Social control: the enforcement of law

Abstract

Regardless of whether law is defined in a more or less restricted sense as referring to formally legislated rules or as also involving other normative orders, for law to be socially valid, it has to be accepted among a community of legal subjects (legitimacy) and it has to be enacted and administrated in a specified manner (legality). The relevance of legality was brought out most clearly by Max Weber in his definition of law. But even in the case of extra-legal systems of normativity, which Weber called custom and convention, some force of compliance must be present. A normative order, in other words, must always be accompanied by mechanisms and systems of control that secure obedience through norm enforcement. Such systems of control range from very informal responses and normative expectations, such as public disapproval or private shame, to highly formalized systems of enforcement of law by police institutions and systems of surveillance and punishment. Enforcement is a special and unavoidable problem of law. In modern sociology, the enforcement of law has been addressed primarily in the context of the sociology of social control, which, in recent years, has mostly become associated with the sociology of crime and deviance rather than the sociology of law. As this chapter will reveal, however, the concept of social control was originally more expansive in meaning than its current usage in terms of crime and/or deviance, which from the sociological viewpoint has been more intimately connected to the sociology of law.