Social Control

Social control is the process whereby society seeks to ensure conformity to the dominant values and norms in that society.

This process can be either informal, through customs and everyday expectations, or formal, through laws and official regulations.

Social Control

Social control works through two main tactics. Negative sanctions punish people who break society’s rules. Positive policies instead persuade or reward voluntary compliance with its standards.

The idea is closely tied to deterrence, the threat of punishment discouraging offending.

Sociologists treat deterrence and broader questions about social order as two sides of the same process, not separate mechanisms (Gibbs, 1977).

Social control is the antithesis of deviance. Deviance research asks what drives rebellion against accepted norms; social control asks the reverse question, why people conform. Its aim is to maintain order and peace in society.

Albion Woodbury Small and George Edgar Vincent introduced the concept to sociology in 1894. The underlying problem was older still.

Thomas Hobbes had already asked why individuals restrain their own self-interest for the sake of collective order in his account of the state.

Talcott Parsons (1937) and Travis Hirschi (1969) later developed the concept much further, from two different directions. Parsons built a general functionalist theory of whole social systems. Hirschi instead asked what binds one person to conventional society closely enough that they do not offend.

Historical Development of the Concept

Small and Vincent named the field in 1894. The discipline’s real founding work came a few years later.

Ross and the Birth of the Field

Edward Alsworth Ross was the first sociologist to study social control systematically. His timing mattered.

His 1901 book, Social Control: A Survey of the Foundations of Order, made a bold claim for its time (Ross, 2009). Order in a large, differentiated society, Ross argued, could no longer be taken for granted as a natural by-product of shared sentiment.

Shared sentiment was no longer enough. It had to be secured instead through law, belief, ceremony, education, public opinion, and personal ideals.

Ross wrote against a backdrop of rapid industrialisation and city growth. Small communities were losing their grip. Face-to-face control no longer worked the way it once had in a mass, industrial society.

His central achievement was to treat “control” itself, rather than any single institution that happened to produce it, as sociology’s proper object of study. That was the real innovation. It set the agenda for later work, from Parsons’s functionalism to Hirschi’s control theory decades on.

Durkheim: Solidarity and Anomie

Emile Durkheim rarely used the phrase “social control,” but his work supplied the deeper theory. He traced a shift between two types of solidarity.

Small-scale mechanical solidarity relied on shared belief to do the restraining work informally. Organic solidarity, in large modern societies, needs formal law to do that job instead (Durkheim, 1915).

Durkheim called the unsettled transition between the two anomie. He also made a subtler point that is easy to miss.

Too little deviance can itself be a warning sign. A society with unusually low crime and unusually tight conformity may be crushing the very criticism and dissent that healthy change requires. Later functionalists, including Parsons, built directly on this less obvious part of Durkheim’s foundation.

Two Twentieth-Century Directions

American sociology then split the study of social control along two lines. Talcott Parsons (1937) generalised the problem to whole social systems, asking how any society reproduces its own norms across generations.

Travis Hirschi (1969) relocated the same question to the individual. He asked what specifically binds a person to conventional society closely enough that they do not offend.

Both lines of thought remain active areas of research today, alongside the neutralisation, Marxist and interactionist traditions covered below. A fourth strand comes from the French theorist Michel Foucault.

He reframed social control once again. This time the focus is surveillance, not shared values or individual bonds, a theme picked up in the evaluation section below. Both twentieth-century approaches are examined in full further down, alongside the Marxist and interactionist critiques that followed them.

Agencies of Social Control

Agents of social control are the people or groups who work to influence or regulate the behavior of others. They can be found in all levels of society, from the family to the government.

• Education: The inculcation of civic norms, which transpires at a tender age for most children, is often inspired by the desire of those in authority to ensure that the future citizens would remain committed to upholding that particular society’s abiding values . The recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance, and elementary school courses on democracy exemplify this.
• Family: The control exerted on individuals by their parents, siblings, spouses, and relatives seldom employs clear rules. However, children learn how to respect authority from their parents. Siblings may aid one in discerning early the appropriate standards for acceptable behavior among one’s peers.
• Community:Implicit threats of ridicule, shame, and ostracization pervade most mechanisms of social control employed by various communities. The prospect of exclusion from a house of worship may procure and preserve a religious group’s members’ fidelity to orthodox beliefs. Likewise, the hope of reward (extratemporal bliss, or even human respect) may inspire members to assist each other in times of need.
• Criminal Justice System:Severe punishments meted out to convicted criminals may serve to deter future felonies. The temporary removal of wrongdoers from society at large both impedes their recruitment of others into crime and renders them incapable of committing endless infractions with impunity. Cities with higher incarceration rates, thus, are likely to have lower crime rates (Sampson, 1986).
• Religion: Sacred symbols and rituals bind a community together and reinforce everyday norms of conduct by attaching them to something greater than an ordinary social rule (Durkheim, 1915). Critics counter that a dominant class can use the same religious legitimacy to justify the political and economic status quo.
• Health and Illness: Talcott Parsons’s sick role holds that societies grant the genuinely ill a temporary exemption from normal duties, on condition that they try to get well and seek competent medical help. This exemption is conditional. Physicians act as gatekeepers, certifying who may occupy the sick role and for how long.
• Age Structure: Different age groups face different behavioural expectations, from what counts as age-appropriate dress to acceptable leisure. Access to social, economic, and political resources is itself partly distributed by age, making age a genuinely independent axis of informal control.
• Collective Behaviour: Every domain works differently. Neil Smelser’s value-added theory treats the response of police and community leaders as the final condition deciding whether a crowd or protest escalates into a full social movement. The protests after the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014 show how an escalating formal response can intensify unrest rather than contain it.

Sampson (1986): Testing Formal and Informal Control Together

Aim: To test whether official criminal-justice sanctions (formal control) and family structure (a proxy for informal control) together help explain differences in serious crime rates across American cities. The city-level approach was new.

Method: Sampson (1986) analysed structural and crime data for 171 U.S. cities with populations over 100,000.

He modelled robbery and homicide rates against formal-control indicators, such as police strength and the certainty of incarceration. Family-structure indicators, such as divorce rates and female-headed households, were included too. The model also accounted for poverty and population density.

Results: Cities with a higher certainty of jail incarceration had lower robbery rates. This is consistent with a genuine deterrent effect.

Independently of this, weaker family structure predicted higher crime too.

Conclusion: Formal and informal social control behave as two distinct, only partly substitutable levers on crime. Strong formal enforcement does not fully replace weak family and community bonds, and the reverse is also true.

The study has real limits. It is cross-sectional, so it cannot show that weak family structure or low incarceration risk causes later crime rather than merely accompanying it. It also relies on official crime statistics, which can reflect recording bias as much as real offending.

Types of Social Control

Theories of Social Control

Parsons’ Approach to Social Control

Talcott Parsons was a functionalist heavily influenced by the writings of Emile Durkheim and Max Weber.

Around the 1950s, Parsons sought to align the abstract idea of social order with the concrete concept of social control by developing a theory of social systems.

This general theory identified four functions that operated through multiple levels of human reality. The analytical requisites of the functions demanded that social control be seen under four elementary types: religious, informal, medical, and legal.

Parsons inquired into how the transgenerational reproduction of societies transpires.

He noted that most individuals in a society are not opposed to most societal norms and values and that they heed them for most of their lives.

He adduced socialization to explain the purported ‘willing conformity.’

In other words, socialization uses families, schools, and religious communities to uphold compliant members as examples worth emulating. This aids individuals’ internalization of societal norms.

Parsons also developed a four-sub-system model applicable to the social system.

The model was predicated on a social system’s tasks relevant to its milieu. The four subsystems, also known as the AGIL system, comprised the following:

1. Goal-attainment: the polity

2. Adaptation: the economy

3. Integration: the culture comprising norms concerning social control and law

4. Latency: the normative issue of incentives to gratify the social system’s requirements

While Parsons’ theorizing was not flawless, his approach incorporated the perennial problem of scarcity and its concomitant challenge of resource allocation.

Matza’s Techniques of Neutralization

David Matza and Gresham Sykes argued that breaking social norms usually brings shame and guilt. That guilt discourages most people from delinquency or crime (Sykes & Matza, 1957; Matza, 1964).

Would-be delinquents develop techniques to neutralise that guilt in advance. This protects their self-image before they even offend.

The techniques let delinquents drift back and forth between criminal and conventional conduct. They work by weakening the moral force of cultural mores, and by counteracting the guilt a serious transgression would otherwise produce. The guilt fades quickly.

The neutralization impedes the internal and external controls conducing to inhibiting incentives for deviance, thereby inspiring delinquency while simultaneously immunizing the perpetrators’ self-image.

Matza and Sykes focused particularly on the following five techniques of neutralization:

1. Denial of responsibility

2. Denial of victims

3. Denial of injury

4. Condemnation of condemners

5. Appeal to higher loyalties

Research on the Matza-Sykes theory has yielded mixed outcomes. Their theory of neutralisation has since been absorbed into labeling theory, learning theory, and control theory as much as it stands alone.

Its capacity to serve as a sufficient explanation of crime is still unsettled. Maruna and Copes (2005) reviewed several decades of this research; Kaptein and Van Helvoort (2019) have more recently proposed a refined model of the techniques themselves.

Marxist Approaches to Social Control

Marxist sociology treats the criminal justice system as part of the repressive state apparatus. The ruling class uses it to maintain power through oppression while appearing legitimate.

Laws reflect ruling-class ideology. Punishment is part of the repressive state apparatus too (Althusser).

The police and courts treat the working and middle classes differently. A middle-class offender is more likely to be treated as having made a mistake. A working-class offender committing the same act is more likely to be arrested.

Many corporate crimes go uninvestigated.

Bowles and Gintis’ Correspondence Theory extends the same logic to education. Schooling, on this view, is used by the ruling class to instil its own norms in the workforce. The mass media are said to do the same: gatekeeping and setting the agenda to spread elite worldviews.

The police are cast as an accomplice too.

Law enforcement’s scant attention to white-collar crime, such as corporate fraud, is cited as evidence for this.

Marxist theory holds that a dominant class safeguards its economic interests through control of both criminal law and cultural norms. The formal and informal standards a society expects people to follow are, on this account, simply the values of the ruling group.

Political change complicates the theory. A shift in power from a former oppressor class to the previously oppressed does not guarantee any fundamental change in a society’s primary behavioural norms.

Interactionist Approaches to Social Control

The interactionist tradition is closely tied to labeling theory. It holds that the very efforts of social-control agencies to prevent delinquency can, ironically, be positively correlated with deviance (Becker, 1963).

On this account, crime is a social construct.

Stereotyped assumptions shape who gets labelled as criminal, and police patrol working-class areas more heavily. That policing pattern inflates working-class crime statistics relative to the middle class. The statistics end up skewed.

Working-class offenders are often assumed to be making a conscious choice to commit crime.

Middle-class offenders committing the same act are more often seen as making an innocent mistake. They are also less able to negotiate the system to their advantage.

What follows, interactionists argue, is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Criminal careers are produced this way. Deviance is amplified by the labelling process itself, rather than by an individual’s social background or blocked opportunities.

Individuals become criminals partly because of the labelling that occurs during micro-level interactions with police, not solely because of their social background.

This is not evenly applied. Some delinquents escape labelling altogether, and the less powerful are more likely to be labelled. This leads interactionists to call for policies that avoid labelling minor infractions as deviant in the first place.

Hirschi’s Control Theory

Travis Hirschi’s theory posits that deviance and crime are induced by the weakening of an individual’s bonds to society (Hirschi, 1969; Hirschi & Gottfredson, 1983). Strong attachment, conversely, engenders conformity.

Hirschi adduced four types of bonds as the essential constituents of the glue that holds a society together:

1. Attachment

2. Involvement

3. Commitment

4. Belief

The theory implies that single, unemployed, and young males are more prone to delinquency than their older, married, and employed counterparts. Truancy, in particular, seems a potent predictor of deviance.

Hirschi suggests that the underclass are more likely to lack impulse control and bonds to the community which prevent them from committing crime.

Hirschi’s theory has substantial supporting evidence. Donald West and David Farrington’s Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development followed 411 working-class men from childhood into their late thirties (Farrington, 1999).

Delinquents and criminals were more likely to come from impoverished single-parent households. They were also more likely to have experienced poor parenting, and to have parents who were themselves offenders. The pattern was consistent.

Martin Glynn’s qualitative research on absent fathers points the same way. His sample of 48 young people, aged 16-25 and drawn from Liverpool, Derby, and London, was culturally and socially diverse (Glynn, 2011). The effects of absent fathers ranged from anti-social conduct and crime to drug use and heavy drinking.

Critical Evaluation of Theories of Social Control

The theories above do not so much disagree about the facts of social control as about whose interests it serves and where power is located.

How the Theories Compare

Functionalists such as Parsons and control theorists such as Hirschi treat social control as broadly benign. It is the glue that keeps a complex society from falling apart.

They locate it at different levels: the whole social system for Parsons, individual bonds for Hirschi. Not everyone agrees.

Marxists and interactionists are far more suspicious of the same mechanisms.

For Marxists, social control chiefly protects a ruling class’s economic interests behind a veil of legitimacy. For interactionists, formal control can manufacture the very deviance it claims to suppress, through selective labelling.

Matza and Sykes’s neutralisation theory sits between these camps. Most people, on this view, are genuinely restrained by guilt, but that restraint can be talked around.

Foucault’s account cuts across all four. It asks how power operates through diffuse surveillance and expert knowledge, rather than through visible coercion.

Too Much Control Can Be Unhealthy

Durkheim’s own view was more double-edged than later, conservative readings of functionalism suggest. He argued that some deviance is functional for a healthy society. That point comes from within the functionalist tradition itself, not from its critics.

This is what makes it easy to miss.

A society showing unusually low crime and unusually tight conformity may in fact be signalling an unhealthy, even dictatorial level of control. That control can crush the criticism and dissent a society periodically needs in order to change and adapt.

Later functionalists often smoothed over this warning. They treated high conformity as straightforwardly good, but Durkheim’s own writing does not support that reading.

It is a caution worth holding alongside any theory, Parsons’s included, that treats maximal conformity as an unambiguous social good.

Whose Norms Deserve Conformity?

The concept of social control tends to smuggle in a normative assumption: that the norms being enforced deserve conformity in the first place. That is precisely the assumption Marxist and interactionist theories exist to challenge. That is the core objection.

Whether an act of control looks like legitimate order or the imposition of one group’s interests on another often depends on who is judging it.

The same police stop can look like ordinary law enforcement to one observer. Context matters enormously.

To a resident of a heavily policed community, it can look like the unequal treatment documented in research on a racialised “criminal other” (Williams & Clarke, 2018).

This tension is not resolved by any of the theories above. It is precisely why social control remains a contested, rather than a settled, concept in sociology.

Contemporary Research

Recent research has moved away from treating formal and informal control as two separate stories. The criminal-justice literature sat on one side, community studies on the other.

It now asks directly how the two interact.

Aim: Yesberg, Costi, Chan, and Bradford (2024) reviewed the evidence on whether policing builds collective efficacy. That is the mix of neighbourhood cohesion and residents’ willingness to intervene informally for the common good.

Method: The team identified sixteen eligible studies, four experimental and twelve observational, that measured policing alongside collective efficacy. They pooled the comparable effect sizes in a meta-analysis.

Results: Only one measure mattered. Police trustworthiness, residents’ sense that officers are fair and reliable, was linked to stronger collective efficacy.

Simple police presence or activity on its own was not.

Conclusion: Policing can support informal control, but only through legitimacy, not visible presence. This directly updates Sampson’s (1986) much earlier finding that formal and informal control operate somewhat independently.

It shows precisely which feature of formal control matters.

Two further studies help explain how this plays out. Lanfear (2022) analysed 1,641 city blocks across 343 Chicago neighbourhoods.

He found that collective efficacy partly reduces crime by getting abandoned buildings removed or repaired, a physical-environment channel rather than attitudes alone.

Weisburd, Uding, Hinkle, and Kuen (2024) tested a related idea. Their target was the broken-windows theory assumption that fixing physical disorder alone restores community control, using Baltimore street-segment data.

They found that social disorder and crime, not physical disorder, were the strongest predictors of weakened collective efficacy. Legitimacy, the built environment, and the type of disorder present all matter more than any simple substitution of one form of control for the other.

FAQs

What are social control mechanisms?

Social control mechanisms regulate the conduct of individuals in a society. They may be categorized as follows:

1. Preventive: the establishment of roles with assigned priorities and the exertion of social pressure to elicit subordination to laws.

2. Restraining: cultural mores and religious obligations that moderate various inclinations.

3. Sanctioning:

   • Economic: boycotts and fines.

   • Physical: expulsion and imprisonment.

   • Psychological: reproofs and ridicule.

In addition to the above, government propaganda to effect desired behavioral outcomes via the influence of public opinion deserves mention as well.

What are social control agencies?

Individuals, social institutions, and codes of conduct that seek to prevent or restrain deviance and crime can be described as > agents of social control.

Examples range from parents, older siblings, and neighbors, to police officers, the judiciary, and written constitutions.

While some are informal and exert their influence in subtle and intangible ways, others are formal and communicate their expectations (penalties for insubordination and rewards for obedience) through legal promulgations.

Why is social control difficult in contemporary society?

Wider access to information and the growth of social media expose people to opinions and norms that contradict those of their society’s ruling elites. The reach of these platforms is historically unprecedented.

This exposure to alternative worldviews, including views a society would otherwise call deviant, can undermine the credibility of traditional agents of social control. It can weaken their capacity to influence ordinary members of society. The growth of pro-democracy movements challenging otherwise firmly entrenched governments illustrates the pattern.

Is social control theory macro, or micro?

Social control theory may employ either macro or micro-level analysis. Hirschi’s approach, for instance, closely examines immediate family bonds and the implications of their breakdown for deviance.

Interactionists, likewise, focus on how labeling occurs in micro-level interactions between the would-be-deviants and various agents of social control such as police officers.

The Marxist approach views the phenomenon as a macro-level struggle between an oppressive capitalist ruling class, and a passive and oppressed workforce.

Similarly, Parsons evaluates the roles played by the macro milieus such as the economy and the polity, as constituents of the larger social system containing controls.

What is the difference between strain theory and control theory?

Strain theory holds that individuals are pushed into crime and deviance by stressors society imposes on them. Control theory instead attributes deviance to a lack of bonds or controls.

The two theories occupy opposite ends of a spectrum. Strain theory holds that the pressure to succeed can push people toward illegal activity, such as drug dealing or theft. Control theory holds that the same social expectations deter crime, by channelling people’s energy into legitimate work and relationships.

How is socialization a form of social control?

Socialization involves the internalization of cultural mores and social norms, via both teaching and learning for the attainment of cultural and social continuity.

Parsons, notably, argued that socialization engenders a willingness to submit to a society’s standards for conduct. Socialization can thus, be described as a type of informal (rather than formal) social control.

Socialization hardly includes legal sanctions or imprisonment. However, when it is carried out by families, schools, and religious communities, it does indoctrinate individuals and mold them into citizens obedient to civil laws.

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