If so, unemployment is best understood as a public issue rather than a personal trouble.Īnother social problem is eating disorders. While some individuals are undoubtedly unemployed because they are lazy or lack good work habits, a more structural explanation focusing on lack of opportunity is needed to explain why so many people were out of work. Millions of people lost their jobs through no fault of their own.

The high US unemployment rate stemming from the severe economic downturn that began in 2008 provides a telling example of the point Mills was making. Jackman – The line of hope… – CC BY-NC-ND 2.0. Both the correct statement of the problem and the range of possible solutions require us to consider the economic and political institutions of the society, and not merely the personal situation and character of a scatter of individuals.” But when millions of people are out of work, unemployment is best understood as a public issue because, as Mills (Mills, 1959) put it, “the very structure of opportunities has collapsed. If so, their unemployment would be their own personal trouble. If only a few people were unemployed, Mills wrote, we could reasonably explain their unemployment by saying they were lazy, lacked good work habits, and so forth. We will start with unemployment, which Mills himself discussed. To illustrate Mills’s viewpoint, let’s use our sociological imaginations to understand some contemporary social problems. Mills felt that many problems ordinarily considered private troubles are best understood as public issues, and he coined the term sociological imagination to refer to the ability to appreciate the structural basis for individual problems.

Problems in society thus help account for problems that individuals experience. Public issues, whose source lies in the social structure and culture of a society, refer to social problems affecting many individuals. Examples include such different problems as eating disorders, divorce, and unemployment. Personal troubles refer to a problem affecting individuals that the affected individual, as well as other members of society, typically blame on the individual’s own personal and moral failings. Wright Mills’s (1959) (Mills, 1959) classic distinction between personal troubles and public issues. Sociology takes a different approach, as it stresses that individual problems are often rooted in problems stemming from aspects of society itself. When we hear about these individuals, it is easy to think that their problems are theirs alone, and that they and other individuals with the same problems are entirely to blame for their difficulties. For example, many people are poor and unemployed, many are in poor health, and many have family problems, drink too much alcohol, or commit crime. Many individuals experience one or more social problems personally.

Structural functional theory crime