Social Control
Updated: 4 July 2020 Social control is necessary to maintain social order – the functioning of society without chaos or continual disruption. It ensures that only a limited number of values and norms are acceptable . By so doing, it provides predictability, a key element that all societies need. Without having a considerable degree of prediction as to how others will act, peaceful and productive interaction between people becomes all but impossible. Social control, therefore, makes society possible by ‘policing the boundaries’ and dealing with deviant and criminal behaviours. Émile Durkheim (1893) argues that the limited number values and norms considered acceptable – the values consensus – gives a culture or sub-culture – a collective conscience. This values consensus is spread memetically to infect the minds of the members of the social groups. Functionalists tend to make the assumption that it is only when social control becomes ineffective that people turn to deviance and crime. There are 2 forms of social control, informal and formal, and most societies have a mixture of these 2 approaches. Smaller and more self-contained groups tend to use more informal mechanisms. The larger and more complex a society is, the more it will tend to use formal mechanisms.… Read More
