitions advanced by claimsmakers, “object constancy” was typically assumed and sometimes even explicitly referenced, i.e., analysts noted that the social condition in question had remained

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unchanged – only the definitions had altered over time or by group: as if the definitions merely package or wrap around an underlying stable entity (Ibarra 2008, 365).1 Woolgar and Pawluch used the metaphor of “ontological gerrymandering” to characterize how constructionists render their accounts of social problems rhetorically effective. As Woolgar and Pawluch (1985a, 216) argue: By means of ontological gerrymandering, proponents of definitional explanations place a boundary between assumptions which are to be understood as problematic and those which are not. This “boundary work” creates and sustains the differential susceptibility of phenomena to ontological uncertainty. Some areas are portrayed as ripe for ontological doubt and others portrayed as (at least temporarily) immune to doubt.

Such analysis, they add, focuses on the definitional activities of claimsmakers, which require explication and interpretation, but this is accomplished by deflecting attention away from the constructive work that analysts themselves engage in (217). Social constructionist analyses may thus be characterized as selectively relative and insufficiently reflexive (Ibarra 2008, 365), for the tools of constructionist analysis are not considered contingent and in flux, unlike the definitions that participants advance via claimsmaking. Woolgar and Pawluch sparked heated debate that lasted until the early 1990s. Several different representative positions were taken. For Gusfield (1985) and Schneider (1985), the veracity of objective conditions is in fact irrelevant to understanding the claimsmaking involved (see also Woolgar and Pawluch 1985b, 160). If analysts are careful, from the position of Schneider (1985), they may avoid the problem of ontological gerrymandering. Pfohl (1985) linked debates over ontological gerrymandering with those in literary theory and post modernism, advocating a reflexive deconstructionism “more attuned to thorny epistemological problems” (229). Here too the constructionist scholar is tasked with remaining vigilant or “reflexive” toward the account

presented – one that is never inextricable from the positioned power/knowledge of its author (Foucault 1982; Miller 1993). In making a distinction between “strict” and “contextual constructionism,” Best (1989) apparently attempted to distinguish the conceptualization recommended by Kitsuse – which abstains from making assumptions about, or independently verifying, a condition’s “real” nature in carrying out the analysis – from that which clings to the idea of incorporating just such objective features into the analysis of constructive phenomena. Reinforcing Spector and Kitsuse’s agnosticism, Ibarra and Kitsuse (1993) suggested, in an effort commonly referenced as expressing a strict constructionist position, that the term “putative condition” be replaced by the term “condition category.” Ibarra and Kitsuse were attempting to address the object-constancy issue noted by Woolgar and Pawluch in suggesting use of the term, in that it might serve as a reminder to analysts that what was at issue, theoretically, was how social problems were conceptualized, talked about, and acted upon by members, rather than what social problems consisted of independently of such praxis.2 The recommendation reinforced the point that social problem categories are drawn from a society’s classification systems, and expressed through shared and learned forms of communication, i.e., language, or “members’ terms” (Emerson, Fretz, and Shaw 1995). Inasmuch as claimsmaking is a form of social interaction, attending to discursive shifts in “the social problems process” (Ibarra and Kitsuse 1993, 29–30) will direct researchers to investigable sites and topics (e.g., transformations in folk reasoning about etiology, nomenclature, inclusion and exclusion criteria, proposed remedies, best practices, measurement methods, etc., that are posited and employed by participants in relation to problem categories invoked over time and space). As Best understands it (Best 1993, 131), however, “strict constructionism places unreasonable constraints” on analysts because it precludes their ability to independently assess concerns espoused by

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contextual constructionism: the motives of claimants (“the whys” of social problem constructions) as well as the relative merits of various claimants’ arguments (e.g., logical consistency, quality of evidence cited in support of claims). In other words, the contextual constructionist3 is directed to adopt a “debunking” stance toward claimsmakers. Ibarra and Kitsuse’s position on these questions is that they can be addressed empirically: debunking is an often observable component of the social problems process, a turn that may be taken when claims and claimants are made sense of, motives questioned, and grievances and evidence sorted out by the members in some of the myriad circumstances where social problems–related talk and action happens. Investigators need not displace such processes by substituting members’ versions with their own debunking accounts, for the various ways in which members engage the process is central to the constructionist study of social problems. Holstein and Gubrium (2003) proffered not just another critique, but a conception of “context” emergent from ordinary members’ experiences of the world. They advocated a method of analytical bracketing where the analyst can fluidly switch between an examination of the “hows” and “whats” of claimsmaking activity: what they dub discursive practice and (drawing from Foucault) discourse-in-practice, respectively. Context is provided through the incorporation of resources and social accretions that condition members’ interpretations, while centering on members’ discursive practices identifies the processes through which meanings are produced in everyday life; the latter draws from ethnomethodological precepts. The analyst reflexively moves between these two analytic lenses, and the “hows” and “whats” are recognized as mutually and inextricably constituting each other. Holstein and Gubrium (2003) saw their formulation as standing “somewhere between, or apart from, the ‘strict’ and ‘contextual’ designations that have come to define the constructionist landscape” (194). Context is here

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conceived as a “reflexive interplay” (203) that situates analysis of social context as a discursive accomplishment by members themselves, proximate to experience and interpretive practice, consistent with Kitsuse’s original formulations highlighted above (cf. Bogard 2003).4

THREE EXEMPLARS Understanding Understandings Constructionist approaches to the study of social problems generally entail exploration of – at the “front end” – how the meanings of undesirable or objectionable conditions are built up through human praxis and – at the “back end” – the currency such symbolization acquires as it becomes institutionalized or otherwise enters into everyday usage. Scholarship that deftly investigates these phenomena abounds, and here we consider three exemplars, noting how each writer’s text realizes constructionist aims. Diverse foci (in terms of substantive topics and social problems processes) notwithstanding, each author is oriented toward “understanding understandings” while maintaining an agnostic stance about the normative and factual claims advanced by the participants, whether they be activists, social service providers, or journalists. The authors excel at uncovering signifying practices – whether found in texts or actions – that construe or contest the “nature” of social conditions, thematized directly or indirectly through a social problems Gestalt. These studies capture actors’ efforts to render the reality of, respectively, prostitution, wife abuse, and youth violence in distinctive directions, resulting in scholarship that offers models of constructionist analytic practice.

Valerie Jenness: Prostitution and Claimsmaking from the Underside Valerie Jenness’s scholarship has focused on the activism of a number of actors – sex

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workers, hate crime victims, and prisoners (including transgender inmates) – who have been involved in pressing for institutional and public policy changes. Her debut effort (Jenness, 1990, 1993) addressed the claimsmaking activities of COYOTE (an acronym for “Call off your old, tired ethics”), a “loose union of women,” as she quoted one representative’s self-description for the group (Jenness 1990, 403), comprising active and former sex workers, as well as those who advocated on their behalf, originally based in San Francisco. Jenness’s study of COYOTE examines the claimsmaking of activists advocating for changes in how society constructs prostitution, viewing prevailing responses as onerous and counter-productive. Jenness’s account, which grew out of research using participant-observation as well techniques of in-depth interviewing, documents the organization’s activism as it evolves over the course of an extended period of time. By so situating her treatment of the issues, Jenness contextualizes thematic shifts in the claims that the groups’ members presented before various publics. Building her analysis around the perspectives of sex workers and their allies, Jenness documents the views and activities of those who are simultaneously implicated in and silenced by prevailing constructions of social problems. The predominant trend in constructionist analysis up until Jenness’s work had been to canvass the statements of claimsmakers who, although they were calling attention to social conditions that they found disturbing, troublesome, or onerous, were not implicated in those social problems designations. The latter were not so much sought out for their own perspective: to the extent that they were featured in the analysis, it was largely by way of the definitions of claimants, such as medical authorities, legal or academic experts, and moral entrepreneurs, rather than as purveyors of moral discourse, or as players in a contest of symbols, in their own right. The older approach meant that the political activism of so-called deviant actors was routinely neglected, and that “claims-

making from the underside,” as Leslie Miller (1993) termed it, and “the politics of the new deviants,” as Kitsuse (1980) put it,5 were relegated to the margins. Jenness’s work opened up to consideration what happens when claimsmakers assert their positions despite doing so under the shadow of stigma and illegitimacy, and when the deviants of social problem constructions (and their allies) “talk back,” naming the social problem designation as, in fact, the social problem. Jenness focuses on how people from a suspect world and their allies – the world of prostitution – struggle to alter constructions that experts, institutions, and the broader society have historically promulgated, and which had set the terms for understanding the causes and collateral impact of prostitution, renamed by the activists as “sex work” or, more simply, “work.” Jenness’s simultaneous attention to both COYOTE’s claimsmaking as well as COYOTE’s management of the issue of its legitimacy to make claims renders her scholarship humanistic, illuminating not just the ethical sensibilities that shaped the end goals of the movement, but also the creativity and resourcefulness of those who were engaged in that struggle. Jenness depicts with appreciation what members of COYOTE were trying to accomplish by remaining focused on the problem of understanding understandings: threaded through her analysis of COYOTE’s activities is the membership’s concern to address and alter the understandings that others explicitly or implicitly advance about sex work, for they are highly conscious of how others understand them or those whose interests they advance. Jenness follows how COYOTE’s efforts at addressing “understandings” shifted as COYOTE’s interlocutors shifted, from those who oversaw the administration of law enforcement in San Francisco in the early to mid1970s, to participants in various strands of the women’s movement in the late 1970s and early 1980s who questioned the redefinition of prostitution as sex work, and finally as participants in debates about the role of prostitution in the transmission of HIV/AIDS during the mid to late 1980s.

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COYOTE’s efforts to deconstruct and reconstruct the meanings of prostitution were ultimately rooted in the social interactions with which COYOTE was engaged. Jenness’s account reveals how constructions are embedded in the ongoing activities of an organization as it confronts those players and arguments that it sees as most important to address. Such a focus on discursive context is one that students would do well to emulate, because it is context that participants experience as directly relevant, to which they actively orient in real, shifting time, and thus underpins a group’s claimsmaking engagements. Spector and Kitsuse’s program for the study of social problems was always conceived as one focused on social interaction, and Jenness brings out a very rich sense of how context and interaction animate the process and produce the specific content of the constructions advanced through claimsmaking activities. Jenness’s rigorous focus on capturing the play of understandings that were at issue in COYOTE’s activities, explicating how and why those understandings were deemed consequential in the institutionalization and deconstruction of policies of social control, all without any reliance on objectivist notions about, or reifications of, prostitution, make her work on COYOTE an exemplar of agnostic constructionism. Her text reveals the underpinnings for claimsmaking activities by making reference to the members’ point of view, as the lenses through which they comprehend sex work evolve, and thus demonstrates that a focus on the problem of understanding understandings – as a problem of relevance to claimsmakers and hence to the analyst – is where constructionism can firmly ground its analytic practice.

Donileen R. Loseke: People Production and the Social Problems Industry Donileen R. Loseke’s approach to social constructionism considers the narrative logics and emotionally imbued claims embed-

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ded within “collective representations” of social problems that circulate in the popular culture, and shows how the highly dramatized nature of their imagery inform the treatment of people implicated in those representations. Linking person categories and the content of claims, she addresses how social problem claims construct who is worthy of “help” and who is not, noting how such constructions of sympathy-worthiness manifest themselves in the work done by professionals employed by the “social problems industry.” Loseke’s strategy illuminates how categorizations of person types in social problems claims inform the social interaction that occurs between organizations and the populations that they are chartered to “process,” which she refers to, following Miller and Holstein (1989), as “social problems work.”6 Thus, Loseke’s ethnography, The Battered Woman and Shelters (1992), reveals the constructive processes that undergird and shape the institutionalized response to domestic violence. Focusing on how workers account for, and interact with, women seeking assistance (i.e., temporary lodging) from a modern battered women’s shelter,7 Loseke explicates the complexity of meaning instantiated by the very idea of “the social problem of wife abuse,” both as a form of discourse that circulates in the broader culture, but also through a close-up inquiry into how the “the battered woman” category and the concept of “wife abuse” are used as “interpretive devices” by shelter workers as they label and morally evaluate clients as putative victims of intimate partner violence. Recognition of who is and is not a “battered woman,” for example, entails training in claims about what battered women “look like,” which can be challenging since the discourse holds that battered women do not always admit that they are such, but also because not all shelter workers understand the collective representation of the battered woman in the same way – a variability that Loseke investigates by observing the application of the battered woman and wife abuse “categorization systems.”

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Drawing upon interviews, field notes, and possibly most importantly, workers’ log entries, Loseke tracks shelter workers’ understandings of wife abuse and the battered women type, finding a number of contingencies at play in how they are invoked. She notes that shelter workers are challenged by their experiences working with clients, who may resist being labeled or treated in ways consistent with the organization’s (and society’s) constructions of the battered woman figure. At the same time, shelter workers may explain the shelter’s “failure” to fundamentally transform victims of abuse (when the latter return to their batterers, for example), by invoking aspects of what has come to be described as the “battered woman syndrome,” reflexively confirming the power of the construction (cf. Adorjan et al. 2012). Indeed, clients who run afoul of shelter rules or expectations may neutralize objectionable conduct by framing it in relation to the attributes understood to be part of the battered woman syndrome. In effect, then, Loseke weaves a closely observed account displaying the locally situated, and internally cohesive, reasoning that draws upon social problems talk about domestic violence to organize workers’ treatment of clients and negotiate its meaning.8 Loseke’s account of constructive processes pivots around an explication of how understandings of the social problem category (“wife abuse”) and its logically connected person category (“battered woman”) function: how, as interpretive devices, they become the basis for corrective or remedial activity, informing perceptions of what victims of abuse “need,” for example. For Loseke, these understandings organize interactions between staff and clients (and among clients themselves) in certain directions and not others, and they emerge not from a holistic sense of clients’ biographies or cognizance of the heterogeneity of their experiences as discrete individuals, but rather as people who either conform well or poorly with the archetype. Thus, Loseke (1992, 38) notes that the “battered woman,” as a person category posited by the modern construction of wife abuse, is amenable

to the collective living environment of the shelter: A battered woman type of person, by definition, would be a good commune member. Defined in terms of her passivity, low self-esteem, other-directedness, fear, confusion and helplessness, we would not expect her to be a disruptive member of the shelter commune. Indeed, we would anticipate that such a woman would be a good commune member since she would be highly attuned to others and try to please them.

Loseke depicts how this kind of persontyping engenders expectations that can create interpretive challenges for staff, who must handle a myriad of logistical and practical exigencies stemming from client heterogeneity at variance with such generalized understandings; scenarios that Loseke in turn elucidates. In short, Loseke’s text is a key exemplar because it hews closely to the vital constructionist ideal of clarifying processes of reification and typification, demonstrating how they are reproduced and negotiated in the course of practical experience. Her text also emphasizes the importance of documenting the repercussions of these constructions as they direct what kind of “help” is and is not given, to some and not to others. She does not venture into definitive statements about what domestic violence “really is” or “is not,” but is focused on identifying how wife abuse talk and ideation function in settings whose objectives rest upon foundations built by claimsmaking activities. The work is thus properly viewed as wholly committed to the definitional approach to the study of a “social problem.” It consistently seeks to comprehend how the reality of a social problem category is constructed by adhering steadfastly to the perspectives of the shelter staff whose situated praxis animates and reaffirms it.

J. William Spencer: News Discourse, Youth Violence, and the Construction of Ambiguous Culpability Constructionist analyses of social problems commonly turn to media coverage as a way

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of documenting the definitional strategies of claimsmakers and counter-claimants, or as a way of investigating how the tropes, motifs, and idioms of social problems talk are mobilized to make sense of problematic experience. Especially noteworthy is J. William Spencer’s series of works (Spencer 1996, 2005, 2011) examining public discourse about homelessness and youth violence; here we focus on his scholarship in the latter area. In this work we note a useful contrast to the constructions of abusers that underwrote the activities observed by Loseke, for the perpetrators of youth violence depicted in the media reports addressed by Spencer (2005, 2011) have a morally equivocal character: the youth are constructed as being “ambiguously culpable” and hence the accounts encourage mixed and unsettled emotional responses. Spencer’s work thus elucidates how social problems discourse may be imbued with contradiction and ambiguity, and thereby invite consideration of social problems in a distinctive register. While sociologists reviewing media narratives of youth crime and violence often point to how media de-contextualize violent incidents and sometimes spawn moral panics, Spencer (2011) found that the media accounts in his sample, especially those drawn from the 1990s, often “probed almost every conceivable aspect of the social and cultural lives of these kids” (18), depicting youth violence to be a “complex phenomena attributable to multiple causes and solutions” (18). He argues that in such coverage “the condition of youth violence was constructed as a paradox in which the malevolence of the violence was juxtaposed against the youthful status of those committing it” (18). Spencer’s analysis seems directly related to his choice of texts, utilizing national news sources, including transcripts of televised news coverage of youth violence, letters to the editor and editorials, and – possibly most importantly – a series of feature stories in Time, Newsweek, and US News and World Report, including a special New York Times “periodic” series on “When Trouble Starts Young.” Feature stories entail a

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particular kind of journalism, to be distinguished from that practiced by “hard news” journalists. Their pace is slower, their length is longer, and they often begin with a “lede” that consists of a “description or an anecdote,” which “can run for several paragraphs instead of just one” (Rogers, n.d.). Focused on intricate storytelling, such media coverage lends itself to exploring more layers of meaning, and more aspects of humanity, than might otherwise be imparted. Taken together, Spencer’s choice of texts is useful for exploring how social problems are framed with a greater sense of depth and nuance than is encouraged by other news formats, and reveals the distinctive ways that the language and rhetoric of social problems is invoked in them. The feature stories analyzed by Spencer occupy a unique kind of perch: they look simultaneously at individuals and societal trends: they explore the lives of “types of persons” reported about but only partially glimpsed in “hard news” contexts, here probing for what their biographies and social circumstances signal about broader developments in the society from which youth violence springs. Spencer finds that in these accounts youth are often held to be culpable for committing intentional crimes, but the stories set off culpability by implicating social conditions (including broken families, neighborhoods or communities, and wider social changes), and introduce contingency by giving voice to different kinds of solutions (usually vacillating between punishment and treatment or punishment and prevention). The subjects of these feature stories are worthy of sustained attention, their selection by news organizations imply, because they represent opportunities to understand trends in the culture that are seriously problematic and with which readers ought to be concerned: a surge in cases of violence involving wayward youth sometimes depicted as “cold-blooded.” This journalistic strategy’s implicit promise is that by focusing on specific individuals who instantiate a trend, we can better understand what drives the trend. These reports tend to utilize a “crisis motif,” according to Spencer, suffusing the

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subject with a sense of urgency; the crisis motif is validated by “range claims,” which estimate a social problem’s pervasiveness. As the focus of feature stories, however, the hermeneutical problem of youth violence, rather than its pervasiveness, is made central. The youth are given contradictory readings: at once innocent children, and yet capable of cruelty incomprehensible from a child toward another child: “cold,” “senseless” – assessments supported with details from the crimes described, thus floating the possibility that we are witnessing the emergence of a subclass of “juvenile super predators” who are “conceptually evicted” from childhood (Jenks 2005). However, in delving into the backgrounds of the youth, and pursuing the etiology of their becoming offenders, a decoupling occurs. Spencer (2011, 19) notes “even as the victims of this violence were consistently portrayed as innocents and their deaths as tragedies, violent youth themselves were cast in complex and equivocal ways, as both victims and victimizers.” Thus, Spencer delves into the elements that generate the text’s puzzlement as well as the aspects of social problems talk that offer insight into its possible explanation. In so doing, Spencer shows both the rhetorical construction of a “social crisis” as well as how the language of social problems discourse is utilized to grasp the crisis’s origins and frame responses to it. If the responses advanced do not always seem up to the task, it is only further evidence of the magnitude that the crisis represents. These texts, then, are not so much offered as “claimsmaking” (in the sense of expressing a grievance) but instead render evocative treatments of the pathos and tragedy laced within a social trend. Consequently, these texts unsettle and ask perhaps more for rumination than they do for action (the latter being the objective of conventional claimsmaking). Spencer’s analysis is consistently agnostic as to the “real causes” and “best solutions” to youth violence. His goal is to draw attention to how certain forms of media discourse present social problems in complex and often ambiguous ways, and which need not de-contextualize issues and events nor

promote moral panics. Spencer (2005, 63; 2011, 21) notes that “simplicity and clarity may have become the rule of thumb in constructionist analyses of social problems, in part, because that is what we look for. We might advance constructionist social problems theory by looking for the complex and ambiguous instead.”

Paths Forward In this final section we explore new directions that social constructionists are pursuing. We begin by considering the importance of cyberspace for claimsmaking, noting the central role that new communication technologies can have for “disenfranchised” claimsmakers from the Global South. Here we highlight claimsmaking in regions of the world that lack full participatory democracy, asking how social constructionism may advance empirically and theoretically through the development of a global circumference. We conclude by discussing an alternative, more quotidian conception of the realms within which social problems–related expression can be pursued. Cyberspace: Old Wine in New Claimsmaking Bottles? The popularization of the Internet and the widespread adoption of “wired” devices have permanently augmented how people communicate, including their transmission of understandings about social problems. However, while sociologists have been surveying cyber-sociality, social constructionists have only begun to explore its influence on social problems–related talk and action. An exception to this neglect has been Ray Maratea’s work on cyberspace, first in terms of blogging (Maratea 2008), and more recently in terms of political claimsmaking (Maratea 2014). Applying a public arenas model of claimsmaking (Hilgartner and Bosk 1988), Maratea (2008) explores the argument that the blogosphere “increases the overall carrying capacity for problem

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claims, expands the opportunities for outsider claimsmakers to promote social problems, and provides new avenues through which insider and secondary claims can be disseminated” (139). Blogs, Maratea observes, are admittedly “biased” and without pretense of objectivity (Maratea 2008, 146), and their frequently expressed “communal sentiments” help assure bloggers they are writing to a like-minded community. Maratea (2008, 146) argues that “blogging communities” can be construed as “small but persistent advocacy groups” (Hilgartner and Bosk 1988, 66) that utilize Internet technology to keep issues alive and generate large blocs of support at speeds faster than could be possible using traditional, more time-consuming methods, such as direct mail or telephone solicitation.

Blogs offer constructionists a new medium to compare to traditional, offline forms of claimsmaking. Yet Maratea does not present cyberspace as something completely novel compared to such traditional activities. Despite the virtually limitless “carrying capacity” afforded in cyberspace (e.g., through hyperlinking and “blogrolling” [144]), Maratea argues that the dynamics associated with traditional arenas of claimsmaking (e.g., newspaper column space, TV news air-time) remain relevant: online audiences, like their offline counterparts, also have a limited amount of time and attention to focus on particular social problems (140). He adds that blogs in particular have limitations such as the costs entailed by their upkeep and the amount of time bloggers can devote to posting fresh content (145). For Maratea, the Internet creates new venues for claimsmaking that nonetheless are tethered to traditional social problems processes. In a broader inquiry into how the Internet shapes political activism, Maratea (2014) reminds us of Spector and Kitsuse’s interest in how claimsmaking is geared to “spark civil outrage, rally supporters into action, and ultimately force the powers that be

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into taking the proper action to rectify the problem” (5). He explores how the Internet enables new forms of citizen journalism and political activism. The contemporary Internet features not only blogs, but a vast array of “cyber-arenas” “where claims are continuously disseminated to audiences and social reality is in a perpetual state of negotiation” (6). “Underdog” claimsmakers – that is, political activists traditionally without a voice and audience – are emboldened in their capacity and agency through cyberspace access, given the “minimal effort” (7) required to post claims online (cf. Miller 1993). Here too, however, Maratea is quick to question the presumably unlimited potential of the Internet to give voice to the disenfranchised, given that those in authoritative positions in specific institutional realms (e.g., medical, social welfare, and criminal justice practitioners) continue to set the agenda, and have “yet to be greatly impacted by Internet technology and citizen journalism” (Maratea 2014, 10, original emphasis). He adds, “even with an online networking structure in place, political claimsmaking campaigns are doomed to fail if activists are unable to acquire needed resources and mobilize supporters into action” (12; see also Maratea 2015). Constructionist scholars are thus urged to not become too sanguine about the constructive potential of virtual spaces and online claimsmaking per se. Nevertheless, the increased hybridity of claimsmaking, whereby participants simultaneously have a presence in virtual and offline spaces and communities, albeit with varying balances of involvement, would appear to be a starting point for contemporary studies of social problems activity going forward. Claimsmaking beyond Liberal Democracies The looming integration of virtual and offline strategies suggested by Maratea’s research was confirmed in a case study by Adorjan and Yau (2015) involving Scholarism, a Hong Kong-based student protest group that used Facebook to facilitate the

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organization of demonstrations and mass rallies against a postcolonial government broadly viewed as catering more to the whims of officials in Beijing than Hong Kong citizens. Given limited democratic venues in Hong Kong (a postcolonial Special Administrative Region of China), the paper investigates how Scholarism deployed Facebook to raise awareness of itself as well as issues related to the “re-sinicization” of Hong Kong (following the territory’s return to Chinese sovereignty in 1997). Specifically, Scholarism’s efforts encapsulated and expressed anxieties concerning the erosion of political freedoms and ideological encroachment from mainland China. Moreover, as Adorjan and Yau demonstrate, Scholarism’s online organizing garnered supporters from a wide segment of the population (including parents, educators and academics), and they trace how ensuing (and extensive) street protests were successful in blocking a major government initiative. Scholarism thus challenged, and continues to challenge policies emanating from the Hong Kong government as a nondemocratically elected authority, and hence ultimately questions its very legitimacy (cf. Adorjan and Chui 2014). Apart from presenting a case study on how cyberspace is effectively used by claimsmakers, the paper prompts consideration of how claimsmaking is shaped outside of liberal democracies, especially outside the Anglo Global North. Given the absence of avenues for participatory democracy, the Internet presents a space where claimsmakers can express grievances, identify and network with like-minded activists, and be empowered to act as agents of change. As Adorjan and Yau (2015) argue, While traditional modes of claims-making still occur in Hong Kong to express concern over social problems, netizens represent the vanguard of political purchase, drawing on the Internet to bring voice to those silenced under Hong Kong’s undemocratic channels. (175)

Adorjan and Yau’s work highlights the feasibility of investigating social problems pro-

cesses beyond the occident while remaining aware of the importance of avoiding the problem of Orientalism noted by Edward Said, which in the present context can take the form of “viewing claims-making outside occidental regions from western eyes” (Adorjan and Yau 2015, 176; see Said [1978] 1994). Fostering collaboration between constructionist scholars across national contexts may help navigate the issue noted by Said. Adorjan, a Canadian with several years’ experience living and conducting research in Hong Kong, and Yau, a Hong Kong citizen fluent in Cantonese, collaborated to successfully acquire original Cantonese sources of claimsmaking, situating these within the context of contemporary Hong Kong, and interpreting their observable dimensions through a constructionist lens. Constructionists have also begun exploring claimsmaking in mainland China, drawing attention to social problems discourse in the context of its authoritarian milieu. Jianhua Xu (2015), for example, has illuminated the “differential role” (122) of Chinese news media through his inquiry into a motorcycle ban policy in the southern part of the country. Notwithstanding Chinese media often being “regarded as the mouthpiece of the Chinese authoritarian Party-State” (123), Xu provides compelling evidence for resistance by the press to State discourses regarding social problems, especially in the city of Guangzhou, where two-wheeled motorcycles were banned in 2007 following the government’s construction of motorcycles as a social problem. Collecting virtually all mainland newspaper articles referencing the ban on motorcycles that were published in the 2000s (a sample totaling 6,462 articles), Xu identified a debate crystallizing around two general positions. One position, articulated by newspapers that have a reputation as being under the control of Chinese state censorship, justified the motorcycle ban by identifying “seven sins” associated with motorcycles, including their contribution to noise and air pollution, role in traffic accidents, use by “criminals for snatch theft” (Xu 2015,

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126), and status as harbingers of underdevelopment. In siding with the government stance and justifying the ban, Xu characterizes this group of newspapers as “nonissue makers” in that they minimize or repel efforts to problematize9 the questioned policy and, by proxy, find fault with how the State operates. By contrast, Xu describes an alternative position expressed by the Chinese press, which openly criticized the motorcycle ban policy. This position, found only in a particular group of newspapers, took issue with the policy on several grounds, including a unilateral, top-down approach to policy adoption and implementation, governmental indifference to the policy’s impact on ordinary citizens, and dubious assertions for instituting the ban. Consequently, these newspapers demanded that the policy be abolished altogether (Xu 2015, 127). Recognizing that readers unfamiliar with the Chinese context may wonder how newspapers could take such overtly antagonistic positions challenging the Chinese Government, Xu underscores the significance of the post1980s emergence of a kind of duopoly among the Chinese media, whereby a subset of newspapers was subjected to market-based demands, while other newspapers remained tethered to the Party-State. This division of what might be termed “representational labor” allowed “the two goals of propaganda” to be pursued (Xu 2015, 135): While the “parent” papers are oriented towards the wishes of Party-State, the “offspring” papers are oriented towards the public. For example, in Guangzhou, South China Daily is an official party newspaper of Guangdong Provincial Communist Party. While South China Daily mainly serves the propaganda function, its commercial spin-off, Southern Metropolis Daily, mainly serves the market. Despite editors and journalists being sanctioned, fired, and even imprisoned for its aggressive reporting, Southern Metropolis Daily remains one of the most liberal commercial newspapers in China.10

Under budgetary constraints during the 1980s, Xu explains, “nearly all media (except

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for a few such as People’s Daily) had to become financially autonomous” (135). The differential roles that have since been taken by Chinese mass media with respect to claimsmaking processes – as exemplified by dueling media stances documented in the motorcycle ban study – suggest the possibility of a transformation in China from “hard” to “soft authoritarianism.” This institutional arrangement permits certain newspapers to function as claimsmakers, presenting issues at degrees of variance with Chinese state authorities, thereby counteracting the more conformist “non-issue-making” stances emerging from the traditional proState press. Xu recognizes that there may remain skepticism about the division of representational labor in enabling genuine resistance, insofar as some scholars have argued that “the media’s commercialization actually strengthens Chinese authoritarian regime [sic] rather than weaken it” (138) because, for example, oppositional media shed light on sources of antiregime sentiment, and hence fold “useful” information into the State’s surveillance apparatus. Xu’s case study thus raises fascinating questions about the extent to which “social constructionism can be applied in authoritarian countries” (137), or the assumptions that the perspective’s application to same would entail disturbing or even rejecting. Broadening the Scope: Claimsmaking as Quotidian Practice The constructionist approach to social problems stands to benefit from a reexamination of how it conceives of the creation, maintenance, and alteration of what has arguably always been its underlying subject – moral order (cf. Schneider 1984, xi) – by revisiting the imagery that guides its empirical and analytic practice. A series of discrete writings have launched discussions in this direction and appear to converge around the idea of seeing claimsmaking in a broader context, as quotidian practice. So reimagined, social problems talk is situated not strictly in relation to imagery drawn from the world of social movements and political activism,

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nor the “arenas” in which grievances are expressed with the intent of persuading others to alter institutional responses to social problems, including via changes in legislation, public policy and public awareness. This initiative, rather, recognizes manifestations of claimsmaking in other realms besides, particularly in mundane communication that may be here refracted, there submerged, but nonetheless engaged in reconfiguring and reproducing moral order in ways that are of interest to students of social problems. A precursor to this broadening of the scope of constructionist inquiries was the social problems work perspective (Miller and Holstein 1989). As discussed in our review of Loseke’s field research with a battered women’s shelter, the social problems work perspective looks at what might be termed the aftermath of claimsmaking activity, examining how the moral and ameliorative discourse injected into the broader culture creates or transforms the institutional spaces within which the people “produced” by claimsmaking activities are treated. This perspective was valuable for how it prompted constructionists to consider the downstream repercussions of social problems claimsmaking and its influence in moving ideation and practice in particular directions, as the logic of claims was worked out in mundane settings. A strength of the social constructionist perspective on social problems that Spector and Kitsuse developed lies in its clear conception of where one should look for activities or data that are relevant to the development of the theory. That clarity may have taught constructionists all too well how to proceed, however: a danger of working from a clear conception of what social problems– related activity looks like is that we may limit ourselves, for “if analysts simply focus on cases where an instance of a problem has been identified, the events and interpretive work leading up to the presenttime definition take on a somewhat ‘determined’ quality” (Holstein and Miller 2003, 83). Revisiting and problematizing “what is

a claim?” (Miller 1993) thus is an important strategy for constructionists to adopt, as it forces consideration of the biases and filters that obscure possibly relevant phenomena within our theoretical purview, and prompts reflection on the boundary work that sustains some forms of expression as “not claims,” even though they may be tacitly so viewed by “consociates” (Schutz, 1967). We note, for example, that the paradigmatic participants in the social problems process identified by Spector and Kitsuse assume a particular guise, and the circumstances of their engagements are distinctively structured: Spector and Kitsuse depict the claimant (and counter-claimant) as having clear conviction and certainty about being in the right, and hence being in possession of a strong sense of righteousness. [ . . . ] Such an image of the archetypal claimant was carried over into subsequent statements that were advanced in this tradition of theorizing [ . . . ] A perspective that is premised on an appreciation of moral relativism [ . . . ] itself seems to presume moral absolutism on the part of the parties involved in claims-making. They are either certain that something is wrong and ought to be remedied, even eradicated, or they are certain that something is perfectly acceptable, or at least defensible. (Ibarra, 2009, 81–82)

Evidently, the activity of such actors will be focused on performing persuasive acts, for they “know” what is wrong (or not wrong), and hence seek others’ support for their definitions of what must be done. Recognizing that such a scenario is important to the study of claimsmaking, Ibarra nonetheless suggests replacing certainty with uncertainty as the basis for identifying the speakers (or claimants) who might instruct us on the construction of social problems, now construed as the study of “problematic sociality” (Ibarra 2009, 86). He argues that such a move will restore to analysis the emergence of claims from situations of “not knowing,” and hence address a blind spot in the approach recommended by Spector and Kitsuse while folding into the

social constructionism

framework those “personal troubles” (Mills 1959) that the perspective neglects (Ibarra 2009, 80–81). Meanwhile, Miller recommends that we deconstruct “the empirical distinction between activities that make claims and those that do not” (Miller 2003, 96) such that claimsmaking that is more covert in appearance, disguised in any number of ways – because of the subculturally styled (Ibarra and Kitsuse 1993) vehicles used, for example – but no less engaged in commenting on or expressing a stance toward moral order, will come into view. Both Ibarra and Miller, in short, suggest that listening be reoriented, so that it may discern traces of discourse that are relevant to understanding social problems, but which Spector and Kitsuse’s central imagery may obscure. They thus recommend a return to everyday life as the locus of the making of moral meanings, but not necessarily to the “arenas” recommended in CSP. Nichols (2003) offers a valuable extension of constructionism’s possibilities consistent with the emerging approach described above, highlighting the importance of audiences as active and constitutive parts of the social problems process. Influenced by Mikhail Bakhtin, he critiques Spector and Kitsuse’s original formulation, noting that it exhibits a “strong ‘monological’ tendency” (93) that “characterizes the speaking activity of claimsmakers and the responding activity of audiences as quite separate, rather than mutually interpenetrating aspects of the same action” (95). Thus, Nichols argues that while CSP’s formulation offers some “potential for analyzing the interplay of communicative acts in definitional processes” (99), its emphasis is less on a “sustained dialogical focus” and instead on the monological “utterances of claimsmakers” (100). Drawing from symbolic interactionism and communications studies, Nichols advances a “dialogical” social constructionism highlighting the “joint action” (Blumer 1969) involved in claimsmaking (indeed, Nichols cites Valerie Jenness’s work, discussed above, as providing “a dialogically oriented model of claims-making” [103]). For Nichols,

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The first requirement of a dialogical methodology is to move beyond the separate utterances of individual claimsmakers in order to capture the interplay among communicative acts in the larger discourse. Like ordinary conversations in everyday life, social-problem conversations among an array of interested parties are “joint productions.” (111, original emphasis)

The dialogical model, therefore, presents the possibility for a more nuanced analysis of the ‘constructionist dance’ that occurs idiosyncratically. The “larger social problems conversation,” Nichols argues, “involves communications that are often indirect, intermittent, not face-to-face, and relatively long-term” (112). The model may thus indicate a method for tracing the globalization of social problems through various online and offline social worlds, across spatial and temporal boundaries, through ebbs and flows of activity and inactivity, and through diverse sociocultural contexts (see 115–16). Going beyond highlighting “successful” (where claimsmaking can seem teleologically construed) and solely instrumental claims, Nichols suggests that a more holistic, dialogical model “would recognize not only instrumental-strategic claimsmaking but also an expressive, non-strategic type” (109), which need not be concerned with persuading others. Nichols’s vision of dialogical social constructionism, in tandem with other work discussed above that argues for a more expansive, quotidian conception of the issues, charts potentially fruitful paths forward for the study of social problems.

Glossary Bracketing The act of suspending commonsense belief in the objectivity of something in the interest of uncovering the sense-making and communicative practices that establish its obdurate nature or “realness.” Claimsmaking The process of advancing definitions of social conditions as problematic, usually stated as grievances about or objections to circumstances that are

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onerous or intolerable and must be ameliorated. Claimsmaking also features assertions, inferences, and assumptions about the nature, extent, and causes of such conditions. Contextual constructionism An approach to the study of social problems that asserts that because social problems have both “objective” and “subjective” aspects, reference to both dimensions can and should be made in carrying out the study of constructive processes. Objective aspects of a disputed condition are invoked as part of the analyst’s determination of which constructions of the problem are consistent with “the facts” or standards of scientific measurement, and which are reflective of “distorted” or “partial” knowledge. Ontological gerrymandering Analytic practices through which constructionists accomplish the sense of “constructedness” that contradict the assumptions of the perspective, such as tacit reliance on the notion of object constancy. Strict constructionism An approach to the study of social problems that adopts an agnostic attitude toward the social conditions that are in dispute by claimants and counter-claimants. Reference to members’ experiences and interactions, as well as the distinctive forms of social problems expression, is made to uncover dynamics of meaning and process. Disputes about “the facts” or the “evidence” that are incorporated into a social problem conversation are studied as part of the process, rather than as events the sociologist must adjudicate.

Notes 1. For example, an analyst studying youth crime may want to address how ‘young offenders’ are differentially represented in media accounts over a period of time by examining shifts in the relative emphasis on “punitivity” or rehabilitation in these representations (e.g., Adorjan 2009). However, both cultural associations revolving around ‘young offender’, and indeed the meanings

associated with ‘young’ and ‘offender’ may be viewed by the analyst (as opposed to claimsmakers) as different from one historical era to another. In order to observe shifting subjective definitions, objective ‘anchoring points’ are (at the least inadvertently) introduced to give leverage to comparisons across periods of time. 2. Ibarra and Kitsuse’s statement, however, did not address the other aspect of ontological gerrymandering noted by Woolgar and Pawluch: namely the noncontingent nature of the “tools” of constructionist inquiry, nor has this fundamental issue been adequately addressed in the literature elsewhere (Ibarra 2008, 365). 3. In Best’s formulation, “contextual constructionists study claims-making within its context of culture and social structure” (Best 1993, 139), as well as its history. Although Kitsuse recommends remaining agnostic about the objective status and characteristics of the conditions that are the focus of claimsmaking activities, he does not suggest that the analyst should assume culture, history, social structure, and institutions do not exist, and he certainly does not argue that context is irrelevant to understanding the construction of social problems or deviance. Quite to the contrary, attention to proximate context courses through Kitsuse’s corpus of writings: from the study of “social problems as social interaction,” where the identification of local “styles” and “settings” is proposed as important to shaping and reflecting “the social problems process” (Ibarra and Kitsuse 1993); to the salient role given to national and institutional context in his analysis of ‘Kikokushijo’ (Kitsuse et al. 1984); and to the centrality accorded in CSP itself to “intellectual and professional context” (Nichols 2015, 78). Agnosticism on the part of the analyst is recommended as a predicate for bracketing. For Kitsuse, here as elsewhere, the analyst should follow the lead of the members: what is and is not bracketed is contingent on what behaviors or conditions are being treated as problematic (objectionable, offensive, onerous) by participants in the constructive processes under investigation. Thus Spector and Kitsuse recommend agnosticism about the claims advanced by claimsmakers, but not about whether there are claimsmakers, or settings within which (or parties before whom) claims are contextualized (at

social constructionism a street corner protest, in a city hall meeting, on television, or in cyberspace) (Kitsuse 2001, xii). Bracketing is pursued strategically, to enable explication of constructive processes, and not in the service of an “infinite regress” into subjectivism, as has on occasion been asserted (e.g., Best 1993). 4. See Nichols (2015) for a useful typology of the senses of “context” that are encountered in constructionist analysis, and Weinberg (2009) for a more philosophical discussion of the importance of context in constructionist scholarship. In addition to Cynthia Bogard (2003), another scholar drawing from Holstein and Gubrium’s (2003) constructionist analytics is Jared Del Rosso, whose work examines the situated production (during US Senate hearings on Abu Ghraib) of the “reality” of torture perpetrated by American military personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan (see Del Rosso 2011, 2014). Del Rosso seeks to advance constructionist analytics by articulating “an approach sensitive to the ‘textual mediation’ of claimsmaking” (Del Rosso 2011, 166). His analysis highlights how mobilization of “texts” as evidence sustains conflicting claims about the extent of a putative social problem: “detainee abuse.” In Del Rosso’s reading, context is an emergent resource circulating “amongst sites of social problems work, rather than a social force behind or above claims-makers” (169); it operates as a shifting “textual environment” whose continuous accretions of meaning alter what can be tenably claimed therein about a candidate social problem. 5. Kitsuse (1980) used the term “tertiary deviants” to refer to those deviant actors who reject society’s condemnation on the basis of their alleged deviance, and who use such marginalization positively, as the collective basis for social problems activism. 6. The social problems work perspective can be seen as an extension of the people processing studies that were produced by sociologists of deviance utilizing the societal reaction conception (e.g., Kitsuse and Cicourel 1963; Sudnow 1965; Cicourel 1967; Emerson 1969). More recent constructionist examinations of ‘person production’ include the social construction of nonhuman agency (e.g., Weinberg 1997), and examinations of human service agencies (e.g., Holstein 1992; Spencer 1996, 2001), among others.

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7. Modern shelters are distinguished from traditional shelters in that the latter are not founded in a feminist conception of domestic violence (e.g., they may be concerned with reuniting the victim with her family, including the spouse/partner, rather than seeking her subjective transformation, i.e., “raising” her “consciousness”; Loseke 1992, 28–29). 8. Loseke’s analysis echoes Weider’s much lauded study of how the “convict code” is deployed in a halfway house (Weider 1974): the parallel is in Loseke’s depiction of how “wife abuse” and the “battered woman” function to organize inference and action on the part of shelter workers. 9. See Ball and Lilly (1984) for an earlier attempt to distinguish the social construction of “nonproblems” through specific deflection practices. Ball and Lilly’s framing of the question of the “nonproblem” (the “notell motel”) assumes that the condition in question would be a problem were its characteristics accurately understood by others, and thus is effectively anchored as a “latent” social problem in a way that parallels Becker’s (1963) “secret deviant.” 10. Xu’s article reproduces an image of a publicly displayed advertisement in which the Southern Metropolis Daily bills itself as

omnipresent. We don’t take the old road, nor do we take only one road; We are not tunnel-visioned, nor are we rule-abiding and obedient; We always want to try something new and do something different; Now, it is our time to show our talent; SMD, omnipresent, attacking, with razor sharp sword. (Xu 2015, 136)

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Pa r t I I I

PROBLEMS OF DISCRIMINATION AND INEQUALITY



CHAPTER 17

Racism Heather M. Dalmage

Abstract Racism is an ideology or action predicated on the grouping and differential valuation of human beings based upon assumed inherent qualities. Race, the categorization of human beings, was historically a European project that has been mobilized to rank, control, contain, organize, and exploit people and societies. As race developed through the processes of globalization – including colonization, slavery, nation building, and capitalism – it became both a vehicle and a commonsense explanation for human exploitation. Deploying racial categories is inherently racist, and yet, historically created categories frame communities and identities that are needed for solidarity in the struggle against racial injustice. Racism can be understood through examining the creation and enactment of the concept of race over the past four centuries at the intersection of science, nation building, and shifting discourse.

Introduction: Racism Matters Racism is an ideology or action predicated on the grouping and differential valuation of human beings based upon assumed inherent qualities. Race, the categorization of human beings, was historically a European project that has been mobilized to rank, control, contain, organize, and exploit people and societies. Through the processes of globalization – including colonization, slavery, capitalism, and nation building – race became both a vehicle and a commonsense explanation for human exploitation. Many differences exist in the boundaries and content of contemporary racial categories across

nations, but the racial hierarchy, with its roots in the Renaissance and Enlightenment, remains. Categories created, challenged, and reconstituted over centuries hold sway in every aspect of human life (Omi and Winant 2015; Winant 2001). In a country like, South Africa, where people were, until recently, forced into particular categories, the work of constructing and maintaining racial categories is clearer. For instance, District Six, a neighborhood in Cape Town, no longer exists. In 1966, under the Group Areas Act of 1966, the Population Registration Act of 1950, and the Prohibition of Mixed Marriage Act of 1949, the apartheid government declared District Six 303

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a “white only area.” Before the racial reorganization was complete in the 1980s, homes were razed and families torn apart. While most community members were assigned to the Coloured category and sent to a Coloured township, in many instances the government put members of the same family into separate racial categories: Black, White, and Coloured. In the name of racial organization and white supremacy, these families were forcibly scattered to separate townships. Today, a man in South Africa identified and identifying as white may have a grandmother who lives as Coloured. Under apartheid, the South African Nationalist government created laws that governed nearly every aspect of social, legal, cultural, and physical space (Posel 2001). At stake were privilege, power and access to resources. In a post-apartheid era, race matters in the struggle to address and redress the injustices created under apartheid. The effort to define race continues within a world order that privileges whiteness and a nation with a constitution that espouses “non-racialism.” In other countries, the categories reflect histories of scientific racism that have been hidden and forgotten, even as the outcomes of race categorizing have been institutionalized and enacted daily. For instance, following emancipation from slavery in 1853 in Argentina, people of African descent were made invisible (Telles 2014). Through aggressive recruitment of people from Europe, wars, illness, and direct white supremacist mobilization, Argentina nearly annihilated the indigenous peoples and people of African descent, both physically and in the nation’s imagination. The nation prided itself on whiteness, modern-ness, and global position and made a conscious decision to not include people of African descent among the race groupings counted in the national census, from the mid1800s to 2010 (Loveman 2014; Telles 2014). As a result of social justice movements across Latin America by oppressed peoples, a question about African and indigenous descent was added to the 2010 census (Telles 2014; Alberto and Elena 2016). Unlike in

the United States and South Africa, where laws were created to uphold whiteness, in Argentina, “whiteness became highly naturalized, almost coterminous with the nation and blanketing all with its bounds” (Alberto and Elena 2016, 14). In complex ways the racial hierarchy remains a part of the cultural identity of progress and modernity (Telles 2014). And, in an interesting global twist, today one of the most popular clothes brands uses the US confederate flag as its logo (Pittman 2015; Murray 2015). In short, racial categories have been naturalized, institutionalized, and internalized to the advantage of whites. Moreover, as race became a global “central organizing principle,” so too did the resistance to racism and the need to use the race categories in order to resist the oppression caused by them (Winant 2001). The US civil rights movement made it possible for blacks and other people of color to struggle as citizens for greater equality. Yet, since the 1980s, the United States has been in a colorblind era, driven by a dominant ideology that espouses that “seeing race” actually creates race, and that legislating race leads to unfair group-based privileges (Crenshaw 1997). Colorblind ideology has led to a reversal of civil rights gains and a populace without tools to think critically about racism. Today, a black boy in the United States is five times more likely to be incarcerated than his white peer (Sakala 2014). Whites have six times the net assets of families of color (Gordon 2014). Blacks and Latinos are twice as likely to live in poverty as whites (Pew Research Center 2016). In 2016, 39 percent of black children were living in poverty, while 10 percent of white children were in poverty (Musu-Gillette et al. 2016). The measures are deep and broad, each the outcome of a racist system. The era of colorblindness should be named, more appropriately, the era of colorblind racism (Bonilla-Silva 2005). In this chapter I address the origins of racial categories, including the development of scientific racism. I then explore the role of counting, through the census, as a factor in cementing the notion of “white”

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as synonymous with the concepts of citizen, freedom, civilized, progress, and Western. Finally, I analyze the construction of the boundaries of racial categories in order to protect the racial order that privileges whiteness. I conclude with an analysis of contemporary forms of racism at the intersection of multiple locations of inequality and domination.

Origins of Racial Categorization The categorizing of human beings based on designated traits tied to geography, read and defined through the aesthetic lens of the Enlightenment thinkers, is the foundation of race (Goldberg 1990; Mosse 1978; Ferber 1998; West 2002; Smith 2015). The developing scientific process required categories that could be defined, measured, observed, and quantified. The process of categorizing humans, part of a larger categorizing of the world, was directly connected to the writers’ ways of being, seeing, and knowing, or as George Mosse (1978) has argued, early writers drew upon experiential knowledge, and the cultural and aesthetic norms of the day.1 The content, boundaries, and ranking of categories were constructed through a European lens driven by debates about “God’s plan,” and the connection between mind, body, and soul. The transition from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, or from explaining the world theologically to explaining it scientifically was jagged (at best) and ultimately ensured a racial order that has benefited people and nations defined as “white.” Some of the first accounts of diversity and difference around the world came in the form of “travel writings,” or diaries. Europeans, mostly men, who explored and exploited across the world kept detailed notes of their experiences and observations. Written through an un-reflected European perspective, against the backdrop of conquest and exploitation, difference was framed as subservient, sexualized, fearful, mystical, and less than human (Rattansi

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2007). Columbus’s travel diaries reveal the ways Europeans made sense of difference. As did other travelers of his time, Columbus believed that monster-like people existed; thus, as he set sail in 1492, he was considered brave and charged by Queen Isabella to convert savages to Christianity and return with gold and slaves. Given the purpose of his travel, his encounters with difference were seen through a lens – a desire – to control and dominate (and save souls). Like other explorers, Columbus held contradictory images of the humans he was encountering (Nandy 1983). Throughout his diaries he describes the people he meets as cowardly, timid, docile and surmises that they would make good servants and slaves, while in other places they were described as evil and to be feared (Columbus 2003). Moreover, women and girls were sexualized, fetishized, exoticized and, of course, objectified (Nagel 2003). The ruthlessness and disregard for humanity can be read in the following passage in which an Italian nobleman named Cuneo wrote about how he raped a woman “given to him” by Columbus. Cuneo writes: I captured a very beautiful Carib woman, whom the said Lord Admiral [Columbus] gave to me and with whom . . . I conceived desire to take pleasure. I wanted to put my desire into execution but she did not want it and treated me with her fingernails in such a manner that I wished I had never begun. But seeing that, I took a rope and thrashed her well . . . Finally, we came to an agreement. (quoted in Zinn 2009, 517)

The notion of difference had a solid, if not fully defined, framework that positioned European men at the top of the human hierarchy. The intersection of race, gender, and sexuality in the burgeoning imagination and desires of the European travelers show the development of race thinking. The writings make clear that later Enlightenment thinkers, the creators of racial categories and hierarchies, did not “create categories out of thin air” (Loveman 2014, 21); rather, they drew upon centuries of existing Eurocentric masculinist writings.

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By 1602, ships sailing the Atlantic in search of wealth, had been carrying human cargo for more than a century. That year William Shakespeare was completing Othello, a story that explores the construction of difference through the protagonist, “the Moor” (depicted as a dark-skinned man, generally from North Africa). While interpretations of difference had been developing across the collective consciousness of Europeans, the science of race was still about a century away. Descriptors of Othello call upon an aesthetic that degraded “thick lips” and were grounded in the idea of the unnaturalness of whites and blacks forming families. Othello was likened to a horse (animal-like), and his relationship with Desdemona, a white woman, was viewed as dangerous because he, the Moor, was not fully human. In the first half of the play, prior to meeting Othello, he was referred to solely as “the Moor,” indicating that the label was a stigma (Goffman 1963). And, yet, Othello was also a revered military leader. The devaluation of difference and blackness was already in place, even if the devaluation was not yet theorized as an essential human and spiritual difference with clear boundaries. Throughout the Middle Ages, darkness and blackness were associated with evil. The Book of Genesis was used to provide a rationale for slavery and the devaluation of darker-skinned people. The story of Ham was interpreted such that Ham sinned against his father, Noah, and thus Noah cursed the son of Ham, Canaan (who represents all of Ham’s descendants), to a life of servitude. Nowhere in Genesis is mention made of skin color tied to servitude, but a prevalent belief, developed alongside slavery, was that Africans descended from Ham and thus slavery was biblically supported (Goldenberg 2005). Not surprisingly, the language and images utilized in earlier travel writings and art, reappear in a systemized manner during the Enlightenment. From the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, explanations were created that worked to justify an unjust social order and

systemized the dehumanization of Africans and indigenous peoples through slavery, colonization, and other forms of exploitation. The “scientists” and philosophers engaged in the naming and ranking of humans were all men of European descent living in a privileged class position. While the developing science required observation, they failed to recognize their role and social position in the construction of their “science” (West 2002; Mosse 1978). Prior to the Enlightenment, there “had been no common standard of judgment upon lesser peoples” (Mosse 1978, 12). And, yet, early Enlightenment thinkers were writing in a world already more than a century into the transatlantic slave trade, with a European focus on accruing wealth and slaves.

Enlightenment Thinkers and Human Varieties The Enlightenment positioned reason, grounded in observation, over superstition and religion in a move toward progress and civilization. Aesthetics, God, and wealth acquisition formed the backdrop to the naming and valuing of human difference. Science and aesthetics had a dialectical relationship as natural philosophers drew on Greek standards of beauty (West 2002). Physical features were believed to reflect essential, inherent qualities such as morals, beliefs, talents, intelligence, and the soul. In short, humanness and Godliness were inscribed on the body (Mosse 1978), with religion and science supporting one another. What began in the late 1600s as the creation of categories laden with value judgments, developed into a full-fledged ranking of human varieties and justifications for slavery and human exploitation built into the structure of nation-states. Below I trace the creation of race as the foundation for contemporary global racism through a brief analysis of the writings of Francois Bernier, Carolus Linneaus, Joahann Blumenbach, Immanuel Kant, Christian Meiner and Sir Arthur de Gobineau. The writers span from 1684 to 1853, and

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collectively provided the categories, philosophy, and “science” that catapulted the eugenics movement of the late 1800s and the contemporary global racial order. In 1684 Francois Bernier, a traveler and physician, was the first to organize human beings into types (Banton 1987). He wrote A New Division of the Earth,2 based on his own “observations” and extensive travel. The first half of Bernier’s essay includes a physical description of the people in each of his geographically based categories (Smith 2015). Geographers up to this time have only divided the earth according to its different countries or regions. The remarks which I have made upon men during all my long and numerous travels, have given me the idea of dividing it in a different way . . . there are four or five species or races of men in particular whose difference is so remarkable that it may be properly made use of as the foundation for a new division of the earth. (Bernier 1684, 360–61)

Bernier was clear that this categorizing was his idea based on his observations. Unsurprisingly, in his observations, Europeans are used as the norm, the comparison group, thus “implying a racial hierarchy of races” (Goldberg, 1990, 302). Moreover, he created a category he called “Lapps” for whom he saved his harshest judgments and did so entirely from “pictures I’ve seen, and the account which I have received of them from many persons” (Bernier 1684, 364). In other words, despite his claims that he based his racial division on observation and travel, he was, in fact, developing human groupings based on others’ accounts – on preexisting ideas about the human difference. The second half of Bernier’s essay is dedicated entirely to naming and ranking women’s beauty within the various divisions, stating that “women in the Indies” were “very much to my taste” (Bernier 1684, 365). Bernier argues that beauty, measured against “our Europeans,” is tied to the environment through access to water and food. In short, Bernier creates categories that begin with Europe at the center, build upon preexisting judgments tied

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to the objectifying, exoticizing, and sexualizing of women. And, in a step toward race science, he uses “observation” and tries to understand the context (the geographically specific access and choice of water and food) to explain human difference. By 1735, Carolus Linneaus put human beings into four broad categories, with a fifth category that he assigned, “wild and monstrous humans, unknown groups and more or less abnormal people.” Linnaeus ([1735] 1964) argued that, the highest of human varieties should be “the governor and subjugator of” the “lesser varieties” (Baum 2006, 65). Of course, the highest were Europeans, whom he described as “gentle, acute, inventive” and “governed by laws.” Americans were “obstinate, merry, free” and “governed by custom.” Asians were described as, “severe, haughty, avaricious,” and “ruled by opinion.” Unlike Bernier who saved his most vitriolic namecalling for “Lapps,” Linnaeus saves it for Africans who he describes as “crafty, lazy, negligent” and “governed by caprice.” He argued that geographic isolation and environmental differences shape human groups. And, while a monogenesist (someone who believes that all humans have a shared origin in Adam and Eve), he argued that humans were shaped over time and in different ways. Linneaus believed that God led him to develop his ranking of human beings (Linneaus [1735] 1964, 7). His categories contain value judgments grounded in religion, aesthetics, and preexisting ideals of the “other,” used to justify inequality (Banton 1987). In 1775, the year the American Revolution began, Johann Blumenbach, a German physician and anthropologist, published the essay, On the Natural Varieties of Mankind. In this system of classification, he created a schema with five human races: Caucasian, Monogolian, Ethiopian, American, and Malay.3 Like others of his time, he was a monogenesist and described races based on their physical distance from the “civilized” Europeans whom he called “Causcasian” – a word he chose based on his study of craniology and declared that “the most beautiful

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form of skull” was found in the Caucasus (Blumenbach [1775] 1999). In his essay, Blumenbach explained the “Caucasian variety” and in doing so, laid the framework for modern racism. He argued, first, that whites (or Caucasians) were the purest, most beautiful humans, cautioning that “it’s very easy to degenerate into brown, but very much more difficult for dark to become white” (205). Second, that a racial hierarchy, grounded in nature, exists and is visible through physical attributes. Third, that some humans are of a higher form and should rule over others. Moreover, in his attempt at normalizing race science, Blumenbach invited the reader to decide which system of human categorization, from among a half dozen that he lists, made the most sense. To be clear, he was not inviting the reader to question the concept of race, highlighting his belief that the underlying assumptions of human difference and valuation were beyond question. Two years later, Immanuel Kant wrote the second edition of his essay, Of the Different Human Races, in which he responds to continued debate over monogenesis and polygenesis (Kant [1777] 2014). Here, Kant declared that, “[blacks] and whites are clearly not different species of human beings, but they do comprise two different races” (2). Moreover, he argued that it was “self-evident” that blacks and whites were the bookends of race, the “base races,” from which other races developed through intermixture. His evidence was the existence of “half-breed children,” thus showing that humans are one species. And, like other race thinkers, Kant argued that some humans were superior and should rule over others. Harkening to Blumenbach’s idea that Caucasians represent the highest form of human being, Kant posited that race mixture undermines the purity of whites. And, foreshadowing eugenics, he argued that humans had “natural dispositions” which could be exemplified in slavery: “Red slaves are used only for domestic work in Surinam, because they are too weak to work in the fields. Africans are thus needed for fieldwork . . . the [red slaves or Native Amer-

icans] lack ability and durability” (Kant [1777] 2014, 17). He understood that human difference arose in interaction with the environment, but once differences were created, they became essential and static (Hannaford 1996). Interestingly, Kant never traveled. His rankings of humans were based entirely on the writings of others, isolated from the people he believed to be degenerative. The theme of racism developed and enacted independent of the targets of racist thinking, and racism carries through to contemporary forms (Maly and Dalmage 2016). By the late 1700s, nearly three centuries into the transatlantic slave trade, the classification of humans was developing coherence, even as the race science was being questioned, challenged, and shown to be unreliable to the point of being myth. Writers and scientists defending the slave order began arguing that humans were not all of the same species. Thus, while earlier writers saw mixed-race people (however defined) as proof that all humans had shared origins, the race writers of the late 1800s saw miscegenation as a sign of degeneracy and proof that the white race must be protected in order for the world to progress. Most eighteenth-century race thinkers saw themselves as establishing science as the mode for analyzing the world and understanding human origins (Banton 1987). Christian Meiner, a German philosopher, polygenesist, and explicit racist, considered himself a philosopher of the people and saw his role as the translator, interpreter, and framer of scientific ideas to the masses. In his 1785 essay, Outline of History of Mankind, he articulated disdain for Africans, calling them ugly, and claiming that there are two races, not sharing a common ancestry. Moreover, he tied humanness to physical appearance stating: “One of the chief characteristics of tribes and peoples is the beauty or ugliness of the whole body or of the face” (quoted in Mosse 1978, 11). As a polygenesist, Meiner also believed that blacks and whites were physically different. The difference, he explained, meant that blacks felt less pain than whites. Through his racist

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claims, he was providing more rationalization and justification for the exploitation, abuse, and dehumanization of blacks and others in a slave economy. During the transition out of the slave era, and with almost 200 years of creating whiteness and then proclaiming it to be the highest, purest, and most beautiful race, Sir Arthur de Gobineau wrote his theory of the racial order. The world was in transition from slavery to other forms of economic exploitation. De Gobineau, a wealthy, well-connected French traveler and aristocrat, published The Inequality of the Human Races in 1853. With an explicit white supremacist stance, he wrote: “The negroid variety is the lowest, and stands at the foot of the ladder” (de Gobineau 1853–55). He then commenced a delineation of the differences between the groups, ranking whites firmly on top, and as “gifted with reflective energy, or rather with an energetic intelligence” (de Gobineau 1853–55, 206). According to de Gobineau, races mixed originally, but once civilization was created “further race mixing leads to the degeneration of the race through a decline in the quality of its blood” (James 2016). De Gobineau was not an isolated white supremacist, but rather moved at the highest levels of French society, traveled around the world, and was a longtime friend of Alexis de Tocqueville. Within ten years, Louis Agassiz, the noted geologist and biologist, and “devout creationist” (Gould 1981), argued that only white people descended from Adam and Eve. Furthermore, he posited that “half breeds” were as much a sin against nature as incest, stating that “the idea of amalgamation is most repugnant to my feelings. I hold it to be a perversion of every natural sentiment” (Ferber 1998). Fear of tainted blood (and thus a tainted soul), through race mixing drove the legal, political, and social actions needed to create the segregation and containment of “others” along with the development and acceptance of white supremacy. As these “scientists” formulated their theories of race, they were developing a system of global whiteness. The messaging about

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the characteristics and hierarchical arrangements linked to slavery, colonization, and a desire for profit and control, etched race into the fabric of the world mosaic, from the broadest institutions to the deepest corners of identities. Ideas of impurity, dirt, disease, and pollution were tied to racial categories. For purposes of protecting whiteness and counting people, the boundaries of categories were particularly important. As they were grouped together, some differences among people were ignored, while other differences were enhanced (Goldberg 1990, 306–7). The outcomes of categorizing and ranking were experienced across the globe through slavery, colonization, and nationstate building. The idea that people have different origins justified exploitation and also supported the demands for antimiscegenation laws intended to block racial mixing. The categorizing, based on characteristics deemed to be inherent and essential, were still debated, but in light of the global shift away from slavery and new forms of human and colonial exploitation, the ranking was now being institutionalized into nation-state identities. Of course, this shift happened in a context in which European countries developed with the wealth gained from slavery and plunder. The introduction and use of statistics built upon a taxonomy created by European men and accepted globally, kept European men at the top of their created human hierarchy. The questions of the soul and humanness were woven into the question, “Who is a citizen?” Categories, Counting, and Creating Citizens: Nineteenth-Century Global Changes By the nineteenth century, scientists and philosophers had developed a model for understanding the world and its diverse human species (Smith 2015). While Europe was scrambling to divide Africa for direct colonization and exploitation, Latin American countries were gaining independence and fashioning their nation-states through the European lens. The racial hierarchy

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of domination was built into the developing nation-states (Omi and Winant 2015), as they sought independence (liberation) from European colonizers while wanting to be regarded as an equal in the eyes of Western nation-states. Categorizing and census counts were pathways to being seen as modern (Loveman 2014). Moreover, through census categories governments elevated some groups and identities and made others invisible and legitimized the distribution of resources and services (Marx 1998; Loveman 2014). In 1853, the same year of the publication of de Gobineau’s essay and the end of slavery in Argentina, the International Statistical Congress (ISC) convened for the first time with the hope of creating a system of race categories to utilize across the globe for statistical analysis (Loveman 2014; Nixon 1960). The first session of the ISC in Brussels included the “notables of the European statistical world and its affiliates in the Americas; attendance was confined to official delegates: 153 attended representing 26 countries” (Nixon 1960). The goal of the ISC was to determine a way to count populations so that nations could be compared to one another (Loveman 2014). The use of statistics, was part of a modernizing project through which countries could compare and contrast themselves to one another in reference to the West. With race already developed into a systematic and accepted schema, the counting began in countries throughout the globe. The census served a “legitimizing function” (Loveman 2014, 88) and propelled the world toward what Howard Winant (2001) has called a “global racial formation project.” This project included the ideological apparatus needed to support colonization and the development of national identities (Winant 2001). Showing comparable demographics was a route to being seen as Western, as a member of the international community, modern, and white. The process of counting, thus, cemented the categories used for census taking and whiteness, civilization, and Western superiority were made synonymous.

An aim of the census was to signal civilized-nation status; census officials downplayed the presence of people deemed uncivilized (Nakano Glenn 2002; Loveman 2014). By the late-1800s racial categories and hierarchies were refuted by scientists across the globe, including by Darwin’s theory of evolution (Darwin 1859, 1871). Despite evidence to the contrary, race ideologies remained pervasive and had the effect of normalizing racism as the quest for human and natural resources by Europeans continued. Racism served to: defend the subordination or even extermination of non-European peoples throughout the world and was believed by Europeans to explain the ever-increasing gulf in power and progress that separated them from the peoples they were overrunning. (Horsman 1999, 47)

Nation-states wanting to join the international community needed to structure themselves in a way that reflected their worthiness. As a result, restrictions on certain groups were put in place in every country in the Americas. Thus, census counting was based on racist “scientific” categories that developed across Europe and could be employed to “monitor, segregate, exclude, or exterminate those living inside the state’s borders but perceived as remaining outside the boundaries of the national community” (Loveman 2014, 22). According to Anthony Marx (1998, 5), “Citizenship is a key institutional mechanism for establishing boundaries of inclusion or exclusion in the nation-state.” Humans outside the boundaries of those considered civilized were either not counted or else were clumped without explanation. In the United States, multiple laws were passed to block undesirables from entering the country including antimiscegenation laws used to build a border around whiteness. Existing scientific theories about racial hierarchies shaped the way nations structured themselves and in the process, structured race (Nakano Glenn 2002; Winant 2001). Categories and census counting determined who fit where in a preexisting

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hierarchical schema. Similar to Blumenbach’s request of his readers to accept racial categorizing as a fact, the goal of comparable censuses around the world was to determine how well nations fit into the Western-centric schema. The use of racial hierarchy for counting citizens and others merged with notions of creating better nations by creating better citizens, thus paving the way for a eugenics movement (Winant 2001). Sir Francis Galton, a well-traveled scholar of many talents and cousin of Charles Darwin, coined the term “eugenics.” Eugenics was founded on the pseudo-science of distinguishing superior and inferior human beings and the belief that humanity can be improved through controlling reproduction. Galton firmly believed that racial groups are hierarchical and matched human potential and outcomes. Explaining the exceptions to the rule he argued that people from lower groups could be high achievers and those from higher groups could be low achievers, but that ability and intelligence are genetically driven and tied to race (Gould 1981; Galton 1883). Followers and advocates of eugenics were obsessed with patrolling the borders of racial groups to ensure the continued progress and superiority of the highest group: whites. This meant that the myth of white racial purity was a foundation for the ways eugenics was practiced. Thus, as the eugenics movement gained strength, so too did the concern for regulating the borders of nations through immigration control and within nations, the borders of racial categories (antimiscegenation laws) (Rattansi 2007). Abby Ferber has argued: Immigration is described in the same terms as those used for the threats of disease and interracial sexuality: an invasion or penetration of the white body by the nonwhite Other. Terms like “penetration” “infestation” “pollution” and “invasion” are used to describe all of these phenomena. (Ferber 1998, 100)

The concern for pollution and degeneracy placed an obsessive focus on the progenies of mixed-race relationships. The eugenics movement was based on the idea that

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without protection the human race would decline (Pascoe 2000, 193). Clear boundaries were thus needed to maintain a racial system that privileges those regarded as white. Within forty years of Galton’s introduction of eugenics, the United States had embarked on a wide-ranging campaign. The 1924 Johnson-Reed Act significantly reduced the number of immigrants from groups coming into the country who were considered less desirable. Congressman Albert Johnson, the lead architect of the Act, was also the head of the The Eugenics Research Association and opposed interracial marriage. The Johnson-Reed Act and other immigration laws of the eugenics era were created to protect the desirable stock of humans from the threat posed by the large number of undesirable groups from Europe and other parts of the world (Nakano Glenn 2002; Gugliemo 2004). From within the nation, the eugenics movement developed racial hygiene and sterilization programs, while supporting antimiscegenation laws. These laws also served to protect the property and labor rights for the humans seen as acceptable and as citizens (Nakano Glenn 2002). In the United States, citizenship was tied directly to race and race was defined through legal and extralegal means in order to protect whiteness (Nagel 2003; Nakano Glenn 2002). The eugenics movement, which was based on scientific racism, developed across Britain and the United States and partly served the Nazi platform of the mass extermination of Jews (Rattansi 2007). And while the horrors of the holocaust were unfolding and visible, yet ignored by the world (Laqueur 1980), in the United States, antimiscegenation laws protected white racial purity and the systems of whiteness.

Antimiscegenation Laws in the United States: Boundaries to Maintain White Supremacy In 1939, Marie Antoinette Giraudo Monks, a self-proclaimed French countess, presented

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her late husband’s last will to a California court to gain her inheritance. Monks was accused of fraudulently claiming to be white and marrying across race lines. She was forced to endure a six-week trial that brought to the fore centuries of evershifting racial thinking (Pascoe 2000). At the time of the trial, laws against interracial marriage existed in thirty states. Marie Antoinette had married and lived as a white woman and throughout the trial maintained a claim to whiteness. However, the eugenics movement, was concerned with race mixing and mobilized through law, programs of racial hygiene, sterilization, and racial violence. Marie Antoinette’s racial identity was scrutinized. During the trial, a surgeon, Dr. James C. Anders, considered a race expert because of his interaction with “people of negro extraction” (California Court of Appeals 1939, 978) testified about the shape of Monks’s neck, heels, and skin color (984). From the witness stand he clarified, “I mean the shape of the features of the face. The mouth and the nostrils and the cheekbones are the three things; and another thing that is hard for me to put into words, but there is a peculiar characteristic of the ankles and heel and lower calf of the leg of a negro woman or man that is different from that of people of the pure white race” (982–83). Moreover, Dr. Anders claimed he could confirm Monk’s blackness because “there is a peculiar pallor or color of the skin on the back of her neck where she hasn’t used cosmetics so freely” (984). Following three centuries of white supremacy, and at the height of the eugenics movement, the testimony was taken as proof that Marie Antoinette Giraudo Monks could not be identified as “pure” white.4 While Monks lived socially as a white woman, according to the courts, she was considered one-eighth black, and thus under their current antimiscegenation law, prohibited from marrying a white person. She was found guilty of fraudulently marrying across race lines and denied the inheritance. For Marie Antoinette Giraudo Monks, this meant the denial of her citi-

zenship rights and of the approximately $82 million inheritance. Tracing the ever shifting, often contradictory laws that were enforced to maintain wealth in the hands of whites, Peter Wallenstein (2002, 162) writes: “Whiteness brought wealth – absorbed it, retained, kept it out of the hands of people who, aside from their racial identity, had an entirely legitimate claim on property they nonetheless could not get.” The use of laws to protect white privilege, power, and purity were inconsistent across the country. In Virginia, for instance, the law changed over the course of a person’s lifetime so that they could have married when they were considered as white and later considered black, all without doing anything more than breathing. Laws changed regularly, so that in some places, the rule for determining blackness was being one-fourth black (having one black grandparent), while in other places it was being one-eighth black (having a black great grandparent). California in 1939 followed a one-eighth rule (if one of the eight grandparents is black, the person is black). Thus, had Marie Antoinette fought this case in Virginia before 1910, for example, she may not have had to stand trial (Wallenstein 2002, 138). Additionally, had she married in any of the twenty states that did not have antimiscegenation laws at the time, the marriage (and thus the will) may not have been challenged. While the stakes were quite high in Monks’s case, in fact, throughout the history of race and regulating marriage from the 1660s to the 1960s, definitions of blackness shifted regularly in order to block inheritances (property and wealth) from passing from white to black hands (Harris 1993). While many other countries maintain a hierarchy of whiteness, in which light skin, straighter hair, and claims to European ancestry were rewarded, the United States developed a sharp line of race demarcation (Davis 1991). Harkening back to Blumenbach’s notion of Caucasians as the center of the races, the myth of pure and fragile whiteness loomed large. In his book,

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Who Is Black? One Nation’s Definition, F. James Davis outlines five key racist beliefs about miscegenation, which while discredited, continued to create and uphold the boundaries between racial categories: (1) some races are physically superior to others; (2) some races are mentally superior to others and can be ranked by intelligence; (3) culture is caused by race; (4) race determines disposition; and (5) race mixing leads to degeneracy (Davis 1991, 23–25). Unlike some Latin American countries, such as Brazil, that encouraged miscegenation as a way to whiten the population, in the United States, a strict line between the races was enforced through legal and extralegal means to stop whiteness from being polluted (Ferber 1998).

Resistance and Shifting Discourse The post–Civil War, postemancipation era in the United States ushered in new forms of white supremacy that were both punitive and lethal. The post–World War II period witnessed uprisings around the world against the injustice of racism and colonization. The anticolonial movements across Africa forced a break in the earlier racial order (Winant 2001). The 1960s civil rights movement in the United States utilized existing racial categories to build solidarity and identities of unity. Inverting the long-standing Eurocentric lens on beauty and Christoph Meiners’s explicit claim that “Black is ugly,” the movement embraced the notion that “Black is beautiful.” The categories of race, created and mobilized to white benefit, were now used to struggle against whiteness. And, openings were created through civil rights legislation to struggle from within the system, as citizens. Between the mid-1950s and the late 1960s, and in response to the civil rights movement, legislation was passed to protect groups facing discrimination, including the 1954 US Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education (that ended legal segregation in the educational system); the 1964 Civil Rights Act (a broad-based prohibition on

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discrimination); the 1965 Voting Rights Act (that ended discrimination toward voters); the 1967 Loving v. Virginia decision (ending antimiscegenation laws); and the 1968 Fair Housing Act (that ended discrimination in the housing market). In order to track the newly earned civil rights protections, in 1977, the US Office of Management and Budget created racial categories used on federal forms and the census to track compliance, while allowing individuals to self-identify. Three years later, just as civil rights legislation compliance and outcomes was starting to be tracked, the Reagan administration charted a path toward colorblindness, as part of a larger neoliberal agenda (Crenshaw 1997; Omi and Winant 2015). With race and racism now entrenched in identities and institutions at the point in history in which racial redress would happen, claims were now made that race no longer matters and that therefore reference to race should be dropped from legislation (Dalmage 2000). This marked the beginning of the era of colorblindness in the United States, an era defined by an agenda to ignore race in explaining, addressing, and redressing social inequality. After centuries of creating identities and nations around the concept of hierarchical racial categories, colorblind advocates suggest that those talking, thinking, and theorizing about race are creating race and racism. Colorblind ideologies claim that race should not be an identifying factor in society. When race is ignored (along with the past four centuries of race-making), then denying and repealing group-based or civil rights legislation becomes easier. In other words, when race is removed from the discussion about social interaction, connection, success, failure, and resource obtainment, then white privilege is masked and the institutional practices that diminish the life chances of people of color are not properly understood and addressed. Because colorblind discourses lack critical analysis about race, individuals taught to ignore race, are unable to understand the complexities of race and racism in society; as such,

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they may default into essentialist and racist explanations. While race was being ignored relative to addressing and redressing social equality, racial fears were being fueled. From the war on drugs to racial profiling to coded race language (utilizing such terms as “welfare queen” and “urban”) racist ideologies targeted blacks and other people of color, and yet whites could deny being racist (BonillaSilva 2005). Prior to the civil rights movement, explicit forms of racism were part of daily life. From separate drinking fountains, to Bull Connor’s use of fire hoses against civil rights activists, and the systematic lynchings across the US South, the role of race in the creation of injustice was evident. In a post– civil rights colorblind era, however, explicit forms of racism have largely been contained to periodic public outbursts by public figures and police violence. And, yet, racism has informed the practices and norms that govern everyday social life, and as such, are hidden and harder to address (Bonilla-Silva 2005; Lewis 2001; Ansell 2006). In his book, Racism without Racists, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (2005) shows that in a post–civil rights era, many whites believe that racism is reducible to individual pathology and that education and consciousnessraising are believed to be the path forward. Furthermore, if race is addressed in law as a “group-based” protection, then individuals who are not members of the named group will face discrimination. Within the political sphere, arguments have been made that the civil rights movement leveled the playing field and thus any legislation that addresses or redresses group-based racism (such as, slavery, internment, Jim Crow laws), is in fact, discriminatory and perpetuates racism. This was the argument made by US Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts when he wrote: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race” (Shapiro 2009). Racism affects every aspect of social life, from interactions, to self-reflection, to the choices individuals make, and is also built into all social institutions. We know that

children have internalized the race system by the age of three (Feagin, Vera, and Batur 2001). Individual racism involves the conscious and unconscious belief that others are inherently inferior and uses that belief to justify social inequality. As a consequence, individual racists discriminate against those they deem inferior in a way that causes harm. Under colorblind ideologies, it is individual, and not institutionalized, racism that is seen as central to the perpetuation of inequality. Because it is identified as the problem, solutions address individual pathology, but ignore structural inequities. That is to say, the individual racist needs to be educated through diversity management or must undergo psychotherapy to address the pathology. In the 1970s, the television character of the sitcom All in the Family, Archie Bunker, served as the iconic pathological racist – uneducated, working class, white and male (Wellman 1993). Racism that is individual and explicit receives a disproportionate amount of attention because it is tangible (a racist comment can be captured for replay, has a specific victim and clear actions can be taken against the racist). Throughout the early twenty-first century, individual racists have been paraded publically, in an orchestrated dance. Public figures such as radio personality Howard Stern, Mississippi Senator Trent Lott, comedian Michael Richards, radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh and others, have made public racist statements. The press and social media disseminate their comments. Outrage ensues, followed by an attempt by the racist to diminish his role in causing harm. Outrage continues. The racist makes a public apology and falls from the public eye for some time before returning to his or her previous career. Given the role of institutional racism in the perpetuation of injustice and inequality, the public outcry over the individual acts conceals the more problematic and pervasive effects of institutional racism. Institutional racism is more difficult to address because it is built into everyday social life, including social arrangements, laws, culture, economics, education, sports, and other institutions dress. The Fair

racism

Housing Act of 1968 banned racial discrimination in the housing market. Yet, after years of keeping blacks and others out of the market, the change in law was met with massive resistance (Massey and Denton 1998; Maly and Dalmage 2016). Within the history of race, citizenship, and property, the law created opportunities, but the underlying structural (or institutional) practices continued to privilege whites. Michelle Alexander (2010) shows how race is central to the policies, programs, and outcomes of a society that was built on racism. Without awareness of institutional racism, liberation movements were difficult to launch and those not facing discrimination are left without the means to understand the disproportionate representation of blacks in the criminal justice system, in lowpaid jobs, and in poverty. Without critical race tools, people default into the very thinking that created the racist order – scientific racism and the belief that blacks are inherently inferior. Colorblindness has led to a generation of people who only recognize racism that is enacted explicitly and overtly while the institutional practices that are structured to white advantage, remain hidden.

Conclusion Racism matters in how individuals think about themselves and act (and are acted upon) in everyday life. The construction of race spans centuries and has been incorporated into all institutions. Travel meant encountering difference – geographic, human, and natural. The difference was explained through a particular lens. And, from the mid-1600s to the mid-1800s, the explanations carried similar themes. The science of race developed alongside capitalism, colonization, and slavery. Each of these systems required the exploitation and inequality of humans. The construction of race categories was grounded in unexamined cultural and historical contexts tied to an aesthetic that upheld Europeans as culturally central and physically beautiful. As ideas of scientific racism were gain-

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ing popularity, slavery as a global economic order was ending. Race theorizing was then used to provide a rationale and a legitimacy for a racial order that assumed white privilege and Western dominance. The process involved deeply racist projects that “whitened” countries, that excluded populations, and that isolated and made invisible groups of people by not counting them in the census. The categories, the boundaries, and the rankings were deeply contentious and yet, they were built into science, academia, the economy, law, and identities and have had tremendous staying power. Race scientists claimed race to be real, locatable in the body, static, observable, definable, rankable, and measurable. In fact, the history of race science shows that race and racism were created in a process of explaining difference, while contributing to unequal and exploitative economic, social, cultural, and aesthetic relations. Despite the fact that race is an illusion created through the imaginative categorizing of human difference, racism has had real consequences in the structure of societies and the global distribution of resources. Omi and Winant (2015) call race a “central organizing principle” in the world. With race science having been debunked for more than a century, today, given names and surnames, zip codes, and physical appearance are utilized to determine, in part, a person’s access to resources. Across the globe, we see the outcome of racial categories – from the informal settlements and townships of South Africa to the favelas of Brazil, to the control of Fortune 500 companies, mass incarceration, the closing of national borders, and the nationalist resurgence of groups and governments. Each contributes to the staying power and the centrality of race and racism to national and international policy.

Glossary of Terms Antimiscegenation laws These laws specified who could marry whom based on defined, albeit shifting, racial groupings.

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The goal was to stop people from reproducing offspring across race lines. Categorization The process of developing criteria shared by all people in a particular grouping. The goal was to highlight the shared criteria, while ignoring differences within groups and similarities across different groups. Citizenship The social and political recognition of a person as a member of a nation-state. Colorblindness The ignoring or dismissing of race in talk, text, daily interactions or law. Enlightenment Spanning from the late seventeenth century through the eighteenth century, this historical era was defined by the movement to define the world through reason and logic. Eugenics The belief that humanity should be improved by controlling “breeding.” Racial borders The boundaries of racial categories, created to protect resources (goods and power) and are held in place by laws, language, cultural norms, and individual actions. Race Race, the categorization of human beings, was historically a European project that has been mobilized to rank, control, contain, organize, and exploit people and societies. Racism Racism is an ideology or action predicated on the grouping and differential valuation of human beings based upon assumed inherent qualities. Whiteness The unearned privilege and power experienced by people categorized as white. Whiteness includes the belief in the racial superiority of people defined as white.

Notes 1. I use “writers” to denote philosophers and scientists (or natural philosophers) and travel writers and artists who had the ability to write their observations, insights and arguments. 2. He was granted a medical degree after a threemonth course and after which he was made

to promise that he’d only practice medicine outside of France. 3. Blumenbach, worked closely with Comte de Buffon, one of the most widely read authors of the day and the first person to use the term “race” to talk about groupings of human beings. 4. Another important factor in this trial was the bringing forth an anthropologist to discuss Giraudo Monks culturally white life. Given the complexity of the cultural and social construction of race, the courts defaulted into the biological explanations of race. For more on this case, see Peggy Pascoe (2000).

References Alberto, Pauline, and Eduardo Elena. 2016. Introduction to Rethinking Race in Modern Argentina, 1–24. New York: Cambridge University Press. Alexander, Michelle. 2010. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: The New Press. Ansell, Amy E. 2006. Casting a blind eye: The ironic consequences of color-blindness in South Africa and the United States. Critical Sociology 32:333–56. Banton, Michael. 1987. Racial Theories. New York: Cambridge University Press. Baum, Bruce. 2006. The Rise and Fall of the Caucasian Race: A Political History of Racial Identity. New York: NYU Press. Bernier, Francois. 1684. A new division of the earth, according to the different species or races of men who inhabit it. In Memoirs Read before the Anthropological Society of London, vol. 1, 360–64. London: Trübner for the Anthropological Society of London. https://archive.org/details/ memoirsreadbefor01anth. Blumenbach, Johann Friedrich. (1775) 1999. On the natural variety of mankind. In Slavery, Abolition, and Emancipation: Writings in the British Romantic Period: Theories of Race, edited by Peter Kitson, 141–212. London: Pickerin and Chatto. Bonilla Silva, Eduardo. 2005. Racism without Racist: Color-blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

racism California Court of Appeals. 1939. Court transcript of Estate of Monks, 4 Civ. 2835, Records of California Court of Appeals, Fourth District (California State Archives), vol. 3, p. 978. Accessed at the Peggy Pascoe archives in the University of Oregon library, Eugene. Columbus, Christopher. 2003. Journal of the First Voyage of Columbus. American Journeys Collection. Translated by Edward G. Bourne. Madison, WI: Wisconsin Historical Society Digital Library and Archives. Crenshaw, Kimberle Williams. 1997. Colorblindness, history and the law. In The House That Race Built: Original Essays by Toni Morrison, Angela Davis, Cornel West, and Others on Black Americans and Politics in America Today, edited by Wahneema Lubiano, 280– 88. New York: Vintage. Dalmage, Heather. 2000. Tripping on the Color Line: Black-White Multiracial Families in a Racially Divided World. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Darwin, Charles. 1859. The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection: or, The Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life. London: John Murray. 1871. The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex. London: John Murray. Davis, F. James. 1991. Who Is Black? One Nation’s Definition. University Park: Penn State University Press. De Gobineau, Arthur. 1853–55. An essay on the inequality of the human races (1853–55). In The Inequality of the Human Races, translated by Adrian Collins. London: Heinemann. http://media.bloomsbury.com/rep/ files/primary-source-131-gobineau-theinequality-of-the-human-races.pdf. Feagin, Joe R., Hernan Vera, and Pinar Batur. 2001. White Racism: The Basics. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge Press. Ferber, Abby. 1998. White Man Falling: Race, Gender and White Supremacy. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Galton, Francis. 1883. Inquiries into human faculty and its development. Institute for Policy Studies, September. http://inequality.org/ racial-inequality/. Goffman, Erving. 1963. Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. London: Penguin. Goldberg, David Theo. 1990. The social formation of racist discourse. In Anatomy of Racism, edited by David Theo Goldberg,

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295–318. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Goldenberg, David. 2005. The Curse of Ham: Race and Slavery in Early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Gordon, Collin. 2014. Racial inequality. http:// inequality.org/. Gould, Stephen Jay. 1981. The Mismeasure of Man. New York: W. W. Norton. Gugliemo, Thomas. 2004. White on Arrival Italians, Race, Color, and Power in Chicago, 1890–1945. New York: Oxford University Press. Hannaford, Ivan. 1996. Race: The History of an Idea in the West. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Harris, Cheryl, I. 1993. Whiteness as property. Harvard Law Review 106:1707–91. Horsman, Reginald. 1999. Superior and inferior races. In Racism, edited by Martin Bulmer and John Solomos, 45–48. New York: Oxford University Press. James, Michael. 2016. Race. In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta. https://plato.stanford .edu/archives/spr2016/entries/race/. Kant, Immanuel. (1777) 2014. Of the different human races. In Kant and the Concept of Race: Late Eighteenth-Century Writings, translated and edited by Jon M. Mikkelsen, 55–72. Albany: SUNY Press. Laqueur, Walter. 1980. The Terrible Secret: Suppression of the Truth about Hitler’s “Final Solution.” New York: Penguin Books. Lewis, Amanda. 2001. There is no “race” in the schoolyard: Color-blind ideology in an (almost) all-white school. American Educational Research Journal 38:781–811. Linnaeus, Carolus. (1735) 1964. Systema Naturae: Facsimile of the First Edition. Translated by M. S. J. Engel-Ledeboer and H. Engel. Netherlands: Nieuwkoop: B. de Graaf. Loveman, Mara. 2014. National Colors: Racial Classification and the State in Latin America. New York: Oxford University Press. Maly, Michael, and Heather Dalmage. 2016. Vanishing Eden: White Construction of Memory, Meaning, and Identity in a Racially Changing City. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Marx, Anthony. 1998. Making Race and Nation: A Comparison of South Africa, the United

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States, and Brazil. New York: Cambridge University Press. Massey, Douglas, and Nancy Denton. 1998. American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Mosse, George L. 1978. Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism. New York: Howard Fertig. Murray, Rheanna. 2015. Argentinian fashion brand John L. Cook’s Confederate flag logo stirs outrage. Today, August 11. www.today .com/style/fashion-brand-john-l-cooksconfederate-flag-logo-stirs-fury-t38041. Musu-Gillette, Lauren, et al. 2016. Status and trends in the education of racial and ethnic groups. National Center for Education Statistics. August. https://nces.ed.gov/ pubs2016/2016007.pdf. Nagel, Joane. 2003. Race, Ethnicity, and Sexuality: Intimate Intersections Forbidden Frontiers. New York: Oxford University Press. Nakano Glenn, Evelyn. 2002. Unequal Freedom: How Race and Gender Shaped American Citizenship and Labor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Nandy, Ashis. 1983. The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nixon, James W. 1960. A History of the International Statistical Institute, 1885–1960. The Hague: International Statistical Institute. Omi, Michael, and Howard Winant. 2015. Racial Formation in the United States. New York: Routledge. Pascoe, Peggy. 2000. Miscegenation law, court cases, and ideologies of “race” in twentiethcentury America. In Interracialism: BlackWhite Intermarriage in American History, Literature, and Law, edited by Werner Sollors, 178–204. New York: Oxford University Press. Pew Research Center. 2016. On views of race and inequality, blacks and whites are worlds apart: About four-in-ten blacks are doubtful that the U.S. will ever achieve racial equality. June 27. www.pewsocialtrends.org/2016/ 06/27/on-views-of-race-and-inequalityblacks-and-whites-are-worlds-apart/.

Pittman, Taylor. 2015. How the confederate flag became an Argentinian clothing brand’s logo. Huffington Post, August 15. www .huffingtonpost.com/entry/confederateflag-logo-john-l-cook-argentina_us_ 55cb8d39e4b0f73b20bb7ce4. Posel, Deborah. 2001. What’s in a name? Racial categorisations under apartheid and their afterlife. Transformation 47:59–82. Rattansi, Ali. 2007. Racism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sakala, Leah. 2014. Breaking down mass incarceration in the 2010 census: State-by-state incarceration rates by race/ethnicity. Prison Policy Initiative. May 28. www.prisonpolicy .org/reports/rates.html. Shakespeare, William. 1993. Othello: The Moor of Venice. Edited by Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Westine. New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks. Shapiro, Ilya. 2009. The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race. Cato at Liberty. April. www.cato.org/blog/ way-stop-discrimination-basis-race-stopdiscriminating-basis-race. Smith, Justin E. H. 2015. Nature, Human Nature, & Human Difference: Race in Early Modern Philosophy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Telles, Edward. 2014. Pigmentocracies: Ethnicity, Race, and Color in Latin America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Wallenstein, Peter. 2002. Tell the Court I Love My Wife: Race, Marriage, and Law – An American History. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Wellman, David. 1993. Portraits of White Racism. New York: Cambridge University Press. West, Cornel. 2002. A genealogy of modern racism. In Race: Critical Theories, edited by Philomena Essed and David Theo Goldberg, 90–112. Hoboken, NJ: Blackwell Press. Winant, Howard. 2001. The World Is a Ghetto: Race and Democracy since World War II. New York: Basic Books. Zinn, Howard. 2009. Columbus and Western civilization. In You Are Still Being Lied To, edited by Russ Kick, 263–73. New York: The Disinformation Company.

CHAPTER 18

Immigration Cecilia Menjívar and Andrea Gómez Cervantes

Abstract The United States is often described as a “land of immigrants,” yet not all immigrants are equally welcomed. Today, immigration is a heated topic in political campaigns and conversations, creating divisions, strong feelings, and emotions. The media depicts immigrants in negative, racialized terms dehumanizing their experiences. Such constructs fuel anti-immigration discourses and support laws that push immigrants to society’s margins, making their lives invisible, dangerous, and difficult. Using a constructionism lens, we argue that negative constructions of immigrants as a problem are not representative of immigrants’ experiences or contributions to society. Immigrants contribute to American society through economic, cultural, and religious realms, yet laws and media, through constructions that are reproduced daily through technology, make it difficult for these contributions to be seen and acknowledged.

Immigration is by now well recognized as a “hot button” topic. Perhaps no other subject today attracts as much controversy, debate, and reaction as immigration and immigrants. This in itself is not new, as historically, negative reactions to immigration have ebbed and flowed in the political landscape leading at times to the formation of nativist political parties and at other times to extending a welcoming hand to immigrants. And although the groups that have been the target of heated reactions have changed over time, the debate has remained relatively constant, usually centering on three fundamental questions:

whether immigrants integrate in US society and become “like us”; whether they constitute a public charge and therefore represent a drain on the coffers of the nation; and whether they bring with them criminality or pose a threat to the security of communities and the nation in general. With varying degrees of attention across historical periods, these questions have informed how the country perceives immigrants, how immigrants are represented and constructed in debates, and how the public and policy makers react to these concerns through policies and political acts and actions. 319

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In this chapter we argue that contemporary – mostly negative – constructions of immigration and immigrants, particularly Latinos, do not reflect what immigrants do, how they live, and who they are. However, the negative constructions we see in the media and in public debates obscure important aspects of immigrants’ lives and their contributions to society, and by highlighting derogatory images, often accompanied by alarming rhetoric, policies are created to address the supposed problems that immigrants bring and create.1 As W. I. Thomas and D. S. Thomas (1928, 572) stated, “If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.” In this chapter we will discuss negative constructions and the consequences these have for the immigrants. The impact of negative images of immigrants can be gauged through reactions to immigrants, such as community and individual acts of resistance to receiving newcomers or in general attitudes toward immigrant communities. And even though negative images may simply occur at the same time that stringent anti-immigrant laws are passed, we would like to call attention to the potential effects that negative constructions of immigrants have on the passing of stringent laws. The construction of immigration as a problem in need of fixing leads to the passing of antiimmigration laws, which further cements images of immigrants as a problem in need of solution. The chapter is divided into three main sections. First, we present a brief background of contemporary immigration flows and how we got to where we are, to the increase in the undocumented population that is constructed as a problem. We then discuss the media depictions of immigrants, highlighting potential connections to policy making and laws that have passed recently, followed by the consequences such laws have; we then move to areas that are often concealed in a climate of heightened antiimmigrant narratives: the multifaceted contributions that immigrants make to a wide range of spheres in the US economy and society. We end with a discussion about

changes that can be of benefit to immigrants and to nonimmigrants alike. Our central argument is informed by the theoretical approach of social constructionism or the social construction of reality, first developed by Berger and Luckmann (1966). In their classic work, Berger and Luckmann (1966) sought to understand how knowledge is produced, arguing that knowledge (e.g., understandings of the world) develops out of shared meanings, which are constructed through the interactions and communication that human beings have with others. Thus, individuals do not generate their own understandings of the world in isolation from others. Rather, the meanings people attach to events, places, other humans, and their understandings of the world are constructed through interactions with other human beings in specific social settings. For Berger and Luckmann (1966), reality is defined socially, it is based on subjective (rather than objective) understandings of the world, and it therefore can change according to the social milieu and particular historical moment. In this view, knowledge does not reflect an objective reality but instead reproduces individuals’ constructions of reality. Given that human interaction is key to constructing reality, language becomes an essential element in the construction of reality. We apply these general tenets to an examination of the construction of immigration as a problem and argue that immigrants and immigration are constructed in the media and public through language and terms that often have derogatory meaning. However, these mental representations of immigrants are reproduced so widely and often through media and in public spaces that they become naturalized and they eventually form the cognitive frames that individuals use to make sense of immigration, but also to justify unjust laws and mistreatment against immigrants (Menjívar and Abrego 2012). Through this social construction of the immigrant reality the nation of immigrants becomes a nation that constructs immigrants as a threat and justifies

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their mistreatment through through individual actions.

law

and

Background The media representations we see today and the laws passed are intimately linked to a perceived increase in the undocumented population in the country. Even though there has been an increase, the reasons behind this rise are not simply that more undocumented immigrants are coming in. Rather, through laws passed in 1986 and 1996 in response to “immigration crises,” the undocumented population already in the United States has been unable to engage in the circular migratory patterns of the past (Massey, Durand, and Malone 2002). These laws, responding to political currents and ideological trends, therefore, have directly contributed to the dramatic decrease in circular migration. As a result, the undocumented population grew rapidly from an estimated 3.5 million in 1990 to 6.3 million in 1997 to an estimated 11.3 million today (National Academy of Sciences 2015). These increases correspond to the timing of the implementation of the laws of 1986 and 1996.2 Each piece of legislation passed in 1986 and 1996 called for further strengthening of borders, for increased interior enforcement and for growth in budgets to fund these activities, which has resulted in the hypermilitarization of the border, particularly in San Diego, California and El Paso, Texas. As border crossing became more dangerous and difficult, immigrants (in particular, Latinos) were less likely to return to their home countries. At the same time, the Border Patrol budget continued to increase along with the number of immigrants apprehended. In self-perpetuating mode, this bureaucracy grew substantially, more than any other agency in the federal government, because the more immigrants were detained, the more money the Border Patrol received from the federal government (Massey, Durand, and Malone 2002). Since

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the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) of 1986 went into effect, the US government has spent an estimated $186.8 billion ($219.1 billion in adjusted 2012 dollars) in immigration enforcement, an unparalleled and unprecedented degree in enforcement activity that resulted from new laws and programs (Meissner et al. 2013). This amount equals to fifteen times the budget dedicated to enforcement around the time that IRCA of 1986 was passed and it exceeds by 25 percent the budgets of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), US Marshalls Service, the Secret Service and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Fire Arms and Explosives – combined (Meissner et al. 2013). Thus, the more programs in place to apprehend immigrants crossing the border, the more immigrants were caught and the more the argument was made to channel more resources to these efforts and, thus, the budgets grew as a result. This self-perpetuating bureaucracy, aided by new laws and accompanied by constructed narratives about the threat that the border represents and the crimes immigrants supposedly bring, have contributed to maintain images of immigrants as dangerous. Given the physical and financial difficulty of crossing the border and the dangers it represents, undocumented immigrants stay put and do not travel. Today the majority of unauthorized immigrants (62 percent in 2012) have lived in the United States over ten years (Pew Research Center 2015). Furthermore, the hiring sanctions contained in the 1986 IRCA did not prevent employers from hiring undocumented workers; rather it created a new black market of Social Security and identification cards, and led to the lowering of wages of both documented and undocumented immigrants (Massey, Durand, and Malone 2002). Finally, the authority to declare an immigration emergency led to many dangerous, anti-immigration policies that pushed unauthorized immigrants to the margins of society with dramatically reduced rights and protections.

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Public Views on Immigration in 2015 According to the Pew Research Center (2015), 51 percent of the US population believe that immigrants “strengthen the country through hard work and talents” while 41 percent think of immigrants are a burden, take citizens’ jobs, housing, and health care. These views are further divided according to political party, with Democrats showing more support for immigrants (62 percent) and Republicans having stronger anti-immigration attitudes (63 percent) (Doherty, Tyson, and Weisel 2015). While the majority of respondents believe there is a lot to be done to improve the immigration system, a variety of polling sources show that the majority of the public supports undocumented immigrants who have been living in the United States to stay in the country (72 percent according to the Pew Research Center in 2015, 52 percent according to CNN Poll in the year of 2015, and 60 percent according to ABC News Poll in the year 2015). These beliefs are further divided by age and race (Polling Report 2015). Overall blacks, Latinos, and younger people are more likely to view immigrants positively than whites and those over the age of fifty (Doherty, Tyson, and Weisel 2015). The media plays a fundamental role in shaping such views. The representation of immigrants in the various media outlets has changed over time, ranging from inclusive to less inclusive frames and priority giving to some groups over others. Overall the media serves as both a source and a means to the recreation of reality, which in turn shapes popular views and perceptions (Brader, Valentino, and Suhay 2008; Chavez 2001; Valentino, Brader, and Jardina 2012). Because the United States is a country founded by and composed of immigrants, this ideology permeates discourse and constitutes a core principle of identity for many. Immigrants often blur the lines between the “we” and the “other” that make up a national identity (Chavez 2001). The notion that the United States is a country of immi-

grants gives rise to an ever-present question and struggle to define who belongs and who does not, who deserves and who does not; since its creation the United States has battled over who has access to citizenship rights. Thus, debates of deservingness and the racialization of the immigrant “other” are not new, only the groups have changed over history (see Fitzgerald and Cook-Martín 2014). However, today’s anti-immigration sentiments, disseminated in real time through a vast and sophisticated network of media and technology, intertwined with strong neoliberal policies, create dangerous environments for certain immigrant groups. These media images and messages shape public attitudes and what voters demand of their officials in terms of policies to address this “problem.” Media Depictions of Immigrants The most common anti-immigrant narrative is that of immigrants as a national security threat, an image that has existed since the foundation of the country, as successive groups (e.g., Germans, Catholics, Irish, Chinese, Japanese) have been suspected of posing a threat to national identity and security. In contemporary discourses, the image of an immigrant invasion and reconquest began in the early 1970s (Chavez 2013). However, after 9/11, the need to protect the nation and secure the Mexico–United States border gained a sense of urgency. As such, the US government has targeted foreigners, regardless of legal status, as a national threat (Ewig, Martinez, and Rumbaut 2015), an image that in turn is racialized to target not all immigrants but only those that are constructed as particularly threatening. In today’s context, these groups are primarily Middle Easterners, Muslims, and Latinos. These images in turn circulate widely in the media and public discourses and then feed back to politicians and public officials in charge of designing and passing laws to address this new problem. An effective way to promote the image of immigrants as a threat is through distancing them so much from “us” that immigrants

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are made to appear as less than human. Their dehumanization is fundamental to the portrayal of negative images but also to the anti-immigrant laws that are passed to supposedly address this “problem.” Terms that describe immigrants in various media outlets such as foreigners, illegal aliens, illegals, criminal aliens, rough waters, pollution, and associations with infectious diseases take away real immigrants’ experiences and livelihoods and set the stage for egregious mistreatment through their dehumanization (see Massey 2007). The epithet illegal alien has been particularly effective in erasing the immigrants’ (particularly Latinos’) humanity. The label of illegal alien first appeared in the early 1920s, associating undocumented Mexican newcomers to an illegal status (Ngai 2004). Interestingly, during this time many Mexicans living in US territory had access to citizenship rights, due to the passage of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo at the end of the nineteenth century. During the Great Depression the label of illegal alien was rapidly linked not only to undocumented Mexican migrants, but also to Mexican Americans, the United States–Mexico border, and later Latinos in general (Chavez 2013; Menjívar and Kanstroom 2014; Santa Ana 2002). Asian immigrants also have been historically linked to notions of the alien and depicted as eternal foreigners through images and narratives describing them as “coolies” and “gooks” (Lee 1999). In addition to the illegal alien term, news coverage and public discourse have used a variety of metaphors to depict immigrants as “dangerous waters,” invoking narratives of alarming volumes, floods, ties, and rough seas taking over the American nation (Santa Ana 2002). Immigrants also have been cast as pollutants to local communities (Cisneros 2008; Lee 1999) and as spreaders of infectious diseases (Esses and Lawson 2013). Pictures and news videos of immigrants often show them in disorganized groups, sometimes portraying them as animals that can be hunted, lured, pitted, and put against each other (Santa Ana 2002). In striking contrast, anti-immigrant mobilizations are

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often rendered as narratives of “ordinary” Americans attempting to alleviate a “problem” that the government is unwilling or unable to address (Cisneros 2008). Labels that refer to immigrants as illegals usually equate them with crime, an association that can also be linked to the turn in “crimigration” in the law, by which law has turned immigration violations (which are civil infractions) into criminal acts (see Stumpf 2006). Following this logic, immigrants are often suspected of serious crimes such as murder or rape (Sohoni and Sohoni 2013). Adding to these images, extreme individual cases of violent crimes committed by immigrants are highly publicized, creating a case for anti-immigration discourses (Sohoni and Sohoni 2013). The immigrant criminality is further reproduced in popular TV shows. In his analysis of the popular TV show “Breaking Bad,” Ruiz (2015) describes how Latinos are depicted as villains or drug-lords through hypersexualized characters of the macho stereotype, portraying Latinos as a threat not only to the Anglowhite main characters, but also to their communities. Importantly, however, studies have found that immigrants are less likely to engage in criminal acts and are less likely to be imprisoned than native-born Americans (Ewing, Martinez, and Rumbaut 2015). Indeed, scholars have detected an association between the concentration of immigrants in a neighborhood and a lower level of crime in those areas (Ewing, Martinez, and Rumbaut 2015). Yet, media portrayals and policies continue to criminalize immigrants and immigration as threats to local neighborhoods and the nation (Sohoni and Mendez 2014), highlighting the central role that a social construction of reality plays in how immigration is depicted. Contributing to the threat narrative, other media portrayals of immigration have focused on beliefs of new immigrants lacking the capacity to assimilate into an imagined homogeneous American society (see Huntington 2004). Images of Asian and Latino immigrants maintaining ties to their traditional cultures mark them as “backwards” (Lee 1999). In these narratives the

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United States is depicted as a united nation, with a common culture and identity. One of the most common debates around the threat to this cultural ideal is that of language (Santa Ana 2002; Sohoni and Mendez 2014). English is discussed as a symbol of American identity, and new immigrants are described as unwilling or unable to learn English (Santa Ana 2002). This is the case even when research has shown the rapid progression that immigrants show to speak English and to even stop speaking their native languages the longer they live in the United States. For instance, research has shown that the 1.5 and second generations prefer to communicate in English rather than in their home languages, and after the second generations the mother tongues are more likely to be lost (Rumbaut, Massey, and Bean 2006). An image that cements ideologies about immigrants unwillingness or inability to learn the English language with little basis in reality is the depiction of immigrants’ speech on TV. Even when immigrants speak English well their voice often appears with subtitles on TV (Sowards and Pineda 2013). Although immigrants, including those more likely to be targeted in negative ways in today’s discourse (e.g., Middle Easterners and Latinos) enter the United States through various means including airplanes and airports, overwhelmingly, portrayals with negative connotations focus on crossings of the United States–Mexico border and the illegal acts these embody (Sowards and Pineda 2013). TV shows such as “Border Wars” represent the border as a place of danger and war against those entering the US Patrol agents dressed in military uniform and equipment are shown as the defenders of American values. Militarized images of helicopters, guns, soldiers, drones, and highspeed chases reinforce the need to secure the border (Jones 2014). This is in sharp contrast to what actually happens, as the US government has funneled historically unpresented resources to secure the border in a manner that resembles a war zone (Dunn 1996). In the past twenty-four years the Border Patrol budget grew from $262,647 in 1990

to $3,634,855 in 2014 (“United States Border Patrol” 2014), with most of this funding allocated to hiring agents and fencing the border (Jones 2014). Border Patrol hiring advertisements further promote the threat narrative. In a current hiring ad posted on their website, men and women in military guns and clothes explain their role as “defenders” of the nation and American freedom from “outsiders” that arrive every day, and “do us harm” (US Customs and Border Protection 2015). These images are exacerbated when accompanied by statistics that point to dramatic increases in the number of undocumented immigrants in the country (McConnell 2015). Furthermore, portrayals of immigrants as invaders are usually included in stories of health care and public services. Anecdotes of immigrants coming to the United States only to access “free” health care that is paid for by citizens’ tax dollars are common, although research has found that children of immigrants and new immigrants are less likely to see a doctor than US citizens (García-Pérez 2013), and undocumented immigrants are not eligible for public health services (Huang 2008). Another dramatic example is that of organ transplants. As Chavez (2013) explains, stories of immigrants obtaining organ transplants from national citizens are quite distant from reality. In these stories immigrants are perceived as receiving most of the organ donations and leaving other transplant recipients who are citizens in long waiting lists. Yet, due to federal regulations and informal hospital practices, less than 1 percent of all organ transplants are actually given to those who are foreign born (Chavez 2013). While immigrant men are shown as aggressive invaders, women’s sexuality and fertility is also targeted. Latinas on TV and magazines are hypersexualized and depicted as exotic, hot, “on fire,” and spicy, with promiscuous moralities (Merskin 2007; Roman 2000). While Asian women are often depicted as shy and passive (Lee and Joo 2005), Latina’s fertility levels are shown as alarming and pathological (Chavez 2013). Imaginary of anchor babies are common

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and follow narratives of immigrant women crossing seas and deserts to achieve citizenship by having babies in the United States (Chavez 2013; Huang 2008). The “anchor baby” narrative has fueled anti-immigrant groups’ and politicians’ demands to change the Fourteenth Amendment, jus soli, that guarantees citizenship to those born on US soil (Chavez 2013). It has also promoted closer surveillance and attempts to control immigrant women’s sexuality and bodies (Huang 2008). Although it is a common media image, it would be rather farfetched for immigrant women to plan to give birth to an “anchor baby” with the objective of obtaining a permanent resident card, or “green card,” because given the current immigration laws and their multiple restrictions and obstacles it would take a minimum of thirty-one years for these women to qualify to apply for permanent residence through an American baby born today. Although negative depictions of immigrants are common in media outlets today, there are also some positive views of immigrants in media representations. As Estrada (2015) explains, the two most positive depictions of immigrants (1) emphasize the need for immigrant labor and (2) show immigrants’ social mobility. The first view consists of narratives that overwhelmingly place immigrants as taking the low-paying jobs that Americans would not do. The second image depicts lives of immigrants’ achievement of the American Dream by detaching from their own cultures and languages. In both cases the positive representations of immigrants highlight the immigrants’ social characteristics such as race, country of origin, and class, which, according to Estrada (2015) end up accentuating immigrants’ “otherness.” Similarly, Sohoni and Mendez (2014), looking at media representations of immigrants in Virginia, found that immigrants who are foreign student workers are oftentimes praised for their good work ethic. These immigrant workers often originate in Eastern Europe and Asia and are labeled as “exchange” students or “foreign” visitors. Yet, terms such as illegal or undoc-

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umented are reserved for Latinos, in some cases regardless of legal status. In the same vein, the stereotype of the “model minority” may be viewed as a positive depiction of Asian immigrants. This ideal links Asian immigrants to perceived statuses of high incomes, high educational attainment, good moral standing, and hard work (Lee and Joo 2005). The “hard work, no fun” depiction of Asian families in magazine advertisements and TV characters where Asian immigrants are often shown in business environments or as “nerds,” “math geniuses,” and “no fun” (Lee and Joo 2005; Taylor, Laderth, and Bang 2005; Taylor and Lee 1994) is popular, and Asian immigrants’ personalities are often described as obedient, quiet, or humble (Taylor, Laderth, and Bang 2005). The “model minority” emphasizes a narrative of American assimilation through means of consumption, heterosexism and nuclear family ideal (Lee 1999) and overestimates Asians’ economic position in claiming they have achieved parity with Anglo-whites. However, Asian immigrants come from a variety of twenty-eight countries, range in reasons for migration, poverty rates, legal statuses, educational backgrounds, and family connections in the United States. Indeed, the model minority myth overshadows the struggles that Asian immigrants face while posing high expectations that may not always be met (Kibria 1997; Lee and Zhou 2015). Research (Kim and Sakamoto 2010) has found that not all Asians earn more than whites; rather, age at migration, field of study, and where education is achieved matters. Among Asians, it is the 1.5 generation that earns more than whites (Kim 2015). This image of Asians as the “model minority” also pits immigrant groups against one another, as Latinos are then depicted as undesirable to US society because on average they do not perform on par with Asians, even though they are all immigrants. However, scholars have observed the “hyperselectivity” of those Asians who do perform strongly and often better than US natives, which makes it difficult to directly compare to other immigrant groups (Lee and Zhou 2015).

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Media depictions of immigrants have created a complex, and at times contradictory images of immigrants as a homogenous entity that attempts to destroy the nation (Chavez 2013), but that are also needed for the economy for the work they perform. The strict divisions between “us” and “them” (or “other”) are further legitimated through laws and policies that while targeting immigrant groups are disguised through the language of protecting citizens against external threats and the sovereignty of the nation. Immigration Laws and Public Opinion It is difficult to assess the direction of effect when examining the consequences of negative media portrayals of immigrants and the laws that are passed – e.g., whether the slew of anti-immigrant laws that have been passed in recent years are the result of the public’s negative attitudes which in turn influence policy makers and the laws they pass, or if the laws politicians pass influence the public’s attitudes toward immigrants (Campbell 2012; Soss and Schram 2007). More likely, there is a feedback mechanism that permits the effect to go both ways and reinforce both. Still, it is instructive to examine the laws that have been passed in this context of enhanced anti-immigrant activity and public discourse. Laws have direct effects on immigrants, their families, and communities, as they have significant consequences for immigrants through enforcement mechanisms, but also because they have symbolic meanings (Berkowitz and Walker 1967). The language and images that public officials use to frame immigrants and immigration can directly shape the public’s view of immigrants (Santa Ana 2002). A variety of harsh immigration laws have been passed at various levels of government. The increasingly tight nexus between immigration and criminal law (Inda and Dowling 2013) or “crimigration” (Stumpf 2006) is perhaps most evident in the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA). This law fundamentally transformed life for immigrants –

undocumented, documented, and semidocumented alike, all over the country. IIRIRA and the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA), also of 1996, have radically altered and expanded grounds of exclusion and deportation; retroactively expanded many criminal grounds for deportation; eliminated some and limited other discretionary waivers of deportability that affect even permanent legal residents; expedited deportation procedures for certain types of cases; vastly increased possible state and local law enforcement involvement in deportation through the creation of Section 287(g); and created a new type of streamlined “removal” proceeding – permitting the use of secret evidence – for noncitizens accused of “terrorist” activity (Menjívar and Kanstroom 2014). IIRIRA makes even immigrants who hold legal permanent residence deportable. Furthermore, this law, in tandem with others already in the books, has made possible for undocumented immigrant workers to be charged with aggravated felony for using borrowed Social Security numbers to work. The term “aggravated felony” has been expanded to include a broad array of relatively minor crimes (even misdemeanors) for which immigrants, even those who hold green cards and are documented, can be deported. Media narratives have played an important role as they have mingled with public officials’ narratives to normalize images of immigrants as criminals, setting conditions for additional legislation to rid the nation of these alleged criminals. Federal programs run by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that are meant to round up criminals and terrorists further cement images of immigrants as criminals. Such programs and the rhetoric behind them fuse images of immigrants with criminals and terrorists. Thus, in a self-perpetuating spiral, these enforcement tactics, which are often broadcast in the media and garner the public’s attention, contribute to persuade the public that immigrants are criminals, dangerous, and threatening. In turn, politicians and public officials, always trying to appeal to their constituencies, become more likely

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to propose and pass laws that will address this “problem.” Perhaps the connection between media depictions, public attitudes, and laws passed to address the perceived problems that immigrants create is best exemplified at local levels of government. It is at this level that voters’ attitudes may more directly influence their elected officials into passing laws that affect the lives of immigrants who are already in the country.3 At the same time, state and local-level legislation amplify the effects of federal laws, producing a multiplier effect (Menjívar 2014a). Immigrants in tenuous legal statuses (and their families) experience this multipronged system of immigration laws so harshly that this regime has been conceptualized as “legal violence” (Menjívar and Abrego 2012). The vast technological infrastructure and state bureaucracy at the core of today’s legal regime creates patterns of social suffering for entire groups of people as the comingling of immigration and criminal law leads to a progressive exclusion of immigrants from “normal” spaces and societal institutions. In response to the seeming inaction on the part of the federal government to “fix” the “broken system” of immigration laws, states around the country have introduced multiple bills and laws. In 2006 state legislators introduced 570 bills, enacted 84 laws, and adopted 12 immigration-related resolutions; in 2007 they introduced 1,562 bills, passed 240 laws, and approved 50 resolutions; and by 2009, more than 1,500 immigration bills were introduced, and 222 laws were enacted and 131 resolutions were adopted (Morse et al. 2014). Some of these measures seek to integrate immigrants and facilitate their adaptation (Mitnik and HalpernFinnerty 2010), but most are restrictive and exclusionary (Stewart 2012) with divisive consequences (Steil and Ridgley 2012). It should also be noted that these laws vary considerably from one location to another (see Steil and Ridgley 2012; Stewart 2012). State and local initiatives and laws target an array of issues ranging from penalizing employers for hiring undocumented immigrants, fining landlords who rent to

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individuals who do not have proof of legal residence, and blocking access to a variety of social and public services. As such, these laws directly impact a variety of areas that are fundamental for survival. Their stated purpose is to presumably eliminate the magnet that attracts (undocumented) immigrants and to make the contexts where they arrive so inhospitable that immigrants will self-deport. But as Esbenshade and Obzurt (2008) observe, such laws and ordinances, with a focus on imposing harsh sanctions that target undocumented immigrants, contribute to blur the lines among the different overlapping populations of a group, particularly Latinos. Therefore, such legislation is likely to create conditions for discrimination against Latinos in general, a situation that has led to a concern with current immigration legislation and enforcement among Latinos, regardless of citizenship or legal status (see Lopez, Morin, and Taylor 2010). However, as Møller (2014) argues, such legislative activity is not simply a response to perceived inaction on the part of the federal government to deal with undocumented immigration as the federal government already has significantly intensified its own enforcement strategies through beefing up border and interior enforcement in historically unprecedented levels. This incongruity between perceptions of unwillingness or inability on the part of the federal government, as well as misinformed opinions about immigrants’ criminality, underscore the constructed character of immigration as a problem today. These misalignments also point to the key place that public opinion, largely shaped by the media, has in politicians’ willingness to pass stringent legislation that far from “addressing the problem” end up hurting immigrants, their US-born citizens, and the communities in which they live.

Effects on Immigrants Media constructions, public opinion, and laws that are created to deal with the

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problems that immigrants supposedly bring have enormous consequences for the immigrants. It has been amply documented that an undocumented status, especially among Latino immigrants, has come to be associated with fear, anxiety, and insecurity because of its association with detention and deportation under current enforcement practices (Boehm 2012; Gonzales and Chavez 2012; Menjívar and Abrego 2012). In the long term, the present insecurity and fear of authorities combined with a lack of access to social services (or fear to access services) (Cleveland 2010; Fix 2009) that undocumented (and quasi-legal) individuals experience positions them at a serious disadvantage with relation to life chances. Recent research shows that an undocumented status has consequences through multiple generations, as parents’ undocumented status can affect their children’s life prospects (Bean, Brown, and Bachmeier 2015). As such, in the current anti-immigrant regime, the effects of an undocumented status approximate those of other social markers such as class, gender, race, and ethnicity (Suárez-Orozco et al. 2011; Bozick and Miller 2014; Menjívar and Kanstroom 2014; Massey 2007). Researchers have noted the deeply divergent courses that legal status can have, as it shapes immigrants’ access to educational and job opportunities and to public services, or can lead them to exclusion and marginalization (Menjívar and Kanstroom 2014). Legal status affects employment and wages (Flippen 2012; Hall and Greenman 2015), access to social benefits (Capps et al. 2007), health care (Cummings and Kreiss 2008; Viladich 2012), housing conditions and crowding (McConnell 2015), educational attainment and trajectories (Greenman and Hall 2013; Menjívar 2008), and even friendships and the social lives of immigrants (Bloch, Sigona, and Zetter 2014). But at a more immediate level, the legal regime and the legal statuses it creates can also shape subjective understandings of the self (Gonzales and Chavez 2012; Menjívar and Abrego 2012; Menjívar and Lakhani, forthcoming). Thus, it has been well established

that the legal context that receives immigrants, through the classifications it creates and the implementation tactics it employs, can shape life for immigrants in the short and long term. Today’s enforcement strategies are manifested in the lives of immigrants as a polyvalent force that affects them in multiple ways simultaneously. For instance, Clara, an immigrant in Menjívar’s study in Phoenix, Arizona feared driving, accessing social services for her US-born children, and also being discovered to be working with a fake Social Security number. In one instance, in late 2012 the police stopped her while driving on the freeway and the officer asked her a series of questions to determine her legal status. Without a criminal record, Clara was let go and not sent to ICE detention, but not before she was held by the side of the road while the police officer spoke with ICE. During the time they waited by the side of the freeway, Clara was afraid that her teenage daughter, who was in the car with her, would be sent to a detention center. She described those moments, as well as the days that follow, as terrifying. She was particularly scared because there have been cases in which parents are separated from their children in the course of conducting their daily routines (Menjívar 2014b). Noteworthy, the effects of today’s legal regime and enforcement practices have a spillover effect (Menjívar 2014c) beyond the targeted individuals to their US-born family members and to the communities at large. For instance, also in Phoenix, Josefina (Menjívar 2014b), a legal permanent resident was always careful to carry her “green card” with her because she was afraid that she would be detained and questioned and then sent to detention. As she said: “I fear . . . [that] I will be stopped and deported because now they’re deporting even people who are here legally, just because of how you look!” These narratives reflect the climate of insecurity and fear among Latino – undocumented, documented, semidocumented and even citizens – who have been constructed as a threat and therefore as a target of enforcement strategies.

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In addition, legislative changes at the federal level (exacerbated by state and local-level laws) have had significant consequences for immigrants beyond US borders (Menjívar 2014c). For instance, a shift from a concentration of enforcement exclusively at the border to increased interior enforcement (Kanstroom 2007) has led to historically high numbers of detentions, deportations. The formidable regime today has facilitated approximately 400,000 annual deportations as well as the detention of 429,000 people (in 2011), at a rate of over 31,000 individuals at any one day (Menjívar and Kanstroom 2014). These deportations and forced return migration (connected to today’s enforcement system) have altered life for nonmigrant families in the countries of origin, as returned migrants join families they have not seen in years, remittances decrease, new family members join relatives in the home countries, and in general communities and institutions there must adapt to new flows of return migration (see Medina and Menjívar 2015).

Immigrant Contributions to Society A common misunderstanding is that immigrants do not pay taxes and they overwhelm public services. However, immigrants pay sales taxes when buying items, property taxes when they pay for housing, and when using a Social Security number – whether it is valid or not – taxes are deducted from their paychecks (Hanson 2012). Studies show that immigrants contributed 14.7 percent to the federal Trust Fund in 2009, while only accounting for 7.9 percent of its expenditures, and during the same time native-born citizens have generated a 30.9 billion deficit (Zallman et al. 2013). And after the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, immigrants are no longer eligible for public assistance (Borjas 2002). Although immigrants contribute significantly to the economy, the majority of taxes they generate go directly to the federal government, but states and localities

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are responsible for funding public education and health care for children of immigrants (Hanson 2012). And immigrant children, whether they are documented or not, have a constitutional right to K-12 education. In the face of fiscal austerity, local governments cut budgets and do not receive reimbursements from the federal government. Thus, the concentration of immigrants in particular areas can generate tensions between local governments and the federal government. The economic contributions of immigrants are perhaps best exemplified by their high rates of labor force participation, which have contributed to keep some local economies afloat and to revitalize others. Close to 70 percent of all immigrants are actively participating in the labor force (National Academy of Sciences 2015), a higher percentage than among the native born. This is true even among immigrants with lower levels of education: the lowest educated immigrants have labor force participation rates higher than natives with the same demographic profile (National Academy of Sciences 2015). Due to such high involvement, between 2002 and 2009 immigrants generated a cumulative surplus of $115.2 billion (Zallman et al. 2013). Such high labor force contributions may be the result of immigrants’ age, as they tend to immigrate at prime working ages. This stands in sharp contrast to the rapidly aging native-born population, who has been exiting the labor force and increasing the demand for public services such as health care and residential care (Myers 2007). Adults over age sixty-five are expected to reach 20 percent of the entire population by 2050, while the working-age population – those aged eighteen to sixty – is expected to decrease (Ortman and Velkoff 2014). Immigration represents a prime source of workers to alleviate this discrepancy. Asians are expected to double their participation in the labor force, producing 9 million more workers, while Latinos are expected to account for 80 percent of the total growth in labor force by 2050 (Toossi 2012). As the fastest growing minority groups, Asian and

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Latino immigrants (Brown 2014), will boost the labor force, energize the economy, and increase the nation’s reserves to provide the public services that the native born will increasingly need. Immigrants today are extremely heterogeneous in their labor force composition and thus come prepared to contribute to all sectors of the US economy. They include immigrants at both ends of the spectrum and everything in between, professional immigrants with high educational and substantial work experience as well as immigrants and laborers who take low-paying jobs. In stark comparison with the immigrants of the past, 25 percent of today’s immigrants have a college degree or higher, and also include individuals with lower rates of education than natives (National Academy of Sciences 2015). Immigrants include the engineers and scientists who work in the high-tech industry as well as laborers who harvest food and wait in restaurants. The care sector, which includes nursing homes and health care workers, represents a vibrant niche for immigrant labor. In recent years, US homes have become one of the main spaces that demand immigrant labor. Today, most of the domestic workers, child and adult care workers in the United States are immigrant women from Latin America or Asian countries (Ehrenreich and Hochschild 2003; Hondagneu-Sotelo 1994; Parreñas 2001). As white, middle-class women continue to increase their participation in paid employment outside the home, the work-family tension is often mediated by outside “help.” Importantly, many of the immigrant women who care for older adults and children in US homes leave behind their own families and children. This creates a form of “care chain” where female kin of immigrant women remain as main caregivers of their migrant women’s children while the migrant women become the caregivers of children in the United States and other industrialized countries (Ehrenreich and Hochschild 2003; Parreñas 2001). In addition to significant economic contributions, immigrants serve communities, and participate in institutions and other

spaces. For instance, they have added and reshaped significantly the arts – including aesthetics, literature, comedy, and music, which at the same time represent spaces that have served as vehicles of assimilation, attachment to national origins, depiction of marginalities, and a means of survival in a new society (DiMaggio and FernándezKelly 2010). For example, after 9/11 two main streams of aesthetic ideals evolved within Arab immigrant communities: one emphasizing the Americanization of Arab American identity, the other re-focusing Arab culture and ethnic traditions within American society (Jamal 2010). The first Arab American museum opened in Dearborn, Michigan, in 2005 depicting the political and social contributions of Arab-Americans to US society. Icons such as opera singer Rosalind Elias, race-car driver Bobby Rahal, and White House journalist Helen Thomas are showcased to emphasize positive images that can counter associations of Arabs with stereotypical perceptions of Arabs as terrorists (Jamal 2010). In addition, immigrants have left a mark in all musical genres including hip-hop, pop, salsa, or reggae. Salsa icons such as Celia Cruz or Marc Anthony are well known across the United States. Pop stars such as Pitbull, Jennifer Lopez, Shakira, Enrique Iglesias, and reggae legend Bob Marley have not only created musical styles and empires, but through their music have reached the homes and hearts of all Americans. Immigrants also have infused US cuisine with new spices, techniques, equipment, and ingredients, creating multiple “fusion” cuisines all over the country. Restaurants have incorporated spices and dishes catering to immigrant groups, and “ethnic” restaurants also have incorporated American dishes such as hamburgers and hot dogs in their menus (Gvion and Trostler 2008; Barbas 2003), adding new twists to these “quintessential American dishes.” Traditional foods may be a connection to heritage and culture for many immigrants, but food is also “an exchange of culture and tradition at the most basic level of life” (Bruns 2008). For example, sushi, originally from

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South-East Asia was a method to preserve fish. In the United States, early Japanese immigrants introduced sushi, and opened the first sushi restaurant in 1960. The adaptation of Japanese-style sushi into American cuisine has made almost everything into a sushi roll, ranging from fish, fruits, to even candy (Edwards 2012). The California roll is a popular adaptation of sushi in the United States, with items such as cucumber, crab or imitation crab, and avocado (Edwards 2012). Chop suey, one of the best known Chinese American foods, was popularized first during the Great Depression and later in World War II as it was inexpensive, filling, and fulfilled Anglo-white taste buds (Barbas 2003). Spaghetti, pizza, tacos, tamales, chop suey, or sushi are foods that once were viewed as “exotic.” Today, these can be found anywhere on US menus, increasingly in “fusion” form, such as bulgogi tacos or pupusas with kimchee. Just as immigrants have incorporated many foods, music and traditions to American society, they also have introduced new religions, spiritual practices, and transformed the spaces where Americans gather to pray. The religious landscape that new immigrant flows has created is rich. In 2012 the majority of immigrants identified as Christian or other Christian denomination (61 percent of legal immigrants and 83 percent of unauthorized), Muslims made up 10 percent of the US immigrant population, Hindus 7 percent, and Buddhists about 6 percent (Pew Research Center 2013). Religious institutions represent some of the most welcoming institutions for immigrants in US society, often because immigrants already are members of the religious traditions they come to practice and because they find a welcoming reception in this familiar institution (Menjívar 2003). As such, immigrant participation in religious organizations increases with length of time in the United States (Redstone Akresh 2011). A mix of immigrants’ involvement in churches as well as growing immigrant populations has contributed to a remaking of religious institutions into multiracial/ multiethnic spaces. As church attendance

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among the native born declines, immigrants supply congregations with new members, create new churches and revitalize existing ones, thus reshaping the US religious landscape in significant ways. In response to the expanding immigrant membership, churches today are likely to promote multiculturalism in their congregations (Kivisto 2014). Furthermore, churches, temples, and mosques often provide immigrants with a variety of resources to aid immigrants’ successful incorporation in their new communities – i.e., material and economic aid, job referrals, legal advice – (Menjívar 2003) and organize events to contribute to building communities in local neighborhoods or to supporting global causes (Kivisto 2014). These activities are often guided by immigrants and they promote civic participation. Contrary to media portrayals of immigrants as threats to local and national spaces, recent studies have shown that immigrants serve as a medium to revitalize communities that lack resources and opportunities for social mobility (Ramey 2013; Vélez 2009). Studies show that new immigrants tend to move to neighborhoods of low stability (Martinez, Stowell, and Lee 2010). Immigrants who arrive to disadvantaged neighborhoods often attract families and friends through their social networks, a situation that allows for the establishment of community organizations and institutions and creates sources of economic activity (Vélez 2009). For instance, exiled Cuban immigrants transformed Miami in the 1970s from a resort town into one of the most vibrant cities in the country. In the thirty years from the first large wave of Cuban immigration, Miami had a Cuban mayor and Cubans in Miami had thoroughly transformed the local economy with new businesses that boosted the economy (Fernández-Kelly 2010). Immigrants also are prompt to rebuild communities that may not necessarily be theirs, acting as quick respondents to local emergencies, like disasters. Such was the case after Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005. A high demand for construction jobs to reconstruct the previously

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low-income neighborhoods created a large influx of migration to the city from Central American, Mexican, and Brazilian immigrants both from around the United States and abroad. Although the post-Katrina chaos of a lack of government regulation left immigrants vulnerable to dangerous working conditions, exploitation and chaotic environments (Negi, Cepeda, and Valdez 2013), they continued to work to rebuild the city (Fussell 2009). In stark contrast to media depictions and politicians’ rhetoric, several studies have found that the increase of new immigrants in low-income neighborhoods is associated with the reduction of crime (Vélez 2009; Martinez, Stowell, and Lee 2010; Sampson 2008; Ewig, Martinez, and Rumbaut 2015; Ramey 2013). For example, Vélez (2009) found that, as the number of new immigrant arrivals in Chicago increased, the percentage of homicides in disadvantaged neighborhoods decreased. Similarly, examining the relationship between immigration and crime in San Antonio, Texas Martinez, Stowell, and Lee (2010) found that the growth of the immigrant population overtime was linked to a decrease in violent crimes. As well, the incarceration rates of immigrants has remained lower than among the native born (Ewing, Martinez, and Rumbaut 2015).4 At a more aggregate level, looking at nationally representative FBI data, Ewing, Martinez and Rumbaut (2015) find that as the immigrant population in the United States grew from 7.9 percent in 1990 to 13.1 percent in 2013, violent crime rates during this same periods declined 48 percent. Thus, the often touted association between immigration and crime shows no empirical bases. However, such an association has been the basis for calls to deport immigrants and for laws that seek to keep immigrants out for fear that they supposedly bring crime.

Discussion and Conclusion Historically, immigrants have been constructed as threats to the stability of the

nation, as criminals, and as disease carriers. This is no different today. However, at present, these constructed images, transmitted and disseminated instantaneously through sophisticated technology, give rise to and are accompanied by a vast governmental infrastructure and legal regime that feeds into these narratives to reinforce them in the public’s minds. This creates an exceptionally powerful mechanism that informs how the public sees immigrants, particularly Latinos, and in turn what politicians do, the laws they pass, and how they vote to “fix” this problem. Using the lens of constructionism, we have shed light on this important mechanism, as it fundamentally shapes the construction of immigration and immigrants as a “problem” in need of solutions. We have discussed the negative constructions of immigrants, mostly Latinos, in the news media, the effects that these constructions have, and the important contributions that immigrants make to various institutions and spheres of life that such constructions obscure. Ironically, this backlash against immigrants takes place at a time when immigrants revitalize local economies, contribute significantly to the nation’s coffers, and take care of older Americans – all key activities that could offset the effects if the demographic transition that is unfolding with the retirement of the baby boom generation. Even though we do not argue that such media images directly lead to the passing of laws that negatively affect the lives of immigrants, we want to point to the convergence of various factors – media constructions, laws passed, and public’s opinion – to show the deleterious effects of such images both on the immigrants who are targeted but also on nonmigrant members of society who live thinking that immigrants must be feared. The process we have revealed serves to solidify perceptions of immigrants in tenuous legal statuses as criminals but also to portray them as less than human in the minds of viewers and listeners. This has the effect of normalizing and then justifying maltreatment against immigrants who

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are perceived as lawbreakers (Menjívar and Abrego 2012). As Massey (2007, 14) observes, in the minds of US citizens, undocumented immigrants (alongside sex offenders, drug dealers and those perceived to be lazy welfare recipients) are considered “despised, out-group members.” Massey (2007, 150) warns that this is dangerous terrain: undocumented immigrants “are not perceived as fully human at the most fundamental neural level of cognition, thus opening the door to the harshest, most exploitative, and cruelest treatment that human beings are capable of inflicting on one another.” This is what is happening in US politics as we write this chapter. Making use of toxic language that apparently gains votes, politicians have pushed the conversation around immigration to such negative extremes that it has become difficult to discuss true and humane immigration reform. Today’s rhetoric also has the potentially dangerous effect of further dehumanizing immigrants so that their mistreatment is normalized and accepted in the minds of the public. We hope to have called attention to the constructed nature of the “problem” of immigration so that conversations about true immigration reform can begin to take place.

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Notes 1. Although it is the negative images of immigrants that are associated with negative attitudes, Emily Paredes (2016) observes that even when immigrants are portrayed in seemingly positive ways that images still evoke an othering of immigrants and a separation between “us” and “them.” 2. The number of undocumented reached a peak of 12.2 million in 2007 and declined during and following the Great Recession, and it has remained at the prerecession levels (National Academy of Science 2015). 3. Federal law determines the number of immigrants admitted, but state and local-level laws shape access to goods and services in the states where migrants settle. 4. In recent years, incarceration rates among immigrants have increased (Ewing, Martinez, and Rumbaut 2015). This is due to the close relationship between criminal and immigration law – what some scholars call crimmigation – that has propelled immigrants into the prison system by reshaping immigration offenses into criminal acts (Stumpf 2006; Golash-Boza 2012). Immigrants who have committed small offenses have been re-defined as “criminal aliens,” imprisoned and possibly punished with deportation. The effects of “crimigration” are now emerging in the incarceration rates of immigrants.

Glossary

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CHAPTER 19

Gender Inequality William J. Scarborough and Barbara J. Risman

Abstract In this chapter, we provide a brief overview of gender inequality in contemporary society. We begin by reviewing several theoretical frameworks that have been used to explain women’s subordinate position in society. After a discussion of the historical development of gender theory, we use a gender structure framework to organize contemporary theories into the analytic categories of individual-, interactional-, and macro-level explanations of gender inequality. Next, we illustrate both progress that has been made toward gender equality and the level of inequality that remains, and sometimes has even increased, in three realms: education, paid employment, and the family. We close the chapter by discussing the prospects for a world without gender inequality – stressing the way gender consciousness must coincide with change in interpersonal interactions and organizational structures. A century ago, women in the United States were unable to vote. Most colleges and universities in the country barred women outright or used quotas to regulate the number of women who could enroll. Employment for the few women who chose to work during this period was limited to secretarial or administrative assistant positions. The vast majority of women did not pursue paid employment. Instead, most focused on child-rearing, cooking, cleaning, and managing the domestic sphere in support of a full-time working husband. The feminist movement of the 1960s challenged these traditional arrangements which limited

women’s opportunities. The passing of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act and Title IX of the Education Amendments paved the way for women’s entry into higher education and the labor force. By the mid-1980s, women reached parity with men in achievement of both undergraduate and master’slevel degrees (US Census Bureau 2012) and were entering paid employment at a higher rate than ever before. Today, women outperform men in almost every academic subject at high school and university levels, receiving higher grades and obtaining a greater percentage of college degrees (Buchmann, DiPrete, and

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McDaniel 2008; Perkins et al. 2004; US Census Bureau 2012). Furthermore, women have made tremendous progress in entry into the full-time paid labor force. In 2012, women made up nearly half (47 percent) of employed persons in the United States, with 57 percent of all women participating in the paid labor force, double the percentage of women who worked in the 1950s (US Bureau of Labor Statistics 2014). While the condition of women’s lives varies from country to country, gains in education and paid employment have been observed throughout the world (Charles 2011; Grant and Behrman 2010; McDaniel 2009). Indeed, we have made tremendous strides toward gender equality in the past century. However, progress toward gender equality has been both uneven and unfinished (England 2010). Women remain tremendously underrepresented in most STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) academic programs and careers. Women make up less than onequarter of university engineering majors (Mann and DiPrete 2013) and only 11 percent of employed engineers (National Coalition for Women and Girls in Education [NCWGE] 2012). The percentage of women working in computer science and mathematics-related jobs has actually decreased over the past twenty-five years, with women making up 31 percent of employees in these fields in 1983 and only 25 percent in 2009 (NCWGE 2012). Despite overall gains in women’s employment, a significant gender–wage gaps remains: As of 2012, women’s wages are still nearly 20 percent less than men’s (US Bureau of Labor Statistics 2014). Women remain far less likely than men to occupy the highest-paying jobs with the most prestige and responsibility, constituting only 14.6 percent of executive officer positions at Fortune 500 companies (Catalyst 2013). Most of the gains made by women in upper-level employment have benefited white women, while women of color remain disproportionately stuck in low-level service-sector jobs (McCall 2011; Misra and Murray-Close 2014). Further-

more, there seems to be evidence that the progress toward gender equality that we’ve observed since the 1960s has stalled during the past twenty years (England 2010). The proportion of women in paid employment has actually decreased somewhat since 1999 when it reached a peak of 60 percent (US Bureau of Labor Statistics 2014). Meanwhile, gender inequality in hours spent on childcare and domestic work has changed very little since the 1960s (Bianchi et al. 2012; Bianchi and Milke 2010; Bianchi, Robinson, and Milke 2006; Hays 1996; Hook 2010). Gender remains a paramount structure of inequality in contemporary societies throughout the world. To understand gender inequality, we must first realize that sex and gender are not the same thing. Unlike the term sex, which signifies socially agreed-upon labels for individuals with certain physiological markers, such as penises (male) and vaginas (female) (West and Zimmerman 1987), gender implicates the way social institutions, interpersonal interactions, and individual predispositions are socially organized in ways that privilege one gender (men) at the expense of another (women). A major purpose of gender in today’s society, therefore, is to subordinate women in a way that preserves power and concentrates resources for men (Lorber 1994). The fact that gender identities often correspond to particular physiological characteristics (except for those who are transgender, genderqueer or reject a gender binary) shows that biological differences can be transformed beyond their physical utility to take on social meanings that legitimize inequality. One important way in which gender differences and inequality are maintained is through biological essentialism, the false assumption that differences between men and women are rooted in natural physical differences, such as body-size, strength, genetics, or brain power. When boys choose the name “Sea Monsters” and girls “Barbie Girls” for their soccer teams, as was observed by Messner (2000), parents and onlookers mistakenly attribute this to the

gender inequality

“natural” difference between boys and girls. Yet, where, and more importantly how, did the boys and girls learn what sea monsters and barbies signify in the first place? Children (and adults for that matter), are taught gender-appropriate behaviors and tastes, are immersed in organizations structured by gender, and are rewarded for performing gender in ways that perpetuate difference and inequality. In this chapter we provide a brief overview of gender inequality in contemporary society. We begin by reviewing several theoretical frameworks that have been used to explain women’s subordinate position in society. After a discussion of the historical development of gender theory, we use a gender structure framework (Risman 2004; Risman and Davis 2013) to organize contemporary theories into the analytic categories of individual-, interactional-, and macro-level explanations of gender inequality. Next, we illustrate both progress that has been made toward gender equality and the level of inequality that remains, and sometimes has even increased, in three realms: education, paid employment, and the family.

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inist scholars criticized functionalist notions of sex roles and problematized gender difference by highlighting domestic relations between men and women as a system of stratification (Lopata and Thorne 1978; Stacey and Thorne 1985). This theoretical turn signaled a shift away from a focus on sex-difference to one that examines this difference as a multidimensional system of gender inequality: Gender theory focuses on how specific behaviors and roles are given gendered meanings, how labor is divided to express gender difference symbolically, and how diverse social structures, rather than families – incorporate gender values and convey gender advantages. (Ferree 1990, 867)

There have been several theoretical frameworks developed to explain the mechanisms involved in producing gender inequality. These theories can be organized into three focal categories: individual-, interactional-, and macro-level theories, each of which will be reviewed below. After presenting the different aspects of these theories, we use gender structure theory (Risman 2004; Risman and Davis 2013) as a contemporary framework that syntheses the three conceptual categories.

Theoretical Foundations Early explanations for women’s disadvantage in the workplace and home took the form of a functionalist approach. Parsons and Murdock theorized that the nuclear family, with a working male-head and domestic wife, was the most advantageous and universal in the industrialized economy (Murdock 1949; Parsons and Bales 1955). Functionalist theories emphasized complementary sex roles attached to men and women. Women’s biological role in reproduction provided the logical reasoning to justify their position in the home caring for children and husbands, while men were more amenable to industrial era employment. These early theories did not question the inequality that was implicated by women’s subordination to their husbands. In the 1960s and 1970s a movement of fem-

Individual-Level Theories of Gender Inequality Individual-level theories of gender inequality focus on the formation of gendered selves – the way people identify with masculine and/or feminine characteristics. Socialization is of pivotal importance for the internalization of gendered selves, and few elements are more influential in individuals’ socialization than their parents. Chodorow (1978) argues that the relationship between mothers/fathers and their child are key in the development of nurturant women and agentic men. Mothers have more intimate and caring relationships with daughters that help develop nurturing characteristics and a tendency toward interpersonal attachment. Mother’s relationship with sons, on the other hand, is less close and fosters

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independence and agency. As a result, girls and boys develop antithetical personalities – with girls being more nurturant and boys ascribing to more agentic personalities. While Chodorow focused on the importance of parents in the socialization of individuals into men and women, Bem’s (1993) enculturated lens theory emphasizes the omnipotent influence of the culture we are raised in. According to Bem, in the process of becoming a cultural native – internalizing the norms and ways of life within a specific culture – we also internalize the gendered messages that implicate difference and inequality between men and women. This becomes problematic when individuals inadvertently adopt androcentric cultural practices and worldviews in the process of enculturation. Androcentric cultural norms reinforce men’s privilege over women by reproducing practices and routines which perpetually inscribe men’s dominance. For example, a seemingly innocent cultural practice of men holding doors open for women perpetuates the idea of women’s frailty and dependence on men. As part of becoming a cultural native, individuals are taught to identify with a sex-congruent gender (a feminine female or a masculine male) and in the process adopt a gender schema that guides their behavior and through which they interpret information. The gender schema operates cognitively, shaping the way individuals respond to the appearance and behavior of others in ways that are consistently “gender appropriate.” A gender schema even conditions the attitudes people have toward inanimate objects. For example, individuals associate the color blue with male and pink with female infants, and these colors are part of the way they interpret the actions of babies – viewing males who wear blue as more active and females who wear pink as complacent/gentle. When the process of enculturation occurs in a society with a polarized gender order and where men are in dominant positions over women (androcentrism), people internalize gender schemas that reproduce inequality between women and men.

Omnipresent cultural beliefs about gender can even shape the way we view ourselves as individuals. The widespread stereotype that men are better at math than women, for example, can cause women to assess their personal math competence at lower levels than men, even when test scores and grades are equal (Correll 2001). Using longitudinal data tracking the test scores and gender attitudes of high school students, Correll (2001) discovered that even if girls did not personally believe the stereotype that women are bad at math, they were still aware that many people in society adhere to such beliefs. As a result, the girls in Correll’s study rated themselves as less competent in math than boys who had the same grades and test scores. The detrimental effect of widespread cultural stereotypes on girls’ self-perception is a major reason why many self-select out of math classes. These trends contribute to the shortage of women in the fields of science, mathematics, and engineering. As individuals, our mere awareness of gendered cultural expectations can alter the way we view and evaluate ourselves. People tend to feel more competent when performing tasks that are congruent with gender stereotypes and less competent when involved in tasks that contradict widespread cultural beliefs and expectations. This becomes problematic when we consider that masculine-typed jobs, such as those involving decisiveness and leadership, are the most financially and socially rewarding. Feminine-typed jobs exhibiting nurturance and care, on the other hand, are compensated at a far lower level, suggesting that these jobs are less socially valued (Correll 2001; Foschi 1996). Apart from individuals’ cognitive selfperceptions, another strain of research focuses on biological differences between males and females as the primary reasons for gender differentiation. Evolutionary psychologists such as Michael Gurian (2001) and Leonard Sax (2005) argue that personality-types and emotional temperaments are hardwired into the very biology of women and men. These scholars believe that gender difference is not

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socially constructed, but rather it is the result of the slow-process of natural selection whereby men have become agentic and women became nurturant because it was somehow advantageous during primitive times. Sax argues that gender difference has evolved over time (not so different from how we evolved into walking bipedally) and is now so deeply inscribed within our neurological makeup that personality differences between men and women are the result of natural predispositions. Evolutionary psychologists like Gurian and Sax have been widely criticized for the lack of empirical rigor in their research as well as the implications they draw from rather limited studies. Neuroscientist Lisa Eliot (2009), for example, highlights the fact that an overwhelming number of studies find no difference in the neurological makeup of men and women. Eliot shows how studies claiming to have found explanatory physiological reasons for gender differentiation often fail to consider the way people’s experiences impact the very functioning of their brain and hormones. She uses the term “plasticity” to describe the way individuals’ brains and hormones change in response to their lived experience, explaining that, “every physical feature of the human nervous system . . . respond to life experiences and are continually remodeled to adapt to them” (6). Neurological differences between men and women do not exist independent of society, but rather they are continually shaped by experiences that vary systematically according to our gender. Biological and social forces independently cannot account for the entirety of gender difference. Therefore, understanding the relationship between these two aspects is critical to uncovering how gender difference and inequality is perpetuated. A recent study done by Davis and Risman (2015) used longitudinal data spanning several decades to examine the role of in utero maternal circulating hormones on women’s selfreported masculine and feminine personality characteristics. These scholars found that prenatal SHBG (a testosterone-regulating hormone) was related, albeit weakly, to

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adults’ feminine sense of self. Prenatal hormones were found to be a stronger predictor of masculine personality traits. Yet, the influence of hormones on individuals’ gendered selves was minimal compared to the effect of socialization, measured through respondents’ childhood experiences with parents. In fact, when comparing effect size, socialization had five times the effect as hormones on reported femininity and twice the effect as hormones on masculinity. Davis and Risman’s study is important because it illustrates that while gender identities are mostly caused by social structures, individuals’ bodies may still play a role in personality. Interactional-Level Theories of Gender Inequality A second family of theories developed to explain gender inequality emphasizes the way gender shapes interpersonal interaction. One set of theories, inspired by ethnomethodological and dramaturgical schools of thought, focuses on the way that people perform in ways that are accountable to their gender presentation. West and Zimmerman (1987) introduced the term doing gender to explain how people perform in gender-differentiated patterns which in turn reinforce difference and inequality. A second theoretical tradition emphasizes the way gender operates as a cognitive frame to shape different expectations for men and women (Ridgeway 2011). Stereotypes that attribute competence to men and dependence to women operate to maintain gender inequality. When gender operates as a cognitive status expectation, it often happens “in the background,” such that people are not intentionally treating men and women differently. Nonetheless, cognitive bias results in unfair treatment of women when people are not aware of the stereotypes that shape their actions. West and Zimmerman’s (1987) article “Doing Gender” is the most widely cited article in the field of gender studies. It was groundbreaking during its publication because it broke from the tradition of

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viewing gender as an individual-trait and focused on the way gender is reproduced through the behavior and interactions of people. In their own words, they state “gender is not a set of traits, nor a variable, nor a role, but the product of social doings of some sort” (129). The relatively consistent patterns of behavior associated with men and women can be explained by the way people’s actions are held accountable to their sex category. Unlike sex, the labels of male or female that are assigned to people based on certain biological characteristics, West and Zimmerman use the term sex category to emphasize the “identificatory displays” that are used to signify their sex (127). Because sex markers, such as genitalia and chromosomes, are not readily observable in our everyday lives, the way in which people show their identification with a sex through their clothing, hair-style, and general appearance constitutes their sex category. It is common for one’s sex category to align with their biological sex, but such congruency is not required. West and Zimmerman argued that gender is the performance of behavior that is held socially accountable to an individual’s “sex category.” Whether or not a person’s actions are seen as acceptable depends largely on whether those actions are consistent with what is socially expected given that individuals’ sex category. Behavior that is seen as inconsistent with one’s sex category may be sanctioned, while that which is consistent with our expectations for a sex category are rewarded, reinforced, or merely deemed as normal. In other words, when people do gender they behave in ways that are consistent with normative expectations for men and women – thereby reproducing difference and sustaining inequality structures. The concept of doing gender has been widely used and developed in sociological research to improve our understanding of the way inequality is reproduced. Scholars studying men and masculinity have argued that men’s behavior and identity is held to an ideological ideal, termed hegemonic masculinity. While the specific characteris-

tics of hegemonic masculinity are culturally and temporally specific, they consistently operate to bolster men’s dominant position over women in society (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005). In the United States, the hegemonic form of masculinity can be described as a form of manhood that emphasizes (hetero)sexual conquest, violence, control over women, and the denigration of homosexuality (Connell 2005). The power of hegemonic masculinity is that no man actually lives up to its ideal, but all men are held accountable to behave in ways that aspire to it (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005). Because such a measure of masculinity entails the subjugation of women, its reproduction maintains unequal gender structures. While hegemonic masculinity may form one of the major pillars that maintain gender inequality, recent scholarship has shown that men are increasingly adopting different, less oppressive, forms of masculinity. Through interviews with college students, Anderson (2009) found that as men become more accepting of homosexuality, they tend to adhere more to an inclusive masculinity – one characterized by less peer policing, a weaker emphasis on sexual conquest, and greater acceptance toward women and nonheterosexual men. People are not always cognizant of the way gender shapes their behavior and outlook in the world. Ridgeway (2011), argues that gender inequality remains in today’s society, despite numerous interventions and heightened consciousness of the issue, because it operates as a diffuse status characteristic in the background of social relations, subtly conditioning the way people interpret and evaluate the actions of others in ways that systematically disadvantage women. Using expectation states theory (Berger, Conner, and Fisek 1974), Ridgeway illustrates how interactions between men and women carry the baggage of gendered stereotypes. When limited information about actors is available, people subconsciously organize interactions based upon what they expect given an individuals’ gender. This is problematic because gender is organized as a status inequality that

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benefits men through an association with competence and agency, while disadvantaging women through a cultural association with nurturance, empathy, and dependency. One obvious way that gender, as a diffuse status characteristic, disadvantages women is in the workplace. Because managers are more likely to be men than women (Reskin and Bielby 2005; Stainback and TomaskovicDevey 2009), career opportunities granted by those in power may be susceptible to the cognitive bias that privileges men. All else being equal, managers may feel more comfortable granting a promotion to a man than a woman because of the diffuse status characteristic that men are more competent. Women’s material disadvantage, in terms of resources, opportunities, and power, is both a cause and a consequence of unfavorable status characteristics. Ridgeway argues that women’s historical disadvantage has left them with fewer resources and social capital then men – therefore, the association of women with dependence is less about their natural tendency and more about their access to resources. Nonetheless, because of the unequal arrangement of resources between men and women, stereotypes and expectations are developed in ways that legitimize and maintain material inequality. As a result, status inequalities operate to concentrate opportunity and resources among men while at the same time disadvantaging women and reproducing inequality. Even when material relations shift, however, status inequalities can persist for some time. Women have made tremendous gains in education – where they now outperform men (Buchmann et al. 2008; Charles 2011; Snyder and Dillow 2013), and in the paid labor force (Stainback and Tomaskovic-Devey 2012), yet tremendous evidence remains that cognitive bias continues to disadvantage women in work (Correll, Bernard, and Paik 2007; Goldin and Rouse 2000; Moss-Racusin et al. 2012), school (Chisamya et al. 2012; Spangler et al. 1978), and the home (Legerski and Cornwall 2010). Ridgeway (2011) explains that shifts in the cultural associations tied to men and women lag behind changes in the

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material relations. Once material equality can be achieved between men and women, status differences that result in cognitive bias against women will eventually disappear over time. Macro and Organizational Theories of Gender Inequality Unlike theories of gender that focus on individuals’ gendered selves or the interaction between groups of people, organizational and macro-level theories of gender inequality pay attention to the way that institutions and organizations have structures that position women in disadvantaged roles. Some scholars in this theoretical tradition argue that we can erase gender difference and inequality by re-organizing institutional structures to ensure that men and women are provided the same opportunities and resources (Epstein 1990; Kanter 1977). For example, Rehel (2014) discovered that work-leave policies which allow mothers to remain home for extended periods of time following the birth of a child, while fathers must return to work days after an infant joins the household, perpetuate gender inequality by pushing women to assume the vast majority of childcare responsibilities. When leave-structures are altered so that fathers can take at least three weeks off after the birth of a child, childcare responsibilities are more equally shared between parents. Instead of focusing on how personal levels of masculinity or femininity may influence childcare patterns or how parents’ interactions shape their household responsibilities, Rehel focused on the way institutional structures such as leave policies, shape the opportunities provided to men and women in ways that either perpetuate or challenge gender inequality. One of the earliest, and still extremely relevant, organizational analyses of gender inequality was done by Kanter (1977) in her examination of workplace gender relations at a large corporation in the Eastern United States. At the time of Kanter’s writing, women’s subordination in the workplace was often attributed to their

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lack of drive, their “softness,” or even their controlling behavior. In her book, Kanter argues that gender, per se, has nothing to do with women’s lack of career success, and the reason for women’s disadvantage in the workplace is because of organizational structures that undermine their advancement and cause them to act in ways that are perceived as “bossy” or “controlling.” According to Kanter, when men were located in the same organizational positions as women commonly are, they behave in ways traditionally ascribed to the “bossy” or “controlling” woman. Through ethnographic observation and interviews in a large northeastern-American corporation, Kanter finds that women’s success in the workplace is undermined by their lack of opportunity, their limited access to power, and their numerical underrepresentation. A more contemporary approach by Acker (1990) views organizations as having gendered logics embedded within bureaucratic structures. Instead of workplace structures being “gender neutral,” Acker argues that they are designed in a way that ensures the continued subordination of women – thereby making bureaucratic structures explicitly gendered. To say an organization, or any other analytic unit, is gendered means that advantage and disadvantage, exploitation and control, action and emotion, meaning and identity, are patterned through and in terms of a distinction between male and female, masculine and feminine. Gender is not an addition to ongoing processes, conceived as gender neutral. Rather, it is an integral part of those processes which cannot be properly understood without an analysis of gender. (146)

One primary way that workplace structures privilege men is the fundamental concept of the ideal worker by which occupations are structured upon. Today, employees are expected to work long hours, be available on-call, and prioritize work before all other obligations. Acker explains that the concept of the ideal worker is based upon the priv-

ileged lives of men in our society, “whose life centers on his full-time, life-long job, while his wife or another woman takes care of his personal needs and children” (149). People with caretaking responsibilities for others, still more likely to be women than men, are often unable to fulfill workplace expectations of the ideal worker, encumbered as they are by domestic duties. Modern organizations were first created presuming that workers would have wives. The gendered logic behind the conception of an ideal worker becomes increasingly important when employees are evaluated on masculine-centric measures that privilege men’s ability to focus solely on work. Furthermore, women whose sole focus is on work may suffer from a double-standard whereby they are judged for neglecting their family and home-life, while such considerations do not apply toward male workers (Williams 2000). By pointing out the way that bureaucratic structures can reproduce gender inequality, Acker shows how formal workplace structures are not gender neutral, but have serious implications for the opportunities and rewards available to men and women. When imbued with gendered logics, workplace structures can further disadvantage women. However, when designed in ways that are sensitive to inequalities, workplace structures can actually ameliorate such problems. Ridgeway and Correll (2000) argue that formalized evaluation systems can help temper the effects of cognitive bias among managers who may hold negative stereotypes toward women. In the absence of formalized hiring criteria and a regulated application process, for example, hiring managers tend to assume information about candidates based on cultural stereotypes that view women as less decisive and agentic than men. This disadvantages women in a wide range of jobs, particularly positions in management. By formalizing the hiring process, workplaces specify the requisite qualifications for hire and, in effect, decrease the impact of cognitive bias by ensuring that hiring managers

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draw from relevant application information and not cultural stereotypes when making their decisions. At the organizational level, the deleterious effects of cognitive bias can be prevented by implementing structures that promote transparency in workplace decisions regarding hiring, promotions, and compensation. When workplace structures require that decisions be substantiated with explicit criteria, managers can no longer rely on heuristic shortcuts that draw on cultural stereotypes. Just as workplaces are embedded with gendered logics and bureaucratic policies, they are also imbued with racialized structures that systematically disadvantage people of color. In a study of black male nurses working with mostly white female colleagues, Harvey-Wingfield (2009) revealed that black men in this profession faced “glass barriers” that prevented advancement. Black male nurses were alienated from their white female colleagues who were less warm to someone of a different race/gender than what was typical in the nursing profession. Furthermore, black nurses suffered from negative stereotypes that doctors and patients attributed to them. The black male nurses interviewed by Harvey-Wingfield were often misidentified as maintenance workers or janitors, but never as doctors or hospital administrators. These findings underscore the way race and gender intersect to produce inequality in the workplace, a phenomenon we will explore in more depth later on. The macro-level organizational theories of gender inequality formulated by Kanter and Acker illustrate the ways that organizational structures reinforce gender inequality. While both Kanter and Acker focused on the workplace as a site of inequality, bureaucratic structures and gendered logics operate in multiple contexts, such as through government structures, law, social groups, sports, and media, among several other venues. In the empirical applications section below, we illustrate several institutional factors that reproduce gender inequality in education, work, and the family.

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Gender as a Social Structure Thus far, we have organized the theories of gender inequality into three analytic categories: individual-, interactional-, and macro-level theories. We suggest that no specific level of analysis can alone explain gender inequality, but rather that each sheds light on one particular facet of a multidimensional and complicated social phenomenon. To understand how these various explanations of gender inequality fit together, we use Risman’s theory of gender as a social structure to synthesize previous theories into a multilevel framework (Risman 2004; Risman and Davis 2013). Figure 19.1 illustrates the various components of gender structure theory. The three dimensions of gender as a social structure are the individual-, the interactional-, and the macro-levels of analysis, integrating the previous theoretical traditions outlined above. Within each dimension, material and cultural processes operate to produce gender difference and inequality. Material processes are based upon physical bodies, laws, or geographical locations and how these impact social lives. Cultural processes are ideological or socially constructed notions that orientate people’s perspectives and worldviews. Each component of the gender structure is mutually constitutive and reflexive, such that the material forces in the interactional-level influence and are influenced by the cultural forces at the interactional level. Similarly, each dimension, the individual, interactional, and macro, is interconnected with the other dimensions. A change in one dimension reverberates across other dimensions to alter the gender structure as a whole. At the individual dimension of analysis, Risman depends on scholars such as Bem (1993) to show how gendered identities and worldviews become engrained within individuals through the socialization of cultural norms, beliefs, and cues. The effect of individuals’ bodies constitutes a material process that inscribes gender at the individual level through the influence of prenatal

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Gender as a Social Structure

Individual-Dimension • Gendered Identities and worldviews • Gendered Bodies

Interactional-Dimension • Stereotypes and Expectations • Performance of Gendered Behavior • Material Inequalities

Macro-Dimension • Organizational Structures with Gendered Implications • Widespread Cultural Notions of Gender

Figure 19.1. Gender as a social structure.

hormones, for example, on orientating our gendered identity to align with our physical makeup (Davis and Risman 2015). Integrating previous gender theories that focused on interpersonal relations (Ridgeway 2011; West and Zimmerman 1987), the interactional dimension of gender is also influenced by cultural and material processes. Interpersonal relationships that are shaped by stereotypes, expectations, or scripts exemplify underlying cultural ideologies that condition gender in relationships. As a material process that influences interaction, access to material resources and the effect this has on interpersonal relations, such as household negotiations, can shape the interactions between men and women (Bull et al. 2013; Deer and Doss 2008; Gupta 2007). The third dimension of analysis, the macro, is concerned with group, organization, and institutional structures of gender. This dimension describes how gender inequality can be generated through material bureaucratic structures that disadvantage women, such as mobility structures and minimal access to resources or cultural processes that manifest in organizational philosophies and differentiated work expectations for men and women. A study by Bolzendahl (2014) illustrates how cul-

tural and material forces interact to reinscribe segregation in legislative committees. By examining women’s political participation in Germany, Sweden, and the United States, Bolzendahl found that cultural meanings of gender within each country are inscribed within the organization of legislative committees. In Germany, where there is a polarized cultural conception of gender difference, legislative committees are highly gender-segregated – committees composed mostly of women deal with “people-oriented” issues such as welfare and childcare, while committees made up of men are responsible for “things” such as national defense or financial policy. The cultural meanings attached to gender helped to sort women and men into different committees and the various responsibilities of each committee reinscribes gendered interests and difference. In the remainder of this chapter, we explain gender inequality in the social realms of education, work, and family by utilizing gender structure theory to identify how inequality is affected by multiple social dimensions within each social realm. In our discussion of each social realm, we first provide an overview of trends in gender equality. Then, we explore the individual, interactional, and macro-organizational

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dimensions of gender to illustrate where progress is being made toward equality and where strides toward gender equality are being resisted.

Education and Gender In every region of the world, women’s educational achievement has increased dramatically over the past several decades (Flashman 2013). Globally, the number of women enrolled in higher education reached parity with men in 1990, and in 2006 there were 1.06 times the number of women than men in postsecondary educational institutions (Charles 2011). Yet, most of women’s gains in higher education have been in the industrialized regions of Western Europe and North America. Among the thirty-four OECD countries, a greater percentage of women graduate with a university degree than men: 47 percent of women in these countries will obtain a BA degree, compared to 31 percent of men (OECD 2014). Developing countries in the Global South, regions such as Southeast Asia and subSaharan Africa, on the other hand, continue to report a gender gap favoring boys in both educational enrollment and achievement at all levels of schooling (King and Mason 2001). Yet, research has shown that as schooling infrastructure is developed and educational options become more available, girls perform at levels equal to or greater than boys (Grant and Behrman 2010; Wils and Goujon 1998). Today, the “educational gender gap” in the United States takes on a very different meaning than it did fifty years ago. In 1960, 65 percent of all university degrees in the United States were awarded to men. In 1982 men and women were granted the same number of degrees, and by 2005 nearly 60 percent of degrees were earned by women (Snyder and Dillow 2007). In just fortyfive years, the gender gap in university achievement has reversed and now favors women. This is true for all racial groups in the United States, with women earning

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66 percent of degrees awarded to African Americans, 61 percent of those awarded to Latina/os, and 57 percent of those awarded to whites (Buchmann, DiPrete, and McDaniel 2008). The reversal of the gender gap is also observed in graduate school, with women making up 60 percent of master’s degree graduates and just over half of those awarded PhD degrees in 2010 (Snyder and Dillow 2013). Women’s gains in university enrollment and achievement indicate the declining role of vertical inequality in education – that is, inequality in gross numbers of enrollment and graduation achievement. Yet, women’s gains in university achievement masks important differences in the degrees men and women receive. In contrast to vertical inequality, horizontal inequality refers to “the differences between groups with respect to the distribution over educational sectors, which may leave – even given comparable vertical positions – to unequal opportunities for further training, education, and employment” (Driessen and van Langel 2013, 70). While women have had major increases in educational attainment, there has been little progress in integrating substantive fields since the 1980s (Alon and Gelbgiser 2011; Charles and Bradley 2002). Women are highly concentrated in the academic fields of teaching, health, and the social sector (Vincent-Lancrin 2008). For example, women make up 75 percent of education majors across the thirty OECD countries. Meanwhile, the fields of math, physics, engineering, and computer science continue to be dominated by men. In 1983, women made up 11 percent of engineers and 31 percent of those in mathematics and computer science related fields, by 2009 women made up only 6 percent of engineers and 25 percent of mathematics and computer science employees – indicating that there are fewer women working in engineering, math, and computer science in 2009 than there were in 1983 (NCWGE 2012). Among OECD countries, men obtain approximately three-fourths of college degrees in engineering and IT (Vincent-Lancrin 2008).

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Individual Level Research on education and gender has found that individuals’ sense of their gendered self plays a role in determining their tertiary trajectory. Previous literature has found that self-identified levels of masculinity and femininity significantly predict college major selection. Students identifying as more feminine are more likely to major in the social sciences, education, or health services; while those who are more masculine tend to major in the hard sciences like mathematics, chemistry, and engineering (Leaper and Van 2008; Morgan et al. 2013). At the level of individual cognition, there is also evidence that women are vulnerable to bias in self-assessments due to stereotypes that women are worse than men in the subjects of science and math (Correll 2001). Even when performance is identical, men show more interest and rate themselves as more competent than women in science and math (Catsambis 1994; Correll 2001). Interactional Level Focusing on the interactional level of the gender structure, different expectations between boys and girls help explain some of why girls’ school enrollment lags behind boys in many developing countries. Research from Kenya has shown that the expectations placed on young girls to care for their siblings, parents, and grandparents cause them to drop out of school, while boys are expected to earn money through employment, thereby increasing the expectation that they achieve schooling (Chisamya et al. 2012). Cognitive bias also plays a detrimental role in women’s advancement in the sciences. A study by Moss-Racusin and colleagues (2012) had American university professors in biology, chemistry, and physics evaluate undergraduate applications for a position as a lab manager. All faculty were given identical applications to evaluate, but some applications were attached to a woman’s name, and others to a man’s name. Both men and women professors rated the applicant as less compe-

tent when the application was attached to a women’s name than to a man’s name. All else being equal, women may suffer from persistent stereotypes that foster the notion of men’s greater competence in the sciences (Ridgeway 2011). Macro-organizational Level In some very meaningful ways, institutional change in the field of education has been extremely beneficial for women’s equality. In 1972, the US Congress passed Title IX of the Educational Amendments which prohibited discrimination in college enrollment based upon applicant sex. Prior to this act, universities could lawfully limit the number of women students, and many well-known colleges such as Harvard and Princeton did just that. Title IX removed a major institutional barrier that prevented women from college enrollment. The amendment states that: No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance. (Title IX of the USC 1681 [1972])

Educational expansion has been shown to improve women’s educational achievement across all levels of schooling and in countries around the world. In developing countries where women still lag behind men in educational attainment, government programs like FPE (free primary education) has been shown to improve girls’ enrollment levels (Anzar et al. 2004). Similarly, the expansion of the higher education system in the United States has enabled more women to partake in tertiary education. In particular, the growth of two-year colleges has provided a major boost to women’s achievement of bachelor’s degrees as it becomes more common to attend a local community college for two years before finishing a BA at a four-year institution (Flashman 2013). As the number of two-year colleges more than doubled from 1970 to 2007 (an increase

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from 654 to 1,668 colleges), the percentage of women enrolled in two-year colleges rose to 60 percent (Flashman 2013; Snyder and Dillow 2010). The expansion of higher education, and in particular community colleges, has allowed women the opportunity to obtain associates and bachelor’s degrees who would not have previously been able to.

Work and Gender While the gender gap in education has reversed in recent decades to now favor women, we have seen less dramatic change in the workforce. Despite tremendous gains in gender equality in the paid labor force over the past seventy years, a significant gender gap favoring men remains in employment participation, pay, and representation in management positions. In 1959, American women earned only sixty cents for every dollar earned by men (Misra and MurrayClose 2014). Around this same time, nearly all jobs were completely sex-segregated (Bielby and Baron 1984). During the mid1960s, white men almost never worked with women from any race (TomaskovicDevey and Stainback 2007) and held 91 percent of managerial jobs (Stainback and Tomaskovic-Devey 2009). Today, women make about eighty-one cents for every dollar earned by men (US Bureau of Labor Statistics 2014) and compose a dramatically greater proportion of managers than they did in the 1960s, at 43 percent (Stainback and Tomaskovic-Devey 2009). Yet, workplace segregation remains commonplace along both racial and gender lines. Tomaskovic-Devey and Stainback (2007) find that about 50 percent of all workers would have to change jobs in order for American workplaces to achieve gender and race integration. Despite the fact that there are more women managers today than in previous decades, they remain extremely underrepresented in the top corporate position, making up only 1 percent of CEOs, 15.6 percent of corporate officers, and 6.7 percent of the highest paid positions in

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American firms (Purcell et al. 2010). Certainly, there has been significant progress toward gender equality in the sector of paid employment, yet the gap between women and men remains wide. Progress in paid employment is not only unfinished, but it has also been uneven. Gains made by women have been experienced mostly by white women, while workplace opportunities for women of color have changed little in past decades (McCall 2011; Misra and Murray-Close 2014; TomaskovicDevey et al. 2006). In fact, black and Latina women earn the lowest wages compared to other gender/race groups (Browne 1999; Browne and Misra 2003). These trends point to the importance of understanding how both race and gender intersect as systems of inequality (Collins 2000). While white women experience a gender disadvantage in comparison to white men, they have racial privilege over women of color. Black and Latino women experience both race and gender oppression, resulting in having less workplace authority (Brown et al. 2001) and in being more likely to occupy low-paying service-sector jobs (Aldridge 1999). One of the macro-level reasons for women’s increased presence in the paid labor force and managerial roles has been the expanding service sector (Charles and Grusky 2004; Tomaskovic-Devey et al. 2006). In fact, men’s over-representation in management relative to their population has remained the same since the 1960s, suggesting that women’s gains in management has not come from them taking the jobs ordinarily occupied by men (Stainback and Tomaskovic-Devey 2009). Instead, women’s gains have occurred because the expanding service sector offered increased opportunities for employment in management positions (Charles and Grusky 2004; Stainback and Tomaskovic-Devey 2009; TomaskovicDevey et al. 2006). Managerial jobs in the service economy, however, differ substantially from those in finance or manufacturing in that they come with fewer benefits, lower pay, and are often vulnerable to market fluctuations (Kalleberg et al. 2000). Such trends result in a gendered organization of

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the economy, with white-collar jobs such as finance and real estate being dominated by men (Catalyst 2013; Reskin and Bielby 2005) along with blue-collar jobs in manufacturing (Charles and Grusky 2004), while servicesector occupations are filled with women (Tomaskovic-Devey et al. 2006), prompting many to dub these as pink-collar jobs. The gendered segmentation of the American labor market coincides with similar patterns in authority. While white men are likely to manage people of any race/gender group, women are likely to only manage other women and racial minorities are likely to only manage other racial minorities (Stainback and Tomaskovic-Devey 2009). Furthermore, it is common for white women to benefit from racial privilege and manage other women of color, while women of color are unlike to manage white women or men of any racial group (Stainback and Tomaskovic-Devey 2009). Individual Level The complex patterns of improvement, stagnation, and unequal progress in workplace gender equality coincide with equally multifaceted processes occurring at the individual, interactional, and macro dimensions of social structure. At the individual level, England (2010) explains the “stalled gender revolution” by arguing that personal preferences shape people’s occupational trajectory in gender-appropriate ways. England posits that people’s sense of individualism makes them seek careers that will pay more than what their same-sex parent made, yet because people also hold strongly to notions of gender essentialism, they pursue careers outside of what would be deemed gender appropriate only if there are no other available options. Therefore, middle-class women whose mothers were secretaries end up entering male-dominated occupations in management because there were no other career routes that offered better pay and were female-typed. Workingclass women, on the other hand, could obtain careers that paid more than what their mothers made, while still holding tra-

ditionally female-jobs, such as an administrative assistant. The co-occurring logics of individualism and gender essentialism, England explains, have made it so women remain in gender-appropriate jobs so long as it satisfies their salary goals. More women have not entered blue-collar jobs because these occupations are paid less than secretarial jobs that are more gender appropriate. Despite the fact that the number of blue-collar jobs have tremendously declined since the 1980s, men have not entered administrative/secretarial careers precisely because these jobs are gender-typed as feminine. Men who adhere to hegemonic conceptions of masculinity stigmatize such pink-collar work. Interactional Level Some of the most compelling explanations for workplace inequality stem from the interactional dimension of the gender structure. Hiring discrimination has been found to be a major contributor to gender inequality in paid employment (Bendick 2007; Reskin and Maroto 2010). For example, Goldin and Rouse (2000) used a quasiexperimental design to expose hiring discrimination in symphony orchestras, showing that women musicians received more call backs and were hired more often when a screen was used to conceal the gender of the performer, revealing a male advantage in the cognitive bias of audition judges. Another experimental study by Correll, Bernard, and Paik (2007) found that mothers faced considerable discrimination in hiring. In this study, respondents evaluated applications for a midlevel marketing job. Applications were substantively identical – the only difference being that one contained information that would suggest that the applicant is a mother, while the other did not. Respondents recommended mothers for hire 47 percent of the time, nearly half the rate of nonmothers, who were recommended for hire 84 percent of the time. Additionally, respondents recommended starting salaries for mothers that were, on average, $11,000 less than nonmothers. In a real-life

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application of these findings, Correll and colleagues also performed an audit-study, submitting the application resumes to jobads. Nonmothers were called back more than twice as often as mothers. These findings provide strong evidence that women, and mothers in particular, face a disadvantage in workplace entry. Macro-organizational Level As with education, macro-level changes in US legislation were paramount in promoting gender equality in the paid labor force. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 states that: It shall be an unlawful employment practice for a labor organization – 1 To exclude or to expel from its membership, or otherwise to discriminate against, any individual because of his race, color, religion, sex, or national origin; 2 To limit, segregate, or classify its membership or applicants for membership, or to classify or fail or refuse to refer for employment any individual, in any way which would deprive any individual of employment opportunities, or would limit such employment opportunities or otherwise adversely affect his status as an employee or as an applicant for employment, because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. These laws, known as Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO), made it illegal to discriminate against women in workplace decisions. Furthermore, the federal government set up the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to act as a regulating agency for companies with more than fifteen employees. The passing of Title VII and the establishment of the EEOC are widely seen as a watershed moment for women’s movement into the labor force which, combined with Title IX that removed discrimination in school enrollment, was pivotal in sparking the tremendous gains in workplace equality we have observed since the 1960s in the United States.

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Yet, not all macro-level forces are beneficial. As noted earlier, workplace structures that limit women’s mobility and access to power can reinforce gender inequality. In a study of a large grocery store chain, Ransom and Oaxaca (2005) found patterns of stark gender segregation in initial job placement. The positions men were placed in offered greater opportunity for promotion and mobility into better paying managerial jobs, while the positions women were placed in provided few mobility opportunities. Such differences in mobility are common in many occupations, where (mostly white) men tend to ride a steadily moving “glass escalator” into career advancement (Budig 2002; Williams 1992) while women remain trapped on a “sticky floor” job that offers little in terms of mobility (Purcell et al. 2010).

Gender and the Family Having reviewed trends in gender inequality in education and paid labor, we now turn to an examination of gender and the family. As was the case fifty years ago, women in heterosexual marriages throughout the world still do the majority of household chores and childcare (Breen and Cooke 2005; Hook 2010; van der Lippe and van Dijk 2001). In fact, American women today are putting in more time toward childcare, at 13.7 hours per week, than they did in 1975 when mothers spent an average of 7.3 hours per week performing childcare (Bianchi et al. 2012). Yet, there have also been major strides toward equalizing domestic labor, particularly in childcare. Fathers are taking a larger role in childcare today than they ever had before. In 1960, mothers spent four times as many hours taking care of their children as fathers, whereas in 2010, mothers spent twice as many hours (Bianchi et al. 2012). While mothers still carry the majority of childcare responsibilities, men’s hours of childcare has increased threefold since 1965, from 2.5 hours per week to 7.2 hours per week (Bianchi et al. 2012). Disheartening findings, however, reveal that there

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are important differences between fathers and mothers in the substantive content of childcare (Rehel 2014). Mothers usually do caregiving activities by themselves and these often consist of more routine activities such as hygiene, packing/providing meals, and physical care (Craig 2006; Fuligini and Brooks-Gunn 2004). Fathers, on the other hand, spend more of their childcare hours in tandem with mothers and typically engage in more recreational activities, taking the role of playmate or coach (Coltrane 2004; Coltrane and Adams 2001; Shaw 2008). Previous scholars have argued that the way couples negotiate housework provides insight into power inequalities (Davis and Greenstein 2013). This is primarily because nobody particularly enjoys doing housework (Shelton and John 1996; Sullivan 2013), therefore individuals with more power than their partner exercise it to avoid doing domestic chores. Unfortunately, trends in the gendered distribution of housework suggest persistent power inequalities between men and women that manifest in women currently spending nearly twice as much time on housework than men. There has, however, been some progress toward equality in household labor since the 1960s – the number of hours women devote to housework has fallen dramatically while men’s has risen substantially. Between 1965 and 2011, the number of hours men spent on housework per week more than doubled, from 4.4 to 9.8. Meanwhile, the average hours spent per week on housework for women fell by almost half during this same time period, from 31.9 hours to 17.8 (Parker and Wang 2013). Most of this change occurred between the 1960s and the mid1980s. In fact, since the 1990s we have observed little change in men’s housework contributions, while the downward trend previously observed for women’s housework has slowed substantially (Kan et al. 2011). Individual Level Individual-level beliefs play a large part in perpetuating gender-appropriate tasks

in the family. When heterosexual couples adhere to essentialist notions of gender, they are more likely to organize household labor and childcare in traditional ways that burden women with domestic tasks and prioritize the careers of men (Gaunt 2006; Legerski and Cornwall 2010). Gaunt and Scott (2014) further expanded on the way individuals’ identity can foster gendered household relations, finding that the more mothers value and identify with motherhood, the more likely they are to “gate-keep” access to childcare – actively monopolizing childcare at the expense of fathers’ participation in child-rearing. Material relations between couples can also play a role in housework and childcare. Fathers who work more and have a higher income provide less childcare time (Gaunt 2005; Hook and Wolfe 2012). On the other hand, when mothers work more hours and earn more money, they tend to do more housework in order to compensate for their time away from the family (Tichenor 2005). Interactional Level Spousal negotiation is pivotal in determining the way household chores and childcare are shared. At the interactional dimension, men’s expectation that wives will bear the domestic burden is related to more traditional family dynamics (Gaunt 2006). Yet, another important factor influencing household arrangements has do with opportunity costs. If one spouse has more earning potential than the other, it makes economic sense for that individual to focus their energy on earning an income while the other partner can support through taking care of the domestic tasks. Due to the persistent gender–wage gap, this type of logic usually results in women taking on domestic tasks, yet Gupta (2007) finds that when women earn high incomes, their domestic burdens are relieved somewhat by more supportive husbands. Beyond the relative resources of couples, other scholars point to the persistence of cultural practices as a sustaining force of gender inequality in household

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labor. Reviewing time-use diaries in multiple countries, Kan, Sullivan, and Gershuny (2011) attribute the stalled progress in housework equality to the gender-differentiated tasks men and women perform in the home. Women continue to perform the bulk of routine domestic labor, such as cleaning, cooking, and laundry. While men’s overall time spent one housework has increased since the 1960s, most of this increase has been in nonroutine tasks, such as do-ityourself projects or shopping. As a result, when men and women do housework, they are reproducing gender inequalities because these arrangements place the largest burden on women. Interactions between wives and husbands can just as easily reduce gender inequality in childcare and housework as it can increase it. Sullivan (2006), documenting the historical trend toward gender equality since the 1960s, argues that an increase in women’s consciousness of gender inequality has motivated them to be more persuasive with their male partners in demanding an equitable division of household labor and childcare. The allocation of domestic tasks is verbally negotiated between couples. Women who are cognizant of gender inequality are better able to argue for an equal division of household labor. Another interesting finding from Sullivan is that women who use negotiation techniques in their careers tend to have a more equal sharing of childcare and housework because they employ those skills in discussing the allocation of domestic duties with their partner. Macro-organizational Level The domain of the family has not been affected by federal regulations to the same degree as education and paid employment. Instead, cultural macro-level forces player a large part in shaping the way gender structures family life. The increase in time spent on childcare observed for both mothers and fathers since the 1960s and 1970s is attributed to a cultural phenomenon described by Hays (1996) as intensive mothering. As women continue to succeed in

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the labor force, they acquire the responsibilities and around-the-clock pressure that comes with participation in a competitive labor market. Yet, employed mothers remain encumbered by expectations and responsibilities to provide extensive attention and care to their children. At the same time, the circumstances for raising children have changed – mothers have to jockey for enrollment at the best day-care centers, compete for their child’s participation in extracurricular activities, and stay up to date on the most recent recommendations for raising successful children (Hays 1996). As a result, mothers today are even more involved in their children’s lives than they were fifty years ago when the vast majority of mothers did not perform for-pay work at all. Despite women’s increased labor force participation, women in contemporary society continue to face intense social pressure to put the needs of their family before their career aspirations. Through interviews with women in New York City, Damaske (2011) demonstrates this point, by illustrating how women feel the need to frame their career decisions in terms of how it is beneficial for their family. Women with full-time jobs justified their workforce participation by explaining that their family relied on their income. Even women with high-earning husbands emphasized the importance of their salary in supplementing the household income, underscoring that their decision was driven by a desire to do what’s best “for the family.” These accounts show that even as record numbers of women are entering paid employment, they remain encumbered by social pressures that their decisions should be driven primarily by what’s best for their family, an ethos that does not equally apply to husbands (Williams 2000).

Conclusion: Plans for a Gender Utopia Our overview of gender inequality in education, employment, and family reveals that we have made substantial progress toward gender equality, but that progress is

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unfinished and uneven. Women have made major gains in education, with more women graduating college today than men. Yet, women remain vastly underrepresented in most STEM fields. In the workforce, women are employed at higher rates than ever before and are making tremendous headway in occupying top-leadership positions. Still, most of the progress toward gender equality in employment has been experienced by white women, while black women and Latinas remain concentrated in low-level underpaid jobs. In the family, women still provide the vast majority of childcare and housework hours, despite the fact that men’s time spent in these activities has increased dramatically since the 1960s. Up to this point, most of the strides toward gender equality have occurred through the increased education and employment of women. Meanwhile, women’s normative attachment to the family remains persistent, while men’s family contributions have increased only somewhat over the past fifty years. If we are to ever realize a true “gender revolution,” we must place greater emphasis on increasing men’s role in the domestic sphere (Goldscheider et al. 2015). This means altering structural supports (parental leave at work, for example) in order to foster the involvement of fathers just as much as mothers. It also means a coinciding cultural shift where men assume moral responsibilities for childcare and housework. By increasing men’s participation in the home, we can chip away at the social expectations that women are primarily responsible for family well-being. With men sharing the domestic load, women will no longer be encumbered by social pressure to be family focused (Damaske 2011) or be disadvantaged due to stereotypes that mothers are not committed in the workplace (Correll, Bernard, and Paik 2007). Women have made tremendous strides in the past fifty years, but now it’s time for men to take action that reflects a commitment to gender equality and familial support. In addition, workplaces must not only realize all people are caretakers at different moments of their

lifecycles, but also that cognitive bias that disadvantages women and people of color can be reduced by workplace policies that require formalized evaluation on specified criterion. Change is slow, and sometimes two steps forward is met with one step back. Yet, the more we talk about gender, make it visible, and become conscious of it, the more we are able to alter our everyday actions and the social structures we live in to better facilitate a gender-equal society (Lorber 1994; Sullivan 2004). Sullivan (2004) emphasizes the importance of gender consciousness in making strides toward equality. As people become aware of the way gender operates as a structure of inequality, they can alter the way they do, or rather, undo, gender (Deutsch 2007). Sullivan explains, When individuals do gender within a couple relationship, they do it as part of a dialectic process, which involves both an interpretation of the other partner’s gender consciousness and an interaction with their respective doing of gender. (Sullivan 2004, 216)

Through gender consciousness, we can begin to recognize gender inequality when it occurs in education, employment, and the home. Workplaces can become more gender conscious by monitoring segregation and discrimination (Bielby 2000). In the home, heterosexual couples can improve their awareness of the way patterns in domestic labor may reproduce gender inequality. Men’s gender consciousness can motivate their household contributions – creating a gender-equal environment that lessens women’s practical and affectual domestic burdens. One sign of gender change in contemporary society is the increasing presence of individuals who reject a binary gender categorization in some way. These are individuals who do not dress or behave in ways that are discernibly masculine or feminine. While there has been little research on this topic, it is clear that gender nonconformity challenges the gender order by removing the gender-consistent frames that people

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typically rely on to perceive and interpret behavior. For example, a gender nonconforming person in a women’s restroom may elicit a minor panic from other women in the restroom because they cannot determine if that person is in the (gender) appropriate place. In this example, the organizational structure of restrooms based on a binary conception of gender is challenged when the gender of an individual is indiscernible. As a result, restroom users may sanction the individual who is nonconforming by questioning the legitimacy of their presence or glaring at them disapprovingly. Gender nonconforming individuals upset social expectations in everyday settings that extend far beyond the use of restrooms. In many cases, simple interactions become impossible when one person cannot use the gender of another to interpret behavior. Such instances illustrate the widespread reliance we have on gender to structure our everyday lives. By rejecting gendered presentation and behavior, nonconformists are subject to the scrutiny and oppression of others who maintain that persons should be accountable to a single (not both or neither) gender. While there are very few people who fall into the category of a gender nonconformist, their presence illustrates how the gender structure is changing in contemporary society by challenging the binary separation between the conceptions of women and men. In this chapter we have highlighted multiple theoretical explanations of gender inequality and used the framework of gender as a social structure to synthesize these theories and integrate the multiple dimensions of gender as a system of stratification. Change can begin at any level of the gender structure. Macro-level change has been particularly meaningful through federal legislation. Yet, individual gender consciousness can also instigate major change in relationships. A feminist perspective from one partner can translate into interpersonal relations that reduce gender inequality. In tandem, individual consciousness and interpersonal relations can alter macro social structures. When consciousness-raising is

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practiced widely, it can take the form of a social movement and instigate dramatic social change. The feminist movement of the mid-twentieth century played a major role in improving women’s access to education and employment. As individuals became more aware of gender inequality and the way it is sustained, they organized and demanded change. This change spurred women’s educational and workplace achievement, but it did not have such dramatic effects on men’s behavior. A new social movement, one that encourages men’s gender consciousness, may be needed to finish the goal of gender equality.

Glossary Biological essentialism The false assumption that differences between men and women are rooted in natural physical differences, such as body-size, strength, genetics, or brain power. Doing gender The way people perform in gender-differentiated patterns which in turn reinforce difference and inequality. Gender Implicates the way social institutions, interpersonal interactions, and individual predispositions are socially organized in ways that privilege one gender (men) at the expense of another (women). Gender schema A cognitive frame that shapes the way individuals respond to the appearance and behavior of others in ways that are consistently “gender appropriate.” Gendered selves The way people identify with masculine and/or feminine characteristics. Hegemonic masculinity While the specific characteristics of hegemonic masculinity are culturally and temporally specific, they consistently operate to bolster men’s dominant position over women in society (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005). In the United States, the hegemonic form of masculinity can be described as a form of manhood that emphasizes (hetero)sexual conquest, violence, control over women,

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and the denigration of homosexuality (Connell 2005). The power of hegemonic masculinity is that no man actually lives up to its ideal, but all men are held accountable to behave in ways that aspire to it (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005). Horizontal inequality Differences in the distribution of groups across comparable sectors of work and/or education which may result in inequality in access to resources and opportunity. Plasticity Describes the way individuals’ brains and hormones change in response to their lived experience. Sex Signifies socially agreed-upon labels for individuals with certain physiological markers, such as penises (male) and vaginas (female).

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NCES 2007-017. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. 2010. Digest of Education Statistics 2009. NCES 2010-013. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. 2013. Digest of Education Statistics 2012. NCES 2014-015. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. Spangler, Eve, Marsha A. Gordon, and Ronald M. Pipkin. 1978. Token women: An empirical test of Kanter’s hypothesis. American Journal of Sociology 84(1):160–70. Stacey, Judith, and Barrie Thorne. 1985. The missing feminist revolution in sociology. Social Problems 32(4):301–16. Stainback, Kevin, and Donald TomaskovicDevey. 2009. Intersections of power and privilege: Long-term trends in managerial representation. American Sociological Review 74(5):800–820. 2012. Documenting Desegregation: Racial and Gender Segregation in Private-Sector Employment Since the Civil Rights Act. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Sullivan, Oriel. 2004. Changing gender practices within the household: A theoretical perspective. Gender and Society 18(2):207–22. 2006. Changing Gender Relations, Changing Families: Tracing the Pace of Change over Time. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. 2013. What do we learn about gender by analyzing housework separately from child care? Some considerations from time-use evidence. Journal of Family Theory & Review 5:72–84. Tichenor, Veronica. 2005. Maintaining men’s dominance: Negotiating identity and power when she earns more. Sex Roles 53(3):191– 205. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, 20 USC 1861 (1972). Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, 20 USC 1861 (1972).

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CHAPTER 20

Sexualities and Homophobia Catherine A. Gildae

Abstract Historically, social norms have emphasized procreative sex within the context of a stable union, most often marriage. While homosexuality and other forms of nonprocreative sex have long been viewed as deviant, they have not always been outlawed. As sexual behaviors became increasingly linked to people’s identity, new measures were introduced to restrict so-called deviant sexual expression. This connection between sexual behavior and identity gave rise to homophobia as well as to tightening restrictions on sexualities, particularly female sexualities. Homophobia takes many forms, and beginning in the 1950s in the United States, public policies were created granting explicit permission to fire federal employees on grounds of “sexual perversion.” As US society has shifted its views about sexuality and normative sexual practices, research on sex and sexualities has evolved. Problems, however, continue to exist in the areas of sexualities, most notably for those with female, non-gender-conforming, adolescent, and/or black and brown bodies.

Introduction The term “sexualities” is frequently conceived as referring to the range of human sexual behaviors. It is important for our examination to look beyond sex itself and consider how Michel Foucault (1978) examined sexualities as historical constructs. That is to say, sexualities are the interaction of bodies and ideas, norms and history. Furthermore, informed by Judith Butler (1990), we also understand sexualities as open to

reconstruction and reinvention; they are fluid and performative. Sexualities thus encompasses not only the body, but also the mind, society, and social norms. Within a social problems context, we expand this list further to include a discussion of identities, sexual acts, orientation, regulation, and the representation of the sexual or erotic. Throughout history, sexualities have been regulated through formal and informal means. Current examples include the fact that in the 1950s a person could be

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fired from their job if it became known that they were homosexual; suspicion alone was enough. Social location, physical body, and cultural context determine the sanctions for deviating from the norms of sexual expression; those more privileged in society have greater ability to avoid negative sanctions. For example, so-called Boston Marriages in the nineteenth century, in which two unmarried women lived together, sometimes served to conceal a homosexual relationship. The “marriages,” however, were only available to women with sufficient economic means to live outside the confines of male financial power and protection. Homosexual relationships, the use of contraception, and obtaining or performing an abortion each have, to varying degrees, been prohibited by criminal law, religious law, and social mores. Despite the recent decriminalization of homosexuality and the legalization of contraception, abortion, and same-sex marriage, there remains strong social opposition from a vocal minority to sexualities that deviate from marital, same-race, heterosexual, and procreative sex. As a discipline, sociology has been fairly silent on the topic of sexualities. Sociology has been influenced by the other social sciences, and society in general, in the move to include, or exclude, sexuality studies. Janice M. Irvine (2014) posits that research on sex is frequently regarded as dirty work – stigmatized, marginalized, unimportant. Scholars conducting research on sex and sexualities face funding challenges, job insecurity and scarcity, and roadblocks by institutional review boards. These challenges explain the comparative scarcity of sociological scholarship on sex.1 The culture of the discipline and of sociology departments creates constraints for sex and sexualities researchers. According to the American Sociological Association, sexualities as an area of study emerged within sociology only in the early twenty-first century. Funding and employment opportunities are significant challenges, as is a graduate student’s ability to find a mentor in the area of sexualities. Sexualities research is

a marginalized endeavor, often conducted either by those who have already proven themselves experts on other topics, or by those willing to remain on the margins of the discipline. Challenges from outside the department include university-wide obstacles. According to Irvine, “While university practices shape the careers of scholars and teachers, they also shape and constrain what knowledge can be produced about sex” (654). Sexualities research continues to be largely interdisciplinary drawing heavily on biomedical, public health, legal and social-scientific research. As a result, in the following sections a multidisciplinary approach will be taken in understanding the various social problems associated with sexualities and homophobia. Academic inquiry initially focused on deviance and morality, not on a deeper understanding of sexualities (Irvine 1994; Seidman 1994). The Kinsey Reports on human sexual behavior in the late 1940s and early 1950s precipitated much of the change in the sociological understanding of homosexuality (Kinsey 1948, 1953). When sociologists William Simon and John H. Gagnon (1967) inquired about studies of the female homosexual that address issues other than when she is “acting out her deviant commitment,” they discovered that there are virtually no such studies. It wasn’t until 1973 that the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its list of mental illnesses and psychiatry began to understand homosexual persons outside of that classification. During the 1970s, growing awareness and mobilization around rights for employment, housing, and the freedom to enter into same-sex relationships marked a shift in the academy. Since that time there have been more studies on sexualities, but they are still fewer than studies in many other specializations. Academic areas, such as gay and lesbian studies, have treated gays and lesbians as subjects. Sociology, by contrast, has tended to treat them as objects (Irvine 1994). This objectification means that gays and lesbians, conceptualized as “the other,” are studied only in reference to the normative group. The researcher’s voice

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trumps that of the researched, both in the questions asked as well as in the conceptual interpretation and data analysis.

Why Sexualities? Sexualities is an important area for consideration because it permeates the human experience and is tied to many areas of social life, as well as to other institutional and individual-level social problems. To speak of sexuality in the singular is to deny the very essence of human sexual expression, which is that sexualities are a corporeal social construction, intimately and always connected to the body of the individual and to historical and social circumstances (Seidman 1994). Sexualities, in the plural, in all the many varieties, is the starting point for an examination of social problems because of the societal tendency to view normative sexuality as coupled, straight, white, adult, “vanilla,” married, and so on. Sex is frequently viewed as static and unchanging, bad, or at least largely suspect and dangerous (Rubin 1984). Viewing sexualities in the plural acknowledges the wide range of human sexual expression and challenges the primacy of any one, valid form. Sexualities as plural broadens the understanding of human sexuality beyond the narrow confines it was once held in, and is still conceived.

Homophobia Related to sexualities, but with its unique concerns, is the social problem of homophobia. Phobias by definition are irrational fears. Homophobia is a fear of homosexual persons, but also the fear of being perceived as homosexual. It can be asserted violently, through hate crimes, but is often expressed subtly. According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, approximately 20 percent of single-bias violent incidents reported in 2014 were motivated by gender identity (1.8 percent) or sexual orientation (18.6 percent).

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Subtle forms of homophobia include asking a female if she has a boyfriend or husband, for example, thus conveying a bias, an assumption of heterosexuality. Homophobia is intimately tied to gender role socialization, and specifically to constructions of masculinity. Hegemonic masculinity is a collection of gender practices supporting the legitimacy of patriarchy, the dominance of men, and the subordination of women. Among other things, hegemonic masculinity is decidedly heterosexual, with the sexual domination of women by men. Homonegativity and heteronormativity are tied to homophobia as potential embodiments of the prejudice, but they are not the same thing. Homonegativity refers to the acceptance of negative social attitudes toward homosexuality. Heteronormativity connotes the expectation that everyone is heterosexual and that social interactions and social institutions are structured around heterosexual norms. Homonegativity and homophobia are quite often internalized, leading to gays and lesbians remaining in the closet. In other words, the pervasiveness of negative conceptions of homosexuality can discourage people from being open and honest about their homosexuality. Similarly, someone who is “out” may distance themselves from the gay community in order to avoid being stigmatized. One interpretation for this type of behavior relies on Erving Goffman’s (1963) notion of stigma, specifically the idea that people will hide or conceal a spoiled identity from others. Homophobia is its own issue but is also deeply embedded in other social problems related to sexualities. As will be discussed in subsequent sections, homophobia is a variable in problems related to families, racial and socioeconomic inequality, crime, and education.

Theoretical Foundations Theories of sexualities are rooted in the Western classical tradition of natural law. Both the philosophical and the theological branches of natural law offer a conceptual

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framework that has defined normative sexual relations for centuries. Plato, Aristotle, Saint Augustine, and Saint Thomas Aquinas often based their thinking on the principles of natural law. Later theorists draw on more contemporary understandings of biology, but remain rooted in the biological determinism associated with natural law. Specifically, sexual behaviors that are not procreative were considered deviant and even investigated to determine their cause. Today, sociological theorists and critical and queer theorists shed new light on sexualities and offer significant challenges to biological interpretations posited by natural law. A Natural Law Perspective on Sexualities The natural law tradition has profoundly shaped Western social and moral philosophy. Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225–74), considered to be among the greatest of theologians and philosophers, wrote about the role of natural law in Summa Theologica (Aquinas 1948). In Aquinas’s view, natural law is a set of prescriptions for life, while human law is a set of proscriptions on behavior. Natural law philosophies inform our deliberations, and even our unconscious thoughts, concerning questions about sexualities. Natural law asserts that there are several basic goods including the sanctity and goodness of human life, and the integrity of self and marriage.2 Marriage is particularly important given that, “Natural law valorizes the male-female relationship in a special way, as the foundational relationship for bearing and raising children, and the old natural law emphasized the husband as the ruler of the household” (Eskridge 1997, 511). Natural law traditions underscore the role that biology plays in determining the appropriate gender and sexual roles of women and men in society. Men and women are understood as complementary not only in regard to biology but also in regard to purpose, temperament, and behavior. The reproductive organs are evidence of this complementary design and perceived gender differences are viewed as natural and eternal. Homoerotic behavior is regarded as

problematic because it violates the design of the human person (the “parts don’t fit”). In light of this belief, all homosexuality ought to be condemned and any political support of such relationships or families, should be resisted. While the contemporary Christian interpretation of the Creation supports the natural law belief in the complementary nature and roles of women and men, the early Christian writings of the New Testament are substantially more negative in their treatment of sexuality and marriage. Natural law based on these writings favors asceticism and abstinence rather than a positive view of sex and sexuality. Marriage is not seen as a moral good but as a last resort for those unable to curb their carnal passions. Sexual intimacy between same-sex partners is problematic because it lacks procreative possibility and is deviant because the couple lacks complementarity. It may seem that a married heterosexual couple unable to bear children would be considered deviant, but natural law views the sexual intimacy of the couple as unitive through the mingling of their complementary sexual organs. As a result, there is no possibility for same-sex couples to participate in unitive and potentially procreative acts, even if married. Sociological and Queer Theories The majority of sociological studies on sexualities are informed by the symbolic interactionist perspective that emphasizes identity and subjectivity. Scholars look to the work of Erving Goffman and G. H. Mead in examining the development of the social self. This emphasis on identity is antithetical to queer theory, which aims to problematize identity and the labels affixed to sexualities. In other words, rather than examine sexual identities queer theorists encourage discourse on sexualities and the range of human sexual expression. Sociological studies initially focused on patterns of conventional sexuality, and later on those of homosexuality and other deviant practices. Critical traditions in sociology and in other fields have arisen in response

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to the dominant and elite perspective – the largely male, privileged, and heterosexual approach that makes up the canon. Feminist theory, critical theory, and postmodernism/poststructuralism emerged and questioned assumptions about the nature of society and of relationships between persons. Starting from a less privileged position, the critical theorists brought their own lived experiences, as women, racial and sexual minorities, and otherwise marginal people, into dialogue with the dominant discourse, thus challenging existing beliefs about sex and sexualities. Critical theoretical bases for examining sexualities include theoretical and epistemological challenges by Patricia Hill Collins and Dorothy Smith. Collins (2000) critiques male Eurocentric truth claims, and (re)introduces the subjectivity of the social theorist. According to Collins, “black feminist thought addresses ongoing epistemological debates in feminist theory and in the sociology of knowledge concerning ways of assessing ‘truth’” (221). Women, nonWesterners, and people of color have been treated as objects, rather than as subjects in their own right. They have been objectified, ignored, or forgotten. Collins’s articulation of standpoint theory is important in considering and weighing sexualities from a critical perspective; standpoint theory demands that the narratives, stories, and voices of the marginalized be the primary data. Like Collins, Smith calls for women to be central in the discourse on sexualities. Collins says of Smith, “[She] identifies the need for a new starting point for sociology, one rooted in the actual experiences of people as they go about their lives rather than in the ideological constructs of theory inherited from sociological traditions” (Collins 1992, 75). In changing the starting point and prioritizing women’s voices, bodies, and experiences, Collins and Smith dramatically change the sexualities discourse. Collins challenges the representation and de-/sexualization of women’s bodies. White women have been de-sexualized, stripped of their sexual agency. “According to the cult of true womanhood that accompanied

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the traditional family ideal, ‘true’ women possessed four cardinal virtues: piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity. Propertied White women and those of the emerging middle class were encouraged to aspire to these virtues” (Collins 2000, 73). Women of color are seen in stark opposition to this model of true womanhood; they are instead treated as objects of sexualization. They are viewed as archetypes of Jezebel, the welfare queen (where both are over-sexed), the matriarch (emasculating) and the mammy (maternal, nonsexual) (Collins 2004). A theory of sexualities that privileges women’s voices, that takes narrative, or storytelling, as essential data, and that engages their lived experiences, has the potential to address some of the shortcomings of the previous approaches. Narrative, unlike other data sources, is tied to wisdom and lived experience; it is subjective and empowers the storyteller. Steven Seidman (1994) argues that queer theory is important for the future of sociology because it shifts the center of sociological knowledge and considers previously ignored or marginalized starting points. Queer theory is more accurately understood as a challenge to theory than a theory itself. It claims as central to the development of Western society that which has largely been taboo: sex. Rather than taking capitalism, secularization, or class stratification as central conceptualizations, queer theory views the creation of sex and sexuality as fundamental in social history. “Perhaps,” states Seidman, “the classical sociologists’ silence on ‘sexuality’ is related to their privileged gender and sexual social position” (167). The social sciences have long linked sex, gender, and sexuality in what is viewed as the “natural order.” Queer theory is different in its approach to sexualities. “Queer theorists view heterosexuality and homosexuality not simply as identities or social statuses but as categories of knowledge, a language that frames what we know as bodies, desires, sexualities, identities; this is a normative language that erects moral boundaries and political hierarchies. Queer theorists shift their focus

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from an exclusive preoccupation with the oppression and liberation of the homosexual subject to an analysis of the institutional practices and discourses producing sexual knowledges and how they organize social life, with particular attention to the way in which these knowledges and social practices repress differences” (Seidman 1994, 174). Queer theory disrupts the sexuality binary of male and female and sees it as occurring along a spectrum, much like sexologist Alfred Kinsey found in his examination of sexual behaviors in the mid-twentieth century. Every theoretical perspective makes contributions to knowledge, and it also has its own deficiencies. To view sexualities from a natural law perspective, for example, has stark implications for anyone engaging in sex outside of married, heterosexual sex. In this perspective, even masturbation is considered deviant and is not included in many sex education curricula. Symbolic interactionism examines identity, but neglects issues concerning a full consideration of the origins of the labels. Concepts such as stigma explain behavior, but the critical and queer theories expand the consideration beyond people who are white, able-bodied, straight, young, etc., and make a case for the centrality of sexualities. However, these theories serve more as a critique than as an interpretive framework for understanding sexualities in society.

Methodological Considerations There are three primary concerns when it comes to sexualities research: access to subjects, a multidisciplinary and critical understanding of sexuality, and the language used to frame the examination. Access to respondents typically requires clearance from an institutional review board (IRB) as well as contact with the population of interest. Researchers without existing connections to respondents who are members of marginalized groups, and without firsthand knowledge of their sexualities, may have limited access. Overcoming access barriers

requires a thorough examination of stereotypes about what constitutes sex and sexualities, for example about who is homosexual or at what age someone becomes sexually active, and getting respondents to candidly disclose. The use of computer-assisted survey design as well as shifting social norms reduce the stigma of talking about sex for many respondents. The Internet increases access further, but comes at a price, namely that while more people may be willing to answer sensitive questions about sexualities, the digital divide prevents marginalized people from being equitably represented in the data. Overlooking people by design, for example by neglecting lower-class homosexuals, and due to the data collection method, can significantly limit understanding of sexualities, skewing heavily toward a middle-class data set. The IRB may be reluctant to grant permission to examine sensitive areas, such as teenage sexuality, as well as fear for the safety of the researcher if s/he is examining deviant groups such as sex workers. A true understanding of sexualities must be accomplished within the context of biomedical science, law, public health, and other disciplines. Because there are few available sociological studies of sexualities, drawing on interdisciplinary work is key to the success of any critical examination. The work being done outside of sociology may be used to inform the work within, but crossing disciplinary boundaries has its own challenges. Each discipline has its own history, language, and culture. It is only relatively recently that cross-disciplinary conversations have emerged and many scholars have not been trained to seek outside information. Understanding the law, physiology, and public health will require researchers to go beyond their training and learn a new language, to read and comprehend the available data. The language of studies of sexualities is also complex. In order to understand researchers must employ categories and terms familiar to them. Informed by the critical and queer perspectives they should also be aware that labels are limiting in that

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they are incomplete descriptions and used differently by different people. Drawing, for example, from queer theorists, sociologists would do well to “view heterosexuality and homosexuality not simply as identities or social statuses but as categories of knowledge, a language that frames what we know as bodies, desires, sexualities, identities; this is a normative language that erects moral boundaries and political hierarchies” (Seidman 1994, 174). The official questionnaire of the US Census, for example, is fraught with problems of language and identity. The form asks respondents about their relationship to each of the children living in the same household, allowing possibilities such as biological child, step child, and adopted child. For same-sex couples who have children together in their current relationship the options available on the form may not match their lived experiences – the biological child of their partner is neither their biological, step-, or adopted child and respondents are left to answer according to their own judgment (Baumle and Compton 2014, 99). Similarly, the respondents are unable to define their relationships or identity in a consistent manner from survey to survey. For example, Census data about samesex couples could only be imputed in 2000, and, recoded same-sex couples to unmarried in 2010, citing the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). Not until 2020 will same-sex couples be counted as such. The advocacy group the National LGBTQ Task Force, has pushed to “queer the census,” allowing respondents to volunteer their sexual orientation with the designation that fits them best. The goal of the LGBTQ Task Force is to get better data about how many people identify as homosexual. Queer theorists would reject this increased visibility because it reinforces the importance of the identity designations.

The Role of History in Understanding Sexualities and Homophobia Social problems associated with sexualities and homophobia must be framed in histor-

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ical context. In this section we review key historical moments and their connection to contemporary understandings. Many of the current calls for restrictions on adolescent sexuality, women’s bodies and reproduction, homosexuality, and sex education, are tied to age old concerns about maintaining the morality of society. Changes in Laws, Policies, and Social Attitudes In 2015 a legislative battle was waged in the US Congress over the federal defunding of the women’s health organization, Planned Parenthood. The debate was intimately tied to social regulations of sexualities, a fight that has its roots in the purity battles of the nineteenth century. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, laws prohibiting abortion and restricting the use of contraception were enacted but not strictly enforced. The passage of the federal Comstock Law in 1873, which criminalized sending contraceptives and abortifacients through the mail, led to an uptick in the legislation of the morality. Appropriate sexuality was narrowly defined in these legal battles as marital and procreative. Wealth and privilege allowed a small percentage of women to circumvent these laws because they had access to private doctors, while those without means were limited to the public clinics and other health services. These restrictive laws continued into the early twentieth century. By the 1950s most similar legislation implemented in the wake of Comstock had been repealed. Connecticut, however, had an absolute ban on contraceptives, without making an exception even in the case of a pregnancy that threatened the mother’s health. “The statutory prohibition on the use of contraceptives even by married persons was accepted by many as a legitimate exercise of the police powers of the state” (Roraback 1989). Legal thinking around the role of the state in regulating morality was about to shift in favor of the creation of a right to personal sexual privacy. In May 1958 the legal cases that would lead to the US

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Supreme Court case, Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), began making their way through the lower courts. The marital status of the plaintiffs and the ban on contraceptive use (rather than on manufacturing or sale) were significant details because the courts looked to the role of law in the private lives of married couples, which had long been seen as deserving some protection from state intrusion. The outcome of Griswold not only gave married couples legal access to contraception, it also gave them the constitutional right to sexual privacy. In the decades that followed there was an expansion of reproductive and abortion rights to all individuals, whether or not they were married. Prior to these changes the risk of pregnancy acted as a strong negative sanction, largely keeping chaste those unprepared to raise a child. Additionally, the fear had been that reliable contraception would remove the risk of pregnancy, thus promoting wantonness among the unmarried and severely limiting population growth, to the detriment of society. Along with the expansion of reproductive rights, and of the availability of reliable and legal contraception, and abortion, which impacted sexuality for heterosexual couples, there were social movements afoot for those who did not identify or behave as heterosexual. In the 1950s people lost their jobs based only on the presumption that they were homosexual, let alone if they were caught engaging in homosexual behavior (Chauncey 2004). Sexual behavior was now presumed to be both one’s identity and one’s character, and as such those who engaged in deviant sexual acts, or who had such proclivities, were not to be trusted. According to Yale historian George Chauncey, in the mid-twentieth century, “homosexuals were . . . systematically denied their civil rights: their right to free assembly, to patronize public accommodations, to free speech, to a free press, to a form of intimacy of their own choosing. And they confronted a degree of policing and harassment that is almost unimaginable to us today” (11). The years leading up to the formation

of the gay rights movement were characterized by excessive scrutiny and regulation of so-called sexual deviants. Social norms around marriage and reproduction were quite repressive, and people who did not marry and have children were frequently viewed as selfish and with suspicion. The key moment in the gay rights movement in the United States was the Stonewall Rebellion that took place in the summer of 1969. The Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in Greenwich Village, New York, was a gathering place for lesbians, gay men, crossdressers, and other gender nonconformists. Police routinely raided such places but on the night of June 17, 1969, the crowd resisted and overwhelmed eight officers. The following evening people gathered and were ready to resist the police should they raid the Inn again. Stonewall marked the moment when a broad and diverse community began to work together toward ending the entrapment, harassment, and brutality of homosexuals by police. Borrowing language from the sexual revolution and civil rights the name of the homosexual movement shifted from Homophile to Gay Liberation in the 1970s. The early struggles focused on equal rights in employment and on “coming out of the closet.” Chauncey (2004) and others argue that “coming out,” that is disclosing one’s homosexuality to family, friends, and neighbors meant they could no longer claim to not know any homosexuals. The 1960s and 1970s were a time of openness, change, and freedom for sexualities in general. This era, however, came to a halt during the early 1980s as more conservative values predominated and AIDS began to manifest itself. Chauncey (2004) describes the societal reaction to the onset of AIDS: “Fear of contagion prompted a new wave of discrimination against gay people in medical care, housing, and employment. Even in cosmopolitan cities like New York, many heterosexuals became afraid to use the same phones or water fountains that gay men used, and in a handful of smaller cities, protests by parents forced schools to expel children with AIDS” (41). Much of the

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progress toward gay acceptance was undone before an epidemiological understanding of the disease became commonly accepted. The early cases of children who had contracted AIDS revived old fears and associations of homosexuality with pedophilia. As it became clear that AIDS was spread through sexual contact and the sharing of hypodermic needles, the condemnation of immoral behavior and lifestyle escalated. Once again the gay rights movement had a clear focus. AIDS education and advocacy became the primary initiatives as gay rights groups sought federal funding to research and treat AIDS and endeavored to humanize those afflicted. Advocating for employment protections, health care, AIDS, and housing took center stage. By 1993, in Hawaii the first sympathetic ruling in a legal case on same-sex marriage case was reached. Baehr v. Lewin (1993) marked the start of the contemporary marriage equality movement. The Supreme Court of Hawaii ruled in favor of legalizing same-sex marriage. But before any samesex marriages could take place, the state constitution was amended by the legislature and popular vote to clarify that marriage is legally the union between one man and one woman. Most state equality groups, such as Mass Equality in Massachusetts, continued to focus on employment and housing discrimination reforms and put in place any legal protections they could secure for the growing number of queer families. While the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), had defined marriage for federal purposes as the union of one man and one woman, states could decide for themselves how to define marriage. Within a few years, advocacy groups began to look at the states without a ban on same-sex marriage in order to find a test case for legalizing same-sex marriage. In 1999, the Vermont Supreme Court ruled, in Baker v. Vermont, that same-sex couples could not be excluded from the rights, benefits, and protections afforded by Vermont law to married opposite-sex couples. Rather than making same-sex marriage

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legal, the Court deferred to the legislature to act upon their ruling. The result was the creation of a new legal status called civil unions for same-sex couples. All of the state level rights and benefits of marriage are granted by civil unions. The push for marriage access was a disputed goal within the movement and was an affront to the work done by earlier generations. The couples in these test cases were selected for their conformity and heteronormativity, replete with house, children, pets, and the caring for aging parents. In Lawrence v. Texas (2003) the US Supreme Court struck down all remaining laws that criminalized homosexual sodomy. According to the Court, “The liberty protected by the Constitution allows homosexual persons the right to choose to enter upon relationships in the confines of their homes and their own private lives and still retain their dignity as free persons.” Decriminalizing homosexuality did not lead to the acceptance of same-sex marriage, but it did continue to break down legal distinctions between married and unmarried persons around the right to sexual privacy. Citing several landmark cases, the Court held that a right to privacy includes the right for consenting adults to engage in sex, even if it is considered deviant or immoral. In their dissent, Justice Antonin Scalia, Chief Justice William Rehnquist, and Justice Clarence Thomas explicitly worried about the possibility of a lower court ruling in favor of same-sex marriage citing the Lawrence decision: “Today’s opinion dismantles the structure of constitutional law that has permitted a distinction to be made between heterosexual and homosexual unions, insofar as formal recognition in marriage is concerned. If moral disapprobation of homosexual conduct is ‘no legitimate state interest’ for purposes of proscribing that conduct, ante, at 18; and if, as the Court coos (casting aside all pretense of neutrality), ‘[w]hen sexuality finds overt expression in intimate conduct with another person, the conduct can be but one element in a personal bond that is more enduring,’ ante, at 6; what justification could there possibly be for denying

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the benefits of marriage to homosexual couples exercising ‘[t]he liberty protected by the Constitution’” (2003, at 604–5 Dissent § V). In fact, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court (SJC) included Lawrence in the list of cases supporting same-sex marriage within the Commonwealth. In 2003, the Massachusetts SJC ruled in favor of the plaintiffs in Goodridge v. Dept. of Public Health. Unlike the Vermont case, the SJC did not defer to the legislature to craft a solution. The US Supreme Court denied petitions to intervene in the issuing of marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Marriage licenses were issued in Massachusetts beginning in 2004 and have continued to be issued to resident samesex couples meeting the requirements for civil marriage in the Commonwealth. Massachusetts, the SJC felt, should not offer marriage to couples who reside in states where their union will be void, as it would cause issues of comity. In 2008, Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick signed a bill to repeal the 1913 statute that had prevented out of state couples from seeking a Massachusetts marriage license if their home state would not recognize the union. For years, women and men in the gay rights movement struggled against the heteronormative conformity required by society regarding gender expression and sexual freedom. Marriage, as the focus of the gay rights movement raises a number of questions about that conformity. Unlike the era preceding marriage equality, the push was to expand the narrow definitions of sexualities and to break open, or “queer,” the sexual norms. Evident from the history of the regulation of sex and sexualities is that, as French philosopher Michel Foucault (1978) observed, sexualities are created through discourse. In other words, talking about sexualities and the boundaries of normative and deviant acts or people, creates the sexualities. Laws were enacted to prohibit deviant sexualities, and to privilege normative ones through marriage. In Lawrence and

the cases leading up to it, judges debated the meaning of sodomy and whether its prohibition is constitutional. The discourse of the legislators and of the Court changed the way sexualities are understood. The women’s movement, the gay rights movement, and the sexual revolution expanded societal approval, or at least reduced disapproval, of a wider array of sexual behaviors and identities. In the case of same-sex marriage and sexualities there is reason to view marriage suspiciously, namely because it is a conformist goal.

Connections with Other Social Problems Sexualities and homophobia are not isolated phenomena, they are intimately tied to a host of other social problems including problems of families, inequalities, crime, health, and education. The problems in each of these areas overlap and intersect. Families Concerns over sexualities in families frequently focus on the role of parents in socializing their children properly and on child-rearing by same-sex couples or homosexual individuals. Many of the social problems associated with families are also connected with homophobia. Not only are black and brown women and their bodies regulated, as previously discussed, so too are their families. At the intersection of race, sexualities, and families is a debate over tradition. “Situated in the center of family values debates is an imagined traditional family ideal. Formed through a combination of marital and blood ties, ‘normal’ families should consist of heterosexual, racially homogeneous couples who produce their own biological children . . . This monolithic family type is actually supported by government policy. It is organized not around a biological core, but a statesanctioned, heterosexual marriage that confers legitimacy not only on the family structure itself but on the children born in this

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family” (Collins 2000, 47). This definition of family is meant to regulate morality and penalize people who deviate from sexual conventions. Those who approximate this family form are rewarded with privileges, rights and benefits, primarily through marriage, and sexuality outside of it is subject to negative sanctions including job loss, criminal penalties, and other forms of discrimination. Bans on interracial marriage and same-sex marriage were aimed at restricting sexual interactions deemed socially problematic. On the one hand, traditional marriage offers advantages and protections, such as potential tax benefits, survivor benefits, and social status; on the other hand, a group of sexual minorities that has a history of fighting conformity now faces domestication, or “the replacement of lesbian cultural categories and concepts with more mainstream categories” (Shapiro 1999, 20). While focused on lesbian identity and culture, this concern also applies to other sexual minorities and deviants. Where the law has crafted a remedy, such as marriage, there is less of an opportunity for the queering of sexualities, challenging the dominant paradigms about intimate relationships and questioning the norms. Other social problems related to families and sexualities center around the socialization of children. Families are a key source of values and norms and so when it comes to social control they play a major role in the sexuality of minors. Fathers are commonly believed to be enforcers of chastity in their daughters (Gonzalez-Lopez 2004). Mother’s communication about sexual behavior and norms appear to be key influencers on adolescent sexual behavior, particularly in reducing the riskier types of sexual behaviors such as unprotected sex (Bersamin et al. 2008). Parents are often the earliest teachers of sex education and the quality of the information they convey about sex depends heavily on factors such as their own education (Byers, Sears, and Weaver 2008). Social learning theorists often point to the lack of a same gender parent as cause for concern as the child will lack a proper role model.

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Though this fear is more pronounced with fatherless boys than with motherless girls, there is concern nonetheless about families lacking a male or a female authority figure (Bos et al. 2012; Davis and Friel 2001). There is also a concern that not modeling sexuality “correctly” puts boys at risk of becoming gay, particularly as a result of having only female parent(s) present. Another social problem worth examination is the connection between homophobic religious beliefs and children and adolescents. The association between religious belief and homophobia is declining, but still present. According to research by the Pew Forum (2015), “Among Catholics and white mainline Protestants, roughly six in ten now express support for same-sex marriage. Support for same-sex marriage among black Protestants and white evangelical Protestants remains lower than among other religious groups.” Age is the most significant predictor of shifting attitudes, with younger people being more tolerant. However, approval of same-sex marriage may not translate directly into support for homosexuals. The role of parental attitudes, whether influenced by religion or other ideological beliefs, is significant because of gay youth’s increased risk of suicide and running away from home (Trevor Project 2015). Parents of LGB youth may experience discomfort, known as “parental coming out,” when they must manage their own identity and decide where, when, and how they reveal themselves as a parent of a LGB child. Parental coming out may be an impediment to accepting gay youth as some parents worry about what their new identity says about them, as parents, and about what others will think of them (Fields 2001). Parents may question their role in their child’s sexuality, or they may become advocates or allies of their child’s sexuality (Broad, Crawley, and Foley 2004; Broad 2002). Groups such as PFLAG (Parents, Friends and Family of Lesbians and Gays) encourage advocacy including the telling of coming out stories for parents. However, not all parents aspire to be advocates and some mourn the loss of

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the vision they had for their child’s future (Broad 2011). Running through these family-related social problems are the connections between gender and sexuality, sexuality and sex education, and problems that arise as a result of family rejection and identity re-formation. Family rejection that leads to a young person running away from home can also lead to risky forms of sex, such as prostitution. Parents who do not understand or who are uncomfortable with same-sex safer sex practices, for example, may be unprepared to educate their adolescent about sex in a meaningful way. Sexuality plays out in challenging ways both for LGBT adolescents, who are discovering and solidifying their identity, and for their parents, who may find their own identities challenged on learning about their children’s homosexuality. The results of these problems range from health concerns, such as contracting STIs (sexually transmitted infections), to an increased risk of suicide, when parents reject their children for coming out as homosexual. There are also problems for society if families fail in their charge to educate and socialize the next generation about sex and sexualities. Inequalities Sexualities and their associated social problems arise in the context of other identityrelated concerns such as gender, race, and socioeconomic status (SES). One must take an intersectional approach to grasp the connections between sexualities and gender, race, and SES because they cannot be fully disentangled from each other. To thoroughly consider poverty, for example, it is necessary to navigate difficult dialogues about race and sexuality, and similarly to examine race-based civil rights one must discern the connections between gender and race, as well as sexualities. Connecting family and poverty to concerns about sexualities is not always obvious. For example, Tanya McNeill (2013, 831) states, “The federal government’s emphasis on abstinence-only sexuality education

has been a key aspect of its regulation of poor women’s sexuality for over thirty years. Welfare policy has always been a racial project that regulates sexuality, race, and gender and imposes heteronormative (white, marital, monogamous, heterosexual, and middle-class) familial standards on poor women.” With this goal of promoting normative, marital sexuality was not hidden. According to Wade Horn, Assistant Secretary for Children and Families, Department of Health and Human Services, “when Congress passed historic welfare reform legislation in 1996, it had three goals: replacing welfare with work, decreasing the number of children born out of wedlock, and promoting marriage” (Horn 2001). Policy makers examine the difference in wealth between married and unmarried couples, but their analysis falls short in that those seeking a spouse do not consider the poor to be viable marriage partners (Edin and Kefalas 2005; Cherlin 2009). In addition to public policy that pushes poor women to marry their way out of poverty, that reinforces beliefs about the promiscuity of poor women (Fields 2005), and that imposes penalties on women for giving birth while on welfare, there is the issue of the invisibility of lesbians and gays. Poverty policy focuses on the heteronormative family and ignores those who depart from it. This is evident in the discourse about absent fathers as well as in stereotypical belief that gays and lesbians are not in need poverty relief. A focus on gender leads us to consider the role of sexualities in the proposed Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). The earliest version of the ERA in 1923 read: “Men and women shall have equal rights throughout the United States and every place subject to its jurisdiction” (Francis, n.d.). After some revision the amendment passed both houses of Congress and went to the states for ratification in 1972. It failed by three states, but the contribution to the debate over same-sex marriage is significant. Social debate over the ERA pointed to growing concerns about gender roles and to a fear of “possible homosexual takeover” (Cott 2000,

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213). George Chauncy offers further explanation of the role that homophobia played in the failed Amendment: “After the rise of the women’s movement and gay movement in the 1960s and 1970s, the opponents of both linked them as much as many of their participants did. The specter of ‘homosexual marriage’ was part of what doomed the battle to ratify the [ERA] . . . Some of [the opponents] most effective arguments warned that the ERA would not just end sex discrimination but would also challenge the very notion of difference between men and women by rendering unconstitutional the legal recognition of such differences” (Chauncey 2004). The resistance to expanded roles for women, to greater gender equality within marriage and in society, and to a growing gay rights movement prevented ratification of the ERA. The ERA not only concerned gender equality and homosexuality, but also interracial marriage. Despite the original legislative intent of the ERA fifty years after it was introduced, the Yale Law Journal in 1973 pointed (negatively) to the possibility that same-sex marriage would become available with the passage of the ERA. “In light of the frequently asserted claim that the Equal Rights Amendment was designed to prohibit sex discrimination to at least the degree that the Fourteenth Amendment presently prohibits racial discrimination,” the author writes, “Loving would appear to raise a strong presumption that homosexual couples could not be uniformly denied marriage licenses after the ratification of the Twenty-seventh Amendment.” The Loving decision coupled with possible ratification of the ERA was negatively associated with same-sex marriage. Racial equality, gender equality, and sexual equality were viewed as suspect, and lest this issue seem dated, the ERA has yet to be ratified. Intersectionality applied to sexuality takes on a new dimension when sexual pleasure and self-worth are examined. An intersectional approach considers the relationships between marginalized identities and how issues of sexual agency are tied to marginality. Specifically, marginality low-

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ers expectations that sex will be pleasurable (Cheng et al. 2014, 535). Furthermore, bell hooks writes on the isolation of African American gays from both their racial and sexual peers: “Often black gay folk feel extremely isolated because there are tensions in their relationship with black communities around issues of homophobia. Sometimes it is easier to respond to such tensions by simply withdrawing from both groups, by refusing to participate or identify oneself politically with any struggle to end domination” (hooks 2001, 72). The overlapping experiences and identities of race, gender, social class, and sexualities point to the complexities arising at their intersection. For example, being sexual and poor or being black and engaging in sex with someone of the same sex, are often viewed as deviant and problematic. Crime Any discussion of the relationship between crime and sexualities must begin with a reminder about how the law has been used to limit sexuality. Additionally, we turn to victimization rates, rates of reporting, hate or bias-related crimes, and the question of rape. It is hard to examine anything to do with crime or criminality without taking seriously the well-known problems tied to race. The arrest and conviction rates for blacks far exceed those of whites and outpace the reported criminality of each group (Butler 2010; Pettit and Western 2004). In other words, being black and violating the law is correlated with a higher rate of arrest and conviction than being white and violating the same law (Wooldredge 2012). Furthermore, there are widespread and welldocumented concerns about “driving while black” (Geiger-Oneto and Phillips 2003), and more broadly, concerns with doing anything while black. As Sanford F. Schram et al. (2009) note, African Americans are discriminated against when applying for loans, shopping for homes or shopping in general, when accessing health care, and are closely scrutinized if on welfare. Adding in the concerns about sexualities, including the

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perceived hypersexualization of African Americans and the relative invisibility of minority gays and lesbians, it is important to examine the data carefully (Ritchie 2012–13; Reger 2015; Lewis 2014; Collins 2004; Davis and Shaylor 2001). Crime is measured not only by arrests and convictions, but also by victimization. There are two main sources of data collection on crimes in the United States: the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), and the Uniform Crime Reports (UCR). Each of these data sources has its own merits: crime victims who do not report their victimization are counted by the NCVS, offenders who are arrested by the police are counted by the UCR. Both of these collect data on the same types of crimes, including sexual assault. Distinctions in the two sources are particularly significant when we consider a crime that includes sex or sexualities. Victims of crimes who are part of a minority group – undocumented persons, sex workers, crossdressers, and transgender persons – are more likely to have had previous negative interactions with law enforcement. This means that they will be less likely to report crime, but some will report having been a victim in the NCVS. (Patterson and Tringali 2015; Fisher et al. 2003a; Cohn et al. 2013). Neither of these forms of data collection is without challenges, but together they paint a better picture of crimes tied to sexuality than either would alone. Small ethnographic studies may offer a richer understanding of the rate of victimization. Another area of concern is the risk of violence associated with sex and sexualities. Racial and sexual minorities who are victims are more likely to conceal the violence, or fear not being taken seriously when they contact the police or seek protection. In addition to a general mistrust of police, social norms questioning how much harm a woman can inflict upon another woman or upon a man, as well as questioning what sort of man would take violence and abuse from another man or from a woman, are significant stumbling blocks for victims reporting violence (Eaton et al. 2008). As the report-

ing and conviction rates make clear, there is still a long way to go in getting appropriate resources to those who need them (Irving 2008). Expanding outreach to sexual minorities and providing appropriate training for first responders are a couple of ways of encouraging sexual and racial minorities, and men, to report being the victim of a sexual crime. Related to an understanding of violence in intimate relationships there has also been progress in the definition of rape. Marital rape as a crime is a relatively new notion. Historically the wife had been regarded as the rightful sexual property of the husband, to do with as he pleased. “Legal actors historically were reluctant to intervene in cases of spousal rape and other domestic violence under the assumptions that the state should not encroach on private, familial matters, and that a man has the right to discipline his family” (Jackson 2015, 290). Thinking more broadly, the legal understanding of rape has primarily emphasized stranger rape, and not a rape where the assailant is known, and certainly not where the assailant is married to the victim (FBI 2014). Gender plays a role in the perception of rape as well. If a female sexually assaults or rapes a male, or another female, the legal and social understanding of rape as forcible sex by a man requiring penetration, frequently means that the crime is not prosecuted. Furthermore, there are race-based concerns regarding the “rapeability” of black women, and fears of the sexual prowess of black men (Irving 2008). These concerns emerge at all levels of the criminal justice system from reporting, to arrest, to conviction for sexual assaults. Black men who are dating white women, for example, have been stopped or even arrested for being with a white woman. And black women who have reported sexual assault have not been taken seriously (Ritchie 2012–13). Sexual assault is a well-documented problem on college campuses (Paul et al. 2013; Armstrong, Hamilton, and Sweeney 2006). How educational institutions respond to sexual assault is important and there are additional complicating factors in

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reporting and responding to the victim appropriately. In 1990 the Clery Act was enacted, requiring colleges and universities to disclose crime information annually, including sexual crimes, in and around campus. Despite federal regulation, colleges and universities have been cited for discouraging students to report campus sexual assaults to police, failing to expel students who are found guilty, and allowing students (particularly members of a sports team or a Greek association) to influence the school’s decision (Ahn 2009). Students are most likely to report sexual assault to the school and police when there are “believable” characteristics to the assault, and less likely when it involves alcohol or other drugs (Fisher et al. 2003b). These connections between sex and crime are worthy of attention in an examination of the social problems associated with sexualities. One further area of consideration is the occurrence of hate crimes, which are by definition charges added on to an offense and not crimes in and of themselves. Hate crime reporting is described in the US Code: “the Attorney General shall acquire data, for each calendar year, about crimes that manifest evidence of prejudice based on race, gender and gender identity, religion, disability, sexual orientation, or ethnicity.” Hate crimes vary by jurisdiction and are voluntarily reported by state and local law enforcement agencies, some of which report none (Simmons 2012). In 2013 law enforcement agencies reported 5,928 criminal incidents involving 6,933 offenses as being motivated by a bias toward a particular identity group (FBI 2013). The problems associated with hate crimes are exacerbated for sexual crimes, which are vastly underreported, and for crimes against sexual minorities as sexuality is not a defined category for hate crimes in nineteen states. Health Health and health care are intimately tied with sexualities and homophobia. Access and quality of health care along with an understanding of sexualities by medical pro-

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fessionals, in addition to fear of disclosure of sexual identity, are factors that threaten the effectiveness of health care delivery. Sexual minorities, racial minorities, older people, younger people, and those with disabilities are likely to encounter issues in obtaining quality health care (Gengler and Jarrell 2015). Good health care involves physicians who understand and treat all patients with respect. For example the medical treatment of gays, lesbians, and transgender persons and of those with HIV or AIDS may be compromised by physician’s biases or personal beliefs (Gengler and Jarrell 2015; Fallin-Bennett 2015). Additionally, the provision of quality health care services may mean taking into account the distance needed to travel, whether that be for LGBTsensitive services, or for services concerning abortion and reproductive medicine. For those who are not gender- or sexconforming there are additional burdens. Not all health care providers are trained or willing to care for those with special sexuality needs. The responsibility falls to the patient to locate a medical provider who will work with them, treat them with respect, and offer quality care. Prejudices about sex and sexuality are significant despite the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Psychological Association opposing conversion therapy, which is aimed at changing the sexual orientation of homosexuals, making them heterosexual. Minors lacking full control over their medical care are particularly vulnerable because they do not select their own providers, and their parents may be unaware of their sexual identity or behaviors. Similarly, if a health care provider is not trained to see signs of sexual assault or victimization in same-sex couples they may fail to intervene on behalf of the victim. Due to stigma associated with so-called deviant sexualities, patients may also be reluctant to disclose their sexual practices. Fear of reproach or disdain can keep patients away, or compel them to lie. While the medical understanding of AIDS and the treatment for HIV have vastly improved,

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there are lasting effects from the era of when AIDS was considered as “gay cancer.” For example, AIDS is still viewed as the fault of those who contract it. Due to the stigma associated with male homosexuality in the African American community, many black men engage in secretive and unprotective sex with men. Thus, they are at an increased risk for contracting HIV, and are less likely to be tested. Because of this, black men who have sex with men are also likely to pass HIV to their unsuspecting female sexual partners. Public health efforts around homosexuality have vastly improved since the 1980s, but there continue to be systemic problems of access and quality care. Furthermore, sexual minorities or those who are perceived to be sexually deviant, are less likely to receive quality medical treatment so long as there is a heterosexual bias in the care. Commercial sex workers may avoid health care due to stigma, or may take risks with their sexual health for additional pay. For example, while condom use significantly reduces disease transmission, the pornographic film industry is anticondom because the demand is lower for sex scenes depicting condom use. As such, sex workers may be paid more to have unprotected sex on camera – especially the lowest paid workers – adding to their risk of contracting an STI. Like the others in the context of intersectionality, these issues arise among those individuals with the least social capital and power. Education Sexualities and homophobia raise specific concerns about the nature of education and individual’s freedoms. Among the most contentious topics for debate are the rights of students to freely express their sexual identities, the content of sex education, dress codes, and sexual assault on college campuses. The themes running through each of these topics have to do with formal and informal restrictions on self-identification, the regulation and policing of the body, and the risk of sexual violence on campus. These issues are reminiscent of what Fou-

cault (1978) described in his work on the regulation of bodies as a means of teaching young people to discipline themselves. Schools produce and reproduce sexualities through the regulation and monitoring the boundaries of student behavior and dress (Haste 2013; Fields 2008; McNeill 2013). For example, dress codes emphasize female modesty, teachers and coaches privilege hegemonic masculinity, and sex education underscores normative heterosexuality (Fields 2008; McNeill 2013). The practices perpetuate long-standing and deeply embedded cultural norms about the primacy of male sexuality and heterosexual relationships. Schools enforce compulsory heterosexuality when they only permit opposite-sex couples at social functions, such as the prom, and in the lower grades, with father-daughter and mother-son events. Likewise, the debates over sexual education are closely connected to concerns over gender roles, racial disparities, and homosexuality (Fields 2008; McNeill 2013). Even in schools where comprehensive sex education is available it is unlikely to include sex-positive models that provide information on sexual pleasure and intimacy, and instead rely heavily on public health models that emphasize the risk of disease transmission (Fields 2008; Cheng et al. 2014). Moreover, schools are contested sites in regard to free speech and the right to assemble. Student groups formed around sexual identity, such as a gay-straight alliance or a gay teens club, may be prohibited from gathering on school property (Kosciw 2014). In addition to mandatory sex-specific dress codes there are frequently prohibitions on displaying a nonconforming sexual identity in terms of logos on bags, clothing, or other items (Kosciw 2014). The school’s culture may also permit or encourage homophobia and the use of homophobic language (Kosciw 2014). Sex education is worthy of deeper consideration in terms of its content and delivery. Boys are often viewed as problematic recipients of sex education; they are seen as disruptive, already knowledgeable, and challenging female teachers and peers (Fields

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2008; Haste 2013). Displays of hegemonic masculinity in sex education perpetuate the norm that men are natural sexual predators and that women must learn to control them or risk their virginity. Boys are perceived as experienced and knowledgeable when in reality their knowledge about sex is likely influenced by pornography (Haste 2013). Pornography offers male and female students a sexual script and an explicit vocabulary, though they are unlikely to comprehend fully what they are communicating (Haste 2013). Models of sex education, as mentioned above, and the content are also suspect. Many curricula do not fully cover female sexual anatomy, skipping discussion of the clitoris and focusing only on the reproductive functions of the female body (Fields 2008). Even in comprehensive courses of study, sexual pleasure is rarely considered worthy of discussion and instead the emphasis is on safer heterosexual sex (Cheng et al. 2014). Abstinence-only models of sex education limit discussion to married heterosexual sex and offer no alternatives or information about disease and pregnancy prevention. Topics like masturbation are excluded as they pose no risk of either pregnancy or disease. Homosexuality, where covered is likely to be pathologized and considered a risky sexual behavior (McNeill 2013; Kosciw 2014). Sexuality on college campuses takes on a new dimension where violence and sexual assault are problematic. While many colleges have campaigns to teach students the meaning of consent, they also offer gendered messages by placing sexual safety firmly in the hands of women. Women are frequently told to walk in groups for safety and to limit their alcohol intake. Fraternities are known for their bacchanal parties, but as they take place off campus, the university may have little to no control over their activities. Sororities emphasize traditional female sexual roles, usually to the exclusion of lesbians. Lesbians who are members of sororities have generally come out only after pledging (Stone and Gorga 2014). Male sports and fraternities are another key arena

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for examining homophobia. Incidents of hazing appear to be tied to hegemonic masculinity, where sexual prowess and antifeminine actions are prized above all. Sports encourage performing one’s masculinity – demonstrating power and use of aggression, as well as the admonition to “not be a girl.” The party culture and related social norms of fraternities offer opportunities to reinforce hegemonic masculinity. Social problems associated with sexualities and homophobia cut through all levels of schooling. “Diversity backpacks,” where students are sent home with materials about the various types of families, and the socalled rainbow curriculum where elementary school students were taught about diversity including brief mention of gays and lesbians, have raised concerns about what children are learning about sexualities in schools. Sex education, dating, and being visibly “out,” become the challenges as students age and mature. The risks of sexual assault and sexual violence increase as teens become more independent from their parents when in college. Institutional culture influences how schools respond to these challenges, making change difficult and reinforcing the status quo. In states with a mandate for abstinence-only sex education, there is frequently no coverage of sexual violence and assault in the curriculum. Female college students are often told how to protect themselves from sexual danger, but male students are less likely to be taught about the need for affirmative consent, and colleges discourage students from reporting assaults.

Sources of Social Change The Stonewall Riots of 1969 may seem like ancient history, but the campaigns for inclusion and acceptance, and for freedom from police harassment continue. The ordination of the first known gay Anglican bishop, Gene Robinson, in 2003 marked a new level of acceptance for homosexuals. That same year, the Massachusetts SJC ruled 4–3 in Goodridge v. Dept. of Public Health to grant

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equal access to civil marriage. This decision marked a major change in gay and lesbian rights and raised the stakes on the question of equal rights. In early 2004, when the first legally recognized same-sex marriages were taking place, President George W. Bush renewed his push for passage of the Federal Marriage Act (FMA) that limited the power of State Courts and Legislatures around same-sex marriage. The proposed FMA would have amended the US Constitution, building on the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which already defined marriage as between one man and one woman. The FMA did not pass, and as of 2015 same-sex marriage was legal in all fifty states. Organizations such as Beyond Marriage and The Alternatives to Marriage Project raise concerns about the institution of marriage itself and about the narrow solution to problems of sexuality-based inequality that marriage offers. According to the Beyond Marriage position statement, “To have our government define as ‘legitimate families’ only those households with couples in conjugal relationships does a tremendous disservice to the many other ways in which people actually construct their families, kinship networks, households, and relationships” (Beyond Marriage 2006, 2). For years, gay women and men resisted heteronormative conformity regarding gender expression and sexual freedom. Now many of them are questioning same-sex marriage. Their concerns about marriage as an elitist and conformist goal are closely associated with an understanding of the problems associated with sexualities. The expansion of marriage to include same-sex couples moves the boundary of acceptable sexualities only slightly, and perpetuates the primacy of married sexualities over unmarried. Social changes in the areas of sexualities and homophobia come from a number of sources. One of the most powerful has been the judicial system. Justices on the US Supreme Court have increasingly sided with a right to sexual privacy, ruling that couples can engage in consensual deviant sex and determine for themselves

the consequences of their sexual choices. While the Court has ruled in favor of sexual privacy, it nonetheless maintains a strong preference for heterosexual, married sexualities. Lawrence v. Texas offers the strongest evidence that the Court does not approve of homosexual sex, but that it must protect people’s sexual privacy. The courts, of course, have been affected by changes in society as well as informed by socialscientific and medical research about sex and sexualities. For example, input from the American Psychological Association and other professional bodies, encouraged the Court to rule in favor of Lawrence. The women’s rights movement, the civil rights movement, the gay rights movement, and the sexual revolution have transformed societal beliefs and practices. Feminists have sought better medical research on women’s health and have opposed social and legal mores that define women as property. The civil rights movement advocated for the equal legal treatment of people of color and has informed public policy and encouraged research into treatment of African Americans by law enforcement. The gay rights movement encouraged homosexuals to publically proclaim their gay identity, and pushed the boundaries of what is sexually normative. With homosexuals “out of the closet” it became harder to visualize them as different and aberrant. The movement also connected with the women’s rights movement and the sexual revolution to challenge conventional beliefs about sex and sexuality. Being queer means more than just conforming to the dominant normative expectations of getting married, having kids and living in the suburbs. It pushed for more openness to other lifestyles and sexual expressions. Today there remains a great deal of work left to do. Homophobia in public policies and in local norms, such as those that regulate school groups, is one example of a continuing social problem. Access to reliable contraception, safe abortion, and informed health care for women continue to be controversial. Sex education needs ongoing attention as students are today completing

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high school with little more than the “just say no” policy as their guide to sexual behaviors and identities.

Glossary Compulsory heterosexuality The idea that female sexuality is assumed heterosexual and that heterosexuality is reinforced by society. Hegemonic masculinity A collection of gender practices supporting the legitimacy of patriarchy, the dominance of men, and subordination of women. Heteronormativity The expectation that “everyone” is heterosexual and so interactions and institutions are therefore built around heterosexual norms. Homonegativity The acceptance of negative social attitudes about homosexuality. Homophobia An irrational fear of homosexual persons; also the fear of being perceived as homosexual. Sexualities Encompasses the body, the mind, and social norms as they relate to identities, behavior, orientation, and the representation of the sexual or erotic.

Notes 1. In the 2005–7 period, the American Journal of Sociology published two articles on sexuality, American Sociological Review published four articles, and Social Problems published four articles on sexuality (and a 2006 symposium on feminism and sociology that included an article on sexual assault and an article on abortion). These negligible publication rates are significant given the pressure experienced by sociologists who conduct sexuality research (Irvine 2014, 645). 2. “Human life is a basic good . . . Other basic (or fundamental or natural) goods are integrity of self, the harmony of all the parts of a person which can be engaged in freely chosen action, and marriage, the procreative union of a husband and a wife committed to one another and to their children” (Eskridge 1997, 505).

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sexual communication with children in kindergarten to grade 8. Journal of Marriage and Family 70(1):86–96. Chauncey, George. 2004. Why Marriage? The History Shaping Today’s Debate over Gay Equality. New York: Basic Books. Cheng, Simon, Laura Hamilton, Stacy Missari, and Josef Ma. 2014. Sexual subjectivity among adolescent girls: Social disadvantage and young adult outcomes. Social Forces 93(2):515. Cherlin, Andrew J. 2009. The Marriage-GoRound: The State of Marriage and the Family in America Today. New York: Vintage Books. Cohn, Amy M., Heidi M. Zinzow, Heidi S. Resnick, and Dean G. Kilpatrick. 2013. Correlates of reasons for not reporting rape to police: Results from a national telephone household probability sample of women with forcible or drug-or-alcohol facilitated/incapacitated rape. Journal of Interpersonal Violence 28(3):455–73. Collins, Patricia Hill. 1992. Transforming the inner circle: Dorothy Smith’s challenge to sociological theory. Sociological Theory 10(1):73–80. 2000. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge. 2004. Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism. New York: Routledge. Cott, Nancy. 2000. Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Davis, Angela Y., and Cassandra Shaylor. 2001. Race, gender, and the prison industrial complex: California and beyond. Meridians 2(1):1–25. Davis, Erin Calhoun, and Lisa V. Friel. 2001. Adolescent sexuality: Disentangling the effects of family structure and family context. Journal of Marriage and the Family 63(3):669–81. Eaton, Lisa, Michelle Kaufman, Andrea Fuhrel, Demetria Cain, Charsey Cherry, Howard Pope, and Seth C. Kalichman. 2008. Examining factors co-existing with interpersonal violence in lesbian relationships. Family Violence 23(8):697–705. Edin, Kathryn, and Maria Kefalas. 2005. Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Mother-

hood Before Marriage. Berkeley: University of California Press. Eskridge, William N., Jr., and Nan D. Hunter. 1997. Theories of sexuality, gender, and the law. In Sexuality, Gender, and the Law, 501– 652. New York: Foundation Press. Fallin-Bennett, Keisa. 2015. Implicit bias against sexual minorities in medicine: Cycles of professional influence and the role of the hidden curriculum. Academic Medicine 90(5):549–52. FBI. 2013. Hate crime statistics. Uniform Crime Report. 2014. Frequently asked questions about the change in the UCR definition of rape. www .fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/recent-programupdates/new-rape-definition-frequentlyasked-questions. Fields, Jessica. 2001. Normal queers: Straight parents respond to their children’s “coming out.” Symbolic Interaction 24(2):165–87. 2005. “Children having children”: Race, innocence, and sexuality education. Social Problems 52(4):549–71. 2008. Risky Lessons: Sex Education and Social Inequality. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Fisher, Bonnie S., Leah E. Daigle, Francis T. Cullen, and Michael G. Turner. 2003a. Acknowledging sexual victimization as rape: Results from a national-level study. Justice Quarterly 20(3):535–74. 2003b. Reporting sexual victimization to the police and others: Results from a nationallevel study of college women. Criminal Justice and Behavior 30(1):6–38. Foucault, Michel. 1978. The History of Sexuality. Vol. 1. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage. Francis, Roberta W. N.d. The history behind the Equal Rights Amendment. www .equalrightsamendment.org/history.htm. Geiger-Oneto, Stephanie, and Scott Phillips. 2003. Driving while black. Journal of Ethnicity in Criminal Justice 1(2):1–25. Gengler, Amanda M., and Megan V. Jarrell. 2015. What difference does difference make? The persistence of inequalities in healthcare delivery. Sociology Compass 9(8):718– 30. Goffman, Erving. 1963. Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. New York: Simon & Schuster.

sexualities and homophobia Gonzalez-Lopez, Gloria. 2004. Fathering Latina sexualities: Mexican men and the virginity of their daughters. Journal of Marriage and Family 66(5):1118–30. Haste, Polly. 2013. Sex education and masculinity: The “problem” of boys. Gender and Education 25(4):515–27. hooks, bell. 2001. Homophobia in black communities. In The Greatest Taboo: Homosexuality in Black Communities, edited by Delroy Constantine-Simms, 67–75. Los Angeles, CA: Alyson Books. Horn, Wade F. 2001. Wedding bell blues: Marriage and welfare reform. www.brookings .edu/articles/wedding-bell-blues-marriageand-welfare-reform/. Irvine, Janice M. 1994. A place in the rainbow: Theorizing lesbian and gay culture. Sociological Theory 12(2):232–48. 2014. Is sexuality research “dirty work”? Institutionalized stigma in the production of sexual knowledge. Sexualities 17(5/6):632– 56. Irving, Toni. 2008. Decoding black women: Policing practices and rape prosecution on the streets of Philadelphia. NWSA Journal 20(2):100–120. Jackson, Aubrey L. 2015. State contexts and the criminalization of marital rape across the United States. Social Science Research 51:290– 306. Kinsey, Alfred C., et al. 1948. Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders. Kinsey, Alfred C., et al. 1953. Sexual Behavior in the Human Female. Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders. Kosciw, J. G., E. A. Greytak, N. A. Palmer, and M. J. Boesen. 2014. The 2013 National School Climate Survey: The Experiences of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Youth in Our Nation’s Schools. New York: GLSEN. Lewis, Rachel A. 2014. “Gay? Prove it”: The politics of queer anti-deportation activism. Sexualities 17(8):958–75. McNeill, Tanya. 2013. Sex education and the promotion of heteronormativity. Sexualities 16(7):826–46. National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. N.d. Why data collection matters to LGBT people. www.thetaskforce.org/why-datacollection-matters-to-lgbt-people/.

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CHAPTER 21

Poverty and Income Inequality: A Cross-National Perspective on Social Citizenship Eiko Strader and Joya Misra

Abstract Global-scale economic crisis has brought renewed attention to issues of poverty and inequality, yet we often fail to critically examine what we mean by inequality. Poverty and inequality are social constructions; therefore, how they are defined has important implications for how societies understand and address inequality. This chapter provides an overview on measures and concepts used to study poverty and income inequality from a comparative perspective. We discuss the issue of poverty and consider how the social citizenship framework of T. H. Marshall opens new ways of understanding inequality. Increasing inequality has created a new class of poor, who are not only materially deprived but are also deprived of political and cultural life, unable to participate fully as members of a society, or are “socially excluded.” We argue that clarifying what we mean by social rights allows us to more concretely discuss the concepts of needs, equality, and social inclusion.

Problems of Poverty and Income Inequality The world is becoming increasingly unequal, with the rich disproportionately benefiting from economic growth while the rest are left behind (OECD 2015; Piketty 2014). Although the rate of “extreme poverty,” defined as the population living on less than $1.25 a day (adjusted), has declined from 47 percent in 1990 to 14 percent in 2015 (United Nations 2015), income inequalities have been increasing across

the globe. Among wealthy countries, the income gap between the richest 10 percent of the population and the poorest 10 percent has widened dramatically in the last three decades, illustrating that inequality increased throughout the economic boom of the 1980s and the recent economic crisis (OECD 2015; Piketty 2014). Yet these numbers do not allow us to consider all aspects of material, health and social hardships. Without fully understanding what we are measuring and what assumptions we are making, we fail to recognize the full extent

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of poverty and inequality problems. How we define and measure poverty or inequality have important theoretical and policy implications. For example, if we were to lower the global absolute poverty threshold from $1.25 a day to $.25 a day, the poverty rate would drop dramatically and we may problematically deem the issue of poverty to be solved. However, changing the measurement of poverty in this way would not mean changing the quality of life for those no longer deemed “poor.” Scholars also often use measures of relative poverty, such as half of the median income in a given country, as a threshold for poverty; and one may ask, is it a better indicator? It is worthwhile to consider whether poverty is better understood to be an absolute (below a specific absolute minimum) or a relative (in relation to the population as a whole) phenomenon. For example, using the global absolute poverty threshold for the United States might suggest that those earning over $456 a year are not poor. However, few Americans would agree with this definition. We argue that identifying the assumptions underlying common poverty measures, as well as the best approaches to measuring poverty and inequality, should help us develop more equitable and meaningful solutions. This chapter provides an overview of measures and concepts used to study poverty and income inequality from a comparative perspective. Poverty occurs in both rich and poor countries (Townsend 1993); we focus on wealthy democratic countries to identify the biases and assumptions embedded in current definitions of poverty and inequality. We consider how the social citizenship framework of T. H. Marshall broadens our understandings of poverty and inequality. Introducing the concept of citizenship and clarifying what we mean by social rights allow us to more concretely discuss the concepts of needs, equality and social inclusion. We conclude the chapter by discussing some limitations of this approach, and provide some directions for future research.

Extent of Poverty and Social Exclusion: A Brief Overview We first overview the incidence of poverty across wealthy countries, to make a case that there is sufficient evidence for incomebased poverty and inequality to be considered social problems. Figure 21.1 shows the distribution of relative poverty rates based on equivalized post tax and transfer household income (not only income from employment, but also any social transfers provided by the government, as well as taxes levied, and adjusted to the household size) across the thirty-four member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in 2010. In Figure 21.1, relative poverty is measured in terms of 50 percent and 60 percent of the median income for the total population in each country. Using this measure, in the United States, roughly 17 percent of the total population is considered poor and another 7 percent or so is considered near poverty, even after taxes and social transfers are taken into account. Comparatively, it appears that 24 percent of Americans, 17 percent of British, and roughly 13 percent of Norwegians are poor or at risk of poverty and social exclusion. Risk of poverty in the United States is more comparable to Chile, Turkey, and Mexico than to European countries. Setting aside issues of nonmonetary deprivation for the moment, this relative poverty indicator based on income is essentially a summary figure measuring the share of low-income earners at the lower end of the income distribution in a country. The median income is where the distribution can be divided into two equal parts; half of the population earns more than the median, and the other half earns less than that amount. Unlike the mean income, the median is insensitive to outliers, making it a better indicator of typical income in each respective country. A few high earners would pull the mean estimated value up, while the median would not change. Revisiting Figure 21.1, 20 percent of households in Mexico earn less than half of what

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Figure 21.1. Relative poverty rates across OECD countries, 2010.

a typical household makes after all taxes and transfers are paid. However, this median figure does not tell us much about the upper and lower ends of the income distribution – even though these differences may also be meaningful. In Figure 21.2, we plot the same poverty rates used in Figure 21.1 against the income ratio between the top 10 percent (i.e., ninetieth percentile group) and the bottom 10 percent of working-age income earners (ages eighteen to sixty-five) alongside the horizontal axis. These figures indicate that the top 10 percent income earners in Denmark roughly make 2.9 times as much as the bottom 10 percent group, whereas this gap is about 9.1 for Mexico. From these values, we can imagine how the earnings of the rich compare to those of the poor cross-nationally, using a set of uniform scales that can be applied to subjective concepts such as rich and poor. As can be seen from Figure 21.2, there is a clear trend between the prevalence of relative poverty and the extent of inequality. Denmark, Iceland, and the Czech Republic have the lowest levels of poverty and inequality, while Mexico, Turkey, Chile, Israel, and

the United States have the highest levels of poverty and inequality. This positive correlation between poverty and inequality suggests that as the gap between rich and poor increases, the share of low-income earners also increases (or vice versa, since correlation does not imply causation). This seemingly simple association has been a point of contention for many social scientists and policy makers, attempting to understand this relationship (OECD 2015; Ravallion 2007; Li and Zou 1998). Negative Consequences of Poverty and Income Inequality Poverty and growing inequality are social problems because a great number of studies document their negative consequences. For example, being poor can induce a sense of failure, and internalized shame can lead to depression or suicide (Walker 2014). Poverty and homicide rates are also positively associated cross-nationally (Pridemore 2008), suggesting that poverty shortens life expectancy in multiple ways. In addition, the negative effects of poverty can be physically passed down from generation

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to generation, by increasing the likelihood of low birth weight and malnutrition among infants, which can then lead to a higher incidence of chronic and acute illness in childhood (see Seccombe 2000 for reviews of relevant studies). Indeed, childhood poverty is found to be detrimental to brain development (Kim et al. 2013; Aber et al. 1997), mental health (McLeod and Shanahan 1996), school achievement (McLoyd 1998), and adult earnings and work hours (Duncan et al. 2010), leaving long-lasting negative impacts through adulthood. Similar negative associations are found between poverty and mental health among women (Belle 1990), or between neighborhood-level exposure to poverty and alcohol use (Cerdá et al. 2010), further illustrating the destructive nature of poverty. A meta-analysis of 155 studies shows that higher income inequality is associated with lower levels of population health (Wilkinson and Pickett 2006); three general hypotheses are suggested to explain this link. First is the absolute income effect, which presumes that income has diminishing marginal returns on health, and henceforth, additional income does not improve one’s health status after a certain point.

A small portion of the population accumulating too much wealth reduces much needed income from the rest of the population, who see decreased health outcomes. The relative income effect on the other hand is realized through stress and frustration stemming from the observed income gap between oneself and others, indicating that absolute deprivation is not the only source for negative health outcomes. Third is the contextual effect of income inequality, which postulates that income inequality directly degrades the health of the nonrich. The physical separation of the rich from the rest, from gated communities to private schools, makes it increasingly harder for the rich to make decisions that benefit the larger community. Based on this framework, the super rich are theorized to directly harm the lives of the rest (for the extensive discussion of these hypotheses, see Kawachi and Subramanian 2014). In an increasingly divisive and unequal political climate, preferences of the rich continue to take precedence over those of the poor or middle class, suggesting that inequality undermines democratic decisionmaking processes (Gilens 2012). Equalization of opportunities through public

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education is also hindered by growing inequality through physical segregation of schools, affecting school performance and limiting social mobility of low-income children (Duncan and Murnane 2011). In addition, children from parents with lowersocioeconomic backgrounds tend to grow up in unstable families, because lowwage precarious employment makes marriage difficult or unpractical (Cherlin 2014). Therefore, the negative impacts of income inequality are as grim as those of poverty. Intergovernmental organizations and government agencies identify poverty and inequality as problematic. For example, the 2000 Lisbon Summit of the European Council, Presidency Conclusions stated, “The number of people living below the poverty line and in social exclusion in the Union is unacceptable,” resulting in the Union to set strengthening of employment, economic reform, and social cohesion as the council-wide strategic goal for the next decade (European Parliament 2000). Similarly, the 111th United States Congress led by President Barack Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act in 2009 to provide relief for those affected by the recent economic recession. Around the same time, the Parliament of the United Kingdom received Royal Assent to make the Child Poverty Act of 2010 into a law, leading to the creation of the Child Poverty Commission. There is good reason for governmental concern, since research suggests that income inequality leads to increased political instability, and may further slow economic growth (Alessina and Perroti 1996). Difficulty of Capturing the Texture of Poverty The concepts of poverty implied through the absolute and relative income measures discussed so far are abstract and general, and do not provide a clear picture of what poverty is. Defining the meaning of poverty leads us to ask a series of definitional questions (Lister 2004). For example, would earning 60 percent of median household

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income lead to food insecurity? Should food insecurity capture not having enough to eat, not having healthy and balanced meals, or simply worrying about food running out? These are qualitatively different states of being food insecure, and henceforth, signal different experiences of material deprivation. Poverty could also be measured as being homeless, but would this include living temporarily with friends or family, living in a hotel, living in a shelter, or only include those living on the street? To illustrate this point, let us continue with the example of food insecurity using data from the United States and examine how measuring one aspect of material deprivation leads to a complex set of discussions about defining poverty, social exclusion, and inequality. In 2013, an estimated 14.3 percent of the households in the United States were considered food insecure, at least sometime during the year, which is strongly associated with income. However, 6.7 percent of households with incomes above 185 percent of the poverty line set by the government (about $43,700 for a family of two adults and two children in 2013) reported being food insecure, suggesting that income alone fails to predict the prevalence of food insecurity. Indeed, Figure 21.3 illustrates that the prevalence and the severity varies by family and demographic characteristics. For example, 34.4 percent of households with children headed by a single woman, and 26.1 percent of households headed by a nonHispanic black person reported food insecurity, compared to 9 percent of the elderly living alone during the same year (ColemanJensen, Gregory, and Singh 2014). These gaps in food insecurity suggest that material deprivation cannot be gauged solely based on income and should be analyzed in conjunction with other socially meaningful factors that may increase or decrease one’s vulnerability to material, health and social hardships. Indeed, women, children, and racial/ethnic minorities are particularly vulnerable to various kinds of deprivation (Bianchi 1999; Pager and Shepherd 2008). Another layer of complication comes from the fact that poverty and inequality

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Figure 21.3. Prevalence of food insecurity by family and demographic characteristics.

are moving targets, making them harder to capture through government program participation data. Among the 17.5 million food-insecure households, only 62 percent of them is estimated to have participated in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly the Food Stamp Program), a free or reduced-price school lunch program, and or special SNAP program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) (Coleman-Jensen, Gregory, and Singh 2014). Food insecurity can occur both sporadically and consistently, so that occasional surveys of program participations may not sufficiently capture the prevalence of food insecurity in the United States. In addition, depending on application procedures, outreach effort, or administrative barriers, the official qualification to become eligible for food assistance may not reflect the actual state of food insecurity. Analyzing this one aspect of material deprivation for one country at one point in time easily highlights the difficulty of defining and measuring the experience of deprivation. Stigma and the invisibility of poverty and inequality also make it difficult to estimate the extent of the problem because the victims are often hidden from the rest of the society. Homelessness is a serious con-

cern across the European Union, yet currently there are no official statistics estimating the overall prevalence at the Union level (European Federation of National Organisations Working with Homeless 2015). Data collected from fourteen EU member countries in 2012 show that an increasing share of the homeless population is made up of immigrants, who face difficulty of securing employment, accessing the social safety net, and navigating a discriminatory housing market, making them virtually invisible from the public eye (Striano 2012). The Italian census estimates that about 60 percent of people in homeless shelters are immigrants (Italian National Institute of Statistics 2012), and the UK Department for Communities and Local Government similarly estimates that about 54 percent of those sleeping outside in London during 2013–14 were non-UK nationals (2015). A counterexample to the case of homelessness in Europe can be found in Japan, demonstrating that depending on cultural or societal contexts, homelessness also makes poverty more visible. Due to the stigma attached to social assistance, many Japanese hide economic hardships from the public and their neighbors (Aoki and Aoki 2005), making clusters of street sleepers and homeless camps the only

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visible reminder that poverty exists (Sekine 2008). This brief discussion highlights how difficult it is to grasp the magnitude of poverty and inequality from abstract numbers and concepts. This is because we make many assumptions about poverty and inequality. First and foremost, we implicitly link a certain amount of income to acceptable level-of-living standards, which is then used to categorically separate those whose living conditions are deemed unacceptable. However, the food insecurity example demonstrates that being above the poverty thresholds does not guarantee food security. Second, we assume that problems of poverty stem from class inequality, yet the higher incidence of homelessness among immigrants, or the higher food insecurity of racial/ethnic minorities, women, or children, indicates that poverty reflects much broader systems of social inequalities. Third, we also assume that there is an ideal pattern of income distribution, where the gap between haves and have-nots is deemed acceptable within capitalism. In spite of efforts to problematize poverty and inequality through intergovernmental organizations and government agencies, all of the countries discussed in this chapter have capitalist economies, which assume that a certain level of inequality is necessary. Even when we examine more concrete conditions, such as food insecurity and homelessness, we face similar dilemmas in defining inequality. Most importantly, we make value judgments about which conditions should be considered indicative of poverty or inequality. In addition, we assume that there is an ideal state of nondeprivation that can be defined. Lastly, because of the stigma attached to certain conditions that signal the state of poverty or inequality, measuring these conditions is challenging.

Theoretical Issues in the Study of Poverty and Income Inequality How do we develop a clear definition of poverty? Narrowly, poverty is about income deprivation, but many scholars consider

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nonmonetary hardship as part of the experience of poverty. In this section, we first review and contrast various definitions of poverty and discuss how these concepts are operationalized and measured. Next, we examine the underlying assumptions and judgments embedded in each measure. Finally, we discuss the notion of social inclusion, and seek solutions to the problems of poverty and inequality within the social citizenship framework of T. H. Marshall. Defining and Measuring Poverty: Why It Matters Poverty will always be a contested concept, because defining what constitutes poverty (or what does not) is a part of political and social processes that divide people into the poor and the nonpoor. Being considered officially needy can mean being qualified to receive social assistance in advanced societies, while it may also mean being stigmatized. Even generous welfare regimes believe that those who are able-bodied should earn their living without being dependent on social assistance programs for too long (Nelson 2013). From a definitional or social constructionist perspective, scholars participate in the process of “ontological gerrymandering” by identifying the characteristics of social problems and claiming certain phenomena problematic, manipulating a boundary between problematic and unproblematic social conditions (Woolgar and Pawluch 1985). Therefore, providing a definition of what poverty is has implications not only for scholars and those who experience poverty, but also impacts how policy makers and the public view and treat poverty as a social problem. The case of Japan can illustrate this point. Japan is often regarded as an egalitarian society with little inequality, where the majority of citizens enjoy middle-class lifestyles and workers can expect lifetime employment (Abe 2010). Yet Figure 21.1 easily demonstrates that the Japanese relative poverty rate is comparable to that of the United States. However, both domestic and international scholars note Japan to be a unique exception to the growing

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income inequality problem (Tachibanaki 2009; Schlesinger 2015). This global (and domestic) impression of egalitarian economy and the stigma attached to poverty simultaneously create social conditions in which poverty is regarded as a foreign concept in Japan. Indeed, Aoki (2007) shows that most Japanese do not understand the concept of relative poverty and misconstrue it as a state of extreme deprivation that can only occur in developing nations. Even when people live in adverse conditions, such as not having heat or lack adequate health care, most perceive “themselves as being not ‘in poverty’ but ‘close to poverty’” (Iwata 2007, 32). The ramification of this misconception is that those who are actually poor “see it [poverty] as a more marginal issue, i.e., as ‘someone’s’ problem ‘somewhere’” (Iwata 2007, 29). In this environment, claiming poverty as a social problem becomes challenging, since the victims themselves do not recognize poverty. Reflecting on these conflicting ideas about the definition of poverty, Aoki (2007, 5) notes, “there is a critical and urgent need to discuss and construct a clear concept of relative poverty using understandable language accessible to Japanese people.” The case of Japan illustrates how manipulation of a boundary between problematic and unproblematic social conditions occurs at the different junctures of the social construction process, and highlights how important it is to critically analyze theoretical and empirical issues surrounding the definitions of poverty. Next, we discuss the commonly used definitions of poverty that can be grouped into two general approaches – “absolute” and “relative,” where the former broadly or strictly concerns inability to pay for basic physical needs and the latter concerns inability to participate in society meaningfully (Lister 2004). This nuanced difference between two approaches has direct influence on operationalization and measurement of poverty indicators because the former defines poverty through input elements while the latter traces the concept of poverty back from outcome elements.

Therefore, absolute poverty is often measured using estimated monetary thresholds, while relative poverty is measured using outcome-based income and deprivation measures. However, as we review these two approaches, it should become clear that these approaches have both distinctive and overlapping elements that are imperative for us to define and measure various aspects of poverty effectively. Upon reviewing and contrasting these two approaches, we discuss alternative definitions of poverty to break the binary conceptions of poverty, and offer some remarks for future research. Defining and Measuring Absolute Poverty A classic example of absolute poverty are the poverty thresholds and guidelines used by the US Census Bureau to estimate the prevalence of poverty and the Department of Health and Human Services to determine eligibility for social welfare programs. Mollie Orshansky developed the primary foundation for current thresholds during the 1950s and 1960s by surveying the cost of food necessary to feed an average-sized family. Based on the 1955 Household Food Consumption Survey, she estimated that families of three or more allocated about one-third of their disposable income on food, and henceforth, poverty thresholds were calculated as three times the cost of the “economy food plan” defined by the US Department of Agriculture at the time (Fisher 2008; Citro and Michaels 1995). Although this approach allows for the easy and straightforward calculation of income necessary for basic survival, this seemingly objective estimation of “subsistence needs” no longer reflects the reality of modern families. For example, an average family during the 1950s relied on income earned by a male breadwinner and most wives stayed home. This implicit assumption about household structure means that the costs of childcare are not accounted for under the current thresholds (Citro and Michaels 1995). Housing costs have also dramatically shifted for many households, as have expenditures on food. Indeed, poverty defined in absolute

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terms is riddled with culturally embedded values and assumptions about needs, precisely because the definition relies on value judgments about what people need for basic survival (for more extensive review on the shortcomings of US poverty threshold, also see Brady 2003). Another place to empirically examine the concept of absolute poverty are the minimum income schemes used to set social assistance benefits. How each country screens potential beneficiaries and determines the adequate level of social assistance differ greatly (Frazer and Marlier 2009). For example, the defined minimum level of income in Finland is estimated to cover food, clothing, laundry, personal hygiene, medication, public transportation, and housing, as well as cable TV, phone, and Internet costs and small allowances set aside for hobby and leisure (Ruoppila and Lamminmäki 2009). This estimation method is quite different from the American foodbasket based method, yet this approach to defining minimum income level also faces similar challenges. Let us illustrate this point by using the case of British minimum income standards. The British estimation method is very similar to that of the Finnish, where the items included in the list is said to allow one “to have the opportunities and choices necessary to participate in society” (cited in Bradshaw et al. 2008, 1). However, how the list is adjusted according to the age and household structure of the potential recipient reveals how this standardized budget approach suffers from biases surrounding what is considered a minimum for healthy and acceptable living. For example, Deeming (2009) notes that a weekly budget for a meal at a café only appears in the calculations for older adults, whereas this is not the case for young adults. On the contrary, a budget for books and magazine purchases is not included in the calculations for older adults and only applies to young adults. Indeed, the uniform problem across these minimum income schemes is that when the notion of minimum acceptable living is translated into an actual budgetary

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requirement, there is no clear rationale as to how and what to quantify life’s necessities (Frazer and Marlier 2009). As Deeming (2009) mentions, deciding whether to use the price of a steak versus ground beef is a subjective and arbitrary decision placed upon those who set the minimum income schemes. Another uniform feature of these minimum income schemes is that they need to be less attractive than incomes earned from the labor market. Because all of these countries function within capitalism, the activation of able-bodied welfare recipients is an essential aspect of the social assistance provision. In order to prevent an inactive labor force and welfare dependency, many countries walk a thin line between provision of adequate support and benefits being low enough so that low-wage employment is more attractive than continued receipt of social assistance benefits (Frazer and Marlier 2009). As the result, the minimum income schemes are set quite low, corresponding to average social assistance benefits across the EU amounting to below 40 percent of median income in 2008. Across the twenty-eight member countries examined in the study, only three countries – Denmark, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, provided social assistance that reached 50 percent of median disposable income, and no country reached the 60 percent of the median used to indicate the relative risk of poverty and social exclusion (Nelson 2013). Henceforth, not only do these minimum income schemes reflect implicit value judgments, they all have the explicit aim of labor force activation. Indeed, all minimum income schemes make value judgments about how much absolute income is needed to escape poverty but not enough to leave the labor market completely. Based on this brief review, it should be clear that the definitions of absolute poverty or acceptable minimum levels of income suffer from inherent biases and assumptions about the requirements for basic physiological survival. The concept of absolute poverty relies on the assumptions and judgments of experts about minimum human

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needs, and henceforth, do not fully recognize the social and historical context shaping the experience of poverty. Even when efforts are made to adjust the estimated income level for different household structure, age, gender, citizenship, or disability status, the concept of poverty defined in fixed terms cannot account for changes in norms and social context. The relative poverty approach attempts to address this shortcoming by anchoring the experience of relative deprivation to the prevailing norms and social context. Relative Poverty and Inequality In Poverty in the United Kingdom, Townsend (1979) first showed how relative deprivation could be defined by correlating various standards of life with income and figuring out an income point in which standard of living drops to an unacceptable level. Instead of trying to chase down the absolute state of poverty, the relative poverty approach defines the state of deprivation as a socially constructed multidimensional condition, determined in relation to populations who are not poor. This methodological approach became the dominant framework for defining relative poverty. The major advantage of this approach is that relative definitions can capture changing definitions of life’s necessities across different times and places. Unlike the fixed notion of absolute poverty, relative definitions can be adjusted for changing socio-historical context, such as the increasing female labor market participation not captured through the US absolute poverty threshold. Henceforth, the concept of relative poverty is inherently comparative (Lister 2004). Another unique element of relative poverty is that the concept of needs is not purely restricted to basic physiological needs and can be defined in relational or symbolic terms (Lister 2004). For example, before the advent of the Internet, computers and smartphones, these items were not a part of ordinary life. However, as these technologies became widespread and accepted in everyday life, they became desirable or

even necessary. The concept of “digital divide” captures this ever-changing social condition in which inequality in access to technologies separate the haves from the have-nots in destructive ways. Servon (2002) notes, technology is a moving target, which can quickly morph into a new form of inequality, because a new luxurious innovation can quickly become a necessary object. Once an item, such as computer becomes a ubiquitous part of ordinary life, inequality in access can impact the success of an elementary school children, as well as the earnings potential of workers. A recent study suggests that the social implication of the digital divide extends to health outcomes as well, showing that racial minorities and those with limited education in the United States who already face higher risks for poor diabetes conditions have a lower likelihood of Internet-based patient portal use. Therefore, those who are in most need to communicate with health professionals about their chronic illness suffer the most from the limited access to the Internet and computer illiteracy (Sarkar et al. 2011). The case of “digital divide” illustrates how important it is to account for the ever-changing social and temporal context behind the need in question. Indeed, the concept of relative poverty as conceived by Townsend (1979) is more adaptable to contextual shifts surrounding the experience of deprivation compared to the rather fixed notion of absolute poverty, yet many criticized his operationalization of relative poverty measures. Most notably, David Piachaud (1981) critiqued that even with a list of sixty indicators examining working conditions, from health, and social relations to air quality of immediate surroundings, the objectification of poverty and the development of the relative deprivation threshold are both largely arbitrary. In an attempt to reduce assumptions and biases embedded in Townsend’s deprivation indicators, Mack and Lansley (1985) created a consensual list of life’s necessities based on a public survey, yet deciding where to draw the line of relative deprivation still relied on the authors. Another

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90 80 70 Mexico 2010

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Line of Equality 40 30 20 10 0

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Figure 21.4. Lorenz curve, Denmark and Mexico, 2010.

famous critique was made by Amartya Sen (1985), arguing that even within the relative conception of poverty, there has to be an absolute minimum level of material capabilities in which nobody should fall below. In a nutshell, these criticisms stem from the overlapping nature of poverty and inequality problems, asking how much deprivation is too much? The theory of relative poverty is closely related to the definition of inequality, precisely because we somehow believe that there is a point in which the uneven distribution of income, resources, social relations, or opportunities becomes unacceptable. Therefore, measuring and theorizing the reasonable level of inequality directly influence our definitions of “too much inequality.” The most popular measure of income inequality is the Gini coefficient, which is derived from the cumulative distribution function developed by Max O. Lorenz (Haughton and Khandker 2009; Atkinson 1975). Figure 21.4 contrasts the theoretical line of equality against the actual distribution of post tax and transfer household income per person for Denmark and Mexico in 2010. The horizontal axis represents

the cumulative percentage of population and the vertical axis shows the cumulative share of income (or wealth etc., depending on the data being analyzed). The theoretical line of equality shows that if the poorest 10 percent of the population would earn 10 percent of the total income available, and 20 percent would earn 20 percent of total income and so on, it forms a 45degree angled line. The Gini coefficient converts this distribution into a single-summary statistics by dividing the area between the Lorenz curve and the line of equality by the total area under the 45-degree angled line. If the income distribution resembles the line of equality, then the estimated Gini coefficient will be 0 (or perfect equality). On the other hand, if the actual distribution is away from the line of equality, such is the case with Figure 21.4, the value of the Gini coefficient will be bigger than 0 but smaller than the theoretical maximum of 1 (or 100 percent inequality). In our example, the Gini for Denmark is about 27 and 45 for Mexico, indicating that inequality is more severe in Mexico. A single-summary indicator of inequality, such as Gini, allows for easy cross-national and temporal comparison.

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For instance, if we find that a similarly estimated Gini for the United States in 2010 is about thirty-eight, we can easily conclude that income inequality in the United States is less severe compared to Mexico but is worse compared to Denmark. However, a single-summary approach does not indicate what kind of inequality exists in each country. For example, Figure 21.4 illustrates that the income share of the top 10 percent earners in Mexico is about 35 percent, whereas the income share of the similar group in Denmark is about 21 percent, even though the bottom 10 percent earners have similar shares of income in both countries. Here, we can interpret that the gap between the richest 10 percent and the poorest 10 percent of the population is larger in Mexico compared to Denmark. This texture of inequality cannot be explained through Gini. Instead, a simple but effective method is to calculate decile ratios by contrasting the total income amount of two groups, such as the poorest 10 percent against the richest 10 percent (Haughton and Khandker 2009; Atkinson 1975). Decile ratios, such as the ones shown in Figure 21.2 can be denoted as P90/P10 or 90:10 ratios to indicate that the values compare the total income amount earned by the ninetieth and tenth percentile groups in single-summary figures. As we noted earlier, P90/P10 ratio in Denmark is about 2.9, whereas the richest 10 percent in Mexico earns about 9.1 times more than the poorest 10 percent, indicating that the gap between the rich and the poor is wider in Mexico. Other decile combinations can also be used to contextualize the nature of inequality, such as the top 1 percent super rich against the bottom 10 percent, and so on. These single-summary indicators allow us to examine relative income inequality in a very straightforward fashion, yet because they are relative measures, they cannot tell us anything about absolute levels of poverty. For example, if the overall level of absolute income is low, or lowers equally across the board, many can be poor in a relatively equal society. Conversely, if absolute income increases equally for the poor and

the rich, the living condition for the poor may improve while maintaining the overall inequality (Ravallion 2001). Another limitation is that they rely on the relative mean difference across subgroups, and henceforth, it is possible for the overall inequality to go down or level off even when within subgroup inequality is going up (Cowell 1988). And most importantly, because these inequality indicators are merely measurement tools, there is no ideal Gini coefficient or P90/P10 ratio that can be used. These measures are also limited in their focus on income, while poverty reflects more than income differences. Therefore, these measures themselves do not tell us how much derivation is too much, or how much inequality is too much. A similar quandary can be illustrated using relative income-based poverty measures. European Union member countries adopted the relative poverty indicator at the 2001 Laeken European Council. This is defined as the “at-risk-of-poverty” rate, measuring varying degrees of monetary deprivation, from 40 percent, 50 percent, 60 percent, and 70 percent of the national median household income, and the length in which relative poverty persists and so on. However, 60 percent of the median (or any other thresholds for that matter) is an imagined “nonpoor” income level that was set in a rather arbitrary way (Bradshaw and Mayhew 2011). Kenworthy (2011) also makes the important point that relative poverty examined over time can yield wrong conclusions about absolute changes in incomes and in the material well-being of those at the bottom, because if median income grows at a faster rate than the incomes at the lower end, relative poverty increases while absolute living standards also increase. If absolute living conditions at the societal level increased over time, that should be highlighted. However, if the pace of growth differs significantly between those in the middle and those at the bottom, it should be highlighted as well because the gap indicates that social inequality has increased (Kenworthy 2011). Another source of complication is the method used to adjust

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household income to different sizes – the modified equivalence scale, which has no clear empirical basis, yet the EU adopted it from the OECD (Bradshaw and Mayhew 2011). The question Townsend grappled with in the 1970s about appropriate levels of income needed to support different configurations of households is still largely unanswered, and we do not yet know how different households make consumption and saving decisions collectively or individually (Browning, Chiappori, and Lewbel 2013). Social Exclusion to Social Inclusion Thus far, we have treated the definitions of absolute and relative poverty as separate entities, where absolute poverty is broadly understood as not having sufficient financial means to achieve a minimum living standard, while relative poverty is conceptualized as having fewer financial means or resources to achieve the prevailing standards of life. Both of these definitions are equally useful in highlighting different aspects of problematic social conditions, given that they are operationalized and measured well. Indeed, estimating the number of people in the United States who cannot pay for their basic subsistence could be as useful as identifying the share of the EU residents who lack the means to achieve a full social membership. However, these two definitions of poverty do not explicitly link individuallevel vulnerability and macro-level causes of poverty. Comparative cross-national and historical studies illuminate the mechanisms behind systematic poverty, yet the definitions of poverty themselves are more or less about the individuals who fall below the absolute or relative standards. In order to understand the extent of poverty and inequality problems and make sensible policy recommendations, we ought to explicitly include the macro-level structure of poverty into our definitions. One of the important theoretical contributions Townsend (1979) made was his extension of the notion of poverty to social and cultural dimensions of deprivation. In

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his view, if a person cannot participate fully in a given society, he or she is deprived of social membership, and henceforth is excluded from being part of what are considered ordinary living conditions. This notion of social exclusion has been gaining recognition as a related but distinctive conceptualization of the experience of poverty in the past several decades, largely by European scholars but increasingly so by the US scholars in the fields of poverty and inequality (e.g., Brady 2003). The definition of social exclusion is also contested, yet discussions spurred from the framework of social exclusion have generated important questions regarding the opposite condition – social inclusion. Indeed, defining and understanding the state of exclusion illuminates the ways in which we can create a more inclusive society. Scholars differ in how they conceptualize social exclusion, and some even conflate the two concepts, considering social exclusion as poverty “relabeled” (Barry 2002, 13). However, experts suggest that the modern usage of the term carries political and institutional aspects of the poverty experience, making it an equally important subject of social research. Modern usage of the term is commonly traced back to France in the 1970s, where it was used to single out people who fell through the cracks of social insurance programs as “social problems” (Gore, Figueiredo, and Rodgers 1995). In this sense, the socially excluded were stigmatized and treated as the problem, instead of being seen as the victims of the inadequate welfare system. This framing of social marginalization has deleterious social justice implications because while social isolation makes it harder for people’s interests to be reflected in politics, social exclusion causes far more serious implications due to stigmatization, making them scapegoats for social unrest (Barry 2002). However, the discourse on social exclusion shifted during the 1980s as the new class of poor emerged from technological development and economic restructuring (Gore, Figueiredo, and Rodgers 1995). Once a larger subset of the population experiences the

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systematic process of social disintegration and suffers from the increasingly precarious nature of low-wage jobs, social exclusion became seen as a symptom of societal conditions, rather than as individual failure (Lister 2004; Gore, Figueiredo, and Rodgers 1995). This reframed understanding of marginalization as systematic failure became crucial for seeing poverty and inequality as social justice issues, because the term simultaneously problematized individual-level vulnerabilities and structural failures. Within the French “solidarity” or Republican citizenship tradition, shared experience and a sense of social solidarity or empathy toward fellow human beings helped the public to recognize that everybody deserves basic human rights, and saw that the state has the responsibility to maintain solidarity through reintegration (Silver 1994). Other advanced economies however interpreted the meaning of social exclusion differently. Silver (1994) theorized that the Anglo-American “specialization” approach saw social exclusion as a consequence of the liberal market system, where individuals are responsible for their own fate in an increasingly diverse and specialized labor market. Within this framework, citizenship or social membership was only seen as a form of social contract guaranteeing equal rights and obligations of individuals. Henceforth, the state in theory should not impede free exchanges by reintegrating those who freely chose to exclude themselves. Whereas within the “monopoly” or European Left paradigm, social exclusion was seen as a purposeful domination over certain groups by those in power, and inequality maintains their monopoly over scarce resources. Silver (1994) theorized that under this condition, “exclusion is combated through citizenship, and the extension of equal membership and full participation in the community to outsiders” (543). What this line of thought stimulated is the discussion surrounding citizenship and rights, asking if the issue of social exclusion, poverty, and inequality can be discussed alongside the civil, political, and

social rights of citizenship (Room 1995). Once the discourse has shifted to social exclusion being seen as denied or limited opportunities to participate in mainstream society, the role of political, economic, or welfare arrangements became increasingly important in understanding poverty and inequality (Townsend 1979). The Social Citizenship Framework of T. H. Marshall Although there are many competing definitions and understandings of citizenship, when it comes to the issues of poverty, inequality, and social exclusion, many refer back to the seminal work of T. H. Marshall titled Citizenship and Social Class (1950). His writing traces the development of citizenship in England from the middle of the seventeenth century throughout the postwar period, and defines citizenship as “full membership of a community” comprising three elements – civil, political, and social rights. Marshall (1950) theorized that the first right as a citizen was achieved during the eighteenth century, when many of the rights necessary for individual liberty, such as freedom of speech, the right to own property and residence, and the right to justice, were codified through the Courts of Justice. Next, political rights became codified into law when the rights to vote and participate in political process were guaranteed during the nineteenth century. However, under capitalism, political and civil rights did not ensure equality. In order to make sure that the right to “a modicum of economic welfare and security to the right to share to the full in the social heritage and to live the life of a civilized being” (Marshall 1950, 69), social rights were gained. He notes the development of public education and social services as part of social rights. For Marshall, the welfare state was developed in response to the worsening condition of the working class. Although many have criticized Marshall’s characterization of citizenship as being Anglocentric (Mann 1987), vague on the definition

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of social rights (Powell 2002), masculine and patriarchal (Lister 1997), and so on, his theory is important to understand the relationship between capitalism and citizenship. Because many interpret the development of the modern welfare state as a systematic response to the problem of capitalism (Flora and Heidenheimer 1981), much like Marshall (1950) explained the development of social rights, comparative welfare studies tend to analyze social policies within the cluster of modern capitalist nations. EspingAndersen’s (1990) The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism is written within this framework and analyzes how eighteen advanced capitalist nations promote economic and social equalities. Based on the characteristics of social policies and programs, he found that more inclusive welfare regimes lower poverty and inequality, whereas social programs that are targeted to narrow groups do not. However, in Progress for the Poor, Kenworthy (2011) suggests that targeting may be a sensible antipoverty solution as rich countries face fiscal crisis and scrutiny. For the rest of this chapter, we focus on contextual heterogeneity in poverty and social exclusion in relation to income inequality. Upon problematizing a macro-level explanation of poverty within the citizenship framework, we discuss the limitations of this approach and make some suggestions for future studies.

Theory of Poverty: Macro versus Micro Problems of poverty and inequality are socially constructed, and henceforth, how we define, conceptualize, or measure each concept has a profound influence on how we understand the extent of the problems. In a similar vein, how we theorize and interpret the causes of poverty directly influences how the public and policy makers attempt to solve the problems. An experiment-based study from the United States shows that belief about the causes of poverty and attitudes toward the poor

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impact one’s willingness to help the poor (Tagler and Cozzarelli 2013). In this section, we briefly review the lay attributions of poverty, and contrast them with the empirical findings problematizing macro- and community-level factors. We then apply T. H. Marshall’s social citizenship framework to discuss the concepts of equality and social inclusion comparatively. We conclude the section by discussing the limitations of this approach. Who is to blame for poverty? The answer to this question has direct implications for antipoverty policies. A classic study by Feagin (1975) surveyed attitudes toward the poor in the United States and highlighted the pervasiveness of individualism surrounding the public discourse on poverty and welfare. Roughly half of the respondents believed that poverty stemmed from individual shortcomings, such as lack of effort or not being thrifty enough. In addition to individualistic explanation, Feagin (1975) identified structural and fatalistic causes of poverty, where the former blames the structure of society, while the latter blames factors beyond the control of individuals, such as fate. Fast-forward to 2012, a survey by the Pew Research Center indicates that 38 percent of Americans blame lack of individual effort, while 46 percent blame circumstances beyond one’s control. Disagreement in public attitude is further complicated by the sharp partisan divide, where 61 percent of Democrats blame external circumstances, while 57 percent of Republicans blame individual lack of effort as explanations for poverty (Kohut et al. 2012). Indeed, the public attitude toward the poor in the United States still largely remains divided, making it difficult to agree on what the government should or should not do. Lepianka, Gelissen, and Oorschot (2010) compared perceptions on poverty across twenty-eight European countries using multiple response data from the European Values Survey 1999/2000, and estimated country-level support for four major explanations of poverty. They found that the majority of countries identify poverty as a

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50% 60% of Disposable Income 60% of Market Income 40%

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Iceland Czech Republic Norway Denmark Netherlands Slovak Republic Luxembourg France Hungary Slovenia Austria Finland Germany Ireland Switzerland United Kingdom Sweden Belgium Poland Portugal Estonia Canada New Zealand Italy Korea Spain Greece Australia Japan United States Chile Turkey Mexico Israel

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Figure 21.5. Pre- and posttax and transfer relative poverty rates across OECD countries, 2010.

consequence of injustice in society; similar in the way the EU problematizes the issues of poverty and social exclusion. However, unluckiness was the most popular explanation in the Netherlands and Luxembourg, whereas laziness or lack of willpower had the most support in the Czech Republic and Malta. In contrast, Denmark, Finland, Greece, and Russia saw poverty as part of modern progress. An analysis of Eurobarometer 2007 data by da Costa and Dias (2015) further unpacks popular beliefs about poverty and indicates that betweencountries trend and within-country variance are likely to reflect country- or regionspecific cultural and historical processes, both of which are crucial for understanding the ideological basis of redistributive policies and welfare regimes. However, the public perception about the causes of poverty and attitudes toward the poor only provide a single piece of the antipoverty policy puzzle. In the previous section, we briefly discussed the concepts of social exclusion and inclusion, and introduced the social citizenship framework of T. H. Marshall to widen our scope of poverty and inequality problems. Acknowl-

edging that modern capitalist welfare states may systematically exclude individuals or an entire group allows us to more concretely examine the structural causes of social exclusion and the possibility for social inclusion. In addition, the social citizenship framework encourages us to ask what are the fundamental human rights that should be available to all citizens of a society, and lets us examine the role of the state in mediating poverty and social exclusion comparatively. We began this chapter by comparing relative poverty rates across OECD countries. We provided Figure 21.1 to illustrate how using 50 percent or 60 percent of the median disposable income changes the estimated prevalence of poverty, but it also demonstrated how relative poverty rates vary across member countries. However, we did not discuss why we see such a dramatic variance across these wealthy countries. Figure 21.5 compares relative poverty rates using 60 percent of median market and disposable income. Both estimates are based on equivalized household income, which adjusts for different household sizes; thus the only difference between these two estimates

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is that disposable income includes Social Security transfers from public sources and subtracts taxes and Social Security contributions paid by households. Here, we can see that the United States no longer ranks high based on market income, indicating that without state intervention and redistributive measures, countries such as the Czech Republic and Norway have comparable relative poverty rates to the United States. Studies show low levels of public expenditure as one of the contributing factors explaining high relative poverty and income inequality in the United States (Brady, Fullerton, and Cross 2009; Mahler and Jesuit 2006; Smeeding 2005; Osberg, Smeeding, and Schwabish 2004; Moller et al. 2003; Kenworthy 1999). Indeed, Figure 21.5 makes it clear that countries with lower relative poverty rates tend to have a higher share of social benefits relative to household income. Relating this concept of income redistribution back to Figure 21.4, we mentioned earlier that the Gini for Denmark in 2010 was about twenty-seven, indicating that income inequality is much lower compared to Mexico or the United States. However, if we estimate Gini for Denmark using pretax and transfer household income, it would be forty-three. What this difference means is that redistributive policies not only reduce relative poverty rates, but can also lessen income inequality. This line of work extends beyond monetary redistributive policies, and analyzes a variety of contextual factors, such as family and housing policies, as well as economic conditions and wage bargaining systems, that mediate or exacerbate poverty and income inequality. However, the citizenship framework faces a number of limitations as well. Upon discussing some limitations, we conclude the chapter by introducing some comparative studies that take account of some of the caveats and offer suggestions for future research. Limitations of the Citizenship Approach A citizenship-based comparison of poverty and inequality provides important insights

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into how states lessen or exacerbate the problems of poverty and inequality. However, social rights are not available equally to all members of a given society. Van Oorschot (2006) shows that Europeans consistently view elderly people as more deserving of state social assistance, whereas unemployed people are seen as less deserving of support. And above all, immigrants are considered the least deserving group, despite the fact that they face systematic discrimination and other forms of disadvantage elsewhere. Within-country discrimination is not only reflected in the public attitude toward the poor, but is also built into the antipoverty policies themselves, making it harder to examine poverty and inequality at the societal level. Studies examining the concentration of poverty among inner-city blacks in the United States highlight the limitations of the citizenship approach very well. One of the most notable US scholars who extended the citizenship framework was Talcott Parsons, who examined the process of social inclusion and discrimination against blacks. In Full Citizenship for the Negro American?, Parsons (1965) traces the different circumstances behind the process of social inclusion, between the “new immigration” and formally enslaved blacks, and highlights cumulated disadvantages that led to the designation of blacks as second-class citizens in the United States. Parsons argued that blacks will not gain full citizenship until they have access to the same political and economic rights the rest of the population had. Three decades later, in When Work Disappears, William Julius Wilson (1996) reaches a similar conclusion, arguing that urban poverty stems from blacks not having the same social rights. A similar point can be made about gender and social rights, from state-market relations excluding the role of family and women’s unpaid care work (Orloff 1993) to work-life policies ignoring unequal demands of paid and unpaid work between men and women (Misra et al. 2012; Pettit and Hook 2009; Misra, Moller, and Budig 2007; Gornick and Meyers 2003).

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Another empirical and theoretical problem with the citizenship model is that Marshall failed to develop how the state maintains and provides social rights, while existing within a system of capitalism (Turner 1990). For example, one of the major issues separating those who support redistribution and those who oppose it is that income redistribution generally occurs through higher taxation. While some argue that economic growth decreases with income inequality (Kenworthy 2004), others argue that economic growth decreases with taxation and redistribution (Daveri and Tabellini 2000). While Marshall’s notion of social citizenship encourages a focus on the fundamental rights of every citizen, it does not mediate the tension between the state and capitalism.

Potentials of the Citizenship Approach In analyzing poverty and inequality as social problems, it is crucial to recognize the role of the state in defining and addressing these issues. As shown in Figure 21.5, the state plays a key role via taxes and transfers that can mediate inequality, and plays a further role through service provisions, such as state-provided or subsidized education. Yet as Figure 21.5 also shows, there is substantial variation in how effectively the state does so. Given the dramatic increase in inequality over the last several decades, and the potential for dividends of political and economic instability, states will continue to play a crucial role in addressing poverty and inequality. Building from the idea of social citizenship, but nuancing the concept to recognize variations in who counts as a citizen, will allow future generations of scholars to examine how social exclusion reflects not only income inequalities, but also inequalities based on gender, sexuality, age, race, ethnicity, nationality, disability, and other axes of difference. A more intersectional approach to poverty and inequality allows states to develop more effectively targeted

policies and programs that can nevertheless make a powerful difference. For example, if we understand poverty as simply an outcome of unemployment, our solution may be to develop jobs and focus on job training. However, job creation and training may not help those who are too young or too old to work, disabled or ill, or who face other difficulties. Providing economic supports for those who cannot work needs to be addressed; many countries have limited poverty among the elderly with pensions and health care, but there are additional groups deserving of additional state support. Research suggests that, crossnationally, single mothers and their children are much less likely to live in poverty if they have access to subsidized childcare (Misra et al. 2007; Misra et al. 2012). By enabling mothers’ employment through the provision of subsidized, high quality childcare, states play a key role in helping mothers and their children escape poverty. Considering another intersection, Brush (2011) shows how challenging it is for battered mothers to maintain employment, in the face of welfare rules that emphasize engagement with work. While, in theory, employment should lessen women’s dependency on abusive men, abuse trails women into the workplace, disrupting their employment opportunities. Given US welfare rules requiring these women to be employed, domestic abuse survivors not only find little support from the state, but also find themselves in a catch-22, unable to escape abusive situations. Brush (2011) further shows how these processes reflect not only class, but also racial, inequalities. Therefore, state policies and programs that emphasize “work first” as the solution, without attending to the specific constraints of abused women, will have limited success. Research from a social citizenship perspective also needs to recognize the challenges posed by a globalized world, where residents may have different levels of citizenship. For example, social rights may be guaranteed differently to native-born citizens, native-born noncitizens, naturalized

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citizens, documented immigrants, and undocumented immigrants (Aleinikoff and Klusmeyer 2001; Ong 1999; Soysal 1994). These rights may further differ by race and ethnicity (Sainsbury 2012; Morissens and Sainsbury 2005). Emigrants may also hold different citizenship rights as “overseas citizens” of their homelands, so that they enjoy greater or fewer protections. As we recognize the ways nationality, race, and immigration status may lead to social exclusion in a globalized world, it is crucial that we develop new approaches to addressing these inequalities. Future research must struggle with how the shift from an industrial to a postindustrial economy has led to new problems, and the need for new approaches to poverty and inequality. For example, given a postindustrial economy that has hollowed out the middle class (Gornick and Jäntti 2013), it is particularly critical for states to find ways to create less polarized economic and political systems. As scholars have shown, policies in labor markets, social policy, and political representation are linked to fewer social rights for certain groups and the “dualization” of the political economy (Emmenegger 2012). Yet, these growing divides are weaker in Nordic countries. Moller et al. (2014), for example, show in a cross-national and longitudinal analysis, how policies impact the relative income of families with children, analyzing different types of households by family structure and the educational level of parents, to suggest when and where policies help guarantee these families social rights. Just as the state played a central role in the shift from an agricultural to a manufacturing economy, governments can and should shape the distributive consequences of the shift to a postindustrial economy. Research on poverty and inequality also needs to become more global by incorporating evidence and understanding of poverty and inequality in other contexts. For decades, scholarship has been divided between inequality scholars who focus on developing contexts, and those that focus on developed contexts. Yet, in the current

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global economy, there are many overlaps between these two contexts. Understanding how social citizenship plays out in different contexts – including Asia, Latin America, and Africa, as well as the Middle East and Eastern Europe – will strengthen our understanding of poverty and inequality dynamics in wealthy countries. At the same time drawing on evidence from wealthy countries about the importance of calibrating labor market policies, social policy, and systems of political representation as countries develop economically will lead to more stable political transitions.

Glossary Absolute poverty The absolute definition of poverty is often based on basic physiological subsistence needs and is measured using estimated monetary thresholds. Citizenship According to T. H. Marshall, citizenship is a status constituted of three elements – civil, political, and social rights, which ensures full membership of a community. Comparative analysis The method of inquiry in which two or more cases are compared to highlight differences and similarities across the observations. Inequality Unequal access to resources and opportunities in a society or community. Inequality measures Inequality measures capture relative distribution of income, wealth, or life chances, yet they cannot identify ideal pattern of distribution. Poverty measure Poverty measures divide people into the poor and the nonpoor based on subjective thresholds and are accompanied by a set of assumptions and uncertainties. Relative poverty Relative poverty is defined in relation to the prevailing standard of living in a society or community. Social exclusion Social exclusion occurs at the individual or group level, when they are socially marginalized and are unable to participate fully in society. Social inclusion Social inclusion is the process in which a person or a group is

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integrated into the society and are able to participate fully in all aspects of their life.

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American values: 1987–2012. Partisan polarization surges in Bush, Obama years. Pew Research Center. www.people-press.org/ files/legacy-pdf/06–04–12%20Values%20 Release.pdf. Lepianka, Dorota, John Gelissen, and Wim van Oorschot. 2010. Popular explanations of poverty in Europe: Effects of contextual and individual characteristics across 28 European countries. Acta Sociologica 53(1):53–72. Li, Hongyi, and Heng-Fu Zou. 1998. Income inequality is not harmful for growth: Theory and evidence. Review of Development Economics 2(3):318–34. Lister, Ruth. 1997. Citizenship: Feminist Perspectives. 2nd ed. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 2004. Poverty. Oxford: Polity Press. Mack, Joanna, and Stewart Lansley. 1985. Poor Britain. London: George Allen & Unwin. Mahler, Vincent A., and David K. Jesuit. 2006. Fiscal redistribution in the developed countries: New insights from the Luxembourg Income Study. Socio-Economic Review 4:483511. Mann, Michael. 1987. Ruling class strategies and citizenship. Sociology 21(3):339–54. Marshall, T. H. 1950. Citizenship and Social Class and Other Essays. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. McLeod, Jane D., and Michael J. Shanahan. 1996. Trajectories of poverty and children’s mental health. Journal of Health and Social Behavior 37(3):207–20. McLoyd, Vonnie C. 1998. Socioeconomic disadvantage and child development. American Psychologist 53(2):185–204. Misra, Joya, Stephanie Moller, and Michelle J. Budig. 2007. Work-family policies and poverty for partnered and single women in Europe and North America. Gender & Society 21(6):804–27. Misra, Joya, Stephanie Moller, Eiko Strader, and Elizabeth Wemlinger. 2012. Family policies, employment and poverty among partnered and single mothers. Research in Social Stratification and Mobility 30(1):113–28. Moller, Stephanie, David Bradley, Evelyne Huber, Francois Nielsen, and John D. Stephens. 2003. Determinants of relative poverty in advanced capitalist democracies. American Sociological Review 68(1):22–51. Moller, Stephanie, Joya Misra, Elizabeth Wemlinger, and Eiko Strader. 2014. Cross-national

policies and relative household income of families with children by family structure and parental education. Paper presented at the XVIII ISA World Congress of Sociology, Yokohama, Japan, July 13–19. Morissens, Ann, and Diane Sainsbury. 2005. Migrants’ social rights, ethnicity and welfare regimes. Journal of Social Policy 34(4):637–60. Nelson, Kenneth. 2013. Social assistance and EU poverty thresholds 1990–2008: Are European welfare systems providing just and fair protection against low income? European Sociological Review 29(2):386–401. OECD. 2015. In It Together: Why Less Inequality Benefits All. Paris: OECD Publishing. Ong, Aihwa. 1999. Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Orloff, Ann Shola. 1993. Gender and the social rights of citizenship: The comparative analysis of gender relations and welfare states. American Sociological Review 58(3):303– 28. Osberg, Lars, Timothy M. Smeeding, and Jonathan Schwabish. 2004. Income distribution and public social expenditure: Theories, effects, and evidence. In Social Inequality, edited by Kathryn M. Neckerman, 821–59. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Pager, Devah, and Hana Shepherd. 2008. The sociology of discrimination: Racial discrimination in employment, housing, credit, and consumer markets. Annual Review of Sociology 34:181–209. Parsons, Talcott. 1965. Full citizenship for the Negro American? A sociological problem. Daedalus 94(4):1009–54. Pettit, Becky, and Jennifer Lynn Hook. 2009. Gendered Tradeoffs: Family, Social Policy, and Economic Inequality in Twenty-One Countries. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Piachaud, David. 1981. Peter Townsend and the Holy Grail. New Society 57(10):419–22. Piketty, Thomas. 2014. Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Powell, Martin. 2002. The hidden history of social citizenship. Citizenship Studies 6(3):229–44. Pridemore, William Alex. 2008. A methodological addition to the cross-national empirical literature on social structure and homicide: A first test of the poverty homicide thesis. Criminology 46(1):133–54.

poverty and income inequality Ravallion, Martin. 2001. Growth, inequality and poverty: Looking beyond average. World Development 29(11):1803–15. 2007. Inequality is bad for the poor. In Inequality and Poverty Re-Examined, edited by Stephen P. Jenkins, and John Micklewright, 37–61. New York: Oxford University Press. Room, Graham. 1995. Beyond the Threshold: The Measurement and Analysis of Social Exclusion. Bristol: Polity Press. Ruoppila, Sampo, and Sara Lamminmäki. 2009. Finland Minimum Income Schemes: A Study of National Policies. Finland: Net Effect Ltd. Sainsbury, Diane. 2012. Welfare States and Immigrant Rights: The Politics of Inclusion and Exclusion. New York: Oxford University Press. Sarkar, Urmimala, Andrew J. Karter, Jennifer Y. Liu, Nancy E. Adler, Robert Nguyen, Andrea Lopez, and Dean Schillinger. 2011. Social disparities in Internet patient portal use in diabetes: Evidence that the digital divide extends beyond access. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association 18(3):318–21. Schlesinger, Jacob M. 2015. Japan may be exception to Piketty’s thesis: Share of income of Japan’s top 1% has leveled off or even slipped, data show. Wall Street Journal, February 9. www.wsj.com/articles/japanmay-be-exception-to-pikettys-thesis1423451451. Seccombe, Karen. 2000. Families in poverty in the 1990s: Trends, causes, consequences, and lessons learned. Journal of Marriage and Family 62(4):1094–113. Sekine, Yuki. 2008. The rise of poverty in Japan: The emergence of the working poor. Japan Labor Review 5(4):49–66. Sen, Amartya. 1985. A sociological approach to the measurement of poverty: A reply to Professor Peter Townsend. Oxford Economic Papers 37 (4):669–76. Servon, Lisa J. 2002. Bridging the Digital Divide: Technology, Community, and Public Policy. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Silver, Hilary. 1994. Social exclusion and social solidarity: Three paradigms. International Labour Review 133:531–78. Smeeding, Timothy M. 2005. Public policy, economic inequality, and poverty: The United

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CHAPTER 22

Housing Market Discrimination W. Dennis Keating

Abstract Discrimination in housing has long been a problem. While discrimination based on racial and ethnic differences has received more attention, there are many other forms of discrimination affecting other groups, such as the disabled. In the United States, discrimination against African Americans following their emancipation resulting from the Civil War has continued in various forms. Political and legal opposition to racial discrimination has resulted in landmark legislation and judicial decisions aimed at ending discrimination in housing. Despite these precedents, housing discrimination continues. Most notably in the United States is the pattern of continued segregation in much of housing, both in urban and suburban areas. Housing discrimination is different in Europe, where it is largely directed against minority immigrants who mostly reside in enclaves, which governments have sought to improve. The UN proclaims that housing discrimination violates the universal Right to Adequate Housing.

The Current State of Housing Market Discrimination Despite policies aimed at the greater integration of populations and legislation that prohibits various forms of discrimination in housing markets, discrimination remains a significant issue. In the United States, it tends to be more covert today compared to previous generations. A persistent problem is that of the segregation of different populations, most notably on the basis of race and ethnicity. This remains more so the case in

the United States than in Europe. However, segregation by income (economic inequality) and social status (occupation) are also major facets of discrimination. While not interchangeable, these two factors often disproportionately affect racial and ethnic minority groups. Housing market discrimination is not limited only to these factors. Discrimination has also been based on physical and mental handicaps, households with children, gender, religion, and source of income. In the United States, legislation prohibiting

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discrimination based on these factors has been enacted variously at the federal, state and local levels of government. In addition, legal challenges based upon the US Constitution and antidiscrimination legislation have played an important role in attempts to combat discrimination. The Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the US Constitution has provided a basis for challenging discrimination in the housing market.

Housing Discrimination in the United States Residential Segregation In the United States residential segregation has historically focused most prominently on the separation of whites and African Americans. Following the American Civil War, whites in the defeated South used various legal strategies, including force, to prevent the integration of the races. On the West Coast, Asian immigrants also faced discrimination and experienced segregation. A common demographic method used to measure the degree of residential segregation is the dissimilarity index. The index shows the extent of segregation at the levels of neighborhood, city, and metropolitan region. The index ranges from zero to 100. Higher numbers indicate more segregation. The index can illustrate the extent to which populations must shift to achieve a higher level of residential integration. According to Brown University’s American Communities Project based upon the 2010 US Census, Chicago is the most racially segregated city in the United States. Yet, it also ranks as the seventh most “diverse” US city. The diversity index measures the proportion of the major racial groups in cities. It can be argued that the more important spatial basis for measuring segregation is at the neighborhood or census tract level. The racial composition of these communities may differ considerably from the city’s overall racial composition. While there has

been significant progress made in breaking down racial barriers to choice and discrimination regarding housing, major challenges remain. In 1989, Princeton University sociologist Douglas Massey coined the term “hypersegregation.” This term is used to describe cities that have at least four of the following five characteristics: Black residents are unevenly distributed geographically; Black residents are isolated in predominantly Black neighborhoods; These neighborhoods are clustered together, forming contiguous ghettos; The Black population is highly concentrated in these compact areas; These Black residents tend to live in the urban cores of central cities. In a 2015 report in Demography covering the years 1970–2010, Massey and Jonathan Tannen found that the number of hypersegregated metropolitan areas had declined from forty to twenty-one. However, five cities remained hypersegregated through this time period: New York, Chicago, Cleveland, Milwaukee, and Philadelphia. Historical Background Before the Civil War, free African Americans living in cities were not generally residing in totally racially segregated neighborhoods. However, this would change following the Civil War and the emancipation of the slaves in the defeated Southern Confederacy. To prevent racial discrimination in housing against the freed slaves, the US Congress enacted the Civil Rights Act of 1866. However, with a major decision (The Civil Rights Cases) by the US Supreme Court in 1883 undercutting the Civil Rights Acts passed by Congress, this law went unenforced until it was resurrected by the Court in its 1968 decision Jones v. Alfred H. Mayer. Here, the Court ruled that the 1866 law applied not only to governments but

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also to housing discrimination by private parties. In 1868, Congress ratified the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution. The key phrase in this amendment reads: “No state shall . . . deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” This is known as the Equal Protection Clause. Despite its obvious intent to prevent discrimination, as interpreted by the courts, the Clause has not been interpreted to be absolute. In one of its most notorious decisions, the US Supreme Court ruled 8–1 in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) that “separate but equal” segregation did not violate the Equal Protection Clause. That doctrine would be reversed in the unanimous landmark decision in the 1954 ruling against public school racial segregation, Brown v. Board of Education. With the end of the post–Civil War Reconstruction period, the so-called Jim Crow racial segregation laws were adopted by Southern states. African Americans were generally forced to live in racially segregated neighborhoods, more by custom than law. The more extreme policy of discrimination was legalized apartheid barring any interracial residential pattern. Whites and blacks were spatially separated. It wasn’t until 1917 in Buchanan v. Warley that the US Supreme Court ruled that a racial zoning ordinance in Louisville, Kentucky violated the Fourteenth Amendment. Ironically, its reasoning was not that this violated the rights of blacks to live with whites under the Equal Protection Clause but rather that it violated the due process rights of white property holders because it limited their ability to sell their property. A different era of racial discrimination in housing unfolded with the Great Migration of 1910–70 when millions of Southern blacks relocated North in order to escape racial oppression and poverty. In major northern cities like Chicago and Detroit working-class whites feared that their jobs were threatened by black migrants willing to work for less. They also feared that if blacks moved into their neighborhoods, they would reduce property values by their

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presence. This belief still persists among many whites. When African American professionals attempted to move into white neighborhoods, white resistance often took the form of mob violence. A notorious instance of this occurred in Detroit in 1925 when a black physician named Ossian Sweet bought a home in a white neighborhood. He and his family were attacked by an armed white mob. When a white man was shot and killed, Sweet and other members of his family were charged with murder. Defended by the famous attorney Clarence Darrow, he was acquitted on the basis of self defense. However, similar displays of violent white resistance to blacks moving into their neighborhoods continued in Detroit and other cities. Racial Covenants and Land Contracts In Chicago in the 1920s, the real estate industry developed the legal tool of “racial restrictive covenants” to protect white neighborhoods from racial integration. These were enforceable deed restrictions made among white neighbors who agreed not to sell or rent to African Americans (and other racial and ethnic minorities). It was not until 1948 in the case of Shelley v. Kraemer that racial restrictive covenants were found to be illegal. The US Supreme Court reasoned that since these private agreements could only be legally enforced by the courts, they amounted to governmental racial discrimination in violation of the Equal Protection Clause. Another form of discrimination in housing that affected blacks in Chicago was their inability to obtain conventional mortgage loans to purchase homes. Their only alternative were land contracts that unlike mortgages did not allow the borrower to take title to the purchased property until they paid off the loan. Typically, these land contracts carried higher interest rates than predominantly used loans. Attempts by the Contract Buyers League through protests and lawsuits to have these loans declared

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illegal because of their racially discriminatory nature failed. Redlining An even more devastating form of racial discrimination in mortgage lending, redlining, emerged in the 1930s. In the midst of widespread foreclosures caused largely by unemployment during the Depression, the Roosevelt administration’s New Deal reorganized the banking industry. The basic structure of mortgage lending for housing was reformed. A key component was a requirement for mortgage insurance which became available for eligible homebuyers through the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) created in 1934. This all but eliminated the risk of losses from foreclosure for federally regulated lenders. This in turn allowed the lenders to increase the size and number of loans while reducing interest rates. Lenders and their appraisers had accepted the claim that racial minorities, by their presence in communities, caused a decline of property values. Through a rating system residential neighborhoods were judged on the basis of their racial composition. Having black residents led to those neighborhoods being deliniated in red on maps, redlining, which resulted in banks refusing to make loans on homes there because of the perceived risks. The FHA also accepted this prejudicial view toward African Americans and this precluded its issuing insurance in redlined neighborhoods, which meant that lenders would follow suit. The FHA also endorsed racial covenants. This had tremendous consequences following World War II as suburbanization boomed and millions deserted the neighborhoods of older cities where housing did not meet the quality standards of the FHA. These new homeowners, assisted by favorable federal mortgage loans for veterans, were almost entirely white. The developers of suburban residential subdivisions refused to sell homes to black veterans for fear that white home buyers would look elsewhere

and that their housing developments would be redlined. In the cities, realtors participated in this racial discrimination. Blacks were barred from becoming members of the racially segregated National Association of Realtors, which denied them access to the multiple listings of homes for sale that were critical to success for realtors. So, black “realtists” (who organized in 1947 a minority real estate association called the National Association of Real Estate Brokers) were almost entirely limited to working with minority buyers and sellers in segregated minority areas. The code of conduct of members of the all-white National Association of Realtors prohibited realtors from promoting racial integration by showing homes in white neighborhoods to minority home buyers. This was a key factor in the development of a dual housing market reflecting racial segregation that reinforced the existence of racial ghettos. Unethical white realtors (sometimes in collusion with black realtists) took advantage of this by engaging in “blockbusting.” They would frighten white homeowners into panic selling at reduced prices through the possibility of blacks entering their neighborhoods. They would then sell their homes at inflated prices to African Americans who believed that they were moving to a racially integrated neighborhood. All too often, “white flight” would lead to the neighborhood becoming all or mostly African American. A controversial concept is that there is a racial “tipping point” beyond which most white residents will move due to an increased proportion of a neighborhood that is composed of minority residents. This theory has been disputed, including at which point it would prove to be generally true. Public Housing Another New Deal policy that discriminated-against African Americans was the public housing program. While it benefited many of those poor African Americans living in slum housing, it reinforced patterns of racial segregation. Attempts to

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racially integrate public housing in cities like Chicago and Detroit failed in the face of white opposition. In Chicago, it took a legal challenge that was finally decided by the US Supreme Court to attempt to desegregate its public housing (see below). Urban Renewal and Highways The next federal policy that discriminatedagainst blacks was the urban renewal program that began in 1949. With federal subsidies, municipalities designated slum areas as “blighted,” bulldozed them, and, once cleared of the blight, planned for their redevelopment. In US cities, many of the neighborhoods so designated were populated by poor minorities. These neighborhoods were indeed often the site of substandard housing but were also vulnerable to clearance because they lacked the political standing to successfully oppose the removal of the residents and businesses. Because of this, urban renewal came to be named “Negro removal” by critics like Scott Greer. Promised relocation assistance for those displaced was often not forthcoming. The housing occupied by poor underclass minorities, which was mostly in poor condition, was not fully replaced. In similar fashion, urban highways built in this same mid-century era were often routed through poor, minority neighborhoods. As in the urban renewal program, the displaced residents’ housing often was not replaced. In both programs, even if homeowners received legally required compensation, it was not always enough for the purchase of a comparable home or one in better condition. 1968 Federal Fair Housing Legislation Given the moribund existence of the 1866 Civil Rights Act intended to outlaw discrimination in housing and property rights, racial minorities had no federal protection against these abuses short of constitutional challenges under the Fourteenth Amendment. The Kennedy administration had proposed very limited legislative proposals against

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racial discrimination in housing but these were stalled in Congress in the face of Southern opposition. That changed dramatically in April, 1968 following the assassination of African American civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Two years earlier King had led an unsuccessful campaign in Chicago against racial segregation and discrimination in housing. Within a week after King’s death, the US Congress enacted Title VIII of the Civil Rights Act. This “fair housing” legislation banned racial discrimination in housing but exempted owner-occupied smaller units. It banned discriminatory practices like blockbusting, racial steering, and racially targeted marketing. Those who believed that they had been discriminated against by home sellers, realtors, and landlords could file complaints with the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) within a limited time period. HUD’s Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity would then investigate to determine the legitimacy of the complaint. Alternatively, these victims could choose to go directly to court and sue on their own behalf. If state or local governments enacted similar antidiscrimination legislation, administrative complaints would heard first by them. Under this legislation, HUD would not itself initiate investigations on housing discrimination; rather, it had to await complaints. This meant that the burden fell upon racial minorities, or their representatives, being aware of such discrimination and pursuing complaints through HUD or the courts. In the following years, some complainants had HUD recognize the legitimacy of their grievances and, failing conciliation, through successful litigation either received compensation or redress (e.g., admission to rental housing units previously denied to them). However, following passage of Title VIII, much racial discrimination became covert (and a 2013 HUD report found that more subtle forms of housing discrimination “stubbornly persist”). Admissions of racial discrimination became rare. Recognizing this, fair housing organizations began to use “testers.” These are white and

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black volunteers with similar profiles who would pose as potential renters or buyers of the same housing. If the latter were treated differently than their white counterparts, this would become the evidentiary basis for a case claiming racial discrimination in violation of the law. Not only did the courts uphold the use of testers but in Havens v. Coleman (1982) the US Supreme Court upheld the standing of black testers themselves to bring fair housing lawsuits. The inherent flaws of fair housing legislation were documented in studies by the US Commission on Civil Rights in the 1970s. After lengthy lobbying by fair housing advocates, amendments expanding the Fair Housing Act were finally enacted in 1988. They strengthened the ability of “aggrieved persons” to pursue complaints, empowered administrative judges to order compensation for damages and impose fines, and authorized HUD to initiate investigations on its own. For the most part, complaints of violation to the amended Fair Housing Act continue to be initiated and pursued by individuals and fair housing organizations acting on their behalf, and not by HUD. The leading advocate for addressing issues of housing discrimination through the enforcement of antidiscrimination laws and regulations is the National Fair Housing Alliance (NFHA). In its 2014 report entitled Expanding Opportunity: Systematic Approaches to Fair Housing, the NFHA reported that HUD had received 27,352 complaints of housing discrimination in 2013. The NFHA noted that HUD estimated that reported complaints constituted less than 1 percent of the estimated 4 million instances of housing discrimination that occur annually. Disparate Impact Test Lawsuits brought by HUD, or more typically by affordable housing development organizations that have been denied approval for the construction of racially integrated housing, have overcome procedural hurdles. Since it has proven very difficult to prove a motive or intent to dis-

criminate by public officials, the plaintiffs have relied upon the argument that their actions have had a racially discriminatory impact. The use of this legal theory known as “disparate impact” was upheld in Village of Arlington Heights v. Metropolitan Housing Development Corp. (1977), when a rezoning request for a subsidized rental project was denied by a Chicago suburb. However, localities charged with racial discrimination in housing have not only denied it but have fought such claims in court over many years and even decades, making it almost impossible for most nonprofit housing sponsors to pursue such cases due to the costs of protracted litigation. A notorious example of a protracted case involved the attempt of the nonprofit Housing Help Inc. to build a racially integrated subsidized rental housing project in Huntington, New York. The city refused to rezone the developer’s preferred site and instead attempted to restrict the development to an urban renewal area with a concentrated black population. A federal appellate court in 1988 rejected Huntington’s purported reasons for this decision and on the basis of the disparate impact test found that the city had violated the Fair Housing Act and ordered the city to rezone the site chosen by Housing Help Inc. Despite this court order, the legal wrangling dragged on for decades, with still no housing built as of 2015. Controversy has arisen over the use of the “disparate impact” test to determine if there has been racial discrimination in housing in violation of the Fair Housing Act or the Equal Protection Clause. Courts have allowed the use of statistical analysis to determine this issue as illustrated above. Its use was confirmed by the US Supreme Court in Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. The Inclusive Communities Project in 2015 involving the allocation of federal tax credits for low-income housing by the Texas Department of Housing and Community Development. Although the Court majority upheld the use of the disparate impact test, it emphasized that plaintiffs relying upon it must establish that

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a defendant’s policy caused the racial disparity. The Court also warned against remedial court orders that impose racial targets or quotas that might be unconstitutional. A Few Famous Fair Housing Cases A few fair housing cases deserve special attention as follows. In Gautreaux v. Chicago Housing Authority (CHA), in 1966, black tenants sued the CHA, claiming that its policies on admission, tenant assignment, and site selection were intentionally based upon race in order to preserve racially segregated housing projects. After lengthy litigation, CHA was found guilty. Even more significantly, HUD was also found guilty because of its approval of CHA’s practices in Hills v. Gautreaux (1976). The remedy in this case has received considerable attention because an experimental program allowed black tenants to move to predominantly white neighborhoods in Chicago and many of its suburbs because of the City’s opposition to forced racial integration of CHA’s existing projects. It inspired a short-lived HUD housing mobility demonstration program called “Moving to Opportunity” aimed at enabling minority public housing residents in five major cities to move from neighborhoods with high rates of poverty (usually associated with minority race) to neighborhoods with lower rates of poverty. In the face of suburban resistance, especially in Baltimore, this experiment ended. Many poor, black tenants have used HUD’s Housing Choice Vouchers (rent subsidies for private housing) program to move from inner-city neighborhoods to those in inner suburbs (and to better urban neighborhoods). However, evidence suggests that this has not led to significant racial integration, due in part to the refusal of most private landlords to rent to the holders of these vouchers. In most US states, it is legal for landlords to refuse to rent to tenants based on the source of their income (e.g., public assistance). In United States v. Starrett City Associates (1988) the US Justice Department dur-

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ing the administration of President Ronald Reagan challenged the policy of the developer of a large affordable housing development in Brooklyn that imposed racial quotas in the application and assignment process. While the developer argued that this was necessary to ensure racial integration in this housing project (called “integration maintenance”), the Justice Department successfully argued that racial quotas in housing violated the Equal Protection Clause. In United States v. Yonkers Bd. of Education (1988) a federal judge found that the city of Yonkers, a suburb of New York City, had deliberately located its public schools and public housing on a racially segregated basis. After bitter resistance, the city finally complied with the court order requiring it to build racially integrated subsidized housing in its predominantly white neighborhoods. Purpose of the Fair Housing Act In addition to banning racial discrimination in housing, it has been argued that a companion purpose of the 1968 Fair Housing Act was the promotion of racial integration in housing. Proponents of this view cite the position of Senator (later US Vice President) Walter Mondale that the end result of the elimination of racial discrimination in housing would be integrated living patterns. The 1968 legislation required localities to “affirmatively further fair housing” (AFFH). This obligation was then attached to federal housing subsidy programs like the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG)s made to local governments. An attempt by then HUD Secretary George Romney to withhold such federal funding from highly racially segregated communities that were not complying with this mandate, was overruled by the administration of President Richard Nixon in 1971. This led to Romney’s resignation. Since then, HUD has not actively pursued implementing this policy. It has been argued that HUD’s policy follows the basic intent of the 1968 legislation, namely, to eliminate racial discrimination in housing only.

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Westchester County, New York, one of the wealthiest counties in the United States, was sued by the Anti-Discrimination Center of Metro New York. The Center claimed that the county had received annual CDBGs from HUD while conspicuously failing to comply with the AFFH requirements even though it claimed to have done so. The suit was brought under the Federal False Claims Act, alleging that the county was defrauding the government. The basis for this unusual claim was exclusionary zoning in most of the suburban communities in the county. Prevalent in many suburbs, this land-use policy either restricted the location of multifamily rental housing or banned it totally as incompatible with the singlefamily residential patterns that predominate. While not explicitly racial, under the disparate impact test, the policy often effectively excluded poor African Americans. The US Department of Justice intervened in the case on behalf of the Center. The county defiantly denied the charge, even after it entered into a 2009 settlement in which it agreed to sponsor hundreds of subsidized and racially integrated housing units in predominantly white areas, requiring zoning changes. As of 2015, the monitor overseeing the settlement reported that the county had not yet fully complied. Until its compliance is certified, HUD has withheld its CDBG funding. Nearly five decades after the 1968 fair housing legislation, in 2015, HUD issued new AFFH guidelines. Tied to federal grants awarded to communities, these guidelines reinforce the previous requirement that communities both document patterns of racial segregation and also indicate what concrete steps they will take (over a multiyear period) to address this condition. Whether this policy will lead to funding cut-offs by HUD for those communities that fail to meet this new standard, remains to be seen. Conservative opponents have characterized this policy, as unwarranted interference by the federal government in local affairs.

Source of Income Discrimination A significant obstacle for low-income persons seeking decent rental housing in the United States has been the refusal of many landlords to rent privately owned apartments to people receiving public rental assistance. This has been a particularly difficult problem for those low-income persons who have been awarded federal housing choice vouchers. Since 1974, federal low-income housing policy shifted from constructing low-income housing to instead providing financial subsidies to eligible renters to occupy housing in the private rental market. The rationales for this shift were to give tenants a broader choice of housing and neighborhoods, to avoid a concentration of poor residents in predominantly poor neighborhoods, leading to their isolation and in many cases racial segregation, and to reduce the subsidy costs to the federal government. More than 2 million poor tenants rely upon housing choice vouchers, which subsidize rents up to ceilings determined by HUD and local housing authorities. Tenants pay 30 percent of their income toward their rent. However, once these vouchers are awarded, the recipients must find landlords willing to rent housing that meets federal standards. In many rental housing markets, this has proven difficult, both in the central cities and in the inner suburbs. This has resulted in much of the same concentration of these poor tenants as this program sought to avoid. The federal government does not generally regulate the private rental market (unless landlords are federally subsidized). While a few states, such as California and New Jersey, have legislation making this discrimination illegal, most do not. In 2015, the city of Austin, Texas sought to widen housing choices for poor tenants relying upon these vouchers by enacting an ordinance making it illegal for landlords to refuse to rent to them because of their use of federal rent subsidies. However, the real estate lobby persuaded the state legislature to promptly enact preemptive legislation

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banning Texas cities from enacting such antidiscrimination legislation. Familial Status Discrimination Before 1988, families with children seeking rental housing were frequently met with ads that stipulated “No Pets or Children.” Therefore, these families’ housing choices were not only limited by the size of rental housing affecting the number of available units but also by prejudice against children. This ended with the 1988 amendments to the federal Fair Housing Act which prohibits discrimination based on “familial” status. However, renters must still find apartments that are suitable for housing families with children (e.g., with the necessary sleeping quarters). Discrimination against Americans with Disabilities Americans with a variety of disabilities have faced discrimination in housing in the past. Much of this discrimination has been prevented by the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act that provides limited protection. It applies to public accommodations and covers common areas for public use at covered multifamily dwellings (e.g., rental offices). However, the federal Fair Housing Act, as amended in 1988, provides much broader protection against housing discrimination against the handicapped. It applies to handicapped persons with a physical or mental disability that limits one or more major life activities and includes those with mobility, hearing and visual impairments, chronic alcoholism, mental illness, and HIV, AIDS and AIDS-related illness. Disabled tenants have a right to “reasonable accommodations” from landlords, both public and private. This requirement can make landlords undertake physical renovations to their housing units in order to comply with the law. However, they are legally protected against unreasonable requests that would seriously impair their ability to operate their business.

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In addition, to provide accommodations for disabled tenants, there has been considerable controversy over sheltering them in group homes. NIMBY (Not in my Backyard) opposition by neighbors to group homes for the mentally disabled and HIV/AIDS victims has often been highly contentious. Opponents have typically raised issues related to safety and a decline in adjacent property values. Studies debunking these arguments have not dissuaded many of these opponents. Providers of group homes for the disabled facing local opposition have sought legal protection under the Fair Housing Act. Frequently challenged have been spacing and quota policies in residential areas enacted by local governments though landuse regulations. These policies aim to limit the number and location of group homes. Additionally, communities opposing group homes have sought to use the legal definition of a “family” under zoning to exclude group homes from residential areas. These governments have argued that limiting the number and location of group homes for the disabled actually promotes the integration of their disabled residents into the community. The US Supreme Court has ruled that housing for the disabled must be in the most integrative setting possible and it (and many lower federal courts) has rejected spacing and quota requirements as in, for example, Olmstead v. L.C. ex rel. Zimring (1999). Prior to the 1988 amendments to the Fair Housing Act, the US Supreme Court had previously ruled in favor of group homes for the mentally disabled in City of Cleburne v. Cleburne Living Center (1985). In that case, it ruled that the attempt of a Texas city to restrict such a group home to an undesirable site was based on an irrational prejudice against the disabled in violation of the Constitution. In City of Edmonds v. Oxford House, Inc. (1995), the Court ruled that a city’s attempt to restrict occupancy in group homes for the handicapped by limiting the number of occupants, violated the Fair Housing Act. Opposition has subsided due to consistent federal court rulings in

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favor of providers of group homes for the disabled. Religious Discrimination in Housing There has been discrimination in housing by landlords who refuse to rent to tenants whose religion they object to or on the basis of their own religious beliefs. The First Amendment’s guarantee of the free practice of religion is aimed at governmental actions and is not an absolute guarantee. A landlord’s denial of housing based solely on the prospective tenant’s religion could be challenged under the Equal Protection Clause and federal and state fair housing legislation prohibiting such discrimination. Landlords have also refused to rent to unmarried couples. Some states ban housing discrimination based on marital status. Under these laws, the courts have had to balance a landlord’s religious belief that cohabitation is a sin with a tenant’s right to invoke protection under these laws. Landlords who refuse to rent to gay couples based on their religion will run afoul of the 2015 recognition by the US Supreme Court that such discrimination violates the Equal Protection Clause. Also, some states already had laws that generally protected gays and lesbians against discrimination. Sexual Harassment Sexual harassment of tenants by their landlords has been another form of discrimination. In October, 2015, HUD issued a proposed rule to amend and update its fair housing regulations to formalize standards for use in investigations and adjudication of quid pro quo harassment and hostile environment harassment. Discrimination in Lending in Housing Discrimination in mortgage lending for housing was banned by the 1968 Fair Housing Act. The following discriminatory practices are banned:

Refusal to make a mortgage loan or refinance a mortgage loan; Refusal to provide information regarding mortgage loans; Imposition of different terms or conditions on a mortgage loan (e.g., interest rates, points, fees); Discrimination in the appraisal of property; Refusal to purchase a loan or setting different terms or conditions for purchase of a loan; Discrimination in providing other financial assistance for purchasing, constructing, improving, repairing, or maintaining a dwelling or other financial assistance secured by residential real estate. The Act was aimed at previous practices that denied minorities normal financing even if they were eligible to purchase housing. As an antidote to redlining, a national coalition of neighborhood groups organized to demand that federally regulated lenders be required to lend in their own communities. In 1977, Congress passed the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA). While it did not directly address race, it did require the Federal Reserve Board to regularly review and rate the investment practices of these lenders. While the lenders initially opposed governmental interference with their lending decisions, this resistance eventually subsided. As a result, there has been billions of private investment funding (home mortgage loans and other types of loans) in previously neglected neighborhoods, including many that are predominantly occupied by minorities. Contrary to previous predictions, CRAinfluenced lending has generally proven to be profitable to the lenders. However, there is evidence that lender “redlining” has not completely ended. A November, 2015 report on Baltimore by the National Community Reinvestment Coalition argued that the racial composition of its neighborhoods is the prevailing factor in lender decisions on making mortgage loans.

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Reverse Redlining and the Foreclosure Crisis The first decade of the twenty-first century saw a new form of racial discrimination in housing called “reverse redlining.” As the financial crisis unfolded in the United States, fueled in part by a housing “bubble” and subprime lending, racial minority homeowners were affected disproportionately. Some subprime lenders targeted minority neighborhoods where homeowners either refinanced or purchased homes on “predatory” terms which caused widespread foreclosures and abandonment of housing. This led to the disproportionate displacement of minority homeowners, the loss of their equity in their homes, and negative social and economic consequences for their neighbors and neighborhoods. Several US cities – notably Baltimore, Memphis, and Oakland – sued mortgage lenders which they claimed had deliberately engaged in reverse redlining. They sought compensation for damages to the city and their neighborhoods in the form of abandoned housing, much of which had to be either protected against vandalism or demolished because of blight, and lost property taxes. The courts have rejected these arguments because the cities could not prove that there was a causal connection. Nevertheless, the US Department of Justice has won settlements with many of the largest lenders, who have agreed to pay compensation to some who lost their homes due to foreclosures and for housing counseling for homeowners facing foreclosure. However, the lenders did not admit to any illegal activities.

Housing Discrimination in Canada and Europe Like the United States, multiracial countries like Canada and many in Europe also face similar challenges related to discrimination in housing. Racial and ethnic tensions and housing discrimination in these countries often involve immigrants.

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A 2014 report entitled Residential Segregation: A Transatlantic Analysis provided a comparative analysis of residential segregation. The author John Iceland (2014), a sociologist at Pennsylvania State University, argued that immigrant groups in Europe live in insular neighborhoods and generally remain there. Therefore, European governments take a neighborhood-focused approach, trying to improve housing conditions in these enclaves. This contrasts with the US approach of at least trying on occasion to provide greater housing choices and mobility to African Americans and other minorities. Thomas Maloutas and Kuniko Fujita (2012) also pointed out the differences in US and European approaches to residential segregation. They provided nonUS case studies of eleven major cities (six in Europe: Athens, Budapest, Copenhagen, Istanbul, Madrid, and Paris) in their comparative collection. A 2015 book on socioeconomic segregation in thirteen European capital cities documents residential segregation in these cities. A 2013 report (Discrimination in Housing) to the European Commission reviewed protection against housing discrimination under both European Union (EU) law and the laws of its individual member nations. The former requires member states to adopt national legislation protecting against discrimination in housing on the grounds of sex and racial or ethnic origin. Some EU member states provide protection on additional grounds. In addition to segregation, the report generally covered discrimination and protective responses in regard to the supply, allocation and the occupation of housing. A source of updates on European laws is the European Anti-Discrimination Law Review, a publication of the European Equality Law Network that is supported by the European Commission Directorate-General for Justice. In the case of Canada, there is not a constitutional right to housing. However, all levels of government – federal, provincial and territorial, and municipal – have a responsibility to implement human rights norms and standards, including the right

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to housing. An example is the province of Ontario’s Human Rights Commission which deals with ten types of discrimination in its Code of Human Rights. One of its Social Areas is housing. The extent to which Canadian and European national and local governments have successfully addressed housing discrimination has varied considerably.

UN Charter: The Right to Adequate Housing The United Nations Habitat agency, in the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, has stated the universal Right to Adequate Housing. Its Factsheet No. 21 states, “Non-discrimination and equality are fundamental human rights principles and critical components of the right to adequate housing . . . States have an obligation to prohibit discrimination on all grounds and ensure de jure and de facto equality in access to adequate housing and protection against forced eviction” (10). The Factsheet identifies the following nonexhaustive grounds of discrimination: race, color, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status (which may include disability, health status or sexual orientation) and adds that, “In housing, discrimination can take the form of discriminatory laws, policies or measures; zoning regulations: exclusionary policy development; exclusion from housing benefits; denial of security of tenure; lack of access to credit; limited participation in decision-making; or lack of protection against discriminatory practices carried out by private actors” (10).

Conclusion Despite the best efforts of national, state and local governments in Canada, Europe and the United States, including enactment of antidiscrimination laws and fair housing

programs, and decisions of the courts, discrimination in housing in many forms persists. This has serious economic and social consequences for the members of racial and ethnic minority groups, as well as other minority groups, experiencing housing discrimination. The efforts of nongovernmental organizations to combat housing discrimination has had positive results but governmental action remains critical to addressing this problem. In the United States, organizations and academic experts concerned about inadequate progress by the federal government toward effective action submitted a 2014 report (Discrimination and Segregation in Housing) which documents continuing discrimination and segregation in housing and their effect on victims to the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. The report found: [Federal] agencies have not yet enacted specific policy reforms to ensure that their programs avoid perpetuating discrimination or that effectively undertake to eradicate segregation . . . Much of the progress has been incremental and rhetorical. With regard to anti-discrimination enforcement, agencies remain constrained by limited resources. In addition, the elimination of discrimination and segregation requires that the scope of legal protection be expanded beyond the current federal fair housing laws. (5)

The report ends with recommendations for Congressional and Executive Action and questions intended to spur that action (18– 21). This illustrates the need for continued governmental action to further address discrimination in housing.

Glossary Affirmatively further fair housing This 1968 legislative charge for governmental recipients of federal aid for housing and community development has been controversial. HUD issued new implementation guidelines in 2015.

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Disparate impact test Upheld by the US Supreme Court, this allows those claiming illegal housing discrimination to provide statistical evidence to try to prove their case. Dissimilarity index This is a method to measure racial segregation in housing and also to determine what it would take to reverse this pattern. Equal Protection Clause This is part of the Fourteenth Amendment of the US Constitution and has been invoked to challenge discrimination in housing. Fair housing This is a term used in the United States to describe antidiscrimination in housing policies and programs. Hypersegregation A term coined by sociologist Douglas Massey to describe the most racially segregated metropolitan areas of the United States. Racial covenants Legal agreements by white housing owners agreeing to refuse to sell or rent their property to racial and ethnic minorities. Racial segregation A pattern of spatial separation of the races, either by law or custom. Redlining A term describing the practice of lenders refusing to make loans in areas with a significant African American population.

References Belkin, Lisa. 1999. Show Me a Hero: A Tale of Murder, Suicide, Race and Redemption. Boston: Little, Brown. Boustan, Leah Platt. 2013. Racial Residential Segregation in American Cities. Working Paper 19045. Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research. Briggs, Xavier de Souza, ed. 2005. The Geography of Opportunity: Race and Housing in Metropolitan America. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press. Brooks, R. W., and Carol M. Rose. 2013. Saving the Neighborhood: Racially Restrictive Covenants, Law, and Social Norms. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Carr, James H., and Nandinee K. Kutty, eds. 2008. Segregation: The Rising Costs for America. New York: Routledge. Greer, Scott. 1965. Urban Renewal and American Cities: The Dilemma of Democratic Intervention. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill. Haberle, Megan, and Jorge Solo. 2014. Discrimination and Segregation in Housing: Report to the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. Washington, DC: Poverty & Race Research Action Council and National Fair Housing Alliance. Iceland, John. 2014. Residential Segregation: A Transatlantic Analysis. Washington, DC: Migration Policy Institute. Immergluck, Dan. 2004. Credit to the Community: Community Reinvestment and Fair Lending Policy in the United States. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe. 2009. Foreclosed: High-Risk Lending, Deregulation, and the Undermining of America’s Mortgage Market. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Iniguez-Lopez, Diego. 2015. Realizing the Promise: How to Affirmatively Further Fair Housing. New York: The Opportunity Agenda. Lamb, Charles M. 2005. Housing Segregation in Suburban America since 1960: Presidential and Judicial Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Logan, John, and Brian Stults. 2010. The Persistence of Segregation in the Metropolis: New Findings from the 2010 Census. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. www.s4.brown .edu/us2010. Maloutas, Thomas, and Kuniko Fujita. 2012. Residential Segregation in Comparative Perspective: Making Sense of Contextual Diversity. Surrey, UK: Ashgate. Massey, Douglas S., and Nancy A. Denton. 1993. American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Massey, Douglas S., and Jonathan Tannen. 2015. A research note on trends in black hypersegregation. Demography 52:1025–34. Meyerson, Martin, and Edward C. Banfield. 1955. Politics, Planning, & the Public Interest: The Case of Public Housing in Chicago. London: Free Press. National Community Reinvestment Coalition. 2015. Analysis of Home Purchase and Small

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Business Lending in Baltimore, Maryland, and the Surrounding Areas. Washington, DC: National Community Reinvestment Coalition. National Fair Housing Alliance. 2014. Fair Housing Trends 2014 – Expanding Opportunity: Systematic Approaches to Fair Housing. Washington, DC: National Fair Housing Alliance. Ontario Human Rights Commission. 2007. Human Rights and Rental Housing in Ontario. Toronto: Ontario Human Rights Commission. Polikoff, Alexander. 2006. Waiting for Gautreaux: A Story of Segregation, Housing, and the Black Ghetto. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Ringelheim, Julie, and Nicolas Bernard. 2013. Discrimination in Housing. Brussels: European Commission. Satter, Beryl. 2009. Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America. New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt. Seicshnaydre, Stacy E. 2015. The fair housing choice myth. Journal of Affordable Housing & Community Development Law 23:149–203. Semyonov, Moshe, and Anya Glikman. 2009. Ethnic residential segregation, social contacts, and anti-minority attitudes in European societies. European Sociological Review 25:693–708.

Sharkey, Patrick. 2009. Stuck in Place: Urban Neighborhoods and the End of Progress toward Racial Equality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Squires, Gregory D., ed. 1992. From Redlining to Reinvestment: Community Responses to Urban Disinvestment. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Sugrue, Thomas J. 1996. The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Tammaru, Tiit, Sako Musterd, Maarten van Ham, and Szymon Marcinczak. 2015. SocioEconomic Segregation in European Capital Cities. London: Routledge. US Commission on Civil Rights. 1979. The Federal Fair Housing Enforcement Effort: A Report of the United States Commission on Civil Rights. Washington, DC: U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. US Department of Housing and Urban Development. 2013. Housing Discrimination against Racial and Ethnic Minorities. Washington, DC: US Department of Housing and Urban Development. US Department of Housing and Urban Development, Office of the Assistant Secretary for Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity. 2015. Quid quo pro and hostile environment harassment and liability for discriminatory housing practices under the Fair Housing Act. Federal Register 80(203):63720–29.

CHAPTER 23

Hunger and Food Insecurity Stephen J. Scanlan

Abstract In this chapter I examine hunger and food insecurity as social problems. I focus on these concerns, not as purely biological, environmental, physiological, or natural phenomena, but as being rooted in social and structural factors such as conflict, culture, development, the economy, globalization, population-demography, politics, and social stratification, among other sociological issues. From this approach, famines as the classic case of hunger, food insecurity, and deprivation in their most severe form would not be viewed as strictly the result of natural disasters or drought but as the result of social conditions that make them a human-induced catastrophe tied to politics and inequality. I begin by presenting the conceptualization of hunger and food insecurity, addressing the complexity of the issues and their multiple forms and ways of discussing them. I then provide a snapshot of the state of hunger in the world and trends that have resulted in the current condition. I close with a discussion of hunger and food insecurity in the context of what comprises social problems and consider their intersectionality with other global concerns.

Introduction The World Food Programme ([WFP] 2012a) once proclaimed hunger to be “the world’s greatest solvable problem.” Citing the presence of nearly 1 billion people on the planet going hungry in the wake of the global food crisis that preceded its statement, the WFP sought to make clear the seriousness of an important global concern. At the same time, despite its prevalence, the organization also

cited a number of approaches it believed to be most effective at solving the crisis of world hunger. Such is often the case when it comes to discussion of global hunger and food insecurity as social problems: emphasize the severity of hunger and the injustice of this in a world of plenty while offering straightforward solutions for this calamitous social condition that has plagued humanity for centuries. Whether from academics,

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intergovernmental agencies, or religious, charitable and other nongovernmental organizations and think tanks, the problem has attracted a great deal of attention and rightly so. At the same time, its persistence, complexity, and intersectionality with other problems, big and small, have proved daunting, meaning that generations of activists, policy makers, and researchers have devoted energy to its understanding and resolution while hundreds of millions suffer. This chapter emphasizes hunger and food security as social problems: not as purely biological, environmental, physiological, or natural phenomena, but as being rooted in institutionalized and structural factors such as conflict, culture, development, the economy, globalization, population-demography, politics, and social stratification among others. From this perspective, famines as the classic case of hunger, food insecurity, and deprivation in their most severe form would not be viewed as strictly the result of natural disasters or drought, but as being rooted in social conditions that make them human-induced catastrophes. This chapter first presents a conceptualization of hunger and food insecurity, addressing the complexity of the issues, their multiple forms, and ways of discussing them. It then moves forward with a snapshot of the state of hunger in the world and various trends that have resulted in the current condition. This is followed by the discussion of hunger as a social problem and finally considers its intersectionality with other global concerns.

Hunger and Food Insecurity: Conceptualization Hunger – what the World Food Programme (2015a) defines simply as “not having enough to eat to meet dietary energy requirements” – is a widely understood concept in both absolute and relative terms. As a human universal there is a connection across cultures as to its meaning and con-

sequences, even if an individual has never experienced it in its extreme forms. At the same time, there are nuances that make it more complex than it may first appear, ultimately implying multiple meanings (Mooney and Hunt 2009) and needs for clarification (Busch and Lacy 1984). This is particularly the case when introducing the notion of “security” and exploring the many causes and forms of hunger. Consider The State of Food Insecurity in the World (SOFI), published annually by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). It presents a glossary of twenty-two terms that are closely related to hunger, food insecurity, and food security (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations [FAO] 2015a, 53). The concepts all have independent meaning but may also reflect different forms of hunger and food insecurity and thus overlap. For example, in addition to hunger and food security/insecurity, the SOFI discusses dietary energy in multiple forms (e.g., intake, requirements, and supply adequacy), malnutrition, nutrition security, nutritional status, stunting, undernourishment, undernutrition, underweight and wasting. This is in addition to the growing interest in “overnutrition” and concerns about the prevalence of obesity and its health effects. And finally, it is noteworthy that despite the multitude of terms, the SOFI makes no mention of famine or starvation. The report is useful to clarify the meaning of hunger and food security for discussing them as a social problems and recognizing their complementary forms and related considerations. Reflecting the complexity of the concept and incorporating elements of food availability, access, and health, the FAO defines food insecurity as: A situation that exists when people lack secure access to sufficient amounts of safe and nutritious food for normal growth and development and an active and healthy life. It may be caused by the unavailability of food, insufficient purchasing power, inappropriate distribution, or inadequate use of food at the household level. Food

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insecurity, poor conditions of health and sanitation, and inappropriate care and feeding practices are the major causes of poor nutritional status. Food insecurity may be chronic, seasonal, or transitory. (FAO 2015a, 50)

This definition has evolved since 1974 when the United Nations World Food Conference defined it as “availability at all times of adequate world food supplies of basic foodstuffs to sustain a steady expansion of food consumption and to offset fluctuations in production and prices” (FAO 2006). The term was further refined at the 1996 World Food Summit which proclaimed, its opposite, food security, to exist “when people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life” (FAO 1996). Food insecurity would be the absence of such conditions. As seen in these definitions, the meaning of food insecurity has evolved from placing emphasis solely on production and supply to also include concerns about distribution and access and ultimately to consider the extent to which individuals are able to derive the nutrition they need from the food they consume. In this regard, food security has commonly been discussed as standing on “three pillars” that reflect its core components (Busch and Lacy 1984; World Health Organization [WHO] 2015). These pillars are food availability, food access, and food utilization. Availability refers to the existing supply, be it the breadbasket of food produced globally or any number of sublevels whether a country, region, community, or household. The “supply question” has attracted much attention – particularly alongside concerns with population growth and its detrimental impacts on the environment and resources (Brown 2009). Understanding food insecurity by default has often started with assessing availability, a necessary but not sufficient inquiry as reinforced by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), which denotes that “people can starve even when enough

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food is available” (UNDP 1994, 27). Influenced by the important work of Sen (1981) and colleagues (Drèze and Sen 1989) on the “entitlement approach” to food security, access and the ability of hungry populations to acquire available food increasingly emphasized the unequal distribution of food in a world where it was plenteously available – even in countries where food actually leaves the country while its population starves. Poverty and other forms of stratification, whether based on age, gender, race and ethnicity, rural-urban differences, etc., thus become a defining characteristic of food insecurity. People are simply unable to purchase available food or otherwise lack access to it because of discrimination or the absence of some public system of distribution. Finally, food utilization is an additional necessary consideration for understanding food security. Utilization refers to the nutritional value of the food that is available and accessible and whether that which is consumed is part of a balanced diet in which the most important vitamins, minerals, and other nutrients are able to be absorbed and digested by the body so as to ensure adequate health. Those experiencing food insecurity may have enough caloric intake to avoid starvation, but a diet consisting only of white rice, for example, will fall short on providing adequate nutrition. The three pillars approach has become the standard with regard to the discussion of food security, though with parallel discussions and extensions that further emphasize the meaning of its components. De Rose et al. (1999), for example, speak of food shortage, food poverty, and food deprivation. From the point of view of hunger and food insecurity as a social problem, such reframing emphasizes social-scientific factors that consider conflict, culture, economics, inequality and political conditions that create barriers to access. Food insecurity is therefore a social condition that requires social solutions and this idea is particularly important for understanding hunger as a social problem. Rivera-Ferre (2012) asserts that the social sciences play a

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critical role in reframing the way hunger is conceptualized, shifting from “natural” scientific explanations to considering its social causes and solutions. Since the initial conceptualization of food security it has been argued that an additional “fourth pillar” is needed to account for its complexity and the vulnerability experienced by hundreds of millions of the world’s hungry citizens. Food stability therefore became an important component of the dialogue, which included disruptions in and shocks to global and local food systems that got in the way of availability, access, and utilization considerations. Food stability was introduced prior to the occurrence of the 2007–08 global food crisis that left the world’s poor in particular without the ability to acquire food in the wake of price spikes but its meaning and significance became quite evident at the time (Patel and McMichael 2009). Food stability refers to the ability of an individual, household, community, or country to withstand serious disruptions in its food system or the ability of the citizenry to acquire food security in any of its forms. According to the FAO (2006, 1), sudden economic and climatic shocks, or cyclical events such as seasonal food insecurity, can create food instability. Furthermore, events such as armed conflict, production shortfalls, market failures, migration and refugee patterns, and price fluctuations can all contribute to food instability and therefore hunger. Accordingly, food insecurity can either be chronic or transitory with regard to how it is experienced by populations and individuals. The International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) elaborates this distinction in light of the inclusion of food stability. As IFAD (2014) notes, “chronic food insecurity . . . involves an inability to meet food requirements over a long period, while transitory food insecurity concerns shocks that briefly push the level of food consumption below the requirements.” In other words, hunger that is part of one’s daily life and for a long period of time is chronic while that connected to a temporary shock, complex crisis, or emergency, is

transitory. As IFAD (2014) further notes, “a household can be said to be food secure only if it has protection against both kinds of insecurity,” adding that numerous shortterm problems that can impact individual or household food security include cash shortfalls, crop failures, illness or other incapacity preventing work, seasonal changes, and unemployment. To these could also be added conflict, natural disasters, and population patterns such as immigration or refugee crises. Furthermore, it is important to note that what may start as a temporary shock could evolve into something more chronic, requiring more complex needs and resources. The core idea behind people experiencing food insecurity is that there is great uncertainty as to where a next meal may be coming from. Regardless of whether this condition is short-term or permanent, it is a threat to survival and therefore demands serious attention. The aforementioned considerations drive the research and action on hunger taken by intergovernmental agencies such the World Bank, or others within the United Nations such as the UNDP, the United Nations Environmental Programme, UNICEF, UNIFEM, the World Food Programme, or the World Health Organization. We must, however, raise issues that go beyond an overly compromised definition of food insecurity resulting from the constraints of global organizations bound by political economy considerations and of governments that sponsor their activities and policies. Such definitions are useful for calling attention to an issue that must be addressed while also informing policy that is not overly critical of the systems of inequality that are its root causes. I argue for the importance of approaching hunger and food insecurity by emphasizing fundamental needs and minimum standards that all citizens should be privy to. There is no justification for the deprivation of something as fundamental as food and nutrition – especially in a world of plenty. I therefore focus on the centrality of food poverty and on the forces of politics, power, and inequality that generate hunger in an

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16.0 14.0

14.9

14.4 14.1 13.7 13.9 13.8 13.8 13.7

13.8 13.2

12.0

13.6

13.3

12.4

11.9 11.0 11.1

10.0 8.0 6.0 4.0 2.0 0.0

Circa Circa Circa Circa Circa Circa Circa Circa 2007 2008 2009 Circa 2012 Circa Circa Circa 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2004 2010 2013 2014 2015

Figure 23.1. Percentage of the world’s population experiencing hunger, circa 1996 to circa 2015. Source: Constructed using data from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations State of Food Insecurity in the World (Rome, Italy, multiple years).

unjust political economy of the world system. This may arguably mean that hunger is an ethical question that carries with it various cultural and moral convictions that implicate all of us (Pinstrup-Andersen and Sandøe 2007). I leave that discussion to the philosophers but raise the issue that the deprivation element, at the core of food insecurity in an unequal world, is a grave reality demanding critical scrutiny. Such an approach demands careful analysis of the definition of hunger, its root causes, and how we construct and conceptualize its pervasiveness.

The Current State of Hunger in the World According to the UN Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO 2015a), there were 795 million chronically undernourished people in the world in 2015. Although a staggeringly high number remain affected by hunger – approximately one out of every seven people on the planet – world hunger has actually improved after peaking in severity in the wake of the 2007–08 food cri-

sis. The FAO (2015a) reported a drop in the prevalence of undernourishment from 14.4 percent in 1995–97 to 11.0 percent for the 2014–16 reporting period as seen in Figure 23.1. This trend is good news, but the world must remain vigilant – especially with regard to those poorer populations most vulnerable to hunger such as rural inhabitants, smallholder farming communities, women, and children (WFP 2012a). To these I add those impacted by conflict and war, discriminated-against groups, and those least capable of coping with food system instability whether from climate change or price fluctuations among other shocks and uncertainties. As previously mentioned and as will be discussed in greater detail below, hunger and food insecurity stem from social stratification and inequality in their many forms. In this regard it is important to elaborate on the current state of hunger in the world in light of regional variation and concentration. This points to where the problem is most severe but also indicates where progress is uneven and the issue most daunting or persistent. The WFP (2015b) notes that 98 percent of the world’s hungry live in

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Table 23.1. Regional Variation in the Undernourished Population and Percentage of the Population That Is Undernourished

Region The Caribbean Caucasus and Central Asia East Asia Latin America North Africa Oceania South Asia Southeast Asia Sub-Saharan Africa West Asia

Undernourished population (millions)

Percentage of population

7.5 5.8

19.8 7.0

145.1 26.8 4.3 1.4 281.4 60.5 220

9.6