from INVITATION TO SOCIOLOGY by Peter L. Berger (pp 36/37)
It may have become clear at this point that the problems that will interest the sociologist are not necessarily what other people may call “problems.” The way in which public officials and newspapers (and, alas, some college textbooks in sociology) speak about “social problems” serves to obscure this fact. People commonly speak of a “social problem” when something in society doesn’t work the way it is supposed to according to the official interpretations. They then expect the sociologist to study the “problem” as they have defined it and perhaps even to come up with. a solution” that will take care of the matter to their own satisfaction. It is important, against this sort of expectation, to understand that a sociological problem is something quite different from a “social problem” in this sense.
For example, it is naive to concentrate on crime as a “problem” because law-enforcement agencies so define it, or on divorce because that is a “problem” to the moralists of marriage. Even more clearly, the “problem” of the foreman to get his men to work more efficiently or of the line officer to get his troops to charge the enemy more enthusiastically need not be problematic at all to the sociologist (leaving out of consideration for the moment the probable fact that the sociologist asked to study such “problems” is employed by the corporation or the army). The sociological problem is always the understanding of what goes on here in terms of social interaction. Thus the sociological problem is not so much why some things “go wrong” from the viewpoint of the authorities and the management of the social scene, but how the whole system works in the first place, what are its presuppositions and by what means it is held together. The fundamental sociological problem is not crime but the law, not divorce but marriage, not racial discrimination but racially defined stratification, not revolution but government.
This point can be explicated further by an example. Take a settlement house in a lower-class slum district trying to wean away teen-agers from the publicly disapproved activities of a juvenile gang. The frame of reference within which social workers and police officers define the “problems” of this situation is constituted by the world of middle-class, respectable, publicly approved values. It is a “problem” if teen-agers drive around in stolen automobiles, and it is a “solution” if instead they will play group games in the settlement house. But if one changes the frame of reference and looks at the situation from the viewpoint of the leaders of the juvenile gang, the “problems” are defined in reverse order. it is a “problem” for the solidarity of the gang if its members are seduced away from those activities that lend prestige to the gang within its own social world, and it would be a “solution” if the social workers went way the hell back uptown where they came from. What is a “problem” to one social system is the normal routine of things to the other system, and vice versa. Loyalty and disloyalty, solidarity and deviance, are defined in contradictory terms by the representatives of the two systems.
