The volume you are reading, Agenda for Social Justice, was directly inspired by the 2000 Presidential Address delivered by Professor Robert Perrucci, the 48th President of the Society for the Study of Social Problems (SSSP). During the annual meetings held in August in Washington, DC, Dr. Perrucci outlined his criticism of the scholarship produced by SSSP members and other social scientists, indicating that over time its focus had drifted toward the abstract and intellectual, and away from the concrete social justice work to solve social problems which has inspired the Society's foundation and the scholarship of its earliest members. Because of this, Dr. Perrucci warned, sociology and related disciplines had become less relevant in public discourse, and this crisis of legitimacy was echoed in policy-making circles, as much social research was ignored in policy debates, and rather sat upon the dusty shelves of academic libraries (and now perhaps in similarly unread corners of academic databases).

To remedy this, Dr. Perrucci called for SSSP members to produce a “report to the nation” whose issuance would coincide with major elections in the U.S. These reports, Dr. Perrucci said, should define significant social problems facing the nation, explain via best available data and research the extent of such problems, and propose practicable policy solutions which can mitigate or solve these social problems. The vision was that the SSSP membership would periodically produce a volume which would be based on the best research evidence available, but which would be written in jargon-free language accessible to the general public and “to get people in the wider society thinking about the ‘middle range utopias’ that could serve as alternatives” to the contemporary snarl of social problems.

Dr. Perrucci's speech was the keynote address of the 50th Annual Meeting of the SSSP, the first of the new millennium, organized under the theme “Inventing Social Justice: SSSP and the 21st Century.”