Agents Of Social Control Research Articles

Social control and strenuous exercise among late adolescent college students: Parents versus peers as influence agents

In the context of a model of health-related social control, we compared the associations among social control strategies, affective and behavioral reactions, and exercise for parental and peer influence agents. Late adolescent college students (n = 227) completed questionnaires that focused on social control from a parent or a peer who attempted to increase their exercising. Results from this cross-sectional study revealed that most relationships in the model were similar for parent and peer influence agents, however, (a) negative social control was a stronger predictor of reactance among parents than peers; (b) positive affect was a stronger predictor of attempts to change among peers than parents; and (c) positive affect predicted frequency of strenuous exercise only among parents. Decreasing parents' use of negative social control strategies and increasing adolescents' positive affective reactions to parental social control agents may be keys to promoting positive lifestyle changes in late adolescence.

Routledge handbook on the global history of nursing

Routledge Handbook on the Global History of Nursing Edited by Patricia D'Antonio, Julie A. Fairman, and Jean C. Whelan (Oxon, United Kingdom: Routledge, 2013) (265 pages, $225.00 hardcover)The Routledge Handbook on the Global History of Nursing confirms the power of the history of nursing to illuminate global issues. It establishes that accounts of nursing can and do provide a critical lens with which to analyze a broad range of issues. In their introduction, Patricia D'Antonio, Julie Fairman, and Jean Whelan affirm the unique and fruitful ways in which these studies reveal previously unrecognized historical connections and impulses and complicate previously accepted historical relationships. The 14 substantial chapters that follow, stretching across time and place and using various methodologies, document that examining the lives of nurses can help us more credibly interpret our past, or, stated another way, that if we omit the experiences of nurses, we are leftwith a limited view of historical processes.A short review can only highlight some of the major points. For example, Kara Dixon Vuic's chapter on wartime nursing draws on the work of numerous authors who have closely studied the experiences of nurses. She concludes that such research invite[s] broader question about the ways nursing has functioned as a powerful agent in cultural extensions of national power, and even as an agent of social and political control (p. 28). Thomas Lawrence Long presents a cogent description of cultural studies and then applies the insights of cultural studies to representations of nursing in fiction, touching on 19th-century publications; highlighting 20th-century publications, films, and television (primarily from the United States); and explaining the relative small number of nurse writers. J. Margo Brooks Carthon and Katherine Abbott describe social network analysis and apply it to the history of Philadelphia's Starr Centre, showing how this increasingly popular technique uncovers crucial connections and relationships that shape health care institutions.Other essays are more focused. Christine E. Hallett's close study of The British Journal of Nursing teases out the ways in which Britain's nursing elite created a scientific knowledge base as a tactic to develop professionally. Dianne Dodd examines memorials to World War I nurses, describing how such cultural artifacts reflect both history and the perspectives of the viewers over time. The four chapters by Winifred Connerton, Jonathan Cole, Helen Sweet, and Rosemary Wall and Anne Marie Rafferty study nurses involved in various facets of colonialization and imperialism, providing material with which we can build comparative studies around the world and over time. …

From surveillant text to surveilling device: The face in urban transit spaces

This paper considers the power, the significance and the operation of the human face as it transitions from being a mere object for defining dispositions to an agency for transmitting control in contemporary transit spaces. Seen as the most idiosyncratic surface of the body, the face has become a critical object for the measurement of truthfulness in recent years. CCTV and facial recognition technologies have increasingly been deployed in various transit spaces such as airports and railway stations to scan, detect and recognise particular facial characteristics of the target face so as to identify risky situations and intervene before they become hazardous events. However, this paper shows that in addition to these techniques of control-at-a-distance, the face is becoming an important site for a different technique of control as well. Specifically, the face is becoming a key site for circulating a particular range of affects to modulate individuals and to maintain security in transit space. A growing number of transport operators are now supplementing ‘detached’ infrastructures such as CCTV and security personnel, with more ‘affective’ infrastructures of social control such as friendly smiling platform staff and welcoming station concierges at information desks. By taking a closer look at one Japanese railway operator, Keikyu Corporation, and its implementation of the ‘Smile Scan technology’, this paper investigates how the face of the passenger is modulated, made receptive and thus turned into an agent of social control in urban transit spaces.

The 1980 Hague Convention: The Need for an Advocacy Response to Protect Children in the Context of International Parental Child Abduction

This paper will focus on the practice of social work within the context of an international Hague Convention concerning children: the 1980 Hague Convention on The Civil Aspects of International Parental Child Abduction. After describing the programmes of International Social Service (ISS) Australia, this organisation's existing approaches to working with families affected by international parental child abduction will be specifically discussed as an example of practice within the context of that Convention. The paper highlights the benefits of social work practice and mediation-based services for families. Dilemmas of practice within a legal framework will then be considered, with particular reference to the trap of uncritical implementation of social work practice as a social control agent of the judicial system. Potential social work contributions in the area of analysis and critique through the perspectives offered by gendered analysis, human rights and children's rights, and the tradition of advocacy as an integral sphere of practice will be discussed, with the paper arguing that for social work to best meet the needs of children affected by this legislation, it must perform its vital functions of social and political critique, and individual and systemic advocacy.

Sociology of Law: How It Can Be Implemented to Control the Violence and Crime among Youth in Pakistan

Sociology of law controls the behavior, attitudes, and the actions of the individuals to balance their social situation. Each society is controlled by the agents of social control like family, neighborhood, religion, education, law, administration, force, and public opinion.In Pakistan, money, land, sexual assault, illiteracy, honor killing, old enmity, and drug are the main factors causing juvenile delinquency. Pakistan has more potential to control crime and violence by the implementation of informal and formal social control.In this modern world media which is considered as the fourth pillar of the state, the big tool of controlling the agents of informal social control like family, religion, public opinion etc.Formal social control agents is carried out by state, such as police officers, judges, school administrative law, control of deviance through civil commitment and criminal law, employers, military officers, and non-political control agencies, like NGOs.Pakistani families are mostly illiterate, they don’t know what should do and what we should not do. They don’t know what socialization is? Mostly criminals are the product of poverty, wrong socialization of family and the negative environmental circumstances.To control poverty, Human resource management should make effective and fair and the distribution of wealth should be equal, if we want equality we will have to follow the Islamic principles of economics.

On the inside: prison ethnography around the globe

Situate yourselves as close as you can to the perpetrators of crime and deviance, to the victims, to the agents of social control; put yourselves, as best you can and for as long as you can, inside their lives, inside the lived moments of deviance and crime. You won't experience it nicely, and if the danger and hurt become too much, be glad of it. Because as near as you will ever get, you have found your way inside the humanity of crime and deviance.

Church, school and locality: Revisiting the historiography of “state” and “religious” educational infrastructures in England and Wales, 1780–1870

The historiographical tradition which developed within the history of education from the 1970s regarded religious organisations as distractions from the “real” task of developing state-funded universal compulsory education. Despite more positive evaluations of voluntary agencies within the history of social policy, since the 1980s, the schools affiliated to the national co-ordinating religious societies are still regarded as potential agents of social control, inadequate in numerical terms, with poor standards, dull curricula and brutal discipline. This article seeks to redress the balance of this historiography by means of a case-study of part of the London hinterland. It will show how voluntary schools attached to national and international “modern” co-ordinating bodies might provide sufficient school places, a curriculum which was structured, with results evaluated positively by inspectors, and could operate systems of rewards rather than corporal punishment. Comparisons with the period after school boards were founded indicates that attendance rates stayed about the same, that the curriculum initially narrowed in one area, and that corporal punishment increased. While these factors were due partly to population increase, the evidence nevertheless demonstrates how voluntary schools could provide adequately, even well, for local populations, and that rate-aided school provision might have negative consequences.

The Feminization of Control: Female Militia and Social Order in Iran

Abstract The purpose of this article is to analyze the evolution of the Women’s Basij Organization and its role in maintaining social order in Iran. This paper examines how and why the Islamic republic of Iran (IRI) uses female Basij members as agents of social control. During the past three decades, the IRI has recruited and indoctrinated a group of Iranian women through the Women’s Basij Organization, and has used these women to guard Islamic values and manners in Iranian society. In this way, female Basijis have been crucial to the Islamic Republic’s strategy to penetrate Iranian families and institutionalize social and political order in post-revolutionary Iran.

Do Thugs Sell? An Investigation of the Relationship between Deviance and Stakeholder Response

Although there have been many cases in the popular press detailing the deviant actions of celebrities, athletes, and corporations, theoretically, little is known about the relationship between an individual’s deviant actions and the response from key stakeholders that support that individual. On the one hand, the concept of deviance or misconduct is fuzzy (Vaughan, 1999). Similarly, it is not so straightforward that key stakeholders will always sanction an actor that is deviant (Bensman & Gerver, 1963). Drawing upon an empirical analysis of the relationship between misconduct by professional football players, and the influence that this has on attendance at football games, we examine the relationship between deviance and stakeholder response. Additional, we build upon Greve, Palmer and Pozner (2010) theoretical insights on social-control agents to examine if the relationship between deviance and stakeholder response is moderated by a change in social-control agents. Our study speaks to the renewed interest in stakeholders (Barnett, 2012) and the link between deviant actions and organizational outcomes Greve, Palmer and Pozner (2010).

Organizational Wrongdoing: Conceptual and Empirical Advances

Organizational misconduct (or wrongdoing) is pervasive in modern organizations and adversely affects individuals, groups, organizations, fields, and societies. This symposium builds on a rich stream of research on organizational wrongdoing by providing insight into new conceptual and empirical advances. The three papers pursue areas for future research that were proposed in a recent authoritative review of organizational wrongdoing: the relationship between individual- versus organization-level variation on misconduct or wrongdoing; the role of social networks in the pursuit of wrongdoing; and the important but often overlooked role of social-control agents and labeling in organizational wrongdoing. The authors elaborate conceptual frameworks from organization and management theory and employ a range of methods to examine wrongdoing in novel contexts. Their results have important and timely implications for research, practice, and policy. The discussant will draw on insights from his extensive research program to explore these perspectives and will conclude by facilitating an interactive question-and-answer session. Bad Apples or Bad Barrels? Individual and Organizational Heterogeneity in Professional Wrongdoing Presenter: Pooria Assadi; Simon Fraser U. Presenter: Andrew von Nordenflycht; Simon Fraser U. Using Network Analysis to Understand Economic Wrongdoing Presenter: Donald A Palmer; U. of California, Davis Wrongdoing and Wall Street: A Critical Perspective on the Boundary of Organizational Misconduct Presenter: Christopher Eaton; U. of Calgary Presenter: Laurie Milton; U. of Calgary

Benevolent ladies and irrepressible busybodies: contesting the bounds of ‘genuine’ philanthropy

Female philanthropy in the nineteenth century presents as a site for the contestation and reinscription of hierarchical hegemonic ideological constructs of gender and class. Female philanthropists were complexly and contradictorily positioned as both agents of social control while simultaneously being subjected to socially determined notions of respectable womanhood and genteel femininity. Dominant discourses prescribed that relationships between the providers and receivers of assistance be circumscribed by difference, deference and distance. These boundaries were challenged by social reformers who sought to address and eliminate the causes of poverty rather than provide palliative charity. This article explores the tensions that arose in the Auckland and Melbourne philanthropic communities in the early to mid-1870s when women's rights advocate Mary Ann Colclough proposed a number of schemes to provide for women in need. Dubbed by the periodical press as an ‘irrepressible busybody’ and a member of the ‘shrieking sisterhood’, her actions challenged accepted notions of who was deserving of assistance, the nature of appropriate assistance, and who was entitled to provide that assistance. This is clearly evident in the newspaper debates her actions engendered, debates that essentially sought to delineate and reinscribe the bounds of ‘genuine’ philanthropy.

X-ray scanning, wiretaps, and other searches: examining college students’ perceptions of the reasonableness and intrusiveness of homeland security searches

This paper presents the results of a survey that asked 1084 undergraduates from nine colleges across the northeastern USA to evaluate the intrusiveness and reasonableness of searches conducted by police and other agents of social control. Five versions of the survey tool, a self-administered questionnaire, were created. Each of the five versions varied the target/nature of the search, and participants received only one version of the survey. The five variations varied scenarios with the participant as the target of the search, with another unspecified person as the target, and with search specifically directed towards drugs, crimes against children, and homeland security. The current analysis focused on a subset of the sample addressing perceptions of 17 search scenarios targeting homeland security, immigration control, and border security. Participants’ attitudes towards homeland security searches were also compared to similar searches directed against oneself to provide insights into whether participants rate searches directed against themselves as more intrusive than searches conducted for homeland security purposes.

The Risk That DSM-5 Will Affect the Way We See Ourselves

Because illness is a social construction, doctors are inescapably agents of social control, and diagnoses are inescapably a means to exercise power. Psychiatric diagnoses therefore shape identity according to whatever ideology provides the definition of mental health and illness, and they do so with the authority of science. This function of diagnosis is ambivalent. A disease label can be a ticket to social resources, but it can also be a means of oppression, leading people to attribute external ills to internal problems such as "chemical imbalances." A DSM that acknowledges its shaky scientific foundation can minimize the harm of the latter, but only at the expense of its power to provide the former. Keywords: Psychiatric nosology, Antipsychiatry, DSM-5, Mental illness, Social construction, Personal identity, Asperger's disorder, Reification, Deviancy, Thomas Szasz, Peter Sedgwick

A discourse and practice gap in working with youth-at-disadvantage in the outreach social work service in Hong Kong

Abstract In this study, the discourses of outreach youth workers reveal that the majority of them are quite conscious of how broader social, contextual and familial changes impact the problem behavior of young people in Hong Kong. Moreover, many of them prefer not to be strict social control agents who harshly regulate the behavior of young people, as expected by society. Ideally, these workers can be a force for social change when they are highly conscious of social impacts on the situations of young people and do not prefer to be strict social control agents. In their everyday practices, however, the ways by which they select and assemble their work are political and complicated. Their discourses are usually subjugated in the complex relations of power at work between the policy demands on the work focus and to the output standards of the service, on the one hand, and the orientations of the agencies, on the other. As a result, what they do remains at the personal and remedial level in regulating the problem behavior of young people. Although none among them has denied the importance of including both micro and macro levels of intervention in the service, a discourse and practice gap does exist in their everyday practices.

The rhetoric of therapy in forensic psychiatric nursing

The objective of this paper is to present the results obtained from a qualitative research study conducted in a forensic psychiatric setting and to explore the dual role associated with being both "agents of care and agents of social control." Following the narratives provided by nurses working in this field, the analysis that follows will problematize the rhetoric of therapy in forensic psychiatric nursing. In order to support the analysis, this article comprises four sections. The first section will briefly review the study's methodological considerations. Using a combination of Foucault and Goffman's work, the second section provides an empirical contextualization of correctional environments and their effects on nursing care. The third section explains the effects of having a contradictory mandate of care and custody from Festinger's (1957) theory of cognitive dissonance. Lastly, the fourth section provides a critique of disciplinary interventions in forensic psychiatric nursing, as it is explained by the participants.

Radicalism within the Context of Social Movements: Processes and Types

Drawing on work within the study of social movements and on conversion processes that is relevant to understanding radicalization, as well as on our own relevant research experiences and findings, especially on radicalism in right-wing and left-wing movements, we focus attention on the elements and dynamics of social movements, both intra-movement and extra-movement, that facilitate the grassroots development and maintenance of radical identities and enhance or diminish the prospect of engagement in radical action. In particular, we note the importance of free spaces to associate apart from the reach of control agents and adversaries,the development of affinity groups and a security culture within which associational trust might develop, and the role of perceptions of the prospect of persecution by social control agents as working together to contribute to the development of radicalization. However, we emphasize that there is no single pathway to radicalization, or type of radical, but that different types, and thus pathways, result from the different ways in which the contributing factors can interact and combine.

How pressure is applied in shared decisions about antipsychotic medication: a conversation analytic study of psychiatric outpatient consultations

The professional identity of psychiatry depends on it being regarded as one amongst many medical specialties and sharing ideals of good practice with other specialties, an important marker of which is the achievement of shared decision-making and avoiding a reputation for being purely agents of social control. Yet the interactions involved in trying to achieve shared decision-making are relatively unexplored in psychiatry. This study analyses audiotapes of 92 outpatient consultations involving nine consultant psychiatrists focusing on how pressure is applied in shared decisions about antipsychotic medication. Detailed conversation analysis reveals that some shared decisions are considerably more pressured than others. At one end of a spectrum of pressure are pressured shared decisions, characterised by an escalating cycle of pressure and resistance from which it is difficult to exit without someone losing face. In the middle are directed decisions, where the patient cooperates with being diplomatically steered by the psychiatrist. At the other extreme are open decisions where the patient is allowed to decide, with the psychiatrist exerting little or no pressure. Directed and open decisions occurred most frequently; pressured decisions were rarer. Patient risk did not appear to influence the degree of pressure applied in these outpatient consultations.

Prison Violence, Gender, and Perceptions: Testing a Missing Link in Discretion Research

Criminal justice literature often suggests female social control agents (e.g., police, prison staff, and others) use force less often than male colleagues facing similar situations. Most explain this with reference to personal or social factors which are gendered, arguing role-pressures or differences in skill sets between men and women lead to different reactions by agents. However, part of the story may also be about assessment rather than reaction—men and women may diverge in how they recognize and interpret cues in some (particularly minor) violence situations. Testing this, survey data was drawn from a random sample of 2,077 staff working in all 112 Federal Prisons operating in 2005. By estimating fixed effects models (grouped on prison), as well as controlling for correlates of exposure within a given prison, male and female staff were compared with respect to their assessment of statistically similar violence events. The data showed that women assessed fewer minor assault events to have occurred than their male colleagues, yet the same number of serious violence events. This supports the argument that perceptions may play an important role in explaining gender differences in the use of discretion.

Ethical issues in forensic psychiatry in penal and other correctional facilities

Forensic mental health practitioners, especially psychiatrists working in jails, prisons or other correctional facilities, face special problems that are unlike others encountered in bioethics. Literature published during the past year shows that the forensic psychiatrist has to adhere to role clarity: as a physician, he is primarily obligated to the treatment and well being of the incarcerated patients and is not exclusively an agent of social control. Moreover, the general conditions in a therapeutic setting (e.g. dealing with medical confidentiality) have to be clear and transparent to the patients. Different ethical models building a fitting framework for forensic practice are used. Forensic psychiatric practice in penal and other correctional facilities poses particular ethical dilemmas. There is a great need for international humanitarian law, which serves both to protect vulnerable prisoners and to shield health professionals who treat prisoners with respect and dignity from abuse or penalty. It must be a common objective to find the right balance between protection from exploitation and access to research beneficial to prisoners.

Resistance and survival: children's narrative from Central America and the Caribbean

In her analysis of some of the most interesting and important children's literature from Central America and the Caribbean, Ann Gonzalez uses postcolonial narrative theory to expose and decode what marginalized peoples say when they tell stories to their children, nd how the interpretations children give these stories today differ from the ways they have read them in the past. Gonzalez reads against the grain, deconstructing and critiquing dominant discourses to reveal consistent narrative patterns throughout the region that have helped children maneuver in a world dominated by powerful figuresfrom parents to agents of social control, political repression, and global takeover. Many of these stories are in some way lessons in resistance and survival in a world where the toughest kid on the block,? often an outsider, demands that a group of children play or pay,? on his terms. Gonzalez demonstrates that where traditional strategies have proposed the model of the trickster? or the paradoxically astute fool, to mock the pretensions of the would-be oppressor, new trends indicate that the region's children, nd those who write for them'show increasing interest in playing the game on their own terms, getting to know the Other, embracing difference, and redefining their identity and role within the new global culture. Resistance and Survival emphasizes the hope underlying this contemporary children's literature for a world in which all voices can be heard and valued the hope of an authentic happy ending.