Social control consists of the methods used to regulate behavior in society. There are three main theoretical perspectives on social control - functionalists see it as necessary for survival, interactionists see it as a social process, and conflict theorists see it as benefiting powerful groups. There are three main types of social control - internalized norms, social structure, and formal/informal sanctions. Deviance is shaped by social forces like labeling, strain due to unequal access to goals, and cultural transmission of norms from one generation to the next. Conflict theory views social control as a mechanism for powerful classes to maintain their power and property over subordinate classes.

1. Social Control

2. Social Control consists of the
methods and means that
regulate behavior within
society

3. The functionalists,
interactionists and the conflict
theoretical viewpoints:

4. Functionalists see social
control as an indispensable
requirement for survival.

5. What would it be like if nobody
obeyed rules? What would
society be like?
What would this school be
like?

6. So how far do we go?

8. London. Yes, now.

9. London’s Underground
(subway)

10. On the other hand, the conflict
theorists see social control as
operating in favor of powerful
groups and to be a
disadvantage to others.

12. And the latest.

13. OWS at UC Davis peaceful protest, 2012

14. Who makes the rules now?
Who makes the laws? Do
property laws benefit
everyone or only property
owners?
Example: Public/private
beaches.

16. Are any social arrangements
neutral?
Laws? rules?

17. Three main types of
Social Control
processes:

18. • Internalized norms
• Structure of the social
experience
• Formal and informal
sanctions

19. The process of
“Internalization”

20. The Process:
• Learn what the norms are.
• Learning to believe that the
norms are legitimate.
• Are all of our norms
legitimate?

21. The structure of social
experience:
• It is a parochial experience
• We are locked within the social
environment provided by our
culture

22. Formal and Informal
Sanctions:

23. What are some typical formal
sanctions?
What are some typical
informal sanctions?

24. Formal Sanctions:
• Reactions to official agents of social
control
• Police; courts; psychiatrists; businesses
with rewards and threat of firing; school
administrations

25. Informal Sanctions:
• Occur among small groups or friends
• Unofficial pressures to conform
• Being late for class might get a scowl
• We shrug our shoulders
• We look askance
• We make a dry comment

26. Sanctions:

27. Some theories on Deviance
• Biological and Physiological
Perspectives at the dawn of the 20th
Century
• Becker’s Labeling Perspective
• Merton’s theory of Structural Strain
• Cultural Transmission
• Conflict Theory

28. Cesare Lombroso 1835-1909
and his theory of deviance

29. Atavistic Stigmata: truncated
evolution or the throwback

30. Negative Evolution

31. Lombroso facial features

32. All this is called Biological
Determinism (now debunked)

33. Labeling Perspective

34. Howard Becker

35. According to Becker, deviance
is the creation of social groups
and not the quality of some
act or behavior.
(A socially constructed
process.)

36. Deviance is culturally relative. Consider
the Etoro as described in Hughes and
Kroehler (2007) and their bizarre sexual
practices. This is “normal” for the Etoro
while extremely deviant in our culture.

37. Studying the act of the
individual is unimportant
because deviance is simply
rule breaking behavior that is
labeled deviant by persons in
positions of power.

38. The rule breaking behavior is
constant, the labeling of the
behavior varies.
Write or think about this: how
does it affect the way we
normally see deviance (crime)
in society?

39. • The interaction between who makes
and enforces the rules and those who
break them.
• There is a cultural relativity to deviance
• Some acts, like violence, however, are
generally agreed upon as socially
deviant.

40. Again, who makes the rules?

41. What does the term “Moral
Entrepreneurs” make you
think about?

42. Some “Moral Entrepreneurs”
• MADD
• Religious organizations
• Greenpeace
• Operation Rescue
• Prohibition (1920-1933)

43. Four Traditional Views of
Deviance According to Becker
• Statistical
• Pathological
• The Question of Social Stability
(Functionalism and politics)
• The Failure to Observe Group Rules

44. Edwin Lemert 1912-1996
Noted for social control
theories that emphasized the
influence of social forces.

45. Primary and Secondary
Deviance

46. Primary deviance is the initial
incidence of an act causing an
authority figure to label the actor
deviant. It usually goes
unnoticed.
Think of some deviant acts you,
or we, commit and get away
with.

47. • Exceed the speed limit
• Experiment with drugs
• Cheat on a homework assignment
• Swim in the nude
• Become intoxicated
• Commit vandalism in celebration of a
football victory
• Trespass on private property

48. But if the label sticks and if the
labeled deviant reacts to this
process by accepting the
deviant label, and further
entrenches his/herself in
deviant behavior, this is
referred to as secondary
deviance.

49. Secondary deviance is an
internalization process. One is
first labeled and then the
concept of being a deviant is
internalized.

50. The internalization process is
one in which individuals
incorporate within themselves
the standards of behavior of
the larger society.
Hughes and Kroehler, 2007

51. Labels don’t have to relate to
criminal deviance. They can
relate to other realms of
society as well.
Think of some.

52. Tracking (within school
effects)
• The process of categorizing students into
groups by IQ and achievement scores.
• The intent is to better facilitate them into higher
achievement.
• The result is labeling and self-fulfilled prophesy.
• Consider the Rosenthal and Jacobson study
• Consider the Jennie Oakes study.
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52

53. Mental Illness
What do you think? I’ll give
you more in the next slide.

54. There is a stigmatization to
being labeled “mentally ill.”
Being so labeled can (and
does) alter self perceptions.

55. Master Status
There are labels that we either have
ascribed to us or we achieve in society.
We have many labels of status, called
the status set. (Student, teacher, father,
daughter, employee, etc.)
One, however, stands out above the rest.
It can be positive or negative. Think up
some examples of what might constitute
a master status.

56. Robert K. Merton 1910-2003
Structural Strain Theory

57. Based on Durkheim’s theory
of Anomie

58. Emile Durkheim, 1858-1917

59. Briefly, anomie is the
condition one experiences
when there is a breakdown
of social norms; that is, a
condition where norms no
longer control the activities of
members in society.

60. Changing conditions as well as
adjustment to life leads to
dissatisfaction, conflict, and
deviance. He observed that social
periods of disruption (economic
depression, for instance) brought
about greater anomie and higher
rates of crime, suicide, and
deviance.
(Hewett Sociology, UK)

61. The collective conscience is
the totality of beliefs and
sentiments common to the
average members of a
society. An act is criminal
when it offends the collective
conscience. (DOL)

62. It is actually public opinion and
opposition which constitutes
the crime. An act offends the
common consciousness not
because it is criminal, but it is
criminal because it offends
that consciousness.
A crime is a crime because we
condemn it.

63. Does this sound a little like
Labeling Perspective?

64. Durkheim found that crime
serves a function in the social
system.

65. Punishment publicly
demonstrates that the
sentiments of the collectivity
are still unchanged … and the
crime inflicted on society is
made good. In fact, the
primary intent of punishment
is to affect honest people.

66. “Consider the Perp
Walk”

67. Lee Harvey Oswald

68. Bernie Madoff

69. Bear Sterns Employee

70. Bear Sterns Employee

71. Kenneth Lay of Enron Scandal

72. Jeffrey Skilling of Enron Scandal

73. Martha Stewart

74. Durkheim suggests that the
social system needs the criminal
for three reasons:
• First, factors such as biological heredity,
or the physical milieu in which the
individual lives, or relative strength of
different social influences make it
inevitable that some of these
differences should be of a criminal type.

75. • Secondly, any society in which the
norms were rigorously followed without
exception would be doomed in the long
run, for the social organism must be
capable of change. Space must be left
for individuals and groups to innovate.

76. • Third, Crime is the price that the system
pays in order to have the benefits of
innovation. Crime is the social
equivalent to the biological phenomena
of pain; it is necessary, but it is also
detestable.

77. The criminal offers the social
system the opportunity of
reactivating norms, or
reinforcing them through the
public staging of the ignominy
of those who refuse to obey
them.

78. So Durkheim saw crime as
functional, if disdainful, in
society. Merton on the other
hand sees our values in
conflict with our reality.

79. For Merton, in a society that
so highly values material
wealth, we must ask: what are
the traditional means to that
wealth?

80. Does everyone have the same
access to those means?

81. Only when a society extols
common symbols of success for
the entire population, while
structurally restricting the access
of large numbers of people to the
approved means for acquiring
these symbols, is antisocial
behavior generated.
(Hughes and

82. It is argued “that the strain toward
deviance, particularly crime, is stronger
when the economy is the dominant
institution in society and when social
status is primarily dependent on
performance in economic roles. Crime
rates are particularly high in societies
where people are completely dependent
on the labor market for resources
necessary for survival…”
(Messner and Rosenfeld in Hughes, 2007:146)

83. Merton’s five responses to the ends-
means dilemma:
• Conformity
• Innovation
• Ritualism
• Retreatism
• Rebellion

84. Conformity accepts both the
goals and their cultural holds
as desirable and the socially
approved means of pursuing
those goals.

85. Innovators are determined to
achieve conventional goals
but are willing to use
unconventional means of
doing so (cheat, bribe, steal,
etc.)

86. Ritualists are the opposite of
innovators. They are
compulsive about following
the rules to the point where
the means become an end in
themselves and original goals
are forgotten.

87. Rebels reject both the values
and the norms of their society.
They substitute new goals and
means. This could be radical
movements to the extreme
right or left such as militia
movements or radical
socialists.

88. Retreatists have given up on
both the means and the goals.
They are societies dropouts.
They could be homeless, drug
addicts, alcoholics, and the
like. (Question: is retreat
necessarily a choice or an
effect?)

89. Modes of
Adapting
Accepts
Culturally
Approved Goals
Accepts
Culturally
Approved Means
Conformist Yes Yes
Innovator Yes No
Ritualist No Yes
Retreatist No No
Rebel Creates new goals Creates new means
Merton’s Typology of Adaptation to
Anomie

90. Do you know anyone who
fits Merton’s typology
perfectly? Where do you
fit?

91. Cultural Transmisson Theory
• Beginning with Gabriel Tarde in the
nineteenth century he concluded that
imitation explains deviance. He thought
that there was a “group mind.”
• Criminals (like good people) imitate
those around them.

92. Cultural Transmisson Theory
Later expanded by another nineteenth
century thinker named Gustave Le Bon
the group mind applied to the
masses, i.e. crowd
psychology.

93. • The cultural transmission perspective
was further developed in part from the
research of a group of sociologists at
the University of Chicago (Herbert
Blumer).
• They concluded that deviance is
culturally passed from one generation to
the next.
• As new groups enter an already deviant
orientated neighborhood, the juveniles
learn social deviance.

94. Differential Association
Theory
What does the term say to
you?

95. Edwin Sutherland, 1883-
1950

96. Sutherland states that if the
situations favorable to
deviance outweigh the
situations unfavorable to
deviance learned in other
situations, deviance is likely
to occur.

97. Being exposed to more pro-
criminal than anticriminal
norms and values is the
process of “differential
association.”

98. We learn from our peers
and intimate others. Our
friends. It is the “interaction”
between ourselves and
others that creates the
learning of values.
Do we learn deviance as
well?

99. Sutherland says yes. Built
on the interactionist
perspective people learn
not only how to be deviant
but learn attitudes favorable
to deviance.

100. How can or do we apply
Sutherland’s theory of
“differential association?”

101. How about parents moving
to a “better” neighborhood?
What do parole officers
suggest about parolees
affiliations?

102. On the other hand, what
are the lessons learned in
prison?
This is still cultural
transmission isn’t it?

103. Note that most incarcerated
juvenile delinquents, and
about a third of adult offenders
have immediate family
members who also have been
in jail or prison.

104. So what holds us together in
the first place?

105. Travis Hirschi and the
Social Bond

106. • Attachment
• Involvement
• Commitment
• Belief

107. Attachment:
The process of being involved in social
relationships with others. “Control is
more likely where the psychological and
emotional connections among group
members are high and members care
about one another’s opinions.”
(Shoemaker in Hughes and Kroehler)

108. Involvement is the process of being
involved in social relationships with
others. One way to keep people from
being deviant is to get them to spend
their time conforming. I.e. Boy Scouts,
Girl Scouts, church fellowships, school
programs, etc.
(Hughes and Kroehler)

109. Commitment refers to the strength of
the investment people have made in
conventional social ties and
relationships. Those who have strong
commitments in their social lives are not
likely to deviate because of the losses
they may incur if they are identified as
deviant.

110. Belief is a bond by way of conventional
values and ideas about morality. The
less people believe in the conventional
values of society, the more likely it is
that deviance will occur.
(ibid.)

111. Conflict Theory

112. Conflict theory has its origins
in Karl Marx

113. According to orthodox
Marxism, a capitalist ruling
class exploits and robs the
masses, yet avoids
punishment for its crimes.
Is “crimes” too strong a word?

114. What about corporate price fixing
(US drug prices) and corporate
pollution? What about robbing
pension plans?
Are these crimes?
Note that corporate crime costs
the US economy over 200 billion
dollars a year. That is more than
street crime.

115. To get conflict theory you
have to think in terms of class.
Randall Collins explains:

116. 1. Historically, particular forms
of property (slaves, feudal
landholding, capital) are
upheld by the coercive power
of the state; hence classes
formed by property divisions
(slaves and slave-owners,
serfs and lords, capitalists
and workers) are the
opposing agents in the
struggle for political power …

117. • Slave
owners
• Lords
• Capitalists
• Slaves
• Serfs
• Today’s
workers
Each Group is in a struggle for Power

118. Who owns most of the property in
our society?

119. The top 20 percent of households
in wealth own more than 80
percent of all wealth.

120. 1. Nearly 94 percent of wealth in
America is owned by 40 percent
of households. That leaves only 6
percent of America’s wealth for
the remaining 60 percent of
households.

121. 2. Material contributions
determine the extent to which
social classes can organize
effectively to fight for their
interests; such conditions of
mobilization are a set of
intervening variables between
class and political power.
[The more wealth you have
the more political power you
have.]

122. 3. Other material conditions –
the means of mental
production – determine which
interests will be able to
articulate their ideas and
hence to dominate the
ideological realm.

123. Addendum:

124. Anonymous

125. Anonymous

126. Euro Pirate Party