Social problems are integral to our daily living. Some social problems emerge unexpectedly, and disappear equally fast from our concerns. Other problems acquire a perennial quality. Unemployment, poverty, urban traffic congestion are on our minds and on our television screens. Social problems are of concern to sociologists, social workers, politicians, and, at one time or another, to all of us. They are studied, remedied, sometimes even solved; often they are forgotten because they do not affect us personally. Nevertheless, social problems are always with us.

This book is about the sociology of social problems. It examines how social problems emerge, who is concerned about them, who is threatened by them, and how societies attempt to solve them, attenuate them or perhaps ignore them. This is a theoretical book. The text is based on a theoretical framework that we have developed to enable us to systematically analyse social problems as social phenomena that emerge in society as a form of threat to values and interests dominant in society at a given time and that lead to methods of intervention designed to attenuate, control or solve such problems. In our theoretical framework, a social problem is a form of a ‘negative residue’ that logically emerges from the everyday pursuit of dominant values and interests. We have defined our framework as a ‘Theory of residualist conversion of social problems’.