SOCIAL CONTROL

When a person violates a social norm, what happens?

A driver caught speeding can receive a speeding ticket.

A student who texts in class gets a warning from a professor.

An adult belching loudly is avoided.

All societies practice social control, this is the regulation and enforcement of norms.

Social control can be defined broadly as an organized action intended to change

people’s behavior. The underlying goal of social control is to maintain social order.

Social order is an arrangement of practices and behaviors on which society’s

members base their daily lives.

Think of social order as an employee handbook and social control as the incentives
and disincentives used to encourage or oblige employees to follow those rules.

One means of enforcing rules are through sanctions. Sanctions can be positive as
well as negative.

Positive sanctions are rewards given for conforming to norms. A promotion at work
is a positive sanction for working hard.

Negative sanctions are punishments for violating norms. Being arrested is a

punishment for shoplifting. Both types of sanctions play a role in social control.

Sociologists also classify sanctions as formal or informal

Informal sanctions. Informal sanctions emerge in face-to-face social interactions.

Formal sanctions, on the other hand, are ways to officially recognize and enforce
norm violations. If a student plagiarizes the work of others or cheats on an exam, for
example, he or she might be expelled. Someone who speaks inappropriately to the
boss could be fired.

Penal social control functions by prohibiting certain social behaviors and responding
to violations with punishment.

Compensatory social control obliges an offender to pay a victim to compensate for a

harm committed.

Therapeutic social control involves the use of therapy to return individuals to a

normal state.

Conciliatory social control aims to reconcile the parties of a dispute and mutually
restore harmony to a social relationship that has been damaged.

While penal and compensatory social controls emphasize the use of sanctions.
Therapeutic and conciliatory social controls emphasize processes of restoration and
healing.

SOCIAL CONTROL AS GOVERNMENT AND DISCIPLINE

Government refers to the strategies by which one seeks to direct or guide the
conduct of another or others.

In the 15th and 16th centuries, numerous treatises were written on how to govern
and educate children, how to govern the poor and beggars, how to govern a family
or an estate, how to govern an army or a city, how to govern a state and run an
economy, and how to govern one’s own conscience and conduct.

These treatises described the burgeoning (expanding) arts of government, which

defined the different ways in which the conduct of individuals or groups might be
directed.

The common theme in the various parts of governing proposed in early modernity
was the extension of Christian monastic practices involving the detailed and
continuous government and salvation of souls.
The principles of monastic government were applied to a variety of non-monastic
areas.it implied that People needed to be governed in all aspects of their lives.

The practice of normalization refers to the way in which norms, such as the level of
math ability expected from a grade 2 student, are first established and then used to
assess, differentiate, and rank individuals according to their abilities

Individuals’ progress in developing their abilities, whether in math skills, good prison
behavior, health outcomes, or other areas, is established through constant
comparisons with others and with natural and observable norms.

Minor sanctions are used to continuously modify behavior that does not comply with
correct conduct: rewards are applied for good behavior and penalties for bad.

THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES ON DEVIANCE

Why does deviance occur?

How does it affect a society?

Since the early days of sociology, scholars have developed theories attempting to
explain what deviance and crime mean to society.

These theories can be grouped according to the three major sociological paradigms:
functionalism, symbolic interactionism, and conflict theory.

Functionalism
Sociologists who follow the functionalist approach are concerned with how the
different elements of a society contribute to the whole.

They view deviance as a key component of a functioning society. Social

disorganization theory, strain theory, and cultural deviance theory represent three
functionalist perspectives on deviance in society.
Émile Durkheim believed that deviance is a necessary part of a successful society.

One way deviance is functional, he argued, is that it challenges people’s present

views (1893).

For instance, when black students across the United States participated in “sit-ins”
during the civil rights movement, they challenged society’s notions of segregation.

Social Disorganization Theory

Social disorganization theory asserts that crime is most likely to occur in

communities with weak social ties and the absence of social control. In a certain way,
this is the opposite of Durkheim’s thesis.

Social disorganization theory points to broad social factors as the cause of deviance.
A person is not born a criminal, but becomes one over time, often based on factors in
his or her social environment.

According to Hirschi, social control is directly affected by the strength of social

bonds.

Many people would be willing to break laws or act in deviant ways to reap the
rewards of pleasure, excitement, and profit, etc.

Those who do have the opportunity are those who are only weakly controlled by
social restrictions. Similar to Durkheim’s theory of anomie, deviance is seen to result
where feelings of disconnection from society predominate.

Individuals who believe they are a part of society are less likely to commit crimes
against it. Hirschi (1969) identified four types of social bonds that connect people to
society:

Attachment measures our connections to others. When we are closely attached to

people, we worry about their opinions of us. People conform to society’s norms in
order to gain approval (and prevent disapproval) from family, friends, and romantic
partners.
1. Commitment refers to the investments we make in conforming to conventional
behavior. A well-respected local businesswoman who volunteers at her synagogue
and is a member of the neighborhood block organization has more to lose from
committing a crime than a woman who does not have a career or ties to the
community. There is a cost/benefit calculation in the decision to commit a crime in
which the costs of being caught are much higher for some than others.
2. Similarly, levels of involvement, or participation in socially legitimate activities, lessen
a person’s likelihood of deviance.
3. The final bond, belief, is an agreement on common values in society. If a person
views social values as beliefs, he or she will conform to them. An environmentalist is
more likely to pick up trash in a park because a clean environment is a social value to
that person

STRAIN THEORY