ABSTRACT
This book has had two aims. It has been concerned with mapping the social construction of social problems in the UK in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It has also been concerned with thinking about what a historical focus can bring to the understanding of the social construction of social problems in the UK of the late twentieth century. The first four chapters focused on the processes by which a specific issue and/or group became defined as a social problem, and sought to understand this in relation to the transformations in political, social, economic and cultural relations which accompanied processes of industrialization. The unravelling of established ways of living and the profound dislocations which accompanied industrialization and urbanization required that the nation be reformed so that people could be ‘inserted’ into the new social relations which were emerging and becoming dominant. In their diverse ways these four chapters argued that, in part, this process of reforming the nation provided the frame through which welfare institutions and practices came into being. This entailed the construction of some groups and issues as social problems and, in their turn, these constructions gave rise to a series of welfare institutions and practices. Thus these chapters have sought to explore the ways in which these transformations were linked to, and effected by, transformations in the social relations of class, gender and ‘race’. Chapters 5 and 6 took a different time-span for their enquiry, but retained the focus on the link between the social construction of social problems, discourses and practices of welfare and changes in the configuration of social, political, economic and cultural relations.
