Title: Ontological Gerrymandering: The Anatomy of Social Problems Explanations
Abstract: Recent explanations of social problems have increasingly adopted the "definitional" perspective.This paper provides a critical commentary on the form of sociological explanation common to this approach.Viewed as a practical accomplishment, both theoretical statements and empirical case studies manipulate a boundary, making certain phenomena problematic while leaving others unproblematic.We call the main strategy for managing this boundary ontological gerrymandering.After applying this concept to both theoretical and empirical studies of social problems, we show that the same conceptual problems arise with respect to the labeling theory of deviance.We argue that investigation of the practical management of these problems will contribute to a deeper understanding both of social problems explanations and sociological explanation more generally.In this paper we examine a body of recent contributions to the study of social problems which adopt a predominantly "definitional" or "social constructionist" perspective. 1Our objective is to provide a critical commentary on the character of sociological argument common to this school.We call our approach an "ethnography of argument", where "ethnography" denotes our attempt to take a distanced (or anthropologically strange) view of the activities we observe, and where "argument" is a generic term for activities such as reasoning, explaining, persuading and understanding.Our approach is thus informed by recent developments in the ethnography of scientific practice (Knorr-Cetina, 1981;Latour and Woolgar, 1979; Lynch, Forthcoming; Traweek, Forthcoming; for a review of this literature see Knorr-Cetina, 1983;Woolgar, 1982) which portrays the work of explanation as a practical accomplishment. 2 We begin by identifying the strategy and explanatory moves characteristic of social problems argument within the definitional perspective.We use the term "ontological gerrymandering" to describe its central strategy.Second, we examine how this strategy is used in programmatic theoretical statements and, then, in empirical work what has followed the definitional approach, particularly Stephen Pfohl's (1977) analysis of child abuse.Third, we show that ontological gerrymandering is at the center of some conceptual problems which have characterized labeling approaches to the study of deviance.We speculate that the conceptual strategies and problems we identify in social problems explanations may be characteristic of all sociological argument which invokes a selective relativism with respect to the phenomena it seeks to explain.In the final section we discuss three distinct ways to understand the significance and implications of the critique we offer.