Category: Essays on Controversial Topics
Browse our collection of essays on controversial topics. Each topic in this category represents a controversial issue and thus is a good choice if you are looking for argumentative or persuasive essay topics. When writing an argumentative essay or a persuasive essay you should focus on picking a topic that is current and relevant to society and can be argued logically.
While a strong interest in a topic is important, it’s not enough to be interested. You have to consider what position you can back up with reasoning and evidence. It’s one thing to have a strong belief, but when shaping an argument you’ll have to explain why your belief is reasonable and logical. As you explore the topics, make a mental list of points you could use as evidence for or against an issue.
In the United States controversy over contingent work—called precarious work or atypical work in other industrialized countries—has focused on definitions and numbers. Coined in the mid-1980s by economist Audrey Freeman, the term contingent work connotes instability in employment. As originally used, contingency suggests an employment relationship that depends …
Contraception refers to the numerous methods and devices used to prevent conception and pregnancy. For millennia, women and men have relied on such folk and medical methods as condoms, herbs, vaginal suppositories, douching, and magic rituals and potions—along with abortion and infanticide—as means to control the birth of …
Corporate crime includes secretly dumping hazardous waste, illegally agreeing to fix prices, and knowingly selling unacceptably dangerous products. These offenses, like other corporate crimes, are deviant outcomes of actions by people working in usually nondeviant corporations. Identifying true rates of corporate crime is problematic because victims and their …
The concept of the corporate state closely relates to pluralist philosophy. As opposed to monist philosophy, pluralist philosophy claims the existence of more than one ultimate principle that may serve as the basis of decision and action at the same time. Monist philosophy, in contrast, recognizes that all …
Corruption is the abuse of public power for private benefit. Corruption occurs if a government official has the power to grant or withhold something of value and—contrary to laws and normal procedures—trades this thing of value for a gift or reward. Among corrupt acts, bribery gets the most …
As social movements gain strength, they almost inevitably spark opposition, which can become organized as countermovements. These oppositional groups typically become active when a social movement’s success challenges the status quo, threatening the interests of a cohesive group with its strong potential for attracting political allies. The emergence …
Recent figures from the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) report that violent and property crime are declining. For example, from 2003 to 2004, the index for violent crime indicates a drop of 2.2 percent. Perhaps more telling is that between 1995 and 2004 …
Fear of crime is widespread among people in many Western societies, affecting far more people than the personal experience of crime itself, and as such, it constitutes a significant social problem. Although researchers note that it is a somewhat problematic measure, the question most frequently used to assess …
Crime rates are standardized measures of crime levels. In mathematical terms, a crime rate can be expressed as (M/N)x K where M is an estimate of the amount of crime occurring in a particular setting during a specified period of time, N is an estimate of the population …
The term crime wave has two distinct (but related) meanings in criminological and popular discourse. The most familiar meaning associates the term with relatively rapid and abrupt upward (and subsequent downward) shifts in rates of crime. A second usage suggests that the term refers not to actual crime …
Cults, more appropriately called “new religious movements” in sociology, have emerged since the 1950s in the United States (and elsewhere) and have gathered much media attention. Many of these faiths provide religious alternatives to mainstream Protestantism, Roman Catholicism, and Judaism and are popular with young adults. New religions, …
The concept of cultural capital, which examines the interactions of culture with the economic class system, originated with French sociologists Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron. Although conceived within the context of French culture, much of Bourdieu’s writing has been translated into English, resulting in the extensive use of …
Cultural criminology combines theories of culture, subculture, and crime. This field of crime study draws on a mixture of classical and contemporary theoretical and methodological perspectives. In doing so, cultural criminology provides a holistic approach to the study of crime, not only to gain insight into the social …
In its simplest form, cultural diffusion is the borrowing of cultural elements from one culture by another. Aspects of material culture include clothing styles, musical structures, medicine, and agricultural practices, whereas normative traits such as ideas, behavioral patterns, religion, language, and values are another component of culture. Borrowing …
Cultural imperialism refers to the practice by which one society forwards or imposes its cultural beliefs, values, normative practices, and symbols on another society. Generally, cultural imperialism involves a power relationship, because only those groups enjoying economic, military, or spatial dominance have the ability to inflict their systems …
Cultural lag occurs when the proliferation of technological and material advancement outpaces the normative dimensions of a civilization’s blueprint for social existence. When technology advances more quickly than the social expectations and considerations surrounding new innovations, cultural lag is present. Although technological development and knowledge for knowledge’s sake …
Cultural relativism is a methodological concept rooted in social theory. The term indicates that a society’s beliefs, values, normative practices, and products must be evaluated and understood according to the cultural context from which they emerge. No society should be evaluated with reference to some set of universal …
The notion of “cultural values” brings together two powerful social science concepts to produce a concept that is seductive yet slippery and contentious. It is seductive in that it purports to explain or interpret human behavior, especially differences in behavior between groups, through an emphasis on how human …
A culture of dependency is defined as a type of culture that relies upon, and comes to expect, state benefits and other support to maintain it. Overall the usage is best related to the neoconservative supply-side view of welfare in the 1990s. The argument of a culture of …
The culture of poverty, originally termed the subculture of poverty, is a concept that first appeared in 1959 in the work of North American anthropologist Oscar Lewis. As the name implies, this theory focuses attention on the cultural aspects of poverty. The theory holds that adaptation to the …
