joel best sobre gusfield

7/26/2019 Joel Best Sobre Gusfield

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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 schoolafter serving in the Second World War (Gusfield1990); 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 (Gusfield1963).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 perspec-

tive about the processes by which categories of deviance were defined and redefined;

for me, BMoral Passage,^the 1967 article inSocial Problems, highlighted what I saw as

the books central theme (Gusfield1967).

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 con-structionist approach to studying social problems (Spector and Kitsuse1977). Gusfield

followed; he praisedConstructing 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 developmentof a range of medical studies and their dissemination to an attentive public. Large-

scale 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 notsmoking, 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^ (Gusfield2003: 129emphasis in original). In his SSSP presi-

dential 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^(Gusfield1989a: 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 onleading 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^

(Gusfield1984: 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.

InThe 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 theproblem 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 assump-

tion 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.^

(Gusfield1996: 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. (Gusfield1996: 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. (Gusfield1996: 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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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^(Gusfield1981: 10). To take a simple

example, the National Rifle Association has for decades owned the pro-gun/anti-gun-

control 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 pronouncementsno longer commanded attention but were the Bkiss of death^ for proponents of

alcohol control policies. (Gusfield1981: 11).

A striking example of this loss of influence was the subject of Gusfields disserta-

tion: the Womens Christian Temperance Uniononce a major social movement orga-

nization, 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 disci-

plines (Gusfield1979,1989a). 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 (Gusfield1989a).

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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 particularprograms that evolved; they were the products of long sequences of choices. And, of

course, these social problems workersfrom the intellectual cognoscenti who devel-

oped 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

skeptical

and 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^(Gusfield1984: 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. . . . (Gusfield1979: 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. . .^(Gusfield1990: 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.

(Gusfield1985: 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.

(Gusfield2003: 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. (Gusfield1979: 17)

The analyst who so skillfully dissected othersarguments was quite willing to apply

the same critical lens to his own discipline.

We live in aCrossfire 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. (Gusfield1990: 127).

Asked whose side we are on, the answer is: BOn the side.^(Gusfield1984: 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 nihil-

ism. 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. (Gusfield1985: 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.

(Gusfield1979: 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. (Gusfield1989a: 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 understandhow 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.

References

Becker, H. S. (1963). Outsiders: Studies in the sociology of deviance. New York: Free Press.Berger, P. L., & Luckmann, T. (1966). The social construction of reality: A treatise in the sociology of

knowledge. New York: Doubleday.

Best, J. (2004). Deviance: Career of a concept. Belmont: Wadsworth.

Fine, G. A. (1995).A second Chicago school? The development of a postwar American sociology. Chicago:

University of Chicago Press.

Goffman, E. (1963). Stigma: Notes on the management of spoiled identity. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall.

Gusfield, J. (1963). Symbolic crusade: Status politics and the American Temperance movement. Urbana:

University of Illinois Press.

Gusfield, J. R. (1967). Moral passage: the symbolic process in public designations of deviance. Social

Problems, 15(2), 175188.

Gusfield, J. R. (1976). The literary rhetoric of science: comedy and pathos in drinking driver research.

American Sociological Review, 41(1), 1634.

Gusfield, J. R. (1979). BBuddy, can you paradigm?: The crisis of theory in the welfare state. Pacific

Sociological Review, 22(1), 322.

Gusfield, J. R. (1981). The culture of public problems: Drinking-driving and the symbolic order. Chicago:


Gusfield, J. R. (1984). On the side: practical action and social constructivism in social problems theory. In J.

W. Schneider & J. I. Kitsuse (Eds.), Studies in the Sociology of Social Problems (pp. 3151). Norwood:

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Gusfield, J. R. (1985). Theories and hobgoblins.SSSP Newsletter, 17(1), 1618.

Gusfield, J. R. (1989a). Constructing the ownership of social problems: fun and profit in the welfare state.

Social Problems, 36(5), 43141.

Gusfield, J. R. (Ed.). (1989b).Kenneth Burke on Symbols and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Gusfield, J. R. (1990). My life and soft times. In B. M. Berger (Ed.), Authors of the own lives: Intellectual

biographies by twenty American sociologists(pp. 104129). Berkeley: University of California Press.

Gusfield, J. R. (1992). Natures body and the metaphors of food and health. In M. Lamont & M. Fournier

(Eds.),Cultivating differences: Symbolic boundaries and the making of inequality (pp. 75103). Chicago:


Gusfield, J. R. (1993). The social symbolism of smoking and health. In R. A. Rabin & S. D. Sugarman (Eds.),

Smoking policy: Law, politics, and culture(pp. 4968). New York: Oxford University Press.

Gusfield, J. R. (1996). Contested meanings: The construction of alcohol problems. Madison: University of

Wisconsin Press.

Gusfield, J. R. (2003). A journey with symbolic interaction. Symbolic Interaction, 26(1), 119139.

Spector, M., & Kisuse, J. I. (1977). Constructing social problems. Menlo Park: Cummings.

Wiener, C. (1981).The politics of alcoholism: Building an arena around a social problem. New Brunswick:Transaction.

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