Social Control in Worksettings: Using the Constructive Confrontation Strategy with Problem-Drinking Employees

Abstract

The article describes two concepts relative to the relationship between social controls and deviant behavior: control-managed and control-produced concepts. It uses both to describe a job-based strategy for intervening in problem-drinking behavior: constructive confrontation. Declining job performance that accompanies alcohol abuse is used as a basis for supervisors' confronting employees about deficiencies in performance and constructively offering alternate courses of behavior, emotional support, and practical assistance designed to help them toward rehabilitation. Article traces the development of the strategy, its relationship to social controls that manage drinking behavior in other cultures, and how it represents similar ways to intervene in pluralistic American society. Here, work settings generate formal expectations of performance combined with informal group pressures to define the lower limits of acceptable behavior. Workplaces are also mechanisms for preventing the progression of deviant drinking by helping to keep employees in nondeviant groups, thereby avoiding the deviant process. Various evaluations of the strategy suggest remarkably favorable outcomes. Article concludes that the strategy represents an application of a social learning paradigm that is currently coming into prominence in the behavorial sciences. Current Employee Assistance Programs have grown from the strategy. They have, however, failed to clearly adopt it, and often have tended to ignore it. In addition, the occupational make up of the movement has generated a cooptation trend that could weaken the strategy, even mark its demise, if current trends continue. We wish to gratefully acknowledge the helpful comments of Professor Paul Roman, and the financial assistance of the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism and the Christopher D. Smithers Foundation.