Social Control

Social control, like community, is a venerable concept informing sociology from its inception at the turn of the nineteenth century and remaining central in social thought to the present day. Social control has a variety of definitions, some broader and some more narrow. As Donald Black has observed,

• In one usage which dominated the earlier literature, social control refers broadly to virtually all of the human practices and arrangements that contribute to social order, and in particular, that influence people to conform…. In a second and more recent usage, social control refers more narrowly to how people define and respond to deviant behavior. (Black 1984, p. 5)

This entry uses the broader conception of social control, erring on the side of asserting “he who says social order, says social control.” The concern here is how community, as a unit of social organization both utilizes social control and in turn is affected by different mechanisms of control. E. A. Ross, an early theorist of social control, saw community and social control as nonproblematic: “In the community the secret of order is not so much control as concord. So far as community extends people keep themselves in order, and there is no need to put them under the yoke of an elaborate discipline” (Ross 1908, p. 432). But, as Michel Foucault noted, community itself may operate as a “yoke of elaborate discipline,” and the idea of “self-regulation” as “people keep themselves in order” is in fact one of the important conceptions of social control (Janowitz 1976).

This broad conception of social control implies a normative and a moral order, a set of rules and regulations of right and wrong, a culture into which people are socialized. It also implies sanctioning processes through interpersonal interaction in networks and institutions ranging from voluntary groups to the police. Social control also implies the expenditure of resources to entice or coerce and sanctioning agents with the power and authority to apply those sanctions. Social control is thus directly linked to issues of authority and power and the ability to mobilize resources to get others to do what one wants.

The broad conception of social control touches on three distinct levels or realms of social order: the private (interpersonal behavior), the parochial (local institutions), and the public (the realm of strangers, citizens, and the state). The local community is above all a parochial order, but it is linked to and dependent on the operations of the private and the public orders.

In exploring the relationship between social control and community, a widely shared definition of community is helpful. Community may be defined by three dimensions that highlight social control processes: the cultural symbolic dimension of community inclusive of cognitive identity, language, and moral orders; the classical ecological or territorial aspect of community with its emphasis on shared space and shared fates; and the social structural dimension consisting of interaction in roles, networks, and nodal institutions. These three dimensions can be used to organize the discussion of social control with respect to community.