T his collection brings together some of my essays on a number of current social conditions, issues, and problems. While many of the essays are wholly analytic, those dealing with social problems also propose solutions. They illustrate what I believe sociology can contribute to social policy. Unlike the other social sciences, which emphasize public policy, social policy also covers the nongovernmental sectors of society.
The book is at the same time a plug for policy-oriented sociology, for social research that answers the empirical questions raised by social policy analysts and policy makers. It can also aid them in developing policies that deal with social conditions and problems.
In addition, policy-oriented research can identify many of the likely consequences of alternative policies, including who will be benefitted, hurt, or otherwise affected by each of these policies. Such analyses should help the policy makersand the politicianswho must choose the best policy.
Sociology is particularly well suited to playing this policy-oriented role. My conception of the discipline is fairly simple; it studies what people and their institutions and other social structures (including economic, political, and cultural ones) do with, for, to, and against each other. Putting it this way emphasizes the fact that at its best sociology is thoroughly empirical and employs grounded theories and concepts.
Sociology has other advantages. Less restricted by arbitrary intellectual boundaries than some of the other social sciences, sociologists conduct sociological research on economic, political, cultural, and historical subjects and whatever others policy-oriented studies demand.
Sociologists qualitative methods, especially fieldwork and in-depth interviewing methods, can observe what people actually do and talk with them about issues and problems that matter to themand to those charged with policy making.
Sociological analysis can also investigate the social structures in which people are embedded, including those that help explain their behavior and that cause the problems policy makers, politiciansand citizensmust try to fix.
The disciplines quantitative research methods can provide the numbers that policy makers and politicians always need to justify their decisions and actions.
This collection is a sequel to my 1992 collection People, Plans, and Policies, published by Columbia University Press, which is itself a sequel to a 1968 collection People and Plans, published by Basic Books.
The title of the new book substitutes social policy for planning mainly because I long ago moved out of the city-planning and social-planning fields in which I began my career.
Social policy is not very different from social planning, except that it generally operates in and on the present, whereas planning more often concerns itself with the future.
However, many of the social policies discussed or advocated in this book are not immediately practical. Being an academic, I take advantage of the academics freedom to propose pushing the envelope beyond the currently acceptable. We can therefore advocate policies that could solve problems better than other policies but that are now politically or otherwise impractical.
When I am being impractical, I do it with the hope that some of the resulting suggestions will also be made by and supported by others and, in the longer run, will enter the national policy conversation. If and when the political and other kinds of time are ripe, the suggestions might even become politically and otherwise practical.
Because the last version of this preface is being written shortly after Donald Trump's election and the virtual Republican takeover of all branches of federal and state governments, it is very clear that the times are not ripe. Consequently, my policy and other proposals are now largely wishes and hopes.
However, this is even more reason to enter the national policy conversation with proposals for creating a more egalitarian and otherwise humane country. These proposals must also be discussed widely so that they can be transformed into feasible policies. The policies and the political strategies to bring them about need to be available the moment all the times are ripe.
The five parts into which I have divided this book are similar to the parts of its 1992 predecessor, but the essays themselves are somewhat different.
, on the city, is mostly devoted to critical analyses of contemporary urban sociology. I have been especially concerned with an increasing tendency to emphasize the causal role of space and place in urban studies, thereby downplaying the social, economic, and political forces and agents that better explain the urban condition.
This spatial bias too often leads to ineffective or undesirable social policies, because it tries to change the so-called physical environment rather than the human forces and agents that need to be altered.
, about poverty, is now a much researched field. Perhaps for that reason, I have focused on questions that I think still need to be explored further, particularly about the poorest of the poor and about multigenerational poverty, to complement current research on intergenerational poverty.
However, my recent writing about poverty has more often emphasized unemployment and other job-related issues that increasingly affect a much larger population and threaten to drive them into poverty as well.
therefore consists of essays on jobs and the political economy. The latter is included because todays private economy can no longer provide sufficient decently paying and reasonably secure jobs to all who need them.
Consequently, government must step in with jobs, income, and other means of support to the countrys many unemployed, underemployed, and underpaid people. This being politically improbable in todays polity, I have also been looking for feasible strategies for political change, including in this parts last essay, to educate students about the economy into which they are graduating.
, about race and class, is dominated by two underlying ideas. One, announced in its title, is that race and racism must almost always be seen, and studied, in connection with class and its forms of discrimination. The other is a yet-unsolved American puzzle: why the country and especially its white population have never stopped demonizing and discriminating against African Americans, notably poor ones.
