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DOI 10.1007/s12108-015-9295-4

Joseph Gusfield and Social Problems Theory

Joel Best 1

# Springer Science+Business Media New York 2015

Abstract Joseph R. Gusfield was a key figure in the emergence of constructionist

social problems theory. His approach was characterized by: his determination to
identify the cultural, structural, and historical context of claims; attention to the choices
among alternatives that shaped how problems were defined; and the rhetoric used by
advocates. He highlighted the role of ownershipthe ability to define the terms in which
social problems are constructed. His work is also notable for its skepticism regarding
social scientists theorizing.
Keywords Joseph R. Gusfield . Ownership . Social constructionism . Social problems
theory
Lets begin with a quotation:
We have written within the methodological perspective of the sociologist interested in the general process of moral reform. Our concern is with the structural
and cultural roots of the movement and with the consequences of Temperance
activities and goals for its adherents, its Bvictims,^ and the relations between
these two. . . . It is here, in the analysis of the process, that the sociologist focuses
his interest (Gusfield 1963: 23).
Of course, those sentences appear near the beginning of Joseph Gusfields Symbolic
Crusade. The book was published in 1963the same year as two other classic works in
the sociology of deviance: Outsiders (Becker 1963) and Stigma (Goffman 1963); or to
put it another way, 3 years before The Social Construction of Reality (Berger and
Luckmann 1966) and 14 years before Constructing Social Problems (Spector and
Kitsuse 1977)the book generally credited with launching constructionist social
problems theory. And yet, in those references to the sociologist being Binterested in

* Joel Best
joelbest@udel.edu
1

University of Delaware, Newark, DE, USA

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the general process of moral reform,^ Bthe consequences of Temperance activities and
goals,^ and Bin the analysis of the process,^ we can recognize some assumptions and
concerns underpinning the constructionist stance.
Like Becker and Goffman, Gusfield was a member of what Fine (1995) has termed
the second Chicago school. Like many in that generation, he entered graduate school
after serving in the Second World War (Gusfield 1990); at Chicago, he was exposed to
Herbert Blumers theoretical pronouncements about symbolic interaction, but also to
the practical strategies for making sociological sense of the world advocated by Everett
Hughes. Like other Chicago grad students, Gusfield appreciated Blumers theoretical
vision, but relied on other mentors, including Hughes, W. Lloyd Warner, and Ernest
Burgess in framing his research strategies (Gusfield 1990, 2003). The result was not
particularly doctrinaire; none of the Chicago faculty are listed in the index to Symbolic
Crusade, while there are references to Mead on one page, Marx on two, Kenneth Burke
on three, Durkheim on four, and Weber on nine (Gusfield 1963).
I encountered Symbolic Crusade as a student. I thought of myself as specializing
inand viewed it as a book aboutdeviance. I now realize that Gusfield probably
thought its primary contribution was to the sociology of social movements. But at the
time I understood it as addressing important questions raised by the labeling perspective about the processes by which categories of deviance were defined and redefined;
for me, BMoral Passage,^ the 1967 article in Social Problems, highlighted what I saw as
the books central theme (Gusfield 1967).
But as the once hot topic of deviance cooled, key figures in the labeling perspective
drifted into other specialties (Best 2004). John Kitsuse, of course, articulated a constructionist approach to studying social problems (Spector and Kitsuse 1977). Gusfield
followed; he praised Constructing Social Problems (1979, 1984, 2003), although as I
have already suggested, that books approach complemented his established analytic
orientation. In 1981, Gusfield published his second stellar monograph, The Culture of
Public Problemsnot just one of the first constructionist monographs (Wiener 1981
appeared during the same year), but the first really influential one (it has been cited
more than 1,800 times).
In the years that followed, Gusfield repeatedly described his work as constructivist. He
preferred that termbecause, I imagine, it had associations with the artistic movement that
went by that label. Not being particularly artistic myself, Im going to continue speaking
of constructionism. Although Gusfields two most important books were about alcohol
problems (and he published a collection of his shorter papers on the topic [Gusfield
1996]), he also wrote about the construction of other social problems, including tobacco
(Gusfield 1993) and health foods (Gusfield 1992), and he made it quite clear that he
viewed his work on alcohol as falling within the broader study of social problems.
Therefore, in this paper I want to identify what I see as five key themes and contributions
in his work as a student of social problems. Obviously, similar papers could be written
examining his thoughts about social movements, performance, and so on.

Context: Social Structure, Culture, and History

All of Gusfields writings on social problems emphasize both the structural and cultural
contexts within which problems emerge. Whereas many sociologists emphasize the

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importance of one, sometimes almost seeming to deny the others relevance, Gusfield
constantly shows how the two are intertwined. Here he is explaining why the U.S.
Surgeon Generals 1964 report on Smoking and Health had such dramatic impact:
By 1964, a structure of science had emerged that made possible the development
of a range of medical studies and their dissemination to an attentive public. Largescale epidemiological research was itself a relatively new development in medical
science, addressing the smoking problem in novel language. The institutions
responsible for developing and disseminating knowledge about tobacco use were
those charged with the functions of maintaining and improving the health of the
nation. . . . Research findings were now more easily transmitted to the general
public. In 1964, science reporting had become a part of journalism. . . . (Gusfield
1993: 55).
In this short passage, he notes the relevance of structural changes in medicine,
government, and journalism for making possible the construction of tobacco as a
public health problem. Recognizing the emergence of journalists on a science beat
is a particularly nice, Gusfieldian touch. Locating these structural conditions set the
stage for an analysis of the role of culture. Gusfield goes on to describe the careful
ways scientists described their findings regarding smoking and health problems, but
then notes: BIn the arena of public knowledge, qualifications and conceptual
difficulties gave way to consensus and certainty^ (p. 59). Smoking became
defined, initially as a cause of health risks that could be minimized by not
smoking, then later as a means of endangering the health of others via secondhand
smoke. This later reconstruction meant that smoking was no larger just a bad habit,
it became evidence of moral failings, of both not taking care of oneself and being
indifferent to the welfare of others.
Gusfields determination to appreciate the influence of both structure and culture is
revealed in his impatience with more single-minded analysts: BIn its hostility to structure
and its praise of culture, [symbolic interaction] has been in danger of throwing out not
only the baby with the bathwater but the bathtub as well. . . . social life does display
consistency as well as change and fluidity, organization as well as fragmentation, system
as well as autonomy^ (Gusfield 2003: 129emphasis in original). In his SSSP presidential address, he called for moving: Bthe study of social problems closer to the study of
how social movements and institutions affect and are affected by the interpretations, the
language, and the symbols that constitute seeing a situation as a social problem. At the
same time, we need to take care not to separate the study of meanings from the study of
their historical and institutional settings^ (Gusfield 1989a: 439).
Gusfields determination to respect both the structural and the cultural context of
social problems reflects his historical vision. He understands that social problems
evolve over decades, and he also knows that historians must work with primary
sources. To be sure, there are limits to his historical vision: he stays focused on the
United States, beginning in the early nineteenth century. But his work is a fine role
model for sociologists who dare to explore the past.
In sum, Gusfield emphasizes the importance of context in shaping the construction
social problems. He locates claims within particular historical moments, institutional
structures, and cultural understandings.

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The Analytic Importance of Alternatives

Recognizing the importance of context leads to a very Gusfieldian insight: that the
construction of any social problem is the product of choices, choices about what the
claimsmakeror the analystdecides to notice, and what to ignore. Heres Gusfield on
leading sociologists of the 1920s: Bfor both Ogburn and the Lynds it seemed clear that it
was nonmaterial culture that lagged and technology that led. An alternative formulation
might have been that nonmaterial culture stood firm while technology overran^
(Gusfield 1984: 33). This passage offers a lovely little joltthe reader is nodding along,
thinking BOf course, of course,^ until there is that sudden reminder that too much is
being taken for granted.
In The Culture of Public Problems, Gusfield speaks of the importance of alternative
consciousness (1981: 4550). His point is that all social problems can be framed in
different terms. Thus, the recent campaign against drunk driving had defined the
problem in terms of deviant individuals who irresponsibly drink, then drive and
endanger themselves and others on the roadways. But, once we stop taking this
reasoning for granted, a host of alternative constructions become visible:
One witness at the U.S. Senate hearings on the national traffic safety bill said that
the problem was not in the foolishness or drunkenness of the driver, but in the
failure of the auto industry to construct an automobile designed on the assumption that drivers would be foolish or drunk. (Gusfield 1981: 47)
It is a practical contingency of drinking in the American bar that the drinker will
have to leave at some time in the night. He cannot stay there and Bsleep it off.^
(Gusfield 1996: 133)
One of the other practical contingencies of transportation for drinkers is the total
absence of mass transportation in the late evening or early morning in the areas of
all the bars studied. Never in our observations did anyone suggest or contemplate
taking a city bus to get home. The lack of mass transportation as an alternative to
self-motoring is taken for granted. (Gusfield 1996: 135.)
Taxis, besides being considered a sign of incompetent drinking, are costly. . . . If
the drinker has driven to the bar by himself, he must arrange a return the next day
to recover the car, thus doubling the cost. The individuality of financing taxis is a
fundamental fact of transportation. (Gusfield 1996: 135)
[The bartenders] management of drinking is to refuse further service. He gives
no recognition of an ability to mobilize the peers of the drinker or to use his own
personal knowledge or attachment as a device to influence the drinker. (Gusfield
1996: 165)
In other words, the choice to focus on the drivers deviance ignores the relevance of
automobile safety features, practices that require leaving the bar at closing time, the
absence of mass transit, the high cost of taxis, and the reluctance of bartenders to
intervene. The point, needless to say, is not that these other potential considerations are

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the true cause of the drinking-driving problem, but that there are lots of possible ways
to construct thisor any other problem. (In fact, the campaign against drinking-driving
led to a new custom of designating driversa movement to create a popular alternative
consciousness.) But Gusfields clear message is that B. . . the conditions said to define
the social problem are socially constructed, [and] are only one of several possible
realities^ (Gusfield 1989a: 438).

Evidence and Rhetoric

Gusfield acknowledged his intellectual debts to Kenneth Burke, the literary theorist and
critic (Gusfield 1989b, 1990, 2003). He applied Burkes perspective to social life: BThis
approach has entailed seeing human action as creating meanings that can be understood as if they were literary textsembodying metaphorical, poetic, and symbolic
meanings^ (Gusfield 2003: 125). And this perspective can applied both to the language
of the people analysts study but also to the works of those analysts.
This approach is the basis for the chapters in The Culture of Public Problems that dissect
the scientific literature on drinking and driving (Gusfield 1981, see also 1976). Such research
is routinely cited in claims about the scope of the drunk driving problem; they offer the basis
for claims that drunken drivers account for 50 % of traffic fatalities, and so on. While
analogous evidence is routinely trotted out to support all sorts of social problems claims, the
drinking-driving data seem to be, if anything, quite solid: there is a large apparatus designed
to keep track of traffic accidents that result in fatalities; and at first glance it seems unlikely
that there could be a large Bdark figure^ of unrecorded incidents. And yet, by the time
Gusfield works his analytic magic, we have discovered the layers of assumptions that lie
beneath these data: studies routinely fail to collect blood-alcohol levels on many drivers; the
possibility that fatalities were caused by something otheror morethan drinking is
discounted; percentages are often gathered for one purpose and then assigned to categories
with completely different meanings; analysts can slide from talking about drivers to statistics
about deaths (which may include passengers or pedestrians); and so on. The net effect is to
consistently maximize the proportion of accidents or fatalities that can be attributed to
drinking and driving, and then to attribute scientific certainty to the results.
Gusfield performs a similar critical reading of the literature on smoking risks, noting that:
. . . the differences in death rates between smokers and nonsmokers are stated in
relative rather than absolute terms. . . . From the standpoint of the total nation, that
difference in risk is very important. . . . From the standpoint of the individual its
significance is less clear. . . . It is the public character of the risk rather than its
application to specific persons that forms the basis for environmental control and
individual advice. (Gusfield 1993: 67)
All this isand is intended to beunsettling. Gusfield is not picking on easy targets
clerics blinded by their convictions or activists with overheated imaginations. He is
taking the voices of todays premier authoritiesscientistsand treating their analyses as
literary texts, as rhetoricattempts to persuade. Once again, he discovers people making
choices about what to count, how to count it, what to call what theyre counting, how to
explain the significance of their findings, and so forth. Not only is the audience for those

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claims unlikely to appreciate the consequences of all those choices, but one suspects that
it is very easy for the researchers to become ever less critical of their own results.

Ownership
Which leads us to my favorite Gusfieldian conceptownership: Bthe ability to create
and influence the public definition of a problem^ (Gusfield 1981: 10). To take a simple
example, the National Rifle Association has for decades owned the pro-gun/anti-guncontrol position. Whenever some sort of gun-control policy is proposed, reporters
routinely contact the NRA to hear their response because the press assumes that the
organization speaks for the opposition. Ownership gives ones views weight. It confers
significant advantages in the social problems marketplace where advocates compete to
bring attention to their claims.
But ownership is not permanent; it can be losta process at the very center of
Symbolic Crusade. Thus, Gusfield argues that the Protestant churches were the leading
authority on alcohol problems in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: they were
the force behind first the temperance movement, and then the campaign for Prohibition.
However:
With Repeal, the authority of the churches to be judges of public tastes was
Bdisowned.^ Whatever the desires and attempts of temperance and Prohibitionist
organizations, theirs was no longer the authoritative voice. Their pronouncements
no longer commanded attention but were the Bkiss of death^ for proponents of
alcohol control policies. (Gusfield 1981: 11).
A striking example of this loss of influence was the subject of Gusfields dissertation: the Womens Christian Temperance Uniononce a major social movement organization, part of a coalition powerful enough to successfully promote a constitutional
amendmenthad within just a few decades of that victory become an anachronism,
almost a joke. Once again, we see the importance of historical context to understanding
the politics of social problems.
The WCTUs declining influence created a vacancy to be filled by the alcohol
problems new owners. The problem was medicalized: no longer called drunkards,
problem drinkers became alcoholics who suffered from the disease of alcoholism and
required treatment. This redefinition was promoted by an alliance of former drinkers
(Alcoholics Anonymous), university researchers, treatment facilities, and government
agencies. Gusfield saw this as an example of a broader shiftthe emergence of
troubled persons professions that became the owners of many social problems.
These included the vast battalions of social workers, public health workers, therapists,
counselors, advocates, and on and on, including, as he noted in his presidential
addresses to both the Pacific Sociological Association and the Society for the Study
of Social Problems, sociologists and their colleagues in many other scholarly disciplines (Gusfield 1979, 1989a). All of these folks could articulate the principled nature
of their workaiding troubled people and addressing societal problemsbut Gusfield
noted that they were also interested parties because social problem owners experience both
Bfun and profit^ (Gusfield 1989a).

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The idea of ownership helps us see how the different strands in Gusfields thought
are connected. The rise of the new troubled-persons industries had to be located within
its historical, institutional, and cultural contextthe emergence of a welfare state that
sought to manage poverty, disease, and other social problems by promoting education,
public health, and similar programs. There was nothing inevitable about the particular
programs that evolved; they were the products of long sequences of choices. And, of
course, these social problems workersfrom the intellectual cognoscenti who developed the theoretical frameworks for understanding social problems to the low-level
street bureaucrats who turned individuals private troubles into instances of public
problemsall adopted rhetoric designed to explain and justify their actions, thereby
turning the entire apparatus into something that could be taken for granted (Gusfield
1984, 1989a, 2003).

Skepticism
All of this is more than a little unnerving. Gusfields work delivers a series of
shocks. Just when you think you know where you stand, hell kick that
foundation out from under your feet and show you just how that foundation was
constructed, the choices that were required to build it, and the assumptions needed to
keep it intact. However, this does not mean that he belongs in some postmodern,
we-really-cant-know-anything camp. Rather, he wants us to be self-critical, to be
skepticaland uncomfortable.
Gusfields observes: BThe idea that there is a unity of concern or interest between
those at the top who bestow their benevolence and those at the bottom who receive it is
open to doubt^ (Gusfield 1989a: 436). Obviously, this skepticism can be read as
directed at the sociologists subjects: BIt is the social problems industry itself that
emerges as the object of critique^ (Gusfield 1984: 47). Oh good, we thinkweve been
given our marching orders. But then we find ourselves in his crosshairs:
. . . the sectarianism and solidarity which adherence to theory provides has some
tangible benefits. It grants the adherent sponsorship, contacts, possible journal
access. The more the theoretical sects abound, the more departments feel it
incumbent upon them to have Bone of them and one of those^ to make a balanced
department. . . . (Gusfield 1979: 10)
Sociology receives a great deal of skeptical attention from Gusfield. He recalls: BIn
writing Symbolic Crusade, I was beginning to be wary of theory as a source of
scholarship. . .^ (Gusfield 1990: 116). He described himself as a pluralist:
No paradigm is totalistic in Sociology. Each has to be examined for where it
might be useful. We need to stay close to the historical and empirical situations in
which perspectives emerge and do less analysis of the deductive logic of thought.
(Gusfield 1985: 16).
Increasingly, I have become indifferent to questions of theoretical consistency
and have come to focus instead on the empirical aspects of my own and others

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research. . . . I have come to believe . . . that the fundamental fact in the social
sciences is that there are no fundamental facts in the social sciences. Thus, the
effort to create general theory seems to me to be a waste of time and space.
(Gusfield 2003: 128, 131)
He was impatient with theoristsof all stripesworrying about the logical flaws in
each others paradigms. And his skepticism extended to methodology:
The more refined our techniques, the less we have to say. The depictions of
pathways and analyses of variance have given us greatly advanced tools for
analyzing the play and interplay of variables. At the same time, they have
frequently ended in the view that everything is relevant and everything causes
everything else. (Gusfield 1979: 17)
The analyst who so skillfully dissected others arguments was quite willing to apply
the same critical lens to his own discipline.
We live in a Crossfire culture; in which much of our public discourse is framed in
terms of culture warriorsTeam FOX vs. Team MSNBC, red states vs. blue states, etc.
railing against each other. Gusfield wanted little part of it:
When people outside my scholarly circles heatedly discuss public problems, I
find I become the nay sayer. I am the skeptic who destroys the assumptions on
which both sides of the argument base their conflict. (Gusfield 1990: 127).
Asked whose side we are on, the answer is: BOn the side.^ (Gusfield 1984: 46)
And yet, he had a prolific career as an influential sociological observer; he wrote a
lot, and lots of people not just read, but drew upon what he wrote. There is a difference
between skepticism and cynicism, between asking uncomfortable questions and nihilism. He believed in what hed spent his life doing; he had a stance:
We are ironists rather than realists; unmaskers rather than plastic surgeons.
[Constructionisms] way of raising questions is not necessarily better but it does
bring new questions into focus and that is its value to me. (Gusfield 1985: 17)
We are, at our best, part science, part art, part journalism, part contemporary
historiansscholars not researchers. That is, in my judgement, a reflection of our
datum in human beings. Because they, and this includes ourselves as sociologists
as well, are reactive and reflexive beings, they interpret their world, infuse it with
meaning and bring creative and innovative elements into the structure of life.
(Gusfield 1979: 19).
As interpreters of social problems we earn our livings by other peoples trouble. .
. . What we can best contribute to assuage our guilt is to cast an ironical eye on
the passing scene so as to make us all more aware of the possibilities and
opportunities that the veils of cultural meanings and institutional arrangements
hide from us. (Gusfield 1989a: 439).

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Gusfields Contributions
Joe Gusfield, then, was unusually self-reflective. He understood that Symbolic
Crusadeand later The Culture of Public Problemsaddressed questions that other
sociologists might not think to ask. He took little for granted and sought to understand
how peoplenot just the WTCU or MADD, but scientists and especially sociologists,
including Joe Gusfieldmade sense of the world. Beyond the substantive findings in his
two extremely influential books and his other papers, he continues to stand as an
exemplar and guide for helping us understand how to analyze social problems.

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