States and Social Control

Abstract

Stanley Cohen, who made famous the expression “moral panic” in his 1980 study of the Mods and Rockers, said that “social control” is a Mickey Mouse term (1985:2). Regardless of its membership among rodentia, the term is so broad and abstract as to lend itself to Mickey Mouse usage. When Edward A. Ross introduced the term into sociology in his 1901 Social Control, he distinguished a broad and narrow usage. The broad usage roughly corresponds to society-wide institutions such as criminal justice, and the narrow usage corresponds to culturally shaped interaction: “purposive actions that define, respond to, and control deviant behavior” (Horwitz 1990:9). For Ross, the problem came down to how democratic polities could maintain orderly societies. The narrow and broad senses of the term might reflect a sociology of institutions derived from Durkheim versus a sociology of interaction acquired from Georg Simmel and George Herbert Mead. The Chicago School of Sociology of the first part of the twentieth century embodied both. In their seminal work, Park and Burgess identified social control as “the central fact and central problem of sociology,” and sociology as the “method for investigating the processes by which individuals are inducted to and induced to co-operate in some sort of permanent corporate existence we call society” (Park and Burgess 1924:42).