Social Problems

Abstract

A review of the German-language literature on social problems is confronted with the major difficulty that social problems are analyzed by many special sociologies (e.g., the sociology of deviant behavior and social control) without any explicit reference to the category of “social problems.” The present review will deal with this by concentrating on those publications that use the concept of “social problems” as developed in the controversies between structural functionalists (e.g., Robert Merton) on the one hand and symbolic interactionists (e.g., Herbert Blumer, Malcom Spector, John L. Kitsuse) and radical constructionists on the other. In German-language sociology, the latter approaches gained prevalence and have marginalized the “objectivist” position. Recent publications have been dedicated to analyses of “doing social problems.” It is, however, not always obvious how these analyses differ from the traditional labeling approach. Just as in the international literature, its German-language counterparts offer only few examples of internationally comparative studies of social problems and their constitution, even though such analyses would allow us to identify which conditions are relevant to the career of social problems.