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A sociology of the social construction of problems
analysis
Anoushavan Sarukhanyan
To cite this article: Anoushavan Sarukhanyan (2025), How to achieve societal change. A sociology of the social construction of problems analysis, Strategical communication. Lausanne. 2025.
ABSTRACT:
This article examines the sociological literature on the social construction of problems, with a particular emphasis on the mechanisms that facilitate the emergence of certain issues as public problems within society. Based on insights from sociologists in the field, it is evident that it is not the objective importance of an issue that transforms it into a public problem; rather, multiple dynamics that come into play in the societal debate, including mediatization. By synthesizing the relevant sociological literature, this article identifies key factors that contribute to the construction of public problems and underscores the potential for social movements to leverage these dynamics to achieve their goals as fast as possible.
Introduction
A moral agent conscious of a big injustice happening in a society has a moral obligation to act effectively to eliminate this injustice as quickly as possible. To be able to fulfil this duty of acting effectively, the moral agent must learn the sociological mechanisms that allow the elimination of an injustice in a society. In other words, the moral obligation to eliminate an injustice includes a procedural obligation to learn the mechanisms that allow the societal elimination of injustices.
It is the sociology of the social construction of public problems or the sociology of social problems that studies the process by which certain issues are identified as public problems and become the object of political action. According to sociologists, problems that become identified by society and the authorities as public problems become so not because of their objective importance, but because of some dynamics that take place in the societal debate (Becker, 1966)[1].
I. Three dynamics by which a problem metamorphoses into a public problem
The first dynamic of the process transforming an issue into a public problem is collective mobilization, also called “popular participation” by some sociologists (Cobb, 1983)[2]. In this stage, some people who consider that an issue is a problem, start to publicly make a political claim stating that the problem has to be eliminated by the State or by a company that is blamed for the problem. Very logically, to see one day the elimination of a problem, some must beforehand claim publicly and clearly that this problem has to be eliminated. Lawyers have to put precise claims in their legal actions if they want the judge to give them what they request for their client, in the same way social actors must make a precise claim to get what they want (Felstiner, 1980, p. 636)[3]. This claim-making can be made in link with demonstrations, violent actions, peaceful symbolic actions, petitions, letters to the editor, boycotts, strikes, etc. Mobilization aims to make the claim more visible to the public, attract attention and sympathy from the public opinion or the media, to defend publicly the claim by disseminating the arguments in favor of the claim in the public and finally to increase the number of citizens who share the political opinion of the claim to be able to make sufficient pressure to see a change (Hassenteufel, 2010, p. 51)[4].
b. Mediatization
The second dynamic is mediatization. Nowadays, without media coverage it is unlikely that an important issue will ever become a public problem and will be resolved by the authorities (Dispensa, 2003, p.90)[5]. This is easily understood by the fact that a claim and the arguments in favor of it are much more visible to the public if they receive media coverage. Since mediatization can quickly increase the number of citizens sharing the political opinion favorable to the claim, it is extremely important in the process of social change. Therefore, moral agents seeking to eliminate an injustice should carefully study the factors that help to increase media coverage surrounding an issue.
c. Politicization
The last dynamic is politicization. It refers to the stage where some authority or political person puts finally the issue on the political agenda with the objective of producing a decision that will eliminate the problem (Hassenteufel, 2010, p. 53)[6]. According to Kingdon (1984), a problem must first be on the governmental agenda to be put on the political agenda and produce a political decision for its elimination. What Kingdon (1984) calls the “governmental agenda” is what integrates all the subjects to which people in and around government are paying serious attention (Kingdon, 1984, p. 143)[7]. These objects are often the ones that are regularly covered by the media.
In a more graphic way, Kingdon (1984) explains that to generate a political decision three streams are at play.
The first stream is the problem stream. An issue must be picked from the available problem stream where swim all the problems to which the government pays attention. Three main mechanisms capture the attention of public authorities so that it appears in the “problem stream”:
- indicators (i.e. polls or statistical measures which are often mediatized),
- policy milestones (i.e. crisis which are often covered by the media),
- feedback effects (i.e. information, in the context of an evaluation in particular, about policy failures which are also mediatized).
The second stream is the policy stream. It corresponds to the available policy solutions that can be easily adopted. These solutions must meet the criteria of technical feasibility, their compatibility with prevailing values and their capacity to anticipate future constraints.
Finally, the political stream, which integrates the public opinion of the moment, the actual organized political forces (political parties in particular), the executive branch (sometimes its recent change) and the possibilities of political collective bargaining, gives sometimes rise to a political opportunity for an authority or a politician to take action. Only the joining of these three streams can generate a political decision centered on the elimination of the problem (Kingdon, 1984, p. 178).
II. How social movements can influence these dynamics to increase their chances of success
a. Collective mobilization
i. Expressing the claim
As stated above, the collective mobilization dynamic is the one where social actors make publicly a political claim. We have seen that a problem has very little chance to be eliminated if nobody claims for its elimination. Applied to the problem of killing animals for simple food habits, this means that to see one day this practice eliminated there must first be people who express the political claim that this practice has to be forbidden.
ii. Choosing the strategical arguments for the claim
During collective mobilization, not only a claim is made but are also disseminated in the public the arguments supporting it. To be efficient in attracting the sympathy of as many citizens as possible as well as of the media, social movements have to choose carefully the arguments they use to defend the claim. Chateauraynaud (2011)[8] explains that to be effective, the arguments must be directly related to commonly shared principles in the society. Commonly shared principles play the role of a cognitive filter: only those claims that enter in this filter can be easily accepted by the public. Citizens must be able to link the claim to a general known principle, so that the demand sounds like the continuation of something already existent. A good argument for a claim is the one that produces the insertion of the other's point of view into a known structure. In other words, to be understood by the public as easily as possible and to create as many citizens as possible sharing the political opinion favorable to the claim, an argument has to take its origin in commonly shared moral principles. If we apply these principles, the claim “killing animals for simple food habits has to be banned”, could be defended by an argument like the following: Our society's principles of nonviolence and protection of the weak demand that we end the barbaric practices of slaughterhouses, where countless innocent animals are killed daily despite viable, humane plant-based alternatives. By aligning our social practices with our principles, we can transform slaughterhouses from symbols of injustice into relics of a less enlightened past. That is why the act of killing animals for simple food habits must be penalized.”
iii. Choosing the mode of the collective mobilization
To be effective, social movements have to choose the mode of collective mobilization that has the biggest chances to make the authorities to accept their claims. It is therefore a moral obligation for them to know what researchers say on this subject.
In a study, after analyzing hundreds of violent and non-violent resistance campaigns, Chenoweth (2011) showed that non-violent campaigns succeed in 53% of cases while campaigns that use violence succeed in only 26% of cases, for campaigns that use terrorism the success rate is only 9%[9]. The researchers working on this issue, instead of determining what is objectively violence or terrorism, base their analysis only on what is perceived as “violent” or “terrorist”.
Abrahms (2006) states that no matter what are the real policy demands of the movements using terrorism, their mode of action generates the belief that their objectives are maximalist and dissuades the authorities to make any concessions[10].
Regarding the perception of the first Palestinian intifada, Kaufman (1991)[11] found that while only 15% of the demonstrations during the Intifada were violent (the majority of the latter consisted only of throwing rocks on Israeli Defense forces of the territories), 80% of Israelis perceived that the means used by the protests were “mainly violent” and 93% believed that the Intifada was “directed both towards civilians than towards the army”. More interestingly, while the first objective of the Intifada was “to communicate to Israelis the need to end the occupation of the territories”, Kaufman (1991) found that 66% of Israelis thought that the intifada was directed “against the existence of the state of Israel”.
This is just one example highlighting the results found by Chenoweth (2011) and showing that the more a movement is perceived to be violent the more it creates the impression that the movement has extremist goals that shouldn’t be adopted by society.
In another study (Feinberg, 2020)[12] where were compared the consequences of different kinds of actions on the perception of two different groups regarding the same cause and coming from the same movement, it is shown that movement actions that are perceived as "extreme" or "immoral" by the public generate less public support for the movement. In this study, Feinberg (2020), explains this by saying that when a movement uses “extreme protest actions”, this creates a perception of the immorality of the protest actions which generates decreased emotional connection and identification with the actors of the movement, which in turn creates less movement support. What is interesting is that one of the cases tested on subjects was an animal rights protest. Approximately 300 participants were recruited to test the case. They were separated in three different groups. Each of the groups learned that they would read a transcript from a news broadcast and answer questions about it afterward:
“participants read about a fictional animal rights activist organization called
Free the Vulnerable (FTV). The extremity of the movement’s protest behavior was
manipulated at three levels: Moderate Protest, Extreme Protest, or Highly
Extreme Protest conditions. The protesters in the two extreme protest
conditions engaged in unlawful activities (e.g., breaking into an animal
testing facility) modeled after protest activities of real-life social movement
activists, with the protesters in the Highly Extreme Protest condition engaging
in particularly disruptive and harmful behaviors (e.g., drugging a security
guard [as well as freeing animals kept in the lab and destroying property])
compared to the protesters in the Extreme Protest condition (e.g., sneaking past
the security guard [and freeing animals from the lab without destroying any
property]). By contrast, in the Moderate Protest condition the activists
marched peacefully expressing their demands. Including two extreme protest
conditions allowed us to explore competing possibilities regarding the extreme
protests’ effects on observers’ support for a movement. On the one hand,
observers may base their level of support directly on how extreme the protest
actions are, and therefore protest extremity would have a linear impact on
bystanders’ support. On the other hand, there might be a threshold of extremity
beyond which bystanders’ impressions do not get more negative.” (Feinberg,
2020, p. 1101).[13]
After reading what they thought was a transcript from a news broadcast, participants indicated how extreme they thought the protest was, how much they socially identified with members of the movement, how much they supported the protesters, how willing they were to join the movement and how much they supported the movements’ overarching cause.
The results showed first that participants in both the Extreme Protest and the Highly Extreme Protest conditions viewed the protesters’ behavior as more extreme than did participants in the Moderate Protest condition. Additionally, participants in the Highly Extreme Protest condition viewed the protesters’ behavior as being more extreme than participants in the Extreme Protest condition. Participants in the Moderate Protest condition, supported the protesters more, were more likely to join the movement, and were more supportive of the movements overarching cause. But despite the fact that participants in the Highly Extreme Protest condition viewed the protesters’ behavior as being more extreme than participants in the Extreme Protest condition, researchers found non-significant differences between the other answers of the Extreme and Highly Extreme Protest conditions. In accordance with the threshold hypothesis, the researchers concluded:
“Thus, while protesters in the Extreme Protest condition were viewed as significantly less extreme than those in the Highly Extreme Protest condition, they were judged in a similar light. This result is in line with research arguing that the perceived inappropriateness of many acts does not occur linearly, but as a step function, where behaviors that cross a given threshold are categorized in a similarly negative manner (Alexander, 2008).” (Feinberg, 2020, p. 1101).
Since the conditions of Extreme Protect Action were only in the illegal entry in the building and the illegal saving of the animals without any vandalizing or damage to property and that the answers of the participants in this condition weren’t much better than in the condition of Highly Extreme Protect Action where the drugging of a security guard and damage to property were involved, it means that the simple fact that animal activists do something illegal (without causing any direct damage to someone’s physical integrity or property) can be sufficient to produce the same negative results as if the activists did drug a human being and damaged private property. According to the results of this study, we may think that the Animal Liberation Front’s opposition to all forms of bodily integrity violations (but its acceptance of damage to property, which is already worse than the Extreme Protest Action Condition in the Feinberg study) may not mean any reduction in the negative consequences of their actions in the eyes of the public. Moreover, despite their ethical principles, animal activists engaging in destructive direct action are still labeled as terrorists (Posłuszna, 2020, p. 3)[14].
As one of the aims of collective mobilization is to persuade the biggest number possible of citizens to adopt the political opinions favorable to their claims, social movements have to choose strategically their mode of collective mobilization.
Like it has been noted before, campaigns perceived as violent by the public have two times less chances to succeed than those perceived as non-violent, while those perceived as using terrorism have 6 times less chances to succeed.
But the perception of the actions is produced by media framing which we will examine now.
b. Mediatization
We have seen above that an issue has very little chances to be put on the political agenda if it doesn’t receive media coverage. The mediatization is therefore a very important dynamic helping to transform a problem into a public problem. We will examine precisely this topic, especially regarding the concept of framing, before explaining what social movements can do to increase their chances of success regarding this important dynamic.
It is been a long time that researchers working on the media say similar things about the media:
They are constantly presenting objects suggesting what individuals in the mass should think about, know about, have feelings about. (Lang, 1966, p. 468)[15]
Mccombs (1972, p. 184) suggested also an agenda-setting function of the mass media[16]. This function manifests notably through the selection of issues considered as worthy of interest by the media and through the framing of these issues.
i. Choosing
angles of newsworthiness
Research on news values, newsworthiness and gatekeeping done by journalists is useful to understand some of the factors that the media uses to decide whether a subject is newsworthy or not.
Sociologists have made lists of criteria stating that to receive media coverage an issue must satisfy at least with one or more of them. One list of Harcup & O’Neill (2017) includes the following:
“Exclusivity: Stories generated by, or available first to, the news organization as a result of interviews, letters, investigations, surveys, polls, and so on.
Bad news: Stories with particularly negative overtones such as death, injury, defeat and loss (of a job, for example).
Conflict: Stories concerning conflict such as controversies, arguments, splits, strikes, fights, insurrections and warfare.
Surprise: Stories that have an element of surprise, contrast and/or the unusual about them.
Audio-visuals: Stories that have arresting photographs, video, audio and/or which can be illustrated with infographics.
Shareability: Stories that are thought likely to generate sharing and comments via Facebook, Twitter and other forms of social media.
Entertainment: Soft stories concerning sex, showbusiness, sport, lighter human interest, animals, or offering opportunities for humorous treatment, witty headlines or lists.
Drama: Stories concerning an unfolding drama such as escapes, accidents, searches, sieges, rescues, battles or court cases.
Follow-up: Stories about subjects already in the news.
The power elite: Stories concerning powerful individuals, organizations, institutions or corporations.
Relevance: Stories about groups or nations perceived to be influential with, or culturally or historically familiar to, the audience.
Magnitude: Stories perceived as sufficiently significant in the large numbers of people involved or in potential impact, or involving a degree of extreme behavior or extreme occurrence.
Celebrity: Stories concerning people who are already famous.
Good news: Stories with particularly positive overtones such as recoveries, breakthroughs, cures, wins and celebrations.
News organization’s agenda: Stories that set or fit the news organization’s own agenda, whether ideological, commercial or as part of a specific campaign.” (Harcup & O’Neill, 2017)[17]
According to this, if social actors want to increase the news coverage of an issue, social movements can present it through one or more of these angles to journalists.
ii. Creating contacts with the gatekeepers
Regarding gatekeeping, Clayman (1992) says the following:
“Gatekeeping, as a social scientific concept, can be traced to Lewin's (1947) writings on social planning. He observed that the most efficient way to bring about widespread social change is to concentrate on persons in key positions of influence, who function as "gatekeepers" in the flow of goods and ideas through the society.”[18]
Therefore, another excellent way to increase media coverage is to create contacts with some journalists who detain the power of deciding if an issue will become news. It is possible for example for the representatives of an NGO to ask to meet once a journalist around a cup of coffee to talk about their work and future events that can interest the newspaper “in order to see if it would be possible in the future to provide their newspaper with exclusive information regarding the planned activities”. During the meeting it is possible to ask the journalists about advices regarding what are the criteria that help a subject / event related to their cause to be seen as newsworthy. The simple fact of meeting this journalist will create a personal contact that may help to get more media coverage in the future.
iii. Moving from stigmatization to celebration
A study showed that vegans were a decade ago often stigmatized by the media coverage in the United Kingdom (Cole & Morgan, 2011)[19]. Similar results were obtained regarding media coverage of vegan in Australia (Masterman-Smith, Ragusa, & Crampton, 2014).[20] However, in the recent years vegans’ image in the British press has been transformed from a stigmatised lifestyle to a normalized and healthy diet in particular through the mediatization of vegan celebrities (Lundahl, 2020).[21] This is surely good news and gives the idea that something similar can be done regarding the image of “animal activists”. The animal rights movement could invite celebrities advocating for the animals to animal rights events to do for example discourses or to be the first signatories of petitions that can be mediatized. Such an association with celebrities in the media has the potential to transform the libel of “animal activist” into something much more positive.
iv. Avoiding negative framings and creating positive ones
Regarding the framing done by the media, Entman (1993, p. 52) says the following:
To frame is to select some aspects of a perceived reality and make them more salient in a communicating text, in such a way as to promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation.[22]
Because of the framing process, if a demonstration is presented by the media as a confrontation between police and demonstrators, the article may talk only about the confrontational aspect and “the protesters’ critique may not be part of the story – not because there wasn’t room for it, but because it was not defined as relevant” (Reese, 2001, p. 8).[23] That is why activists should avoid as possible they can the negative framing of “radical activists” or “extremists” for example by avoiding to do illegal actions during a demonstration, explaining to the participants of a demonstration that if illegal actions are committed during the action the media will frame them negatively. Activists can also point out in their press releases sent before the demonstration to the media that the organized demonstration will be peaceful. The press releases sent just after the action can state that it was a great event which helped a lot of citizens realize better the claims and arguments of the movement and represents therefore a democratic success.
v. Taking into account the depth of frames
Frames not only shape the presentation of an individual story but can have lasting consequences on our ways to perceive some issues:
more “cultural” frames don’t stop with organizing one story, but invite us to marshal a cultural understanding and keep on doing so beyond the immediate information. These are the “strategic” frames that speak to a broader way to account for social reality (Reese, 2001, p. 12).[24]
Some sociologists distinguish frames according to their “depth”: deep frames are more general and often older and shallow frames are specific and often more recent (Wolfsfeld, G., 1997).[25] The frame “Cold War” is for example deeper than “unprovoked attack” (Reese, 2001, p. 12) and the frame “animal rights extremism” is deeper than “sabotage of a slaughterhouse”. Some elements of an issue can remind the public of an old and deep frame and produce in their mind the insertion of the issue in this old frame. We can make the hypothesis that the threshold in the study of Feinberg (2020) seen above related to extreme protest actions, after the crossing of which, the consequences of some modes of collective mobilization are similarly negative is linked to the frame “animal rights extremism” that was sustained by the media and that is now known and used by many citizens to categorize animal rights actions as soon as they involve illegality.
vi. Avoiding absolutely two negative frames
If social movements want to be effective, they must avoid the possibility for the media and the public to insert their actions in a frame that has negative consequences for their cause.
To avoid the frame of “animal rights extremism”, this may imply the necessity of highlighting in a press release that the organized action was / will be totally peaceful and was / will be organized by a serious NGO some of the interesting works of which can be presented in the end of the press release. Ensuring that the visual aspects of an event (important element for media coverage) like banners and signs help to avoid a negative framing can also be useful.
Another framing is also usually used by the media regarding people who oppose the violence inflicted upon animals. When there is media coverage about veganism or vegans, it is generally framed it as a “lifestyle” issue. Because of this framing, the issue of the elimination of the killing animals for simple food habits is therefore constructed not as a question of justice that needs to be addressed by the society and the authorities, but as a simple question of personal choice. This makes the political aspect of the problem totally invisible and ensures that any media appearance of vegans is absolutely innocuous for the problem that animal activists want to eliminate. Given that even activists are influenced by the media, it is not always easy even for them to think outside the usual media frames portraying animal people either as militant extremists or as inoffensive vegans just sharing recipes. To avoid the frame “animal rights extremism” that has negative consequences as well as the frame “lifestyle” that has also very bad consequences since it transforms an important question of justice into a benign question of personal choice, animal activists have not only to make sure that they are seen as peaceful but also have to make their political claim visible for example when they talk to the journalist or with visual aspects like for example inscriptions on clothing like “our society has to respect the lives of the animals”. To make it impossible for the media to ignore the political claims of an event, it is possible to put the claim or part of it directly in the name of the event like “kindness to end speciesism festival” or “march for the closure of slaughterhouses”. Also, highlighting in a press release that a demonstration isn’t composed of vegans but of all people who have the political claim that our society should one day respect the lives of all animals, and explaining in it that the event isn’t about the consumption practice of consumers but about the political opinions of citizens may help to make the political claim of the movement become more visible in the media. Indeed, it is easier for people to share the political opinion of someone to whom they can identify, and it is easier for nonvegans to share the political opinion of end of killing animals for simple food habits if they can identify with other nonvegans who have this political opinion.
vii. Implementing absolutely two positive frames
Media often frames animal agriculture as an economic and social issue, rather than as a major ethical and environmental issue. Animal activists have to act to change that by expressing clearly that it is a major ethical issue and highlighting in their communications that we have to take into account the fact that the quasi unanimity of moral philosophers, our society’s specialists of ethics, who have worked on our relation to other animals consider that the practice of killing animals for simple food habits is wrong and should be eliminated (to highlight this fact, animal activists can use in their communications the “Montreal declaration on animal exploitation” signed by around 550 academics)[26].
Animal activists also have to express that animal agriculture is a major environmental issue by informing that according to scientific studies, like the one from Eisen & Brown (2022), the gradual cessation of animal agriculture, over a period of 15 years from today, would lead to the neutralization of global warming over the period 2030-2060, which means in other words, that it would totally offset the warming effect of all other human greenhouse gas emissions over this period[27]. The social actors can be successful in changing the framing surrounding animal agriculture, since there are nowadays more newspaper articles that are critical towards meat consumption (Mroz, 2022)[28].
c. Politicization
Choosing strategical arguments for a claim so that the public opinion is more likely to support it and paying attention to the framing of the problem so that the subject is mediatized favorably in newspapers, are not ends in themselves but help the problem to be put on the governmental agenda (which is the agenda that integrates the problems to which the media pays attention).
What helps the issue to be put on the governmental agenda is also the concrete availability of solutions to eliminate the problem. To be effective a claim should be already expressing what kind of solutions have to be put in place. And ideally focusing on the solution that is the easiest to be put in place by the politicians regarding public pressure and political forces. For example if animal activists want the end of the killing of animals be concretized in law, they should claim not for a legal right to live for the animals but for the creation of a criminal offense that makes it subjected to a fine to kill animals for simple food habits. Since at the end, all problems are eliminated in the law, activists have to request the help of lawyers who are sympathetic to their cause to know how to frame their claim so that it focuses on the easiest legal change to be made to see their problem eliminated. It should be also a good idea to ask parliamentarians sympathetic to their cause which is be the best moment to bring up their issue in the parliament with a petition or another political initiative. If they want to ask parliamentarians to defend their cause in the parliament, they should check which are the actual political forces after an election and ask to politicians who are the more likely to gather the support of the majority. After a new election, it can be a good idea to make their issue heard in the parliament, so that the new elected politicians see that their cause is discussed in the parliament. Activists have to know that a political or legal decision that refuses to eliminate their problem can be an opportunity to mediatize the issue again and to make circulate in the society the arguments in favor of their claim and sometimes showing that the institution didn’t act in a required way to address their problem correctly. This new mediatization of the issue, made easier by the existence of a new institutional decision to which the media generally pays attention, will help to increase the support to their cause in the public opinion which is very good to change the cultural norm in favor of their cause and which will help us in the future initiatives. All social movements had to make the same requests several times to have their problems eliminated. After each discussion, their arguments are more shared and better understood which already changes the culture and creates more citizens in favor of their political claim.
Conclusion
Some may argue that the strategy proposed is reformist, to which Gramsci would answer that nowadays you can't achieve the total transformation of society by force and that the cultural fight is an essential part of the revolution. I would answer that this cultural fight can consist also in making the claim for the adoption of laws and institutional facilities that create an anarcho-communist society based on love. The informations contained in this article are very important but the different operations at play in the process of societal change are not to be interpreted as a "strict procedure" to be followed necessarily to achieve change. The only rule is love. So it will be easy. Have a good time at playing. It is sexier. And know that your children will live in a magnificent world. Especially if you ask ChatGPT how to apply this real theory change highlighted in this paper.
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Environmental Communication.
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PDF of this paper: How to change society. A sociology of the social construction of problems analysis. Strategical communication. Lausanne. 2025.PDF
