Social Control

Social Control

Description

The concept of social control is widely and variously used in the social sciences. In sociology and anthropology it is used as a generic term to describe the processes that help produce and maintain orderly social life. In the specialist field of criminology, it usually carries a narrower meaning, referring to the management of deviance by criminal justice, social welfare and mental health agencies. Sometimes the term takes on a critical sense, for example in social history and women’s studies, where the notion of social control has been used to describe the subtle constraints and forms of domination exercised by institutions such as the family or the welfare state. The expansiveness of the social control concept has meant that it has tended to work as an orienting device for thinkers and researchers, rather than as an explanatory tool of any refinement or precision. Sociologists in the early twentieth century developed the concept to explore the problem of social order in the industrialized, urbanized societies then emerging. Criminologists in the 1960s used the term to redirect attention away from an exclusive focus upon the individual criminal and to stress the role that social rules and reactions play in the process of criminalizing particular behaviours and persons. Social historians in the 1970s employed the notion of social control as a means of subverting and revising orthodox accounts of social reform that had tended to overlook the hidden class-control aspects of many reform programmes. Once such reorientations have been achieved, however, the concept of social control often ceases to be useful and gives way to more specific questions about the different forms, objectives, supports and effects of the control practices under scrutiny. Like many sociological concepts, social control is a subject of continuing contestation, either by those who deny the appropriateness of this approach to particular phenomena, or else by those who find the term insufficiently precise to do the analytical and critical work required. That the concept is also and inevitably tied into political debates—either as part of a conservative quest for social order, or else in support of a radical critique of social institutions—serves to deepen the controversy surrounding its use. So too does the semantic proximity of the term to cognate concepts such as socialization, regulation, domination, power and culture. Social scientists who use this concept are obliged to define it for their own purposes or else invite misunderstanding. Given this conceptual state of affairs, the most illuminating way of understanding the term is to summarize its intellectual history bearing in mind that contemporary usage draws upon many of these past conceptions, and often reinvents under a different name many of the ideas and distinctions that earlier writers first established. The classical social theorists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—Comte, Marx, Durkheim, Weber, Simmel, etc.—did not employ the term social control, although their work certainly dealt with issues of social regulation, enforcement of norms and class domination that social control theorists were later to address. The concept was first explicitly developed by the sociologists of the early-twentieth-century USA, particularly E .A. Ross and W. G. Sumner, who sought to identify the myriad ways in which the group exerts its influence upon the conduct of the individual. Ross’s (1901) Social Control took as its starting-point the shift from small-scale, agrarian, face-to-face communities to dense, industrialized urban societies, and argued that this shift entailed a qualitative transformation in the bonds that made social order possible. Whereas the earlier Gemeinschaft communities had been held together by what Ross regarded as a ‘living tissue’ of natural controls such as sympathy, sociability and a shared sense of justice, social control in the newer Gesellschaft societies was a matter of ‘rivets and screws’ that had to be consciously created and maintained if order was to be achieved within these complex and conflictual social settings. Ross’s work catalogued and anatomized these foundations of order, dealing in turn with public opinion, law, belief, education, religion, art and social ceremony. In much the same way, Sumner’s (1906) Folkways described how usages, manners, customs and morals provided the basic underpinning of social regulation, upon which the more formal system of law was built.

Source Publication

The Social Science Encyclopedia

Source Editors/Authors

Adam Kuper, Jessica Kuper

Publication Date

2004

Edition

3

Volume Number

2: L-Z

Social Control

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