The Handbook of Social Control

Mathieu Deflem

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781119372349
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

The Handbook of Social Control offers a comprehensive review of the concepts of social control in today's environment and focuses on the most relevant theories associated with social control. With contributions from noted experts in the field across 32 chapters, the depth and scope of the Handbook reflects the theoretical and methodological diversity that exists within the study of social control. Chapters explore various topics including: theoretical perspectives; institutions and organizations; law enforcement; criminal justice agencies; punishment and incarceration; surveillance; and global developments.

This Handbook explores a variety of issues and themes on social control as being a central theme of criminological reflection. The text clearly demonstrates the rich heritage of the major relevant perspectives of social control and provides an overview of the most important theories and dimensions of social control today.

Written for academics, undergraduate, and graduate students in the fields of criminology, criminal justice, and sociology, The Handbook of Social Control is an indispensable resource that explores a contemporary view of the concept of social control.

Part I
Theories and Perspectives

1
Social Control: History of the Concept

James J. Chriss

This chapter provides an overview of the concept of social control in the history of sociology. Social control emerged in the late nineteenth century at roughly the same time as the establishment of American sociology, with Edward A. Ross being the main innovator of the concept. A parallel movement in Europe (represented in the thought of Emile Durkheim and Max Weber) focused on the larger problem of social order rather than social control per se. By the 1950s, Talcott Parsons sought to bring into alignment the broader concept of social order with the narrower one of social control by way of the development of a general theory of social systems that specified four functions operating across all levels of human reality. The analytical requirement of four functions implied that social control appeared concretely as four basic types: informal, legal, medical, and religious. By the 1980s, the consensus within sociology saw a further simplification of the Parsons schema into three basic types of social control: informal, legal, and medical (with religious control now being subsumed under informal). The trend over time has been that the most ancient and fundamental system of control – informal control – has waned and become somewhat imperiled in the face of the growth of both legal and medical control.

Ross and Early American Sociology

During the 1960s, the criminologist Travis Hirschi was a graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley. Early in his doctoral training, Hirschi took a deviance course from Erving Goffman, in which the latter provided an overview of the history and current status of social control. It was Goffman’s opinion that the reason social control was on the decline (circa the early 1960s) was that it had become synonymous with sociology. As Hirschi explained, “There was nothing you could not study under the rubric of social control” (quoted in Laub, 2011:300).

According to Hirschi, Goffman traced this view of social control as a broad and unmanageable mélange of sociological topics to Edward A. Ross, who had published a series of articles on social control in the American Journal of Sociology beginning in 1896. Ross later collected this series and included them in the first book ever published on the topic of social control, Social Control: A Survey of the Foundations of Order (Ross, 1901a). The complexity and diffuseness of Ross’s pioneering conceptualization is readily evident in a paper he published titled “The Radiant Points of Social Control” (Ross, 1900).

Specifically, Ross (1900) argued that social control radiates from multiple points, which flow ultimately from power. Yet, power becomes more focused and nuanced as it is coupled with prestige, and the power–prestige system gives rise to 10 radiant points of social control:

• Numbers: the crowd;
• Age: the elders;
• Prowess: the military;
• Sanctity: the priests;
• Inspiration: the prophet;
• Place: officialdom (or the state, claiming control of a sovereign territory);
• Money: the capitalists;
• Ideas: the elite;
• Learning: the mandarins; and
• Individual strength (even with lack of prestige in any of the preceding areas): the individual.

This was around the same time that American sociology was founded as an academic discipline, initiated largely as a result of the publication in 1883 of Lester F. Ward’s two‐volume Dynamic Sociology (Ward, 1883). (Indeed, Ross dedicated Social Control to Ward, and later married his niece and named his third son Lester Ward Ross.) Ward and the other founders of American sociology – William Graham Sumner, Albion Small, Franklin Giddings, and Charles H. Cooley being the most prominent – were equally concerned with social control, although they utilized different terminology and concepts, such as telesis, psychic factors of civilization, regulation, social organization, consciousness of kind, folkways and mores, social bonds, assimilation, adaptation and aggregation, cooperation, human association, primary and secondary groups, and – influenced most directly by Gabriel Tarde (1903) – imitation.

Why did social control emerge as an overriding concern in early American sociology? A standard explanation is that American society was born into conflict, which created a tapestry of recurring challenges to the social order (Meier, 1982). A short list of key historical events and trends would include the American Revolution, the settling of the western frontier, and the Civil War and the period of Reconstruction leading to the Gilded Age and a later Progressive Era. And laced throughout the major historical events were steady population growth, concerns over immigration, labor strife, and the transition from a largely rural to an increasingly urban way of life.

As the sociology of knowledge would predict, Ross and other early American sociologists developed social control in response to the fear that rapid social change was systematically and inexorably releasing individuals from the traditional controls of family and community. This concern was also informed by Herbert Spencer’s (1860) pioneering conceptualization of society as an organism, which depicted individuals not merely as random or isolated units within the larger whole, but as aggregates fulfilling particular functions for the operation of the social system. This stood as an early solution to the problem of explaining how collective or corporate action was possible among an increasingly disparate and diverse American citizenry. Ross acknowledged that levels and types of social control in any society wax and wane over time, but saw the stability and flux of social control as two sides of the same coin. According to Ross (1901b:550):

The function of control is to preserve that indispensable condition of common life, social order. When this order becomes harder to maintain, there is a demand for more and better control. When this order becomes easier to maintain, the ever‐present demand for individual freedom and for toleration makes itself felt. The supply of social control is evoked, as it were, by the demand for it, and is adjusted to that demand.

But who, exactly, is making this demand for social control? For Ross, this would depend on the particular radiant point of control pertinent to the situation, as well as the nature of the parties to the action. Ross (1901a:62) argued there are three possible attitudes toward social control, namely, those of the actor, the victim of the action, and bystanders to the event (Martindale, 1966:283). This reflects the standard utilitarian view of human action launched by Hobbes and later formalized and refined by Bentham and Mill. It views social control as a dependent variable; specifically, as a reaction by victims (or agents or guardians acting on their behalf) to pains imposed by a person or group. Ross further argues that for control to be social, the reaction must have the whole weight of society behind it. From this perspective, actions of lone or isolated individuals are illegitimate or, at the very least, suspect. The most ancient, primitive radiant point of control is the individual, but a situation in which individuals are imposing their will on others returns us to the state of nature, where “might makes right.” It is nature’s method whereby organisms utilize whatever resources are available in the struggle for survival. Here, there is no “ought,” no morality, no right or wrong, but merely expedience (success or failure). The march of civilization leads inexorably to the development of systems of rules and regulations whereby, at least in the earliest stages of this development, the group reigns supreme over the individual. The effort to explain this movement from premodernity to modernity is especially evident in the work of two founders of European sociology, Emile Durkheim (in France) and Max Weber (in Germany).

Durkheim and Weber

Ross’s vision of social control was grounded in a Midwest parochialism that reflected the idea of “American exceptionalism,” referenced primarily by the lack of indigenous feudal institutions in the United States. This absence of an aristocracy created a more diffuse “township” model of control, which was sustained by the system of federalism as outlined in the US Constitution (Hamilton & Sutton, 1989). This was a form of decentralized power that rejected the idea of domination by a sovereign, whether by way of kingship, aristocracy, or other authoritative systems of ruling. Both Durkheim’s and Weber’s thoughts on social control were informed by European formalism with regard to the nature of the state, authority, and domination, and hence parted ways with the early American contributors to the subject (Melossi, 2004).

Durkheim (1984) did, however, argue that between the mass society of modernity and the individual stood certain intermediary formations that provided new forms of organic solidarity. In the new industrial society, Durkheim sees the division of labor as the modern source of social solidarity. He argues against the notion that people become merely cogs in the machinery of the industrial juggernaut, falling prey to dulling routine and bureaucratic overregulation. Rather than a debasement of human nature, Durkheim suggests that with the increasing differentiation of tasks in the division of labor, men and women are not separated from each other and their own humanity, but are put in a position of having to rely on one another more than ever before. That is, with the onslaught of work specialization, workers become m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Part I: Theories and Perspectives
• Part II: Institutions and Organizations
• Part III: Criminal Justice
• Part IV: Law Enforcement and Policing
• Part V: Punishment and Prison
• Part VI: Surveillance
• Part VII: Globalization
• Index
• End User License Agreement