Society and Social Control

Social control is one of the most widely used concepts in sociology, referring to the various means a society uses to bring its unruly or non-conforming members back into line. Because sociology contains genuinely different ways of understanding society, it also contains different ways of understanding what social control is for. For a functionalist, social control means two closely related things: the use of force to regulate the behaviour of individuals and groups, and the enforcement of shared values and patterns that maintain order — restraining deviant behaviour on one hand, and easing tensions and conflicts between individuals and groups on the other, so that society remains stable and cohesive. For a conflict theorist, by contrast, social control looks less like a neutral mechanism for order and more like a tool by which dominant classes impose their own interests on the rest of society — on this view, even law itself is best understood as the formal expression of the powerful's interests, and the 'stability' social control produces is really the continued dominance of one section of society over another.

The oldest and most basic form of social control is physical force: even in the most orderly modern democracies, the state's ultimate sanction remains its capacity for legitimate violence, expressed through institutions like the police, even though this ultimate force is normally used sparingly, as a last resort, with its mere threat usually being enough for everyday purposes. Within small, tightly-knit primary groups, however, subtler and often more effective mechanisms of control operate — including mechanisms that work simply because people successfully claim an authority or backing they do not actually possess.

Sociology distinguishes formal from informal social control. Formal social control operates through codified, systematic mechanisms and dedicated agencies such as law and the state, and modern societies rely heavily on this formal machinery. Informal social control, by contrast, is personal, unofficial and uncodified — it works through everyday gestures like smiles, frowns, ridicule, criticism or laughter, delivered by agencies such as the family, religion or kinship networks. Informal control is often remarkably effective in daily life, though it is not always sufficient to secure conformity on its own, which is one reason formal mechanisms exist alongside it. …