Suchergebnisse

Before the 1930s, social control most often performed the task of linking empirical sociological analysis to values & philosophies of progress. E. A. Ross's book, Social Control (1969), is taken as a watershed in this transition; it linked the concept of pragmatic, nonviolent ends. Through the work of Robert Park (1921), it is shown that the concept became linked to the Rooseveltian, social democratic political project. In the 1930s, though it remained a tool for analyzing the combination of forces that make societies into wholes, its meaning was narrowed to refer to processes of producing conformity through socialization or repression. Analyses of the colonial experience in the post-WWII years stressed the relation of social control to manipulation, oppression, & deviance. This view of social control engendered a number of radical critiques of the term, many of which followed the example of C. Wright Mills (1956). It is demonstrated that, by the 1980s, the concept became associated wholly with social domination, authoritarian power, & ideological bias, & thus lost its usefulness as an analytic concept. D. M. Smith

Argues that, far from being a neutral academic concept, the term social control is best understood as intimately linked to the social democratic political movement in the US; if it is to be useful for analyzing contemporary society, it must be reworked before it can rise above its historical specificity. The political project out of which the term arose is described as one that entailed reflexive communication, democratic discourse, & participation, & implied the perpetuation of capitalism, the power of the state, & the ubiquity of heterogeneity. Although critiques of the term beginning in the late 1960s were right to focus on its lack of historical specificity, its tendency to be centralized in the state, & the implications of this fact for minority groups, they are criticized for reducing the term to its crudest features. A notion of social control that recovers the richness of its original meaning is favored so as to recover the power of self-regulation that was lost at the hands of these radical critiques. D. M. Smith