Social problems are persistent. Many have continued for decades and even centuries, and some show no sign of ending anytime soon. In view of social problems’ long history, certainty of continuing for some time to come, and serious consequences, it is easy to feel overwhelmed when reading about them, to think that little can be done about them, and even to become a bit depressed. As a result, it is easy for students to come away from social problems courses with a rather pessimistic or depressed outlook (Johnson, 2005).
We want to counter that outlook by highlighting both how social change occurs and what you personally can do to help address social problems. You have the power to help!
Change is possible. As just one of many examples, consider the conditions that workers face in the United States. As the Work and Economy chapter will discuss, many workers today are unemployed, have low wages, or work in substandard and even dangerous workplaces. Yet, they are immeasurably better off than a century ago, thanks to the labor movement, a social movement that began during the 1870s. Workers now have a standard eight-hour work day, a minimum wage (though many think that it is far too low today), the right to strike, and much safer workplaces than before the labor movement.
Again, positive change is possible, and it does occur. That's why this book stresses individual agency, collective action, and ultimately social change.
Social Change
Social change refers to large-scale changes across the structure or culture of society. How does social change occur as it relates to social problems?
One source of change in social problems is social science theory and research. Since the 1800s, theory and research in sociology and the other social sciences have pointed to the reasons for social problems, potentially successful ways of addressing them, and actual policies that succeeded in addressing some aspect of a social problem. Our discussion of social problems and their solutions in this textbook is based on sound social science theory and research, and many chapters will present examples of how findings from social science research have either contributed to public policy or have the potential of doing so.
Another source of social change in social problems is the lessons learned from other nations’ experiences with social problems. Sometimes these lessons for the US are positive ones, as when another nation has tackled a social problem more successfully than the US, and sometimes these lessons are negative ones, as when another nation has a more serious problem than the US and/or has made mistakes in addressing this problem. The US can learn from the good examples of other nations, and it can also learn from the bad ones. For this reason, many chapters of this book discusses such examples. In this regard, the US has much to learn from the experiences of other long-standing democracies like Canada, European nations, and Australia and New Zealand.
Despite its great wealth, the US ranks below most of its democratic peers on many social indicators such as poverty, health, and so on (Holland, 2011; Russell, 2011). A major reason for this difference is that other democratic governments are far more proactive in terms of attention and spending to help their populations – taking action before the problem develops or at the start of a problem – than US federal and state governments. Because the US has much to learn from their positive examples, this book’s chapters discuss policies that enable other democracies to address certain social problems far more successfully than the US has addressed them.
Other democracies such as many in Europe rank higher than the United States on poverty, health, and other social indicators. For this reason, the US may have much to learn from their positive examples.
© Thinkstock
In addition to the lessons learned from social science research and theory, and from other democratic societies, social change can be a response to individuals and groups taking action, such as pressuring policymakers to pass and enact policy, changing our cultural understandings of various social phenomena, or providing direct relief to those experiencing a social problem. Below we discuss how individual agency and collective action matter for social change, and how we are all interdependent upon each other.
Agency
Individuals and groups can create social change, as they have agency, in this case the capacity to make decisions about how to help address social problems and to take action. Many people have public-service jobs or volunteer in all sorts of activities involving a social problem: They assist at a food pantry, help clean up a riverbank, and so forth. Others take on a more activist orientation by becoming involved in advocacy groups or a larger social movement.
Our nation is a better place today because of the labor movement, the civil rights movement, the women’s movements, the gay rights movement, the environmental movement, and other social movements too numerous to mention. We will return to social movements below and in our final chapter, but for now our point is that you have the agency to join one! You also have agency to take other types of action such as described above. According to Frances Fox Piven (2006), a former president of the American Sociological Association, it is through such efforts that “ordinary people change America.”
Sharing this view, anthropologist Margaret Mead once said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” Change is not easy, but it can and does occur. Eleanor Roosevelt (1960, p. 168) recognized this when she wrote, “Surely, in the light of history, it is more intelligent to hope rather than to fear, to try rather than not to try. For one thing we know beyond all doubt: Nothing has ever been achieved by the person who says, ‘It can’t be done.’” In the optimistic spirit of these two famous women, we will see examples throughout this book of people making a difference in their jobs, volunteer activities, and involvement in social change efforts.
Change also occurs via individuals because policymakers propose, pass, and enact laws and policies that successfully address a social problem. They often do so only because of the pressure of a social movement, but sometimes they have the vision to act without such pressure. In other words, they have the agency to act on their own.
Finally, individuals have agency in deciding how to approach difference and diversity. Instead of viewing difference as division, as some politicians do today, we view difference as a source of strength and power. Our diversity can be a source of innovative solutions to social problems. We are stronger when we value our differences, rather than fear our differences.
Interdependence
As discussed earlier in the chapter, the sociological imagination helps us see wider social forces at play in our individual lives. Interdependence is the concept that people rely on each other to survive and thrive (Schwalbe 2018). Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. asserts that we are all interrelated, another word for interdependence, in his 1967 Christmas Speech in the quote box below.
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All life is interrelated. We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied into a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. We are made to live together because of the interrelated structure of reality. ... This is the way our universe is structured; this is its interrelated quality. We aren’t going to have peace on earth until we recognize this basic fact of the interrelated structure of all reality.
–Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., activist, sociologist, and minister
Interdependence is everywhere, but specific examples of social, economic, and physical interdependence may help us see it more clearly. With social interdependence, we rely on other people to cooperate to support our life. We give the same cooperation to others in turn. Sociologists sometimes call this kind of social interdependence social integration (Berkman et al. 2000)
For example, when you consider your own life, you might notice how many people helped you become the person you are. When you were a baby, you needed an adult to feed, clothe, and keep you warm. Maybe you were lucky, and someone read you bedtime stories. As we widen this picture, we see that your caregivers relied on store owners, doctors, farmers, truckers, business people, and friends to support the work of caring for you. You may not have had a happy childhood, yet you lived long enough to read these words. This textbook was brought to you by authors, editors, artists, videographers, designers, musicians, librarians, and other students like you. These relationships demonstrate our social interdependence.
In addition to social interdependence, we experience economic interdependence. During the COVID-19 pandemic, we saw empty shelves and rapidly rising food prices at the grocery store. The pandemic was disrupting the global supply chain. Some farmers in Mexico and South America couldn't get their food across the US border (Lopez-Ridaura et al. 2021). US car manufacturers couldn't get electronic chips manufactured in China. Our experiences with the pandemic underlined the reality of our economic interdependence.
We express this economic interdependence in relationships that describe the power of workers and the power of business owners. Power is the ability of an actor to sway the actions of another actor or actors, even against resistance (Fox Piven 2008). In 2017, Francis Fox Piven, the president of the American Sociological Association, defined interdependent power, arguing that while wealth and privilege create power, workers, tenants, and voters also have the power of participation, or non-participation. For instance, we saw interdependent power during the COVID-19 pandemic in the Great Resignation, with people deciding to resign from their jobs rather than return to work for low wages, until wages began to rise.
Finally, and maybe foundationally, we experience physical interdependence. Imagine being on a boat in a glacial lake in Alaska. The tour guide, a biologist, may ask the people on the tour about how many oceans there were in the world. The visitors would desperately try to remember fifth-grade geography, and count the various oceans they could remember. Atlantic, Pacific, Indian... Maybe five? Seven? The biologist may shake her head, “No.” The visitors are stumped. She then reveals that scientists who study the ocean now say that we have just one ocean, which contains all the ocean water across our entire planet. Debris from a tsunami in Japan has washed up on beaches from the tip of Alaska to the Baja peninsula and Hawaii. Most of the plastic pollution found in the ocean is carried by rivers across the world. We are physically interdependent.
Each of these ways of considering our interdependence matters when studying social problems and creating change. Because our actions affect one another, any social problem or solution may ripple through our social world.
For example, social scientists examined mask-wearing during the COVID-19 pandemic, such as behavioral economics researcher Dr. Vera te Velde from the University of Queensland. Dr. te Velde wanted to find out what would make wearing a mask a social norm. Social norms are the rules or expectations that determine and regulate appropriate behavior within a culture, group, or society. (We will discuss norms in more detail in the Sociology chapter.) Dr. te Velde finds that when people trust each other and their government, they are much more likely to wear masks. Trust and shared agreement around social norms encourage consistent behavior. In other words, when we notice our interdependence and trust that others will follow social norms, we are more likely to follow them too.
Sociologist Michael Schwalbe, in The Sociologically Examined Life, calls this mindfulness of interdependence. When we are aware, or mindful, of how our actions impact others, we are noticing our interdependence. We then often act for the good of all.
In a more explicit analysis of racism, Black author and activist Heather McGhee (2021) argues that we collectively benefit when we organize for social justice across race, class, and gender divides. This solidarity dividend is reflected in the gains that come when people work together across their differences to accomplish what we can’t do individually, improving everyone’s lives.
Collective Action
When we work together to create social change, we are engaging in collective action. Collective action refers to the actions taken by a collection or group of people acting based on a collective decision (Sekiwu and Okan 2022). Collective action can occur in the form of mass behaviors (many people engaging in the same activity), independent action such as boycotts, strikes, or demonstrations (those that occur independently of a larger social movement), or action within social movements.
Social movements are sustained and organized efforts to bring about (or oppose) social change. For instance, the organization Fight for $15 (see the figure below) worked to increase the minimum wage to at least $15.00 an hour, from its low wage of $7.25. They deliberately name racism as a cause of division and multiracial unity as a source of power. One organizer says: "We've got to build a multiracial movement, a different kind of social justice movement for the [twenty-first] century" (Fight for $15 activist Terrance, quoted in McGhee 2021:132). These organizing tactics that emphasize our interdependence are working – we saw increases to the minimum wage in several states due to these efforts, even prior to general wage increases during the COVID-19 pandemic, which again was a response to our interdependent power.
This photo portrays the social movement Fight for $15 – who do you see represented? It shows multiracial coalitions leveraging interdependence to build social justice.
No photo credit provided
The interdependent nature of social problems also requires interdependent solutions. Sociologists who study social problems are particularly committed to taking action. They try to understand why a problem occurs to inform policy decisions, create community coalitions, or support healthy families. In the best cases, they seek to know their own biases and work to remediate them, so their research is used to create change.
This challenge is explicitly stated by the Society for the Study of Social Problems President Nancy Mezey, who tells us that studying problems is not enough. We must focus on the most critical social problem of all – climate change – to support all of us in taking action.
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The theme for the 2019 SSSP meeting is a call to sociologists and social scientists in general to draw deeply and widely on sociological roots to illuminate the social in all social problems with an eye to solving those problems…. I am calling on you, the reader, through this presidential address to focus on what is perhaps the largest social problem: Climate change. Indeed, because we have been focusing on individual rather than social solutions regarding climate change – we are now facing grave and imminent danger.
– Nancy Mezey (2020:606)
Social Justice
To confront the social problems of our world, we need a both/and approach to their resolution: We act with individual agency to create a life that is healthy and nurturing, and we act collectively to address interdependent problems. The chapters in this book will explore reasons for hope – leaders, community groups, and ordinary people actively engaged in creating a more just, equitable, and resilient world. We act to create social justice, full and equal participation of all groups in a society that is mutually shaped to meet all their needs (Bell et al. 2007:1). Social justice is when everyone has what they need to equally partake in opportunities. Social justice is when certain social groups are no longer systematically targeted for their race, gender, or sexuality. Social justice is when we eradicated social inequalities.
Among many scholar–activists, scholars who engage in activism for the social problems they study, two women embody the power of this approach. The following biographies introduce two researcher activists embodying the intersection of study and action. With scholar-activists leading the way, we will explore the causes and consequences of social problems locally, nationally, and internationally.
Scholar-Activists Working Toward Social Justice
Jane Addams (pictured below) was a wealthy white woman who combined community building, research, and activism. During her lifetime, the US was grappling with industrialization, urbanization, immigration, World War I, and the Great Depression. Addams responded to these challenges with action.
Pictured here is Jane Addams, white activist, scholar, and Nobel Prize winner. How might the time period she was born into and her social location have influenced her activism?
“Jane Addams” by Gerhard Sisters is in the Public Domain
Addams created and lived at Hull House, a Chicago community center for immigrants in the late 1800s. Hull House was a center for kindergarten and daycare for children, where teachers taught adults and children to read and speak English. Community members could get help in finding jobs and learning about union activities. In creating Hull House, Jane Addams used both individual agency and collective action – the both/and approach.
In addition to being a community activist, Addams was a scholar and a researcher. She studied the causes of the social problems she saw. Even though she was not allowed to attend a regular university because she was a woman, she worked with the men sociologists at the University of Chicago School of Sociology to understand the deep roots of poverty, hunger, and violence in her Chicago neighborhood.
She was also a thought leader in identifying the causes and consequences of poverty and oppression. In addition, she created a network of peace activists and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931 for her efforts in promoting international peace (Michals 2017). Her work for social justice included both scholarly reflection and community action, hence she was a scholar–activist. If you’d like to learn more about Jane Addams and her work at Hull House, watch this video documentary about Jane Addams, or read this biographical statement for the Hull House Museum.
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The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain… until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life.
– Jane Addams, community activist, scholar, and Nobel Prize winner
Angela Davis (pictured below), a Black activist and scholar, is another woman who embodies the power of both/and thinking when combining individual agency and collective action. The challenges of her time included the Vietnam War. The sociologist C. Wright Mills developed the idea of the military-industrial complex, that military spending related to war led to profits for wealthy businessmen (Rosen 1973). Also, some women at the time agitated for equality in work and home as the second wave of feminist activism was building. Protesters in the civil rights movement also were fighting to end segregation and win equality in voting, housing, education, and other social spheres.
In this tumultuous time of social change, Davis started her career as a scholar but soon became an activist protesting the unjust treatment of three Black prisoners in 1970. The combination of scholarship and activism led her to study the deeper causes of the expansion of the prison system. She coined the term prison industrial complex, the overlapping interests of government and industry that use surveillance, policing, and imprisonment to solve economic, social, and political problems (Tufts University Prison Divestment 2023). We will discuss both concepts (the military- and prison-industrial complex) in later chapters.
She saw that Black and Brown men were disproportionately imprisoned and that wealthy corporations and governments benefited from it. Her passionate commitment to radical social change, supported by careful critical analysis, continues today. She says, "The real criminals in this society are not all of the people who populate the prisons across the state, but those who have stolen the wealth of the world from the people" (Davis quoted by George 2020). With others, she founded Critical Resistance in 1997, an organization to abolish the prison industrial complex.
Davis and her collaborators saw interconnected social problems and interdependent solutions in their fight for social justice. Davis embodies the both/and approach to addressing social problems, taking individual action to care for herself and others and connecting activists in social activism in her work toward social justice. If you would like to learn more, consider exploring Angela Davis’s early activism, read her work on the prison industrial complex in Masked Racism: Reflections on the Prison Industrial Complex, or listen to the speech Angela Davis talks at Southern Illinois University Carbondale.
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You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time.
– Angela Davis, antiracist and feminist activist and scholar
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To review, addressing social problems requires individuals to act. Individual agency is the capacity for all of us to actively and independently choose to create change. In other words, any individual can choose to vote, protest, parent differently, or be authentic about who they are in the world. Your choice may be limited by your race, class, or gender, among other identities, but each act of positive agency matters.
Interdependence highlights how we all rely on each other to thrive, and how we have interdependent power to come together and create social change.
Collective action is when we do come together to take action. These kinds of actions people take are creative responses to local, state, national, or global problems. Collective action can be setting up a distribution center for food or clothes after a community experiences an extreme weather event, reinvigorating an Indigenous language or educating about Indigenous worldviews, connecting businesses and nonprofits to provide digital literacy skills training, or organizing a demonstration to call attention to racialized mass incarceration.
Collective action is also seen in protests, marches, sit-ins, or other actions of social movements, which are ongoing and organized attempts to bring about social change.
Individuals, communities, and organizations imagine the future they want to see and take organized action to make it happen. When we take this action, we help achieve social justice, where everyone has full and equal participation in society and all needs are met.
We hope that the examples in various chapters of 'People Making a Difference' as well as the 'Actions Steps' listed at the end of each chapter inspire you to get involved in taking action and creating social change. Like scholar-activists, you can follow the both/and approach, enacting your individual agency and participating in collective action.
You can be a change maker.
