Description
Book SynopsisThe social constructionist perspective has revolutionized the way that social scientists investigate social problems.
Constructing Social Problems (Spector and Kitsuse [1977] 2001) offered the guiding statement of the approach, which both transformed and revitalized the sociology of social problems, propelling it into a quarter century of exciting and innovative empirical research. John Kitsuse and Malcolm Spector challenged conventional approaches to the field; they insisted on treating social problems as social constructions--as the products of claims-making and constitutive definitional processes.
The purpose of this book is to highlight contemporary challenges to the social constructionist perspective on social problems. In 1993, two collections of essays,
Reconsidering Social Constructionism: Debates in Social Problems Theory (Holstein and Miller 1993) and
Constructionist Controversies: Issues in Social Problems Theory (Miller and Holstein 1993), broug
