Blackwell Reference Online

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“Social problems” have formed a specialized field within sociology, especially in the US, at least since the end of the nineteenth century. The European context has always been marked by the concept of the “social question,” which was one of the principal sources for the development of sociology as a scientific discipline apart from philosophy, history, political science, and political economy. Unlike US sociology, in the European tradition the concept of social problems was not disseminated in the sociological literature until the end of the 1960s, when it appeared first in books and articles about social work. While the concept today is institutionalized in special sections of sociological associations and in some journals and textbooks, and its use has been spread in public and political discourse, European sociology has always privileged the concept of the social question, with greater emphasis on macrosociological reasoning and theory building. As a consequence, most of the literature using social problems as a theoretical concept is of US origin ( Ritzer 2004 ; for handbooks in German and French, see Albrecht et al. 1999; Dorvil & Mayer 2001). The term social problem is used in public and political discussions and refers to very different social situations, conditions, and forms of behavior, like crime, racism, drug use, unemployment, poverty, exclusion, alcoholism, sexual ... log in or subscribe to read full text