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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
What is social control? How do social controls become part of everyday life? What role does the criminal justice system play in exerting control? Is the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness a form of social control? Do we need more social controls to prevent terrorist atrocities?
In this third edition of his popular introduction, James J. Chriss carefully guides readers through the debates about social control. The book provides a comprehensive guide to historical debates and more recent controversies, examining in detail the criminal justice system, medicine, national security, and everyday life. Chriss blends theoretical discussion with a rich range of contemporary examples to illustrate the ways in which social control is exerted and maintained. The updated edition includes new or expanded material on autism, trauma and PTSD, sports participation, the murder of George Floyd and the ensuing protests, domestic terrorism, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the growing importance of social media in surveillance and informal control, among other topics.
Social Control is essential reading for students taking courses in deviance and social control, and will also appeal to those studying criminology, the sociology of law, and medical sociology.
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Tables and Figures
Tables
Figures
Preface and Acknowledgments
Notes
PART I UNDERSTANDING SOCIAL CONTROL
1 What Is Social Control?
Introduction
The Covid-19 pandemic
Lockdowns and executive orders
Toward social control proper
Ross and social control
Durkheim: From mechanical to organic solidarity
Social control as regulation
Moral panics and social media
Weber on power, domination, and the rise of the state
Rationalization
The creation of surnames
Gift-giving
Conclusion
SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
Notes
2 A Typology of Social Control
Introduction
Conceptualizing social control: an example
Drift and techniques of neutralization
The derivation of the three primary forms of control
The emergence of norms
Statistical rarity
Perspectives on social order
The nature of sanctions
Social control as a dependent or independent variable
The labeling perspective
SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
Notes
3 Informal Control
Introduction
Agents of socialization
The family
The community
Peers
School
Work and consumption
Religion
Mass media and public opinion
Solomon Asch: how groups shape individual conformity
Later research on conformity and obedience
Milgram’s Obedience Experiments
Erving Goffman and dramaturgical theory
Conclusion
SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
Notes
4 Medical Control
Introduction
Parsons’ sick role
Medicine and social control
Relational disorders
Medicalization, demedicalization, and remedicalization
Biomedicalization and “selling sickness”
Public health and criminal justice
The therapeutic ethos
Trauma and PTSD
Gender and medicalization
A brief look at transgender issues
Conclusion: medicalization as the exclusion of evil
SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
Notes
5 Legal Control
Introduction: the criminal justice system
Law and morality: where is the dividing line?
The history of criminal justice: from informal to legal control
The Enlightenment, and changing ideas about justice and punishment
Cesare Beccaria
Jeremy Bentham
John Howard
Consolidation of state power and the emergence of policing
Peel’s “new police”
Policing in America: four eras
Political spoils
Reform and early professionalization
Community-oriented policing
Post-9/11 policing
The dark side of legal control
Police use and abuse of force
Community-oriented policing and fear of crime
Net-widening
The poor get prison
Conclusion
SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
Notes
PART II CASE STUDIES IN SOCIAL CONTROL
6 Informal Control: Housing Segregation, the Code of the Street, and Emerging Adulthood and Morality
Introduction
The importance of social bonds
From social disorganization to social control
Hirschi’s control theory and elements of the social bond
The move to self-control
Psychopathy, empathy, and oxytocin
Postindustrialism and the rise of the urban underclass
Housing segregation and white flight
The racial–spatial divide
Informal justice: the code of the street
Youth and morality
The purpose of life
Conclusion
SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
Notes
7 Medical Control: Selective Mutism, Autism, and Violence as a Disease
Introduction
The antipsychiatry movement
Selective mutism
The case of Seung Hui Cho
Autism spectrum disorder
Disvalued versus disordered conditions of childhood and adolescence
The public health model revisited
Three stages of prevention
Is violence a disease?
The search for the violence gene
Community violence
SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
Notes
8 Legal Control: Racial Profiling, Hate Crimes, and the Imprisonment Binge
Introduction
Science and race
Racial profiling
Veil of darkness studies
Hate crimes
A brief history of hate crime legislation
Penalty enhancement law
America’s imprisonment binge
Factors in the imprisonment binge
The end of punitiveness?
SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
Notes
9 Terrorism and Social Control
Introduction
Violent political extremism
Domestic terrorism
Anders Breivik
Israel and Palestine
Changes in the law since 9/11
From Bush to Obama
Trump and Biden
Martyrdom and suicide attacks
The “long hunt” and the death of bin Laden
The rise and decline of ISIS
Conclusion
SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
Notes
10 Conclusion: The Future of Social Control
Introduction: China’s social credit system
Technology and future attribute screening
More on surveillance
Routine activity theory
Six strategies for designing out crime
Symbolic inflation
Responsibilization
Actuarial justice and the new penology
Dangerization
The colonization of the lifeworld
Continuing concerns over shoring up informal control
SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
Notes
References
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Tables
Chapter 1
Table 1.1 Mechanical vs. Organic Solidarity
Chapter 3
Table 3.1 Agents of Socialization and Types of Control Exerted
Table 3.2 Goffman’s Dramaturgical Theory
Chapter 5
Table 5.1 Four Eras of Policing and Changes in Community and Police Roles
Chapter 6
Table 6.1 Elements of the Social Bond
List of Illustrations
Chapter 2
Figure 2.1 The Labeling Perspective
Chapter 3
Figure 3.1 The Asch Experiment
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Social Control
An Introduction
3rd edition
James J. Chriss
polity
Copyright Page
Copyright © James J. Chriss 2022
The right of James J. Chriss to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First edition published in 2007 by Polity Press
Second edition published in 2013 by Polity Press
This third edition published in 2022 by Polity Press
Polity Press
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
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Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3949-9
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3950-5(pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022930578
by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Tables and Figures
Tables
1.1 Mechanical vs. Organic Solidarity
3.1 Agents of Socialization and Types of Control Exerted
3.2 Goffman’s Dramaturgical Theory
5.1 Four Eras of Policing and Changes in Community and Police Roles
6.1 Elements of the Social Bond
Figures
2.1 The Labeling Perspective
3.1 The Asch Experiment
Preface and Acknowledgments
While swimming in a pool in the jungle of Nool, Horton the elephant heard a small voice. Kangaroo is the matriarch of the tight and well-maintained social order of Nool. She is depicted as straight-laced and traditional, dripping with conservative “family values.” For example, she proudly proclaims that her son, Rudy, is “pouch-schooled.”
Horton is viewed by Kangaroo as far more than simply eccentric – in fact, he’s downright dangerous – for holding to and spreading his ridiculous belief that he heard a voice coming from a small speck on a clover. Horton insists there are people living on that speck, and he goes about protecting it with every fiber in his being. Kangaroo casts Horton as a weirdo and possibly deranged, certainly a destabilizing influence in Nool. She says, “If you can’t see it, feel it, or hear it, it doesn’t exist.” In no uncertain terms, these sorts of beliefs will not be tolerated in the jungle of Nool. Horton says in his defense, “A person’s a person, no matter how small.”
As Horton continues to maintain that the speck has life on it, which is his duty to protect and preserve, the dour Kangaroo makes a public case against Horton that he is deranged and deserves to be punished. Most of the jungle caves in to Kangaroo’s view, and Horton is successfully made a pariah (except for a few close allies). Being deemed deserving of scorn and ridicule, Horton is harassed and treated shabbily almost until the end of the story.
This is the film adaptation of the classic Dr. Seuss children’s book, Horton Hears a Who!, but it has profound implications for social control.1 After being immersed in the study of social control and having committed a good deal of effort grappling with it through these three editions of the book, I am not sure at all if the scholarly writings – and they are voluminous, as attested to by the bibliography – are much better on the subject than this simple, elegant Dr. Seuss tale. I believe that the further you get pulled into deviance and social control, you start realizing it is something akin to a bottomless pit and there is really no way out. There are no happy endings here. Horton did okay by the end of the story because, well, fairy tales are supposed to be uplifting for young and curious minds just starting on their long trek into the heart of the social system. But the stark reality is that this is really dismal stuff, and it will keep getting much worse before getting better, if it ever does.
This sour tone may reflect close to two years of hell dealing with a crazy virus and people losing their minds over politics. This book was delayed because of the strangeness of 2020 and most of 2021. Even under the best of circumstances, it is not easy to wrap your head around the endgame of social control, but with all the noise and cacophony and angst and turbulence and desperation and madness and anger and hostility and sanctimoniousness and virtue-signaling and punitiveness and prudishness and symbolic inflation and superciliousness and faddishness and querulousness – and so on and so forth – the task is nigh hopeless. I truly believe whatever order is created and maintained is pretty much arbitrary, and any order will do. The only thing you can really do is lay low and cover your ass, because the system is just a big grinder moving people and pieces around here and there according to the whims of those who are temporarily in charge. Yes, the only thing to look forward to is knowing that the assholes in charge won’t be there for long, because there is a restlessness and the political system plays gotcha games for those ignorant enough to enter the arena.
This restlessness does not lead to the Marxist permanent revolution but to PISS, the perpetual investigative state squared. We are now at the point where we might as well pass a law that all elected officials will from day one have a special counsel assigned to them so that they can dig into their finances and private lives and affairs flush with unlimited cash. You know, the whole “indicting a ham sandwich” thing. And then when they are caught, they will play the silly game of the public confessional where they will grovel and claim trauma or addiction – sex is the juiciest one of course – and that having gone through the ordeal they’ll be better and healthier persons for it. And all the while the social media mobs armed with their virtual torches and pitchforks and smartphones are out chasing Frankenstein’s Monster into the night serenaded by wolves howling at the moon.
I want to thank my wife Mandy and my daughter and son, Ariana and John, for helping me get through the ordeal of writing this book over these past few years. The editorial team at Polity has been a delight to work with, including most prominently Karina Jákupsdóttir who was understanding about all the delays. And Ian Tuttle did a magnificent job with the copyediting.
Speaking of which, the world of books and publishing provides slivers of light in the vast darkness. You can escape to your favorite authors and spend time with them and learn from them. I have been spending some time with the great Giambattista Vico and thinking a lot about his eternal cycle of history.2 I could not figure out a way of working it into the book, so I will take this opportunity to share my take on his description of the rise and fall and rise again of civilizations through the three great eras of gods, heroes, and men.3
The ancients needed gods to bring them out from the caves, out of superstition and animal lust, and so the Word was brought to the people and enforced with rapaciousness into the era of heroes, where a myth arose that the lowly masses yearned for leaders to lead them out of the wilderness. The age of heroes delivered the fables and tales of heroic protagonists fighting evil and deadly sins, and on their backs kingdoms were built and defended in the earlier, absolutist version of government (the kingship model). Such king-gods became heroes and also appointed themselves as such through such cultural innovations as the divine right of kings, but, with the dawning of the age of enlightenment, the people – the humble citizens of the sovereign state – started growing restless and challenged the unquestioned rule of leaders and sought to share power with them. The toppling of kings and the ushering in of democracy gives rise to the era of people (men), and as satisfaction of wants and desires are met more systematically with the advent of labor-saving technologies along with the rise of the service city and numerous helping professions (medicine, psychotherapy, and social work to name a few), persons lose tolerance for even the small aches and pains of life, while at the same time demanding that the government protect them from the profanations of a hurdy-gurdy, dangerous world. Although launched in the antiquity of cosmological and theological speculation, this escape from the state of nature, which ushered in civilization along with the belief in a growing chasm between the animal and human, becomes a core cultural feature of modernity even as ecological movements emerge – hearkening back to the ancient Greek Cynics – which direct true believers to reject the distinctiveness of human beings in favor of a unitary theory of nature and life.
Along with this, the self, which used to be shored up through close and personal relationships with friends and family, now becomes a focal concern of governments as well, and subjectivity is mined further and deeper to protect fragile self-esteem and punish those who would violate it. In addition, the health tag, initially applied to the body and later to the mind, is continually extended and now we can talk about public health, behavioral health, family health, immigrant health, pet health, prisoner health, adolescent health, friendship health, and the real biggie: sexual health. With sexual health, eroticism is sought as an end for and of itself, the feeling part carved out of the functional aspect of sex, which is of course procreation. Of course, Lester Ward noted long ago that humanity slowly and inexorably circumvents and ensnares nature’s method, producing an artificial human society alongside the state of nature from which humanity had continually worked to escape.4
But the focus on satisfying wants – erotic and otherwise – becomes a runaway norm, because human appetites are insatiable and, without sufficient constraints in place to moderate them, the pursuit of gratifications will bring a collapse to social order and return men to the caves – to animal or bare life – once again.5 And then at some point, lost in the wilderness, grunts and utterances will attain the minimal level of symbolic significance made intelligible to those particular human beings in that particular setting – the early poetry of the rude races – once again giving birth (or rather, rebirth) to the gods. And so, the cycle churns on.
Soon after the era of gods comes the era of heroes, the first attempt to inject humanity into the grandiosity of the cosmos and the mysteries of life that confront primitive minds just escaping savagery and barbarism. The early epic poetry of Homer and Virgil are well known, but we will move ahead to the late medieval period, specifically the early fifteenth century, where an unknown (perhaps Scottish or English) author wrote the poem ‘The Alliterative Morte Arthure’, in which the goddess Fortuna makes an appearance in a dream of Arthur’s.6 As a genre of classical heroism, King Arthur is invested with the power of Alexander, but Arthur’s campaign against the Roman emperor Lucius would aspire to avoid the bad fate (or the bad repetition) that befell the latter. In the dream Arthur finds himself in a forest filled with savage beasts but escapes to an earthly paradise replete with vines of silver, grapes of gold, fine fruit, and colorful birds.7 After this, Lady Fortune descends from the heavens on her bejeweled wheel which contains eight of the Nine Worthies. All the riders on the wheel are kings or great military leaders, among whom are Alexander, Hector, Julius Caesar, Judas Maccabeus, Joshua, David, Charlemagne, and Godfrey.8 After several of them fall, Fortuna places Arthur on the wheel, giving him a scepter, diadem, and a “pome” or “orb engraved with a map of the world.”9 Originally quite taken by Arthur, by midday Fortune’s mood changes and she crushes Arthur under the wheel.
After awaking, Arthur consults a trusted confidante to interpret his dream. This philosopher – in the poem, clearly playing the part of the medieval moralist – tells Arthur that his time has passed and that he should prepare for death. With the appearance of Fortuna in the dream, Arthur was not able to escape the tyranny of repetition after all: Arthur’s initial escape to paradise from the terrors of the jungle was a repetition of Alexander’s arrival at his own earthly paradise after successful military campaigns. In that paradise Alexander was given a stone by his own philosopher – Aristotle – which has the extraordinary property of outweighing everything in the world. This wonderstone is Alexander, whose presence in the world outweighs history and time. As Lee Patterson explains, “Alexander received an object that marked the limits of the very sovereignty it was supposed to acknowledge, just as the Earthly Paradise itself stood as an impassable limit to his geographical conquests.”10 Likewise, Arthur’s demise after briefly being placed in the company of the Nine Worthies ends in darkness and tragedy, yet the saving grace here is that it is only a dream.
We can dream and dream we shall!
Notes
1
Gordon et al. (2008).
2
See Vico (1982 [1724]).
3
This discussion of Vico can be found in modified form in Chriss (2021b).
4
See Ward (1883).
5
On the insatiability of human appetites, see Durkheim (1984 [1893]). On the concept of bare life, see Agamben (1998).
6
Patterson (1987, p. 210).
7
Ibid., p. 224.
8
Armstrong (2008, p. 95).
9
Patterson (1987, p. 225).
10
Ibid., p. 226.
PART IUNDERSTANDING SOCIAL CONTROL
Chapter 1What Is Social Control?
Introduction
What are we to make of Stanley Cohen’s assertion that social control has become a “Mickey Mouse” concept in sociology and the broader social sciences?1 What Cohen meant by this is that, because it is used so extensively to cover so many things, the concept “social control” has no clear meaning at all. It is simply a catchall phrase for explaining all the ways conformity is induced in human beings.
That there is a vast array of mechanisms and procedures in place for attempting to do just that – to extract compliance of individuals or groups to some ideal standard of conduct, whether this takes place at home, in the factory, in school, within personal relations, at the doctor’s office, while driving a car or at the stadium watching a ballgame – is undeniable. Indeed, as anthropologist Siegfried Nadel argued, “In this sense control is simply coterminous with society, and in examining the former we simply describe the latter.”2 The study of social control is the study of how society patterns and regulates individual behavior.3 So, in response to Cohen, why should the extensiveness of a procedure, practice, or process render the study of that procedure, practice, or process somehow problematic or even futile?
I would argue that even given its vastness and ubiquity, social control is very much a viable concept for sociology and other social and behavioral sciences. The study of social control can be managed by keeping in sight its basic forms. These three basic forms, which will be expanded upon throughout the book, are legal, medical, and informal. This book may profitably be used at the undergraduate or beginning graduate level, in a wide variety of courses, including of course social control, but also deviance, juvenile delinquency, criminology, criminal justice, sociology of law, corrections or the sociology of prisons, the sociology of policing, and the administration of justice. It should also be noted that the topic of social control brings together literatures from a number of fields including history, social psychology, medical sociology, anthropology and linguistics, political science, economics, geography, sociological and criminological theory, law, criminal justice, and sociology more generally. As a consequence, the bibliography is quite large, and should be a useful reference to scholars in many of the disciplines and fields of study listed above.
Part I of the book lays out the groundwork for understanding the concept of social control, including its history and usages. As discussed later in this chapter, the early American sociologist Edward A. Ross was the first person to investigate, in sustained fashion, something called “social control,” beginning with a series of articles he wrote on the subject in 1896. Indeed, without Ross there is no social control. It should be pointed out that, unlike Ross, most of the authors we will be investigating in this book did not set out to study social control per se. That is, a number of philosophers, theologians, political theorists, and social scientists from antiquity onward have written about the relationship between the individual and society, and in most of these instances, although the term “social control” may never have been explicitly invoked, there nevertheless was a concern with how the individual is held in check by wider social arrangement or structures, whether in the form of the state, the family, the community, the economic system (the explicit focus of Marx’s politic philosophy, for example), the group or tribe, or some other regulative mechanism.
After establishing the threefold typology of social control in chapter 2, separate chapters are devoted to issues and controversies associated with informal control (chapter 3), medical control (chapter 4), and legal control (chapter 5). These five chapters will provide to the student a rigorous understanding of social control as it is typically used and applied in sociological and social science analysis.
Part II is dedicated to critical case studies in social control. Chapters 6, 7, and 8 build upon the basic groundwork established in chapters 3, 4, and 5 respectively. For example, while chapter 3 lays the foundation for an understanding of informal control, chapter 6 provides critical case studies of informal control. Because it continues to play a prominent role in modern society, race and race relations is the theme connecting the three case studies in chapter 6, as well as those of chapter 8 (on legal control). The case studies of medical control in chapter 7 focus primarily on the control of youth and adolescence.
Chapter 9 focuses exclusively on terrorism since it is the most pressing concern of Western democracies today. Finally, chapter 10 ponders what the future of social control may hold in light of the challenges to the social order which such problems as terrorism, pandemics, or political upheavals – for example, revolutions or the rise of authoritarianism – have wrought. In examining these broad cultural, political, social, and historical trends, we are in a position to better understand how states attempt to blend medical and legal controls to shore up the social order, and how and to what extent such formal actions either strengthen or weaken the informal controls taking place among friends, families, small groups, religious congregations, communities, and so forth.
At the end of each chapter, I provide an annotated bibliography consisting of five books which are strongly recommended to readers seeking more in-depth information about the topics and issues treated therein. I also provide five discussion questions pertaining to the material covered in each chapter.
The Covid-19 pandemic
On December 31, 2019, Chinese authorities alerted the World Health Organization to a number of pneumonia-related deaths of unknown origin, with the epicenter of the illness located in Wuhan City in Hubei province. It turned out to be a new strain of the coronavirus – which belongs to the same family as the common cold and various influenzas for which vaccines have been developed – and now identified as Covid-19. Since Covid-19 was a new strain of the virus for which a vaccine had not yet been developed, the world could only look on in horror as illnesses and deaths mounted as the virus was carried from China to other parts of the world. By early April 2020, the worldwide death toll from Covid-19 stood at almost 37,000 with the number of infected just under 770,000. And by March 2021 the US figure alone had climbed to over 500,000, with worldwide deaths topping 2.5 million.4
Because of how rapidly and easily the virus is spread from person to person, in the United States and elsewhere many group activities – including sporting events – were shut down and persons who had to be in public (to get food or for health reasons) were told to practice “social distancing,” that is, as much as possible to stay at least six feet away from others.5 This also meant closing down many “nonessential” businesses such as malls, hair salons, bars and taverns, and the restaurants that remained open could only serve takeout or via drive through. This of course had serious economic ramifications, as jobless claims skyrocketed to a level not seen since the Great Depression, while the stock market and other financial institutions took a historic beating. (The stock market later rebounded, however.) In addition, schools and universities shut down and classes were converted to online instruction. Retail giant Macy’s announced they would be furloughing 130,000 of their workers, producing a ripple effect of bad economic news across many sectors of society.
There was early speculation that Covid-19 emerged from wet markets in Wuhan, which are open-air markets where customers can shop for fresh meats, vegetables, and dairy products. But the wet markets per se were not the problem. Instead, there was some mixing of legitimate wet market activities with illegitimate wildlife market activities, whereby exotic animals like snakes and bats were introduced into these markets and infected some of the personnel and products that were otherwise legitimate.6 There has also been growing evidence that the virus may have originated in a lab in Wuhan, specifically, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which was conducting gain-of-function experiments allegedly funded on some level by the National Institutes of Health (NIH).7 President Trump had made this claim at the beginning of the pandemic, and public health officials and the mainstream media treated such claims as wildly speculative conspiracy theories, and any mention of the lab leak theory was blocked by social media companies and the accounts of some of these “offenders” were suspended.8
The Covid-19 pandemic is a good example of how social problems can spread rapidly and go global. The attempts to respond to conditions on the ground as they emerge in each local community create a patchwork quilt of social control policies whose interventions target social, legal, and medical aspects of the pandemic. For example, on the social or interactional level, federal and local government informed persons that they should stay home and, when out, engage in social distancing. They should also wear masks, wash their hands thoroughly (for at least 20 seconds), and use (if available) hand sanitizer. On the medical side, public health officials scrambled to provide medical guidelines regarding symptoms, where to go to get tested, and describing the most vulnerable populations (the elderly and patients with underlying medical conditions). Finally, the legal side of control is made operative in a major way, mainly through disaster declarations, decisions to quarantine, and other powers vested in the executives at various levels of government, for example, requiring businesses to shift production and engineering capabilities to produce more protective gear for medical personnel but also ventilators for critically-ill patients.
Lockdowns and executive orders
Stay-at-home orders promulgated by executive fiat raise anew questions concerning the constitutionality of such orders, especially as they necessarily curtail personal liberties in the name of public safety. As lockdowns continued through December 2020, many persons became restless and started staging political protests, while others opened their businesses in defiance of executive orders that shuttered such nonessential businesses as barbershops, hair salons, gyms, restaurants and bars, and furniture and clothing stores.9 When the governor of Wisconsin attempted to extend the stay-at-home order he had originally declared in March 2020, the Wisconsin Supreme Court declared the extension to be an unlawful restriction on personal liberties.10 Additionally, in late 2020 the US Supreme Court ruled that New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s restrictions on in-person religious gatherings were unconstitutional because such restrictions were harsher than those of comparable gatherings without providing the legal reasoning for such exclusivity.11 The ruling amounted to the unconstitutionality of the executive order because of the way it violated the First Amendment rights of religious worshippers, and that there are limits to the restrictions than can be placed on lawful activities even during a pandemic.
This issue of executive orders, especially when they involve the curtailing of liberties in the name of public safety or health, gets to the heart of conceptualizing and analyzing social control in its various forms. Decades ago, German political theorist Carl Schmitt defined the sovereign (or the executive) as “he who decides on the exception.”12 So, this gives the executive an extralegal and even extraconstitutional avenue for acting unilaterally, even while other branches may move to check the emergency declaration (such as happened in 2019 when President Trump diverted money to build his wall on the southern border, claiming it to be an emergency).
For example, as it relates to lockdown decrees issued by executives at various levels of government (state, county, or municipal) to slow the spread of the coronavirus according to recommendations of public health officials, such stay-at-home orders are basically house arrest. Under normal criminal justice procedures, house arrest is the punishment for someone already convicted of a crime. But a stay-at-home order is a proactive strategy that doesn’t require a crime; indeed, it is close to the pre-crimes conceptualized by Philip K. Dick and made into the movie Minority Report. People could easily make this out to be yet another version of totalitarianism, of a Big Brother, nanny state curtailing liberties for the sake of public health, public safety, or whatever (as depicted in Orwell’s 1984). Both sides of the political aisle can claim totalitarianism. It speaks to the existence of a hyperpartisan political divide in which persons of one political persuasion (whether Democratic or Republican) are likely to view the actions of the executive from the other political party as an unconstitutional power grab. Hyperpartisanship, especially as it has operated in the United States beginning with the 9/11 terror attacks and continuing on through the Trump era and into the current Biden Administration, is reflective of Schmitt’s idea that the political, in its most basic or essential form, is always “friends vs. enemies.”13
Toward social control proper
The study of social control – namely, all those mechanisms and resources by which members of society attempt to assure the norm-conforming behavior of others – is almost as old as the discipline of sociology itself. If we mark the beginning of scientific sociology with the publication of Lester Ward’s Dynamic Sociology in 1883, social control did not appear as a specific and sustained focus for sociological analysis until about 13 years later, in 1896. In that year, Edward A. Ross published the first of many articles on the topic of social control in the American Journal of Sociology. Although Ross is credited as being the innovator of the study of social control within sociology, by no means did he create this subfield out of whole cloth. Rather, like the great majority of intellectual innovations, Ross deftly synthesized pertinent aspects of the extant literature that dealt with the relation between the individual and society, as well as with the problem of social order more broadly.
Shortly after the establishment of the study of social control by Ross, Ward, and other early American sociologists by the late 1800s, a group of European classical sociologists provided contrasting approaches to social control. The two most prominent of these European thinkers are Emile Durkheim in France and Max Weber in Germany. Although this overview of the thought of Ross, Durkheim, and Weber will provide a solid foundation for conceptualizing social control, in later chapters additional theoretical background will be provided as particular substantive phenomena are introduced, including norms, sanctions, socialization, groups, culture, the professions (especially medicine), and the criminal justice system (police, courts, and corrections).
Ross and social control
Edward Ross’s first article on the topic of social control appeared in the American Journal of Sociology in 1896 and was titled, appropriately enough, “Social Control.”14 Following the position of Lester Ward,15 Ross argued that the true constitution of human society is to be found somewhere between the lone individual and the social group or collectivity. How do we make sense of this twin reality, that is, the reality of the individual and society? For Ross, there is good evidence of the existence of a source of influence whereby individuals are transformed into social beings. Rather than a mere random assemblage of individuals, there exist distinct resources or social forces that create patterns of association between members of society. These resources and forces, which (ideally) bind persons together in shared projects and understandings, are various aspects of social control which collectively contribute to social order.
Ross was concerned not only with describing social control but also shoring up the foundations of social order in the face of the appearance of rampant individualism in the transition to modernity. For much of the early history of human civilization, human beings were held in check by the powerful forces of kinship and small, tight-knit communities where everybody knew everybody else and shared the same experiences, beliefs, values, and aspirations. In essence, for eons the group reigned supreme over the individual. But somewhere along the way this changed. Certainly the breakdown of feudalism contributed to the demise of group control, as persons were now free – as individuals – to offer their services to anyone who would hire them in newly burgeoning capitalist markets.
Additionally, the Enlightenment affected the way social thinkers began talking about human society. For example, beginning in the mid- to late 1700s, utilitarian thinkers such as Cesare Beccaria and Jeremy Bentham conceptualized human beings as rational actors who seek to maximize pleasure and minimize pain on an individual basis. Here, the individual is released from the constraining pressures of the group or the collectivity, and this loss of informal social control is one of the factors that explains rising rates of criminality and deviant behavior, especially beginning in the 1800s across Europe and in the United States. Indeed, these observations and concerns contributed as much as anything to the beginnings of criminology as a field of study.16
The forces of industrialization, migration, urbanization, and secularization were in effect releasing the individual from group control, and by the late 1800s criminologists and sociologists were theorizing how such changes were affecting the relationship between the individual and society. For Ross specifically, the question was “What is the nature of social control in today’s society, and how does it differ from the past?” Following Ward, the major social force impelling human beings to act is feelings, desires, or passion. But with the advance of human society, actions based on raw passion give way to “reasoned” or “rational” actions coinciding with the evolution of the human brain and the upgrading of the intellectual faculty.17 The growth of reason also coincides with the growth of human population and the simple fact that with more anonymous others around with whom one must interact on a routine basis, more care, restraint, and calculation is needed in dealing with them.18 Hence, in answer to the question posed above, Ross suggested that the feelings and desires of individuals are continually and in innumerable ways being shaped by the community of fellow human beings with whom they live and associate.
Here Ross distinguished between social coordination and social control. Social coordination consists of the rules and procedures for ordering a society’s activities so as to avoid mutual interference between its various parts. An example of social coordination would be traffic regulations. Since everyone is on the road for ostensibly the same reason – to get from point A to point B – the ends that actors pursue in this case are harmonious. Rather than controlling, traffic regulations merely coordinate the combined activities of the multitude of individuals using public thoroughfares. Social control, on the other hand, seeks to harmonize potentially clashing activities by checking some and stimulating others. According to Ross, social coordination adjusts the essentially harmonious actions of society, while social control regulates incompatible aims and actions.19
The distinction Ross made between social coordination and social control is no longer prevalent in the social sciences, having been erased in favor of a more expansive notion of social control which replaced social coordination with a specific type of social control, namely informal control. At the same time, the other side of Ross’s distinction, social control, was more apt to emphasize the coercive forces of the state and other collective entities such as organizations and institutions that set rules for its members to follow or face consequences. This systematic coercion enforced by special agents is described as formal control (whether legal or medical), while informal control operates through the influence of agents of socialization (friends, neighbors, parents, siblings, and so forth).
By the 1930s the new expansive understanding of social control – which now incorporates social coordination along with cooperative bases of control (such as the development of transportation systems that facilitate myriads of travelers moving from one point to another) – was established. This was best exemplified in a book on social control published in 1939 by sociologist Paul Landis, who stated:
This analysis takes into account not only the conscious deliberate attempts of society to regulate its members, but also those subtle, unconscious, latent, underlying factors which operate in group situations. For this reason, it holds that social control embraces not only such agencies as law, authority, punishment, codes, and creeds, but also mores, customs, traditions, the subtle influence of group expectancy, and other such factors.20
Additionally, although Ross did not follow Herbert Spencer’s terminology of referring to human societies as “social organisms,” he did utilize Spencer’s idea concerning social structures, which carry out vital functions for society analogous to the way this occurs in individual organisms. Specifically, Spencer argued that organisms and societies evolve specialized structures devoted to sustenance, distribution, and regulation.21 Organisms must sustain themselves by finding food and converting it into energy through digestion, and likewise societies set up operations for extracting resources from the environment and turning them into products which members of societies can consume or utilize (e.g., by way of farms, grocery stores, and utility companies). Distribution is the process of getting valued resources to different parts of the body (i.e., blood carrying nutrients to all parts of the body through the vascular system), or to society (by way of road and railway systems over which needed supplies are transported). And most directly for our purposes, for individual organisms the function of regulation is met by the nervous system whereby sense organs send information to the brain which stimulates appropriate muscle responses (e.g., fight or flight depending on the circumstances of the situation). And with regard to society, the supreme regulatory system is the political and military assemblages through which offensive and defensive state actions are pursued (through law enforcement, legislation, protection of borders, and occasionally warfare).22
Although French classical sociologist Emile Durkheim did not focus as explicitly as Ross did on social control per se, his observations on the changing nature of society nevertheless continue to inform contemporary understandings of and research on social control. Let us examine the ideas of Durkheim in somewhat more detail.
Durkheim: From mechanical to organic solidarity23
In his Division of Labor in Society (first published in 1893), Durkheim argued that earlier forms of human society (e.g., hunter-gathering, horticultural, pastoral) are characterized by a mechanical solidarity where everyone is held in check through likeness and day-to-day familiarity with everyone else in the community. Hence, in primitive, preliterate, or preindustrial societies, the basis of social solidarity is cultural homogeneity, to the extent that all members share a common set of understandings, beliefs, symbols, and life experiences.
Since folk societies tend to be small, attachments between members are deep and abiding, grounded in large part along kinship lines and secured via a shared understanding of the sacred. In this mechanical solidarity, group cohesion is strong; indeed, the group takes precedence over the individual in virtually all social settings. Because of this, individuals are held in check because violations of the normative order are interpreted as an assault on the collective conscience of the community, and hence punishments against violators tend to be harsh, public, and focused on the body.
With the advent of industrialization and the democratic revolutions occurring across Western society beginning in the late 1700s, central cities experienced increases in population density as productivity increased and as more and more persons immigrated to these cities in hopes of finding work in the newly burgeoning industrial economy. As populations grow denser, the social solidarity previously ensured through likeness, familiarity, and face-to-face contact is imperiled as the urban metropolis now becomes characterized by anonymity as well as temporal, spatial, and social distancing between its members.
Durkheim was worried that in this new associational society, the quality and quantity of attachments would become increasingly superficial and impoverished as persons are set adrift in a sea of faceless and anonymous others. Especially as exhibited in his book Suicide, published in 1897, Durkheim’s pessimism about modern society was fueled by data, already well documented by the late 1800s, which indicated that social pathologies – suicide, divorce, poverty, homelessness, mental illness, crime, violence, and drug use and abuse – were occurring at higher rates, per capita, in these urban, metropolitan communities. The assumption was that the city was a dysfunctional place that threatened the socialization process, the unity of the family, the routine commitment to civic participation, and the development of secure and stable attachments to others.
In this new situation of heightened individualism and aggrandizement of the self, what would be the basis of social solidarity? Durkheim argued that it is the division of labor, as well as the increasingly prominent role law would play in adjudicating conflict between an increasingly disparate citizenry.24 Hence, the nature of social solidarity changes from mechanical to organic. Instead of likeness and cultural homogeneity, the modern society is characterized by anonymity, cultural heterogeneity, and a vastly expanded division of labor where tasks become increasingly specialized. Because of this increased task specialization, persons are no longer self-reliant. They must turn to others for their day-to-day necessities, whether it is figuring out taxes, getting a medical checkup, buying a house, or even attending to one’s mental wellness. In this new organic solidarity, social integration is assured as a result of the heightened interdependence between citizens of the community.
Concomitantly, whereas in earlier times the group was everything while the individual was nothing, in modernity the individual attains prominence over the group. Indeed, because of the increasingly divergent characteristics of inhabitants of the modern metropolis, the last remaining thing we all share is our humanity. This abstract ideal becomes further embodied in the activities of the democratic welfare state, which remains further and further committed, through the creation of welfare legislation and other provisions, to protecting its citizens against accident, injury, illness, and death.
Table 1.1 provides a summary of Durkheim’s distinction between mechanical and organic solidarity. It should be noted that since Durkheim’s time a number of social scientists have gone beyond the two-era classification – that is, an earlier primitive era of humanity (coinciding with mechanical solidarity) contrasted with a later modern era (coinciding with organic solidarity) – and have begun speaking of a third, so-called postmodern era.25
Table 1.1 Mechanical vs. Organic Solidarity
Area of application
Forms of social solidarity
Mechanical
Organic
Type of society
Small, rural, agricultural, culturally homogeneous (familiarity and similarity)
Large, urban, industrial, culturally heterogeneous (anonymity)
Basis of evaluation
Ascription (who you are)
Achievement (what you do)
Basis of recognition
Family (primary groups)
Work (secondary groups)
Prevalence of law
Low (disputes handled informally)
High (needed to adjudicate conflict between increasingly disparate citizenry and to enforce contracts)
Punishment
Harsh, focused on the body (public)
Rehabilitative and restitutive, focused on the mind (private)
Division of labor
Not a great deal of task specialization
High task specialization
Education
Informal (family and church)
Formal (esoteric knowledge and the rise of professions)
Nature of social bonds
Strong and abiding
Weak and shallow
Source of social solidarity
Collective conscience
Division of labor and law
Societal focus
The group
The individual
Sense of self
Weak or nonexistent
Strong (flowering of personality with multiple cross-cutting affiliations)
Where modernity emphasized centralized authority and operations, in postmodernity decentralization is emphasized (e.g., the use of police mini-stations under community policing, as well as the rise of community corrections). In modernity, there were sovereign nations with well-defined borders, while under postmodernity there is a collapse of such distinctions with the new realities of deindustrialization, globalization, and shifting or disappearing national borders. And whereas in modernity there was trust in the grand narrative of science and Enlightenment reason, in postmodernity there is a fragmentation into a number of discourses (scientific and otherwise) that compete for attention. This idea of a “postmodern” condition, and how social control is conceptualized and operates within it, will be returned to occasionally throughout the book.
Social control as regulation
Both Ross’s and Durkheim’s work place emphasis on the idea of social control as regulation. The organization of human society is simultaneously both unity and regulation. In escaping the lawlessness of the state of nature, the social life of human society comes to be characterized as a nomic life, and hence society is a state of nomia (the Greek word for law or rule).26 This amounts to the idea that within society, a system is in place to deal specifically with the sanctioning or punishment of individuals who do not comply with the rules, that is, with social norms. Norms provide guidance for behavior. For example, because of the operation of the shipboard rule “women and children first,” women and children indeed were more likely to survive the sinking of the Titanic than other categories of people. In a life or death situation, many have suggested that morality is thrown out of the window as people fend for themselves in order to survive. This indeed may be the case, yet, even in the desperate case of the sinking of the Titanic, females were significantly more likely than males to survive the sinking, while those traveling with children under 17 were also significantly more likely to survive. Additionally, social class mattered: those traveling in first class were much more likely to survive than those traveling in second or third class.27
The starting point for any system of control is socialization, which can be defined as the learning of a culture. Because human infants are helpless at birth, ideally there should be competent adults – usually their parents – available to supervise children’s activities and provide to them their physical and emotional needs as they mature. Beyond the provision of food, warmth, clothing, shelter, and emotional nurturing and support, agents of primary socialization also provide to the growing child a set of guidelines for proper conduct. These guidelines can be thought of as a moral template, the contents of which are drawn from the prevailing cultural traditions of a society.
According to Sigmund Freud, Talcott Parsons, and others, the ultimate goal of socialization is the production of self-controlled individuals.28 Children will typically be rewarded by parents and other agents of socialization – teachers, priests, friends, and other family members to name a few – for good behavior and punished for bad behavior, thereby compelling individuals to comport their behavior to the expectations of the group.29 That is to say, if socialization works properly, individuals will choose to act in norm-conforming ways because the costs and pains associated with deviance or non-conformity are simply too great. Equally important, however, is that once individuals take the position that deviance is too costly to engage in, they have in effect internalized society’s standards of what is fair, proper, just, appropriate, normal, ethical, or lawful. In this way, socialization assures the production of self-controlled individuals, insofar as persons are held in check by the threat of external sanctions as well as by internal feelings of blameworthiness, guilt, disgust, shame, embarrassment, chagrin, sorrow, self-loathing, or regret whenever they do something that does not meet the approval of significant others in society. No society can properly be maintained merely by way of external constraints such as those embodied in the legal system and its system of sanctioning.30 The internalization of the moral code of a group by way of socialization is typically a far better mechanism for ensuring social control (as we shall see in chapter 3).
Although this point cannot be discussed in detail in this chapter, it should be noted that a seemingly growing number of persons believe that today’s youth are not being raised properly and lack a conscience, that is, an internal voice that tells them right from wrong. This again is reflected in Freud’s notion that stunted or incomplete socialization is likely to produce individuals whose personality is characterized by an overdeveloped Id (where raw passions hold sway) or an underdeveloped Superego (where moral conscience is not fully formed). News accounts profiling cases of children acting badly and for inexplicable reasons – such as the infamous “wilding” incident in 1989 where six boys attacked a woman jogging in Central Park just for the “fun” of it, or the string of school shootings that have occurred sporadically across America since 1999 – are especially likely to prompt observers to suggest that the socialization process is in decline and perhaps irreparably damaged.31
Moral panics and social media
This reflects how public opinion and group sentiment can affect public policies even when it can later be shown that the original sentiments stirring such changes were wrong or misguided. Indeed, many public policies, especially those that are related to social control – whether legal, medical, or some combination – can be understood as arising as a result of moral panics, namely, widespread concerns which focus attention on a person or group who are believed (rightly but more often wrongly) to have created harmful or deteriorating social conditions.32 Members of society can thereby focus moral outrage on the person or group allegedly causing problems in the first place and, through this process of scapegoating, society-at-large can take comfort in identifying and punishing troublemakers who throughout history have variously been tagged with such pejoratives as demons, devils, witches, hooligans, vermin, rats, or worse.
The Central Park case, mentioned above, is a classic example of a moral panic.33 A white female who was jogging in New York’s Central Park in 1989 was allegedly attacked and raped by seven youths. The youths were reportedly part of a larger group of youths who were out of control and assaulting people for no apparent reason. The lead detective on the case, Robert Colangelo, reported that some of the youths arrested later and brought in for questioning claimed that the random assaults were part of an activity they called “wilding.” This report of wild and out of control urban youth randomly attacking people was the sort of sensational crime story that the news media thrives on, and of course the news spread like wildfire.
Initially seven youths were charged with rape, assault, and attempted murder. Later, charges were dropped against one youth while another turned state witness. Although acquitted of the attempted murder charges, the remaining five youths were convicted on some combination of the rape and assault charges and given sentences ranging from five to fifteen years. The youths came to be known as the Central Park Five. All of them were Black or Hispanic, and their race and socioeconomic status played into ugly stereotypes about urban “superpredators” terrorizing public spaces and neighborhoods.34 However, in 2002 a serial rapist, Matias Reyes, who was serving a prison sentence at the time, confessed to the assault and rape which later DNA testing confirmed.35 The youths who had been falsely imprisoned were released, and from that day forward an even bigger story began unfolding about the perniciousness of moral panics and racism in the criminal justice system.
It should also be noted that moral panics and the work of moral entrepreneurs need not eventuate in official actions of the state (that is, formal controls), but can be dispersed across society more or less randomly by individuals or groups in the form of mob violence or vigilantism more generally (which are more akin to informal, “off the books,” or non-state controls). The increasing presence and availability of social media can now link disparate persons, who otherwise would never have met, into concerted action across neighborhoods or communities, some of which could be described as moral panics. Social media is particularly adept at spreading fear.36 These social media platforms – Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Reddit, TikTok, and Pinterest to name a few – allow focalizing of concerns over such things as pedophiles in the community, human trafficking, cruelty to pets or animals, and many others.37 Indeed, the mob has gone digital, whereby persons can use social media to shame, humiliate, and release private information – so-called “doxing” – about those targeted for denigration and attack.38 Jeremy Weissman believes that things have gotten so bad that government needs to step in to protect persons from social media mobbing:
I argue a new apparatus of surveillance and control is being generated that threatens individual freedom through a coercion of the will by an anonymous and interconnected crowd. I conclude that we must urgently assess how to protect individuals from a social tyranny of the public enabled by these new technologies while effective measures can still be taken to mitigate their dangers.39
As David Altheide notes, social media technologies have the ability to expand, for good or bad, the informal social controls available at the level of everyday life (the lifeworld), in effect amplifying them according to users who come together on various platforms and who share abiding interests on specific issues.40
