Can this shift of a private trouble to a public issue be understood as a consequence of the numbers of people involved?
Social problem | People have problems | People are problems |
---|---|---|
Mental illness | Mentally ill people are ill through no fault of their own and require/deserve treatment. | |
Mental illness can affect all of us (and even if we have not all suffered from it in some form, most of us will know someone who has). | ||
As far as possible mentally ill people should be re-integrated into their communities, since excluding them from ordinary life is likely to make their condition worse. | ||
The most serious fraud is committed not by the members of the welfare culture but by the creators of it, who conceal from the poor, both adults and children, the most fundamental realities of their lives: that to live well and escape poverty they will have to keep their families together at all costs and will have to work harder than the classes above them. In order to succeed the poor need most of all the spur of their poverty. (Gilder, 1981, p. 118)
Such problems – problems of morals, attitude, behaviour – are not susceptible to a quick fix by social policy … If incompetent shopping is the problem, larger hand-outs will not cure it. Higher subsidies will not reform bad budgeting. Whatever the behaviour cause, be it isolation, lack of parental example in domestic economy, illiteracy, poor motivation, depression, self-indulgent or incompetent expenditure by husband, those husbands selfishly not handing enough over to their wives, a failure to look beyond today, simply increasing social security expenditure will not solve it. (Anderson, 1991, p. 27)
The poverty of low wages and poor working conditions is often still a hidden factor in the poverty debate. Recent government policies have specifically weakened employment rights … Alongside the deregulation of employment law, new patterns of employment have changed the profile of the workforce. There has been a marked increase in self-employment and in part-time and low-paid work and a small increase in temporary work. Women are more likely to be in both part-time and temporary work. Many of these jobs are low paid with few employment and social security rights which not only creates poverty, but also stores it up for the future. (Oppenheim, 1993, p. 59)
If we consider this approach as a ‘social construction’ – a way of perceiving or understanding the world – instead of exploring it in ways which seek to challenge or confirm the ‘facts’ on which it is based, what effect would that have?
Explanation | Factors |
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Individual: | |
Familial: | |
Locality: | |
Cultural: | |
Structural: |
Explanation | Factors |
---|---|
Individual: | Explanations might address either the attitudes or capabilities of unemployed individuals. Are they actively looking for work, or are they work avoiders? Have they got the sorts of technical and social skills that employers are demanding? |
Familial: | Has their upbringing or socialisation prepared them adequately for the world of work? Have they got the right outlook? Are there family networks that help or hinder them in obtaining work? |
Locality: | Are there particular possibilities or problems in the local pattern of employment? Are people part of a local culture which makes them less employable or less interested in work? Some people talk about local ‘cultures of poverty’ which pass on attitudes that make people less likely to look for or get jobs. |
Cultural: | Do values in the wider society stress the merits of being employed? Do they promote responsibility? Or do they encourage dependency and idleness? |
Structural: | Whose interests are served by unemployment? Does unemployment make labour cheaper or more manageable for employers? Why does the level or scale of unemployment change in different periods? |
All human activity is subject to habitualization. Any action that is repeated frequently becomes cast into a pattern, which can then be reproduced with an economy of effort… Habitualization further implies that the action in question may be performed again and again in the same manner and with the same economic effort. (Berger and Luckmann, 1967, p. 71)