When does a social problem become a public problem? What makes something a social problem in the first plaxe?
Hi all, currently reading Gusfield’s The Culture of Public Problems for uni and am struggling to pin down a specific definition or outline of what a social problem actually is.
I’m aware that Kitsuse and Spector (1973) said that the subject matter of social problems is “the process by which members of groups or societies define a putstive condition as a problem”, and that in social constructivist theories social problems are necessarily socially constructed as problems. But I’m not sure where the line is between not a social problem, is a social problem, and is a public problem.
The idea I’ve been workshopping around is civic engagement in Australia, with civil disobedience in the form of pro-Palestine protesting being muzzled by state overreach, where the supposed ‘antisemitism’ of the pro-Palestine protestors is used as a justification for police crackdown on protesting, alongside a host of other surveillance measures like the under-16 social media limitations.
Here, the civil disobedience is the social problem, as determined by normative change-makers (from Amy Best), and the state and media response shifts the problem from social, to public.
Would that be a reasonable assessment?