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"Seeing Social Problems shows students how to think about social problems in a new way, by carefully analyzing headline-making issues they are already familiar with. Each chapter focuses on a specific case study that represents a more general social problem. The chapters always start with the knowledge, beliefs, attitudes, and personal experiences that students bring to the case-what the author refers to as the conventional wisdom-and effectively demonstrates to them the "first wisdom" of sociology: "things are not what they seem." In each instance, the author shows how sociologists ask questions, gather empirical data, use multiple perspectives, and consider larger social forces to discover the "hidden stories" behind individual behavior"--

Cover -- Title Page -- Original Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Dedication -- Table of Contents -- List of Table -- Acknowledgments -- Section I Private Philanthropy and Urban Poverty -- Chapter One Preventing Fires while Feeling the Heat -- Chapter Two As American as Apple Pie: The Tradition of Private and Local Antipoverty Reform in the U.S. -- Section II Venturing Inside the Chicago Initiative -- Chapter Three Organizational Motivations for Sponsorship -- Chapter Four Community-based Reasons for Getting Involved -- Chapter Five Collaboration Becomes Old News

A recurring theme echoed by critics of United States philanthropy is that foundations are instrumental in reproducing the class privilege of elites. Since the early 1970s, a cluster of "alternative" foundations has responded to this critique in two ways: 1) By distributing grants to recipients largely overlooked by mainstream philanthropy: marginalized groups organizing for progressive social change, and 2) By making grant decisions in ways that explicitly aim to challenge the class power foundations traditionally exercise. Regarding the latter, these alternative foundations either segregate donors from the process of deciding where their money goes and give this power instead to community activists, or they integrate donors with community activists to make grant decisions collaboratively. My analysis illustrates how both of these grantmaking models reinforce class distinctions, despite their intention of doing otherwise. Indeed, looking at alternative foundations in comparison to their more traditional counterparts reveals just how deeply class lies at the very core of philanthropy.

This analysis looks at how foundations and community organizations jointly formulated antipoverty agendas within the context of a collaboration forged in Chicago between these two groups in the aftermath of the 1992 Los Angeles riots. The study reveals that as foundations exhibited preferences for supporting antipoverty work that they saw as politically safe and uncontroversial, community organizations enticed foundations to expand the range of funding agendas that suited these preferences. This finding is of timely significance given that during the past 2 decades, policy-making responsibility has shifted from the public to the philanthropic sectors.

I embrace Mills's (1940) conception of motives to offer new insight into an old question: why do people join social movements? I draw upon ethnographic research at the Crossroads Fund, a "social change" foundation, to illustrate that actors simultaneously articulate two vocabularies of motives for movement participation: an instrumental vocabulary about dire, yet solvable, problems and an expressive vocabulary about collective identity. This interpretive work is done during boundary framing, which refers to efforts by movements to create in‐group/out‐group distinctions. I argue that the goal‐directed actions movements take to advance social change are shaped by participants' identity claims. Moreover, it is significant that Crossroads constructs its actions and identity as social movement activism, rather than philanthropy. This definitional work suggests that analyzing the category social movements is problematic unless researchers study how activists attempt to situate themselves within this category. Hence, methodologically attending to organizations' constructions of movement status can theoretically inform research which essentially takes social movements as a given, in exploring their structural components.

During the 1990s, universities and foundations separately entered into community partnerships with the intent of revitalizing poor urban neighborhoods. We describe the historical context that preceded their involvement in these partnerships, outline the evolution in ideas about "community empowerment" integral to such partnerships, and explain the partnership model's attractiveness. We then analyze how and why these partnerships embraced the rhetoric of community empowerment and discuss the paradox of elites attempting to empower poor people. Our analysis suggests that these partnerships allowed for the appearance of an inclusive solution to community problems, while maintaining the legitimacy and privilege of their elite sponsors.