Abstract
Inspired by the work of Bruno Latour, I propose treating social problems not as claims, but as chains. Social problems chains consist of sites of claims-making activities connected by objectified forms of socialproblems, such as problem categories inscribed in texts or material constructions of problems. The focus of social problems research, then, should be three-fold. Research should attend to the activities that produce objectified forms of social problems. Research should also attend to the material forms that lend stability and mobility to constructions of social problems. And, finally, research should trace the paths those forms take, as they link sites of social problems activities and enable or constrain claims-makers’ efforts to build their own versions of problems. Doing so, social problems theory can better account for the diverse materials caught up in the construction of problems and the differences among competing constructions of problems.
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Notes
The objectification of social problems exceeds the processes and forms that I describe in this article. Here, I take an approach to social problems forms inspired by work in the sociology of knowledge; my focus is primarily on the materials and forms that allow claims about problems to endure and spread. Claims-making activities, however, are objectified in other ways. They involve social performances – protests, for instance – in which choices about sites, as Malcolm Spector and John I. Kitsuse recognized (1987, 82) are vital. Those performances also involve impactful decisions about personal fronts and props, in Goffman’s (1959) sense, as when protestors don symbolically-meaningful clothes. Finally, social problems activities may lead to changes to the very architecture and scaffolding of social life. Claims-making activities may lead to a reshuffling of systems of knowledge, as when claims-making about the DSM’s treatment of sexuality led to changes in the Library of Congress’s classification system; changes in the shelving of books at libraries across the U.S. followed. Claims-making activities may lead to changes in public monuments, as evidenced by the removal of confederate flags and memorials from public places in the U.S. (Best and Nichols 2018). And claims-making activities may lead to the unfurling of concertina wires to make human cages, as happened at Guantánamo Bay during the George W. Bush administration, and the raising of walls, as may now happen at the southern border of the U.S. during the Donald J. Trump administration.
That constructionism does not adequately attend to the reality of problems was a central critique of a presidential critical dialogue, “The Sociological Re-Imagination: What’s Left of Social Constructionism,” during the 2013 meeting of the Society for the Study of Social Problems. One speaker illustrated this by pantomiming a punch to signify the underlying reality of interpersonal violence that, this speaker contended, constructionists did not or possibly could not account for.
In this regard, Pitirim A. Sorokin’s (1965) treatment of the “bio-physical media” of social life is an important precursor to Latour’s and Smith’s social theory. While Sorokin (1947) largely emphasizes the familiar symbolic forms that meanings take – as in language and writing – he also attends to the materiality of these media (p. 557), theorizing that symbolic phenomena are “objectified and solidified” in the form of “bio-physical ‘vehicles’ and ‘conserves’” (Sorokin 1965, 839).
It’s usually not so simple. Not only can legal actors contest the meaning of evidence, they can also contest its production, destabilizing the referential chain between a document and the underlying reality it’s meant to represent. An “unbroken chain of custody,” replete with texts and other immutable mobiles, defends against claims that evidence has been tampered with or contaminated (Daemmrich 1998, p. 755–757).
In a recent interview with the New York Times, Bruno Latour drew attention to a climate scientist who used the differences among referential chains as evidence of the difference in qualities of those chains: “At a meeting between French industrialists and a climatologist a few years ago, Latour was struck when he heard the scientist defend his results not on the basis of the unimpeachable authority of science but by laying out to his audience his manufacturing secrets: ‘the large number of researchers involved in climate analysis, the complex system for verifying data, the articles and reports, the principle of peer evaluation, the vast network of weather stations, floating weather buoys, satellites and computers that ensure the flow of information.’ The climate denialists, by contrast, the scientist said, had none of this institutional architecture” (Kofman 2018).
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Del Rosso, J. From Claims to Chains: the Materiality of Social Problems. Am Soc 50, 247–254 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12108-019-9405-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12108-019-9405-9