Social Control

This chapter provides an overview of the concept of social control in the history of sociology. Social control emerged in the late nineteenth century at roughly the same time as the establishment of American sociology, with Edward A. Ross being the main innovator of the concept. A parallel movement in Europe (represented in the thought of Emile Durkheim and Max Weber) focused on the larger problem of social order rather than social control per se. By the 1950s, Talcott Parsons sought to bring into alignment the broader concept of social order with the narrower one of social control by way of the development of a general theory of social systems that specified four functions operating across all levels of human reality. The analytical requirement of four functions implied that social control appeared concretely as four basic types: informal, legal, medical, and religious. By the 1980s, the consensus within sociology saw a further simplification of the Parsons schema into three basic types of social control: informal, legal, and medical (with religious control now being subsumed under informal). The trend over time has been that the most ancient and fundamental system of control – informal control – has waned and become somewhat imperiled in the face of the growth of both legal and medical control.