Social control

Social control is a concept in the disciplines of social and political science, often described as a set of rules and standards in society that keeps individuals bound to conventional standards. It has further been seen as a disciplinary model. In other words, social control studies the mechanisms and forms of patterns of pressure that allow society to maintain social order and cohesion. This is often considered a broad subfield of sociology that involves criminologists, political sociologists, and sociology of law and punishment, and involves scholars from disciplines including philosophy, anthropology, political science, economics, and law.

Common examples of formal mechanisms of social control.

As a theory, social control includes both macro and micro components. The macro components tend to deal with forces of social control that focus on formal mechanisms, such as police, law, and punishment, broadly employed to maintain order. Whereas the micro components tend to include an examination of questions related to the role that elites, states, and other political and religious institutions have on establishing the norms and rules that people are governed by.

Social control is considered a necessary part of social order, with many theorists believing that society could not exist without controlling their populations. Control can be achieved through social, economic, and institutional structures, with this or like-minded goals. Further, social control is seen as a necessary enforced social order to make daily life and complex divisions of labor possible, with many assuming that without some social control, chaos and confusion would reign.

This means, broadly speaking, that social control is exercised through individuals and institutions, ranging from the family, to peers, and to organizations such as the state, religious organizations, schools, and workplaces. Theories of social control argue, regardless of the source, that the goal of social control is to maintain the harmony of society through established norms and rules. This means social control is as likely to be exercised by group members as a response to any person or action considered deviant, as it is to be exercised by formal institutions, all with the goal of maintaining conformity. To maintain conformity and social cohesion, mechanisms employed can include shame, coercion, force, restraint, and persuasion on behalf of individuals or institutions.

An important concept to theories of social control is the process of socialization. Often described as a lifelong process, socialization is the set of experiences that lead to the development of social order. The process includes people learning from birth the behavioral and interactional expectations common to their family, peer group, community, and greater society. Socialization, therefore, describes how people are taught to think and behave in accepted ways, and in so doing, control their participation in society.

An example of primary socialization.

Socialization, as a lifelong process, is often broken into two types: primary and secondary socialization. Primary socialization occurs when a child learns the attitudes, values, and actions deemed appropriate for individuals as a member of a given society. Secondary socialization is that which takes place outside the home and when children and adults learn how to act in an appropriate manner for a given situation.

A further process of socialization, re-socialization, refers to the process of discarding behavior patterns and reflexes to accept a new part of a transition in one's life. This is often a process undertaken by members of a society formerly considered deviant, such as criminals or drug addicts.

The physical organization of society plays a large part of social control. For example, road signs and paved streets are intended to regulate the behavior of people when they drive. And motorists, broadly, understand and obey these signs, for the most part. Similarly, sidewalks and crosswalks work to manage pedestrian traffic. This extends to the structure of places, such as aisles in grocery stores, which work to determine how people move through a business. When an individual does not conform to the expectations of these formal structures, they tend to face correction of some sort. The correction can take different forms, such as confusing or disapproving looks, or difficult conversations with family, peers, or authority figures. Further refusal to conform to the social norms can result in more severe outcomes, such as social ostracization.

One of the "goals" of social control is to encourage individuals to conform and obey social norms, through both formal and informal means. Conformity can be understood, in this context, as the act of matching attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors to a group norm. While the tendency to conform happens at the level of small groups, all the way to the level of society, and can be the result of subtle unconscious influences or direct and overt social control. Conformity can occur in the presence of others or when an individual is alone. However, conformity is largely understood as a group phenomenon, and factors such as the size of the group, unanimity, cohesion, status, prior commitment, and public opinion will shape the level of conformity an individual displays.

Example of social conformity in the office place in the 1950s.

Harvard psychologist Herbert Kelmen went further and identified three major types of conformity: compliance, identification, and internalization. In this triarchy, compliance is understood as public conformity, when an individual displays conformity while keeping one's own original beliefs independent. Identification is conforming to another individual who is liked and respected by either an individual or society at large. And internalization is the acceptance of beliefs or behaviors and a conforming with those beliefs or behaviors both publicly and privately.

Example of lines used in the experiment.

A classic study of conformity, undertaken by Solomon E. Asch, exposed students in a group to a series of lines with the expressed goal for the student participant to match the length of the line with a standard line. The experiment had a clear answer, but included in each group were actors pretending to be students, with at times only one actual student. These actors would pick the wrong answer in 12 of 18 trials, and 76 percent of students conformed to the wrong answer on at least one trial, giving the wrong answer to match the actors. The conclusion of the study was that on average, people conformed about one-third of the time, and that included situations when the correct answer was obvious.

Obedience is a form of social influence, in which a person accepts instructions or orders from an authority figure. Obedience is different from compliance, which is generally thought of as behavior influenced by peers, and from conformity, which is explored above and thought of as matching a majority. Obedience, instead, can be considered both good and bad in terms of social control. For example, if an individual is ordered to kill an otherwise innocent individual, this is considered a bad form of obedience. However, if that innocent individual is deemed dangerous to society or a way of life, and a person kills this innocent individual, it is deemed a virtue.

Example of an individual applying shock as part of Milgram's experiment into obedience.

There are two famous studies into obedience and their larger role in social control. The first was conducted by Stanley Milgram, and is known as the Milgram experiment. This controversial and highly replicated study involved telling students they were contributing to a study about punishment and learning. These students were instructed by a supposed authority figure to shock a person in another room for every wrong answer they gave on a learning task. The shocks increased in voltage with each wrong answer. If participants questioned the procedure, the authority figure would encourage them to continue. They study found participants obeyed orders even when it posed severe harm to others.

Students assigned as "prisoners" in the Stanford Prison experiment.

The other famous study was the Stanford Prison Experiment. Conducted by Philip Zimbardo, the experiment took college-age students and put them into a pseudo-prison environment to study the impacts of social forces on participants behavior. The study used random assignment to place half of the students as prisoners and the other half as guards. In the study, the students playing the role of the guards were found to obey their orders so willingly that their behavior turned aggressive. While the students playing the role of prisoners turned hostile and resentful to the guards. The study ended early due to the psychological duress of the students involved.

The means of control, understood to be the methods and forms of motivating individuals to conform with the expectations of society, includes two broad and main means of control: formal and informal.

As the name implies, formal means of social control are generally understood by the society at large, could be thought of as visible forms of social control, and tend to be state-determined through the creation and enforcement of laws. These means of control can use law enforcement mechanisms and sanctions, such as fines and imprisonment, to enact social control. In a democratic society, the goals and mechanisms of formal social control are determined through legislation by elected representatives. The legislation is intended to help give those control mechanisms a measure of support from the population and increase voluntary compliance. The mechanisms used by the state as means of formal social control can include anything from the death penalty to curfew laws.

Police officers are commonly considered a part of a formal structure for maintaining social control.

From a legal perspective, sanctions are penalties or alternative means of enforcement, intended to provide incentives for obedience with the law, or rules and regulations. Criminal sanctions can take the form of serious punishment, such as corporal or capital punishment, incarceration, or severe fines. An understanding of formal control can be further enhanced by social theorist Max Weber's work on the state's use of violence. In Weber's essay "Politics as Vocation," he proposes a definitional relationship between the state and violence in the early twentieth century and concludes that the state has a monopoly on violence. Which means, according to Weber, the state is the only institution in a society that can legitimately exercise violence on society's members. When a person kills a person, that is murder, but when a state kills a person, such as a murderer, that is the state enacting its authority to protect society.

Informal means of control, which could be thought of as the invisible or intangible forms of social control, include community and peer pressure, bystander intervention, and collective responses such as citizen groups, to react to the behaviors of individuals and bring about conformity. The social value of an individual is often considered a product of informal social control. It is exercised by a society without an explicit statement of the rules and is often expressed through customs and norms.

Example of informal control: children playing a game follow understood rules and punish cheaters(deviants).

Informal sanctions can include shame, ridicule, sarcasm, criticism, and disapproval. More extreme cases can include social discrimination and exclusion (ostracization). As with formal controls, informal controls work to reward or punish behavior deemed acceptable or unacceptable. However, unlike formal controls, which tend to be uniform across societies, informal controls will differ among individuals, groups, and societies. The socialization of individuals is often thought of as an early attempt to exercise informal control on the behavior of an individual to bring it in line with the expectations of a group (often the family in primary socialization), and this extends as children leave the home and move into social groups, where further socialization will see more use of informal means of control to push an individual to conform (often peer groups and formal structures in secondary socialization).

The origin of the discussion of social control is often considered to begin with the writings of social philosophers, such as John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, as well as classic social theorists such as Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, and Max Weber, among others.

Many consider social control theory to be ultimately Hobbesian, in that it presupposes that all choices are constrained by social relations and contracts between parties. Adherents of social control theory, much like Hobbes, suggest morality is created within a social order through the assignment of costs and consequences to actions considered evil, wrong, illegal, or deviant by the larger society.

Further, Hobbes would argue that in a society of self-interested individuals, a greater power (understood to be the state) is required to prevent society deteriorating into a war of all against all. In the structure of the state, individuals agree to give up some individual freedoms by promising to obey the laws of the state, while in return the state promises to protect individuals.

In 1937, Talcott Parsons developed one of the earliest sociological perspectives on social control. He argued that conformity is not just produced by external agencies coercing individuals to obey through punishment, but further through individuals internalizing the norms and values through socialization.

Talcott Parsons.

Parsons's research was motivated by his interest in the question of how societies produce enough conformity to reproduce themselves across several generations. He pointed out that the majority of people do not seem to mind conforming to most of society's norms and values for most of the time during their lives. In other words, he noted, people willingly conform. Parsons argued that socialization is central to this willing conformity, and that socialization within institutions (such as the family and education) helps individuals internalize these norms and values and works to convince people that a "good person" is one who willingly conforms to society's rules.

In 1957, Jackson Toby published an article entitled "Social Disorganization and Stake in Conformity: Complementary Factors in the Predatory Behavior of Hoodlums," which discussed why adolescents were inclined, or disinclined, to engage in delinquent activities. Toby argued, in his article, that individuals who do not engage in activities considered delinquent do so because they feel they have too much to lose by joining delinquent groups and, hence, have a "stake in conformity." The notion of an individual being shaped by their ties to his community, and having a "stake in conformity," would lay the groundwork for the idea of internalized norms as a method of social control.

In 1958, F. Ivan Nye followed Toby's study with a book, Family Relationship and Delinquent Behavior. Nye continued studying adolescent delinquency as a means of theorizing about deviance and social control. He conducted formal interviews of 780 young people in Washington State. His sample size and group were criticized for not including individuals from urban backgrounds and for only selecting individuals who were likely to describe their families unfavorably.

Nye focused on the family unit in terms of it as a source of control. Further, his book specified three types of control: direct control, or the use of punishments and rewards to incentivize particular behavior; indirect control, or affectionate identification with individuals that adhere to social norms; and internal control, or the manipulation of an individual's conscience or sense of guilt to encourage conformity.

In 1969, building on Parsons's work, Travis Hirschi argued that juvenile delinquency is the result of an individual's bonds to society being weakened. His theory emphasized the importance of family ties, peer ties, and other social institutions, such as education and work, as important in maintaining social control.

Further, Hirschi's theory of social control emphasized the importance of attachment and social bonds. The more bonds an individual has to society, and the more time the individual spends with people and social institutions, the less likely an individual is to commit deviant or delinquent acts. In Hirschi's theory, deviance does not need explaining; rather, it happens whenever an individual is cut from social bonds and has more opportunity to be deviant.

In 1975, social theorist Michel Foucault attempted to answer the question of how individuals develop a particular conscience for social adherence in his 1975 text Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. In this text, Foucault argued that the eighteenth century introduced a new form of power: discipline. Prior to this period, so his argument goes, governments achieved control by the regulation of bodies, where deviants were controlled by the threat and frequent use of the death penalty or indefinite incarceration.

Michel Foucault.

However, discipline is a power relation in which the subject is complicit. Rather than the state regulating bodies, the state begins to achieve social control by molding the minds of its subjects, including by the state educating individuals to help them conform even when out of the gaze of a punishing authority. This training of an individual occurs broadly in society via socialization, or the lifelong process of inheriting, interpreting, and disseminating norms, customs, and ideologies, which an individual learns and internalizes from the norms of society.

David Matza further developed Parsons's theory with work on "techniques of neutralization." Matza's theory pointed out that people who break the laws of society often still share the general values of the society. He argued that when people commit deviant acts, they often employ "techniques of neutralization" to explain why they broke those social norms or values.

David Matza.

These techniques could include things such as "I was drunk" or "that person is nasty, they deserved it" and are used to justify an individual's deviant behavior. Matza further argued that these techniques allow people to convince themselves that exceptional circumstances explain their occasional acts of deviance, while allowing them to maintain their self-concept as someone who conforms to social norms most of the time.

The Marxist theory or approach to social control tends to be different than those explored above. In Marxist thinking, social control is seen as being consciously or unconsciously "engineered" by the capitalist class of the state. This means the conformity producing approaches, generally those under formal means of social control, are seen as working to produce a docile and passive workforce, as outlined in Bowles-Gintis Correspondence Theory.

Further, as part of this theory, the media is seen as an agent of the social control process. This could be in terms of setting an agenda or gatekeeping to keep an elite's worldview presented as normal and to produce ideological control. Marxists have also expressed criticism of how deviance is reduced, specifically critical of how police work with the state and police, with Marxists pointing to the over-policing and prosecution of working class street crime while corporate crime is under-policed and prosecuted.

Another perspective on social control, the Interactionist approach sees social control and deviance as having an ironic relationship. The more agencies of social control try and prevent deviance, such as labeling or policing certain behaviors as deviant, then the more the deviances are created. A lot of research from the interactionist perspective has focused on how certain types of people, rather than behavior, get labeled as deviant and then are more likely to become deviant.

Considered as an extension of the theory of social control, the society of control is seen as an evolution of the society of discipline, as explored by Foucault's work. The society of discipline is one in which an individual is restrained and enclosed in structures, such as a school or a factory. Whereas, the society of control is one in which these enclosures no longer exist and individuals are proposed a kind of freedom, in which they can do "whatever they want," such as pursue an online education or work from home.

However, while this seems like freedom, what it also does is diffuse responsibility throughout an individual's life. It may be nice to work from home, but now the individual is expected to be responsive to the demands of work even away from the office and respond to communications in a timely manner. So, while the individual is free from the enclosed workspace, the demands of work come to pervade all of the individual's time and lead that individual to be chastised for not responding to communications even if they are outside of a "working" time.

This means the individual, in this society, loses the concept of "free time," which was once a time fully outside of the structures of power. While a disciplinary society has its own oppressive power relations, it has space for free time, such that once a worker leaves their job, their time is their own until they return the next day for another shift. This disappears in a society of control. While freedom seems to be increased on the one hand, the control of an individual's activity expands on the other.

The panopticon.

Rather than the panopticon (emblematic of a society of discipline), with a centralized surveillance focal point, the society of control has a diffuse matrix of information gathering. Everything is tracked and encoded, interpreted into patterns of either acceptable or unacceptable behavior. This means when an individual hits enough markers in their activity, such as visiting certain sites or using specific words, the individual can be placed on a sort of "watchlist." The effect from this is the same as the panopticon: it does not matter if an individual is being actually watched, but to create the feeling that an individual may be under surveillance at any given moment.

However, in a society of control, the feeling of being surveilled is discouraged. An individual knows they are being tracked, but the surveillance is normalized, and individuals are encouraged not to worry about it. While this brings to mind George Orwell's "Big Brother" from the novel 1984, it differs, as in the novel, the fear of being watched is integral. But in the society of control, individuals are not spurred to paranoia; instead, they are encouraged to not think about it, because they are not doing anything wrong. And at the same time, they are asked for confidence in and endorsement of the idea that those who break the rules will be caught. The real challenge to the society of control would have to question the latter idea, that the "wrongdoer" should always be caught.

In order to work, the society of control has to maintain the illusion of freedom, but there are ways that freedom is not just an illusion. One is allowed to say or do what they want, in circumscribed parameters. Most fall in those parameters, without thinking about it, since the only forms of discourse truly proscribed are radical indictments of a political system, calls to terrorist action, and the like. This means the individual experiences the freedom to express their views.

This means the society of control exerts control by letting an individual "do what they want" because proscribed behavior is unrecognized as existing, or thrown under the category of the "criminal," which often the individuals of the society do no take the time to examine. And these proscribed behaviors create a negative class, where individuals fall outside the approved behavior, and therefore fall outside the class of individuals who have "freedom." Further, the society of control discourages any thought about the shared humanity of these individuals, and the society controls an individual to the extent that the individual thinks of those subjugated to the effects of power as "other."

There are some challenges to the theory of social control. Some of these are considered to have serious flaws, such as being an American invention that comes with ethnocentricities and encumbered with ideological language. One such criticism is that the social control model is ahistorical and determinist, such that social control theories tend to fail to focus on types of state or political regimes. Rather, the theory tends to suggest either the natural evolution of informal and formal social controls or the arbitrary imposition of controls by state agents and agencies.

This is understood as when the authorities of a society contribute to rule breaking, which tends to involve escalation. This means the authorities' intervention is conducive to deviance, with the final result not sought by the individuals in a situation. This means that law enforcement, in this case, does not serve social control effects, but rather amplifies them. In escalation, the process of social control triggers violations, or deviant acts. For example, in the case of police responding to a domestic dispute, the act of attempting to control the situation can escalate the situation and lead to arrests of otherwise conforming citizens.

Similarly, police actions when attempting to control the behavior of protests and protestors, or rioters, can further exacerbate a scenario, when the police can turn an otherwise peaceful demonstration or protest movement into a violent one, as individuals respond to police violence with violence of their own as a protective measure. This can cause a protest too, as seen during the Poor People March in Detroit in 1967, when police action attempted to push people outside of a meeting hall while other officers attempted to push into the same people, which ended up causing a riot and the injury and death of individuals.