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The tactics adopted to establish social control may include a mixture of negative sanctions, which punish those who transgress the rules of society, and positive policies which seek to persuade or encourage voluntary compliance with society”s standards.
Albion Woodbury Small and George Edgar Vincent introduced the concept of social control to sociology in 1894. However, this introduction had been foreshadowed in Thomas Hobbes’ discussion of the state.
Much later, Talcott Parsons (1937) and Travis Hirschi (1969) played a vital role in the illumination and development of ‘social control.’
Whiledeviance, the antithesis of social control, investigates into reasons actuating rebellion against accepted norms, social control seeks to explain people’s conformity to the same. Its chief objective is to maintain order and peace in society.
Agencies of Social Control
Agents of social controlare the people or groups who work to influence or regulate the behavior of others. They can be found in all levels of society, from the family to the government.
Types of Social Control
Prohibitions of robbery and murder are striking examples. Perpetration of such crimes would likely produce harsh consequences such as prolonged imprisonment.
Even lesser infractions of the law, such as exceeding speed limits, generally result in significant penalties such as fines. These function to procure people’s compliance with the law of the land.
Informal social controlrefers to the internalization of normative mores through either unconscious or conscious socialization. The special respect accorded to the elderly, a salient characteristic of many Asian cultures, is a manifest example.
Karl Mannheim has categorized social control into direct and indirect forms.
These persons/groups may include parents, neighbors, older siblings, grandparents, teachers, and friends.
The influence of direct social control is more pronounced and durable than that of its indirect counterpart.
Kimball Young (1927) has identified and elaborated upon positive and negative social control.
Positive means of social controlinvolve the provision of positive incentives to procure the compliance of individuals with societal norms. The promise of reward herein may range from pecuniary benefits to the public approval of conformity stemming from the internalization of various social norms.
Awards bestowed upon students for excellence in academics, titles granted to winning varsity sports teams, and honors were given to soldiers demonstrating fortitude on the battlefield are some examples.
Criticism for incompetence, mulcts for parking infractions, imprisonment for theft, and capital punishment for murder are all instances of negative social control that are designed to ensure that most people in a society would gratify its normative expectations for public peace.
Theories of Social Control
Parsons’ Approach to Social Control
This general theory identified four functions that operated through multiple levels of human reality. The analytical requisites of the functions demanded that social control be seen under four elementary types: religious, informal, medical, and legal.
Parsons inquired into how the transgenerational reproduction of societies transpires. He noted that most individuals in a society are not opposed to most societal norms and values and that they heed them for most of their lives.
He adducedsocializationto explain the purported ‘willing conformity.’ In other words, socialization within families, educational institutions, and religious communities would uphold compliant members as examples meriting emulation, and aid individuals’ internalization of societal norms.
Parsons also developed a four-sub-system model applicable to the social system. The model was predicated on a social system’s tasks relevant to its milieu. The four subsystems, also known as the GAIL system, comprised the following:
Goal-attainment: the polity
Adaptation: the economy
Integration: the culture comprising norms concerning social control and law
Latency: the normative issue of incentives to gratify the social system’s requirements
While Parsons’ theorizing was not flawless, his approach incorporated the perennial problem of scarcity and its concomitant challenge of resource allocation.
Matza’s Techniques of Neutralization
Consequently, would-be-delinquents contrive schemes to neutralize this guilt preemptively and safeguard their self-image, were they to partake in deviance.
For instance, they may utilize neutralizing techniques to render themselves episodic relief from normative constraints.
Matza and Sykes focused particularly on the following five techniques of neutralization:
Denial of responsibility
Denial of victims
Denial of injury
Condemnation of condemners
Appeal to higher loyalties
Research on the Matza-Sykes theory has yielded mixed outcomes. Indeed, their theory of neutralization has been incorporated into other theories such as labeling theory, learning theory, and control theory.
However, its capacity to serve as a sufficient explanation of crime is yet to be established. Immo Fritsche, Shadd Maruna and Heith Copes (2005) have, in recent times, sought to summarize the state of the theory, and review its empirical evaluations in light of both psychology and sociology.
Marxist Approaches to Social Control
Laws area reflection of ruling class ideology and punishment is part of the repressive state apparatus (Althusser) which keeps people in line and in their place.
Meanwhile, the police force is seen as an accomplice in the capitalists’ oppressive scheme, and the law enforcement’s supposed scant attention to white-collar misdemeanors such as corporate crime is cited as evidence for this purported capitalist conspiracy.
Marxist theory holds that a dominant class safeguards and promotes its economic interests via its control of criminal law as well as cultural norms.
Consequently, the normative standards, whether formal or informal, which the members of a society are expected to conform to, according to Marxism, are merely values of the ruling oppressors.
Interactionist Approaches to Social Control
The working class are often labeled as being more criminogenic and therefore the criminal justice system sees them as making conscious choices to commit crime where as middle class are seen as making a mistake or unintentionally committing a crime.
What supposedly follows is a self-fulfilling prophecy: criminal careers are engendered, and deviancy is amplified. Interactionists contend that individuals become criminals because of the labeling that occurs during their micro-level interactions with the police, and not because of the individual”s social background, or impeded opportunity structures.
Moreover, interactionists argue that some delinquents and criminals escape labeling, but that the powerless generally tend to receive these labels. The theorist’s further demand policies that pretermit labeling minor infractions as deviant.
Hirschi’s Control Theory
Hirschi adduced four types of bonds as the essential constituents of the glue that holds a society together:
Attachment
Involvement
Commitment
Belief
The theory implies that single, unemployed, and young males are more prone to delinquency than their older, married, and employed counterparts. Truancy, in particular, seems a potent predictor of deviance.
Hirschi suggests that the underclass are more likely to lack impulse control and bonds to the community which prevent them from committing crime.
Their study indicated that delinquents and criminals were likelier to hail from impoverished single-parent households. Moreover, they were more likely to have been subjected to poor parenting and have parents, who themselves had been offenders.
Additionally, Martin Glynn’s research into problems associated with absent fathers has illuminated the consequences of broken familial bonds (Glynn, 2011).
FAQs
Social control mechanisms regulate the conduct of individuals in a society. They may be categorized as follows:
Preventive: the establishment of roles with assigned priorities and the exertion of social pressure to elicit subordination to laws.
Restraining: cultural mores and religious obligations that moderate various inclinations.
Sanctioning:
Economic: boycotts and fines.
Physical: expulsion and imprisonment.
Psychological: reproofs and ridicule.
In addition to the above, government propaganda to effect desired behavioral outcomes via the influence of public opinion deserves mention as well.
Individuals, social institutions, and codes of conduct that seek to prevent or restrain deviance and crime can be described as > agents of social control.
Examples range from parents, older siblings, and neighbors, to police officers, the judiciary, and written constitutions.
While some are informal and exert their influence in subtle and intangible ways, others are formal and communicate their expectations (penalties for insubordination and rewards for obedience) through legal promulgations.
Today’s increased access to a wealth of information and the proliferation of social media platforms can readily expose a society’s members to opinions and norms manifestly contrary to those of its ruling elites.
The growth of Iran’s and China’s pro-democracy movements that have threatened the heavy-handed rule of their leaders illustrates this development.
Social control theory may employ either macro or micro-level analysis. Hirschi’s approach, for instance, closely examines immediate family bonds and the implications of their breakdown for deviance.
Interactionists, likewise, focus on how labeling occurs in micro-level interactions between the would-be-deviants and various agents of social control such as police officers.
The Marxist approach views the phenomenon as a macro-level struggle between an oppressive capitalist ruling class, and a passive and oppressed workforce.
The two theories occupy distinct ends of the spectrum. Strain theory, for instance, claims that the societal expectation that one be successful in life can lead individuals to engage in illegal activities such as the sale of drugs and stealing.
Socialization involves the internalization of cultural mores and social norms, via both teaching and learning for the attainment of cultural and social continuity.
Parsons, notably, argued that socialization engenders a willingness to submit to a society’s standards for conduct. Socialization can thus, be described as a type of informal (rather than formal) social control.
References
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Bowes, S., & Gintis, H. (1976). Schooling in Captalist America.Cole, M. (2019).Theresa May, the hostile environment and public pedagogies of hate and threat: The case for a future without borders. Routledge.
Cicourel, Aaron Victor, and John I. Kitsuse.The educational decision-makers. Bobbs-Merrill, 1963.
Gibbs, J. P. (1977). Social control, deterrence, and perspectives on social order.Social Forces,56(2), 408-423.
Glynn, M. (2011). Father deficit, young people and substance misuse.London: Addaction.
Hirschi, T. (1969). Key idea: Hirschi’s social bond/social control theory.Key ideas in criminology and criminal justice,1969, 55-69.
Hirschi, T. (2017). On the compatibility of rational choice and social control theories of crime. InThe reasoning criminal(pp. 105-118). Routledge.
Hollingshead, A. B. (April 1941). The Concept of Social Control.American Sociological Review, 6(2): 217–224.
Farrington, D. P. (1999). Cambridge study in delinquent development [great britain], 1961-1981.Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research.
Kaptein, M., & Van Helvoort, M. (2019). A model of neutralization techniques.Deviant Behavior, 40(10), 1260-1285.
Maruna, S., & Copes, H. (2005). What have we learned from five decades of neutralization research?.Crime and justice, 32, 221-320.
Matza, D. (1964). Berkeley University of California.and Center for the Study of Law and Society. Delinquency and Drift. New York: Wiley.
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Sampson, R. J. (1986). Crime in cities: The effects of formal and informal social control.Crime and justice,8, 271-311.
Small, A. W., & Vincent, G. E. (1894).An introduction to the study of society. American Book Company.
Sykes, G. M., & Matza, D. (1957). Techniques of neutralization: A theory of delinquency.American sociological review, 22(6), 664-670.
Young, K. (1927). Source book for social psychology.
Saul McLeod, PhD
BSc (Hons) Psychology, MRes, PhD, University of Manchester
Saul McLeod, PhD., is a qualified psychology teacher with over 18 years of experience in further and higher education. He has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Clinical Psychology.
Ayesh PereraResearcherB.A, MTS, Harvard UniversityAyesh Perera, a Harvard graduate, has worked as a researcher in psychology and neuroscience under Dr. Kevin Majeres at Harvard Medical School.
Ayesh PereraResearcherB.A, MTS, Harvard University
Ayesh Perera
Researcher
B.A, MTS, Harvard University
Ayesh Perera, a Harvard graduate, has worked as a researcher in psychology and neuroscience under Dr. Kevin Majeres at Harvard Medical School.
