Joel Best - Images of Issues: Typifying Contemporary Social Problems

These definitions suggest that the essence of social problems lies in objective social conditions and that some conditions are problems. Thus, someone armed with Bassis et al/s (1982) definition could evaluate various social conditions, deciding that Condition X is indeed harmful to either individuals or society, and therefore is a social problem, while Condition Ywhich fails to meet the criterion of harmis not a social problem. Such definitions are called objectivist because they define social problems in terms of objective conditions.

While they fit our common-sense notion of what social problems are, objectivist definitions have two key flaws. First, they minimize or even ignore the subjective nature of social problems. Not all harmful conditions are considered social problems. Consider nutrition. Medical authorities argue that the typical American diet contains undesirable levels of fats and cholesterol. This condition clearly fits Bassis et al,s definition of a social problem: This diet endangers the well-being of individuals, who face greater risks of heart disease and other medical disorders; and it also threatens societal well-being by forcing Americans to devote a growing share of their national income to health care. Yet the nutritional inadequacies of the American diet rarely appear on lists of social problems, even though the condition fits most objectivist definitions. This reveals the subjective nature of social problems: Social problems are what people view as social problems.

Histories of particular social problems reveal the importance of subjective judgments. For example, the contemporary feminist movement began to gain public attention around 1970. The movement aimed to get people thinking differently; it challenged traditional, taken-for-granted assumptions about womens place in society. By the early 1970s, some women were joining consciousness-raising groups, where they discussed issues in their lives. Women encouraged one another to make the personal politicalto understand that the difficulties individual women faced at home or at work were part of larger, societal problems, and that those problems needed to be addressed. Feminists began bringing these issues before the public; they held demonstrations, gave press conferences, wrote books and articles, and lobbied government officials. New terms began to appear in the press: sexism, wife abuse, sexual harassment, pay equity, and so on. Where pre-1970 textbooks on social problems rarely mentioned these issues, post-1970 texts routinely in-eluded one or more chapters on sexism and sex discrimination. Ob vi-ously, the objective conditions feminists attacked were not new; they had been around for a long time. The change was subjective. After 1970, people began including sexism, sex discrimination, and the like on their lists of social problems.