Problems of Modern Society [antikvár]

Introduction This book of Readings is designed to complement two earlier books from Penguin Education, the textbook Introducing Sociology, and the accompanying Modern Sociology: Introductory Readings. The Readings selected in the latter volume were closely tied to the layout of the textbook, chapter by chapter, so as to provide the reader with further material in the form of extracts from some of the original sources we had drawn upon in writing the textbook, and to enable him to read them at first hand, rather than mediated by our own reworking of the ideas they contain. The present volume has a quite different focus: that of 'social problems'. In Part One of the textbook, we distinguished between a sociological problem and a social problem by suggesting that a sociological problem occurs when we have to explain some piece of social behaviour in terms of sociological theory; a social problem is 'some piece of social behaviour that causes public friction and/or private misery and calls for collective action to solve it'. We went on to insist that sociology was concerned with the normal as well as the abnormal; with happy families as much as 'problem families'; with the everyday as well as the exotic; and with respectability as much as with vice. Hence, as sociologists, we were not only concerned with 'social problems', with things that .go wrong, or with 'social pathology'. What is normal, untroublesome, or acceptable, equally constitute sociological problems, for we have to explain theoretically how it is that societies persist, or why (in Britain) nine couples out of ten preserve their marriages despite the well-known tribulations of married life. Yet people do have problems, and they seek to understand what has caused them and work out what they can do to solve them. Few sociologists are unconcerned about these things either, because they have values, like anyone else, which lead them to like some things and hate others. They may be able to direct their researches, therefore, to those things people find troublesome. By 'people' we do not necessarily mean governments or social workers, for they are only special sets of people, and may be defined by the citizen as 'part of the trouble'. Nor are we ourselves administrators, policy-makers, planners, or therapists. We wish to help in the only relevant way we can in our capacities as social scientists. By looking at social problems as sociological problems, we may, we hope, in whatever small degree, help others to arrive at a better under-: Introduction 11