There are many ways to look at the social world. When trying to understand social problems, what they are, how to identify them and how to analyze and understand them, a very useful way of looking at the world is through structural and individualist lenses. For instance, many of us grow up learning, from a variety of sources, that poverty is a problem of individuals who lack motivation, don't want to work, etc. It's an individual's problem. Framed in such a way, the solutions would tend toward addressing individuals and what they can do to make themselves "better." In 1996, the U.S. Congress passed a welfare reform law, titled the 'Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act' (PRWORA). It basically increased work requirements for the poor to receive welfare, promoted publicly funded programs that encouraged marriage and abstinence, and set a five-year maximum time limit for receiving public assistance. The title hints pretty clearly at the approach taken.

PRWORA was not designed to address the causes of poverty, but to change welfare programs. The solutions offered suggest poverty is caused by a lack of marriage, lack of work ethic and immorality. Let's look at this from a more structural viewpoint. Wages have remained stagnant relative to cost-of-living increases (think housing, transportation costs, health care ...). The federal minimum wage (from $5.15 two years ago up to $7.85 in Summer 2009) even with a recent increase is at its lowest in terms of real dollar value since the 1970s. Many of the well-paying manufacturing jobs of previous decades have been 'outsourced' to poor countries where people are willing to work for 1/20, even 1/100 the wage Americans were earning. Those jobs are replaced by low-wage jobs selling back to American consumers (on their credit cards?) the cheap goods produced overseas. Poorly-funded K-12 school districts produce students who realistically are not prepared for college nor competitive with students coming from well-funded suburban schools with adequate property tax bases. Blacks with a college degree on average earn the same as whites with a high school degree. Blacks enlist in the volunteer army at twice their numbers in the general population. Why? And who was able to escape New Orleans before Hurrican Katrina hit? Those with cars, money for gas, resources for lodging and food elsewhere, who are better connected to news and information, etc.

Who do we blame? Individuals? Corporations? Systems?

Can the above problems be attributed to individuals, or do they involve much deeper, structural, barriers to achieving the so-called 'American Dream' and escaping poverty? Is it an individual's fault if his/her job, or even skill set, is 'outsourced?' Is it possible that a lack of marriage isn't at the root of poverty, but that poverty may lead to decreases in marriage rates? This is a question we can ask, and address, scientifically.

Let's take a seemingly trivial example: Why do we brush our teeth in the morning and evening? Because we as individuals choose to, right? Because we know that brushing out teeth prevents tooth decay. Aaaah, but how do we know this? Because of medical and dental research, because of certain scientific disciplines that study such things? Because of TV commercials telling us we'll lose all our teeth if we don't buy the latest high-tech product, like the toothbrush with an onboard computer??

Okay, forget the tooth decay argument. What would happen if we didn't brush our teeth every day, besides losing them? We'd have lots of bacteria multiplying in our mouths, creating . . . . the dreaded halitosis (a term used by advertising geniuses at Listerine to make bad breath sound like some sort of awful disease)! Even if we weren't convinced by the dreaded halitosis, is there peer pressure to brush daily? How do we know that tongue-brushing is good for getting rid of bad breath? Who benefits from a society where unpleasant smells are stigmatized, and a vast array of products offered to prevent or mask them?

Now we're talking structures, companies, industries, institutions, cultural and social norms, these things persist in societies--they don't come and go as individuals do. They operate pretty much the same way no matter who works for them, who consumes their products or services, etc. People are born and die, and often experience these institutions in very similar ways--in other words, the people can be interchangeable in many cases, the structures are quite persistent. Yes, we all get to choose how to practice dental hygiene, but there are influences out there, often times influences we're unaware of, and many times the messages we hear are that 'poor people are lazy and unmotivated,' or 'the U.S. Army doesn't torture, it was just a few bad apples?' As sociologist C. Wright Mills pointed out many decades ago, If one person in the country is unemployed, it might be because that person is unhirable. But when 20 million are unemployed, then obviously something is going on in the economy that is of a more structural nature. Sure, some get hired before others, because they may have friends or a better network of contacts, more qualifications and formal education, more fluent interpersonal skills, etc. But maybe they also had more opportunities to acquire the kinds of things that make them more marketable? We're back to understanding structure, class, social mobility, culture, etc.

Why were individual Arabs and Arab Americans being targeted by law enforcement in the U.S. post 9/11? Why don't we target upper class white males because of the huge corporate scandals that have left hundreds of thousands of workers without jobs or pensions? Do the structures of political power help explain this discrepancy? Who we blame for various social ills has a lot to do with who has the power to frame these issues, and access to the media to get their story told.

What is structure?

What do we mean by structure? Think of a building, a handshake, your daily routine. Most of us get up in the morning (oh! and brush our teeth!), eat breakfast, get dressed, wear pretty similar clothes as our roommates/spouses/significant others/friends, go to work/school in some sort of vehicle or mode of transportation, arrive on time for class, follow the rules laid down in the syllabi, raise our hands before speaking up in class, sit in chairs facing the front of the room, leave at the end of the class period for another class, etc. Pretty predictable critters. Why are we all so similar--because we as individuals choose to be? I'm not suggesting that we're machines that do what we're told, but that if, for instance, an alien were observing earthlings, it might not be able to understand very much by looking at individual explanations for our behavior.

Consider: Why are there so few women in the field of engineering? An individualist explanation would suggest that many women just aren't cut out for the discipline. They can't take the competition, and drop out at higher rates. A more structural explanation might talk about how we as a society learn about gender and gender roles (ever check out the pink toy aisles in WalMart or Toys 'R' Us?). How many women faculty are there in engineering to mentor women? Are boys and girls treated the same in public school settings with respect to advanced math placement? Why are there so many more women in the 'helping' professions, like education and nursing? Why don't more women become physicians (this is changing)?

An important point here is that structures persist. A building has a structure, one that is hard to change without considerable effort, and which influences the behavior of the people inside it. But in a classroom building, for instance, any given hour might look like any other--students facing the front of the room, arriving when class starts and leaving when it's over, some hands going up, some discussion, note-taking, etc.

Poverty is a 'good' example of structure. The number of people defined as poor has changed little since 1960 in the U.S., even though the U.S. economy has tripled in size during that time. Yes, the percent is less because our population has increased. But there are still over 36 million people defined as poor, and most scholars believe that the definition currently in use vastly undercounts the real levels of socioeconomic hardship. Often times you'll hear in the media people talking about how good the poor have it, laying around collecting welfare checks. How many poor people choose poverty over affluence because it means they don't have to work? Poverty is often times daily struggle, and receiving welfare benefits has become hard work. So what interest groups might promote the notion that poor people just need to get married and get jobs? Who would benefit if the public were to believe that people's material failings are their own fault, and government is under no obligation to provide assistance, in fact makes things worse by creating dependency? Might low wage employers be near the top of the list of beneficiaries of such a widely held viewpoint? Would they have money to support political campaigns and lobby to influence Congress on legislation ranging from minimum wage laws to 'pension reform?' When the federal budget gets cut, who takes the hit? The military? Defense contractors? Or the 'undeserving poor' who by golly just need to go out there and get jobs?