Social Control And Deviance

9 Pages 2298 Words

Social Control
Industrialized societies are made up of many competing groups, each with its own history of problems and with its own solutions. Each group also claims a unique identity, a way of life that distinguishes it from other groups in the same society, and its members share these ideas about the way the world is and ought to be. Each group has also developed norms that support its orientations to life. These norms, along with both formal and informal means of enforcing them, constitute a system of social control. Thus, because they participate in the same general culture, the groups in a pluralistic society agree on many things; yet due to their particular histories, they may differ sharply on many others - to the extent that what one group may consider right, another may consider wrong.

Up to this point in analysis, functionalists and conflict theorists are in basic agreement about social control. But now they diverge.

Functionalism and Social Control
Functionalists stress how the various segments of the population in a pluralistic society coexist. As each enforces its own norms on its members, the group can attain a more or less balanced state. Although tensions between them may appear from time to time, the balancing of these tensions produces the whole that we call society. If a group threatens to upset the equilibrium, efforts are made to restore balance. For example, in a pluralistic society, the central government often plays a mediating role between groups. In the United States, the executive, legislative and judicial branches of the government mediate the demands of the various groups that make up society, preventing groups from taking political control (Riesman, 129 -133). This view that society is made up of many competing groups, whose interests manage to become balanced, is broadly representative of the pluralistic theory of social control.

Conflict Theory and Social Control
Conflict theorists...