Globalizing Social Problems: An Agenda for the Twenty-First Century

The Society for the Study of Social Problems (SSSP) was founded 65 years ago with an explicit goal of bringing sociological research to bear on the pressing issues of the day in order to promote social justice. The ethos of the society’s founders, Elizabeth Briant Lee and Alfred McClung Lee (1976), was that sociology should be “a discipline to be used in the service of all people” (p. 5); their challenge to the society was to “be ready to accept the challenges of new issues and conditions as they arise” (p. 7). Many of the original leaders and presidents of the SSSP were animated by the same concern as the Lees about the plethora of problems impacting the post-World War II United States, including pervasive racism and poverty in an era of unprecedented economic growth and prosperity. But a brief glance at the early pages of Social Problems shows that there were also concerns about law, crime, and “deviant” behavior, human sexuality, families, mental health, addictions, disabilities, urbanization, migration, work and jobs, higher education, etc. Most of these topics and concerns, of course, remain central to research at our annual conferences today. A much more recent SSSP president, John Galliher (2002), provides a nice overview of the “cast of characters” and their various but overlapping vision of sociology in those early days; he particularly highlights the likely underappreciated leadership role that Jesse Bernard took in developing and promoting a feminist sensibility in sociology as an integral component to analyzing and acting on a range of social problems—still a hallmark of today’s SSSP.1 My purpose here is not to survey SSSP history, but to affirm continuity with long-standing themes of embracing a critical approach, valuing scholarship that is engaged and relevant to pressing problems of ordinary people, and …