SOCIAL ORDER AND CONTROL Order and predictability are

SOCIAL ORDER AND CONTROL Order and predictability are important if society is to exist. There must be rules and regulations that guide human behaviour if people are to engage in any form of social life. How could people cooperate in any joint venture if they lacked a common understanding of how they are expected to behave and what they aim to achieve?

Social rules and regulations are only very general guides to action, however, and there is much scope for them to be interpreted in different ways depending on the individuals and groups involved. This can sometimes lead to conflict over how rules are to be applied and what standards of behaviour should be followed. Indeed, there are few, if any, societies that are completely orderly. Nearly all the modern industrial nations have experienced severe conflict in recent history, both with other nations and internally.

Conflict may also lead to changes in the values and beliefs that govern behaviour in a society. In the UK, for example, the suffragette movement organised demonstrations and other forms of protest as part of a campaign to win voting rights for women in the early years of the twentieth century. Though they faced considerable opposition, the suffragettes were eventually successful in their campaign and the law was changed so that enfranchised on the same basis as men. women were

SOCIAL CONTROL In order to persuade people to follow the normal ways of behaving, societies have developed two methods of ensuring conformity: informal and formal social control. The most common form of social control is informal and is based upon the socialisation process. Socialisation and social control are mixed together, so it difficult to distinguish one clearly from the other.

Informal social control refers to the mechanisms that are used to reinforce socialisation. It is based on rewards and encouragement for correct behaviour and sanctions such as ridicule, gossip and comment for incorrect behaviour. Threats of punishment in the after-life, for example, have been used in many societies over the centuries to discourage people from behaving badly.

Likewise, the promise of heaven has been put forward as a reward to encourage conformity to the moral codes that people are taught through socialisation. Informal social control may also be exercised within smallgroup settings. Tactics such as ridicule and ostracism may be used, for example, to punish people who contravene the group’s expectations about what is acceptable behaviour. They may act as a powerful deterrent to people who might otherwise reject the group’s norms and values.

In some cases, however, it can have the opposite effect. For instance, it may trigger a rebellious non-conformity by people who find the group norms too restricting and inappropriate for the way they want to live. Formal control refers to the public, legal forms of controlling the population. Certain activities are regarded as dangerous to society, by those who hold power, and are therefore forbidden. Special agencies appointed for the purposes of social control include the police, the courts and the prisons.

They catch, judge and punish anyone who breaks the law, and in the process they attempt to deter others from doing the same thing. The armed forces are also a means of formal social control, though in general they are only used as a last resort to prevent order breaking down or when it has already broken down.

SOCIAL ORDER There are different views about how social order is created. Thomas Hobbes, a seventeenth-century philosopher who was writing during and after the civil war in England, believed that humans are naturally selfish and competitive. He argued that without strictly enforced rules and order, the degree of competitiveness between people was such that they would constantly be locked in a relentless and chaotic struggle against each other.

The only way of avoiding anarchy, or what Hobbes termed ‘the war of all against all’, was through the security derived from strong government. Hobbles considered that people are rational and therefore they would accept the need for strong government in order to restrain their selfish desires and avoid chaos in society.