System Of Social Control Research Articles

“They Call Us Thieves and Steal Our Wage”: Toward a Reinterpretation of the Salvadoran Rural Mobilization, 1929–1931

“They Call Us Thieves and Steal Our Wage”: Toward a Reinterpretation of the Salvadoran Rural Mobilization, 1929–1931

Against Time: Scheduling, Momentum, and Moral Order at Wartime Los Alamos

Abstract This article examines scheduling as a source of institutional momentum in the Los Alamos atomic weapons laboratory during World War Two. As well as allowing coordination of the large and geographically dispersed sites of the atomic bomb project, the scheduling regime operated as a system of social control, suppressing opposition to the use of the weapon. The analysis suggests the importance of historical and ethnographic attention to how schedules inscribe instrumental rationality in the quotidian life of modern organizations.

Shaping the future: indicators of need in the third millennium

In this paper, the issue of sustainability and sustainable development is addressed through the assumed goal of sustainable living. That goal implies that humanity consciously decides to adjust its collective behaviour in order to change present unsustainable practices towards those that reduce and eventually eliminate unsustainable impacts on the natural environment, while at the same time attempting to ensure that the reasonable needs of people are satisfied. In order to steer change from unsustainable to more sustainable practices, social control systems need to be in place, using key behavioural criteria to indicate the necessity (or otherwise) of fiscal, legal or other policies. Starting from an overall philosophy that acknowledges the reality of systemic complexity, this paper describes Max-Neef’s taxonomy of human needs, and Bossel’s more generic orientor framework for systems in general. These two, used together, enable one to evaluate the basic needs of both human, natural, economic and social systems, so that policies can be identified to address critical deficiencies.

Legislative responses to sexual violence: an overview.

In the past three decades, the legislative response to sexual violence has undergone two sets of reforms. The feminist reforms, beginning in the 1970s, sought to modify legal forms and practices to reflect new theories of the nature of sexual violence. The "regulatory" reforms of the 1990s were atheoretical, and adopted a "preventive" strategy to close perceived gaps in the system of social control. This article examines the second wave of reform, with special emphasis on Sexually Violent Predator (SVP) laws. It summarizes the current legal controversies generated by these laws, and suggests that the underlying assumptions and forms adopted by the 1990s reforms may undercut some of the advances achieved by the feminist reforms in understanding and addressing sexual violence.

The Legal Revolution in Town Politics: Oaxaca and Yucatán, 1812-1825

delictuosa de unos indios, 1813,” Archivo General del Estado de Yucatan, Merida (hereafter cited as AGEY), Colonial, Varios, vol. 1, exp. 17. Wherever possible, I have modernized the names of the towns I refer to. If there was any doubt about the identification of a town, however, I left its name as written in the documents. There were some towns that I have not been able to correlate with modern towns, either because their names have changed or because they no longer exist. A further note on terminology: I have chosen to use the word

Psychoanalyzing the Narrative Logics of Naturalism:The Call of the Wild

I/iterary naturalism and romance have recently undergone a change in their relative standing. Once considered a subfield in the domain of American literary studies, literary naturalism has been increasingly invoked to explain pervasive regulative technologies undergirding the literary and the political domains.1 The romance had been installed as the dominant genre in the field because its themes were understood to reproduce the logic of liberal individualism which predominated in the social order. The romance was valued chiefly out of its facilitation of the individual's freedom from economic determinations and its resistance to commodification. These liberatory values proved especially important to a literary sphere which at the time of the romance's rise to dominance was intent on establishing literature's relative autonomy from the domains of economics and politics. The renewal of interest in literary Naturalism has coincided with a critical re-evaluation of liberal individualism. In the wake of Foucaultian redescriptions of disciplinary society, liberal individualism, once revered as the source of the strategies whereby individuals resisted governmental incursion, has been redefined as the social fiction through which the normative order accomplished its rule. Because it constituted the basis for the economic exchanges in the marketplace as well as the political value in whose name the polity was governed, the individual's liberty has been redescribed as the basic unit of exchange in what Foucault has labeled the carcerai society.2 As a consequence of this shift in the focus of critical attention, the Naturalist text has become newly fascinating by virtue of its extravagant display of the disciplinary powers from which the romance had declared itself emancipated.3 As the historical product of economic relations that prevailed at a certain moment in American society rather than as a transhistorical political ideal, Literary Naturalism has been acclaimed the negative counterpart of the romance, able to expose liberal individualism as the effect of the very regulatory mechanisms which the literary romance had opposed. Literary Naturalists were never enraptured with liberal individualism as a political ideal, and they neither denied nor disavowed the complicitous relations between their fictions and more pervasive systems of social control.

Undressing Religion: Commitment and Conversion from a Cross-Cultural Perspective

From Islam to Confucianism to Voodoo, dress plays a pivotal role in religious expression. This book investigates how dress symbolically evidences both religious and social systems across a wide range of cultures - from Africa and South America to Asia, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Caribbean. In some of these cultures, dress is part of a system of social control. Gender issues feature prominently since the control of female sexuality is often of great importance to the world's religions. Members of each ethno-religious group actively construct their own lives, and use dress symbolically. A central tenet for many of these groups is that the soul is visually manifested on the body through dress. Drawing on rich ethnographic case studies, this wide-ranging and interdisciplinary volume represents a major contribution to the study of both religion and dress.

Social Control in Cuba

AbstractWhy has the Cuban government been so successful in its system of social control, and why might that system's effectiveness now be on the wane? This study argues that Cuba combines formal and informal systems of control that simultaneously emphasize openness and rigidity. The formal system is geared to block all antihegemonic acts, particularly those that, if left unchecked, could become symbolic acts encouraging similar behavior that the authorities deem undesirable. The system favors reactive rather than proactive approaches, as exemplified by the rapid action brigades. Noninstitutionalized collective behavior is also taking place, as is the emergence of civil society.

Accounting for Bouncers:

This paper examines the scope, structure and impact of the occupational licensing systems designed to increase the legal accountability of licensed premise security personnel — better known as `bouncers'. Much vilified for a perceived association with high levels of violence, this form of private security now dominates the systems of social control that function across the UK's burgeoning night-time economy. The assured regulation of the trade is an issue of crime prevention within the sphere of public safety. This paper considers the impact of occupational licensing, discusses its lack of coverage and haphazard implementation, and draws out some policy lessons for the soon-to-be-established Security Industry Authority. We conclude by warning that the `bouncer problem' is merely a symptom of the wider disorder related to the rapid expansion of an alcohol-fuelled night-time economy.

An Aesthetics of Crime

Cop Knowledge: Police Power and Cultural Narrative in Twentieth-Century America. By Christopher P. Wilson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. 282 pages. $42.00 (cloth). $16.00 (paper). Hard Boiled: Working-Class Readers and Pulp Magazines. By Erin A. Smith. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000. 248 pages. $64.50 (cloth). $19.95 (paper). Public Enemies, Public Heroes: Screening the Gangster from Little Caesar to Touch of Evil. By Jonathan Munby. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. 264 pages. $45.00 (cloth). $16.00 (paper). Shots in the Mirror: Crime Films and Society. By Nicole Rafter. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. 224 pages. $35.00 (cloth). $14.95 (paper). As a historian of criminology, Nicole Rafter has demonstrated that she has a strong understanding of the different approaches that criminologists have taken in thinking about the origin and prevention of crime. Creating Born Criminals, her social history of biological theories of crime in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, effectively traces the work of some of the early attempts at a scientific approach to why individuals commit crime and how we might identify those most likely to engage in criminal behavior. In her recent study, Shots in the Mirror: Crime Films and Society, Rafter extends her work into the [End Page 535] realm of interpreting film. In it she argues that all crime films implicitly make two arguments at once. While they present a social critique, they also typically offer an audience "some solace or resolution by showing a triumph over corruption and brutality" (3). Although she is quite comprehensive in her approach to film criticism, she offers a much more subtle interpretation of historical texts, events, and movements. She is literate in the varying causes to which criminologists assign the origin of criminal behavior, including psychological, biological, and environmental reasons, as well as that of rational choice. Not surprisingly, she takes a broadly inclusive approach to the genre of the crime film. She does not just write of gangster films, she also investigates cop films, courtroom films, and prison and execution films. But in all of these categories, Rafter all too easily falls into only one way of thinking about crime and punishment: as a reification of power. She writes, "A key source of crime films' enduring attraction . . . lies in the way they provide a cultural space for the expression of resistance to authority" (10). She suggests, however, that any subversive element within these films is ultimately mediated through the representation of the systems of social control as "normal, unproblematic, or even useful" (10). The status quo, as she writes for instance of Escape from Alcatraz, is left "undisturbed" (11). Rafter's work in Shots in the Mirror illustrates a crucial dilemma that faces those critics who operate within the arena of the culture of crime--how to move beyond what has become the traditional approach to interpreting the crime narrative. Representations of crime, whether fictional or not, continue to fascinate the American public, as they have since the age of Charles Brockden Brown. Crime narratives operate as a deeply compelling metaphor for the workings of American culture because of the powerful symbolic resonances in the individual criminal's transgressive act. We define our culture not only by our shared beliefs but by our laws--by what is prohibited or defined as outside the bounds of propriety. In representing the transgressive act, crime narratives challenge our assumptions about such often culturally absolute terms as right and wrong, good and evil, and legality and illegality, especially by illustrating how contingent those terms are on socioeconomic conditions. Critics are especially drawn to these narratives because they can readily decode the ways that writers and directors represent cultural values within constructed texts as a means of social commentary and critique. Critics of the recent past, however, [End Page 536] have too readily embraced a perspective on these narratives that merely emphasizes the contest of power that these narratives seem to metaphorically represent. The influence of Michel Foucault has dominated...

The Directional Effects of Discussion on Auditors' Moral Reasoning*

AbstractAuditors' professional judgements are typically made following a discussion of contentious issues with other auditors (Gibbins and Mason 1988). These discussions may be with others at various levels in the hierarchy of the audit firm, with informal discussion with peers often taking place prior to formal discussions with audit supervisors (see, e.g., Solomon 1987). This study uses an experiment, involving 286 public accountants, to consider how discussion with peers may influence auditors' subsequent resolution of realistic audit‐specific moral dilemmas. Auditors were asked to prescriptively discuss how an accountant ideally should resolve a moral dilemma, or to deliberatively discuss how an accountant actually would resolve a moral dilemma. The results showed that auditors have higher moral reasoning scores after prescriptive discussion with peers and lower moral reasoning scores after deliberative discussion with peers. Thus, the study findings point to the significance of discussion of contentious dilemmas with peers and the importance of type of discussion for predicting and explaining auditors' moral reasoning. More specifically, the results indicate that discussion with peers may provide information and/or signal what is important and acceptable to the resolution of a moral dilemma, which facilitates transformation of an auditor's moral reasoning. This suggests the importance of informal mechanisms, such as peer discussion, as part of the social control system in audit firms.

Sins of Omission: Constructing Negotiating Sets in the Aral Sea Basin

Following the Soviet Union's collapse, the Central Asian states introduced new institutions for interstate environmental cooperation in the Aral Sea basin. This article examines why Central Asian elites and the international community could not choose the optimal negotiation set for environmental protection when designing postindependence solutions for cooperation. How the negotiation sets were constructed hinged on how issues were linked, added, and subtracted. This article explores the three negotiation sets available to the Central Asian states at independence: a water set; a water and energy set; and a water, energy, and agriculture set. Although the third set was the most environmentally effective, it was not included, in the set of feasible solutions for domestic political reasons related to the importance of cotton as a system of social, economic, and political control. Short-term economic and political interests prevented the leaders from shifting agricultural production away from cotton to less water-intensive crops.

Denunziation im Dritten Reich: die Bedeutung von Systemunterstützung und Gelegenheitsstrukturen

The Third Reich has been termed in recent literature a “self-policing” society: without denunciations the Gestapo would not have been effective. In the article it is argued that this picture is an over-simplification. Differential opportunity structures create different ways of access to the “deviants”. Where the private sphere is affected, “deviance” can only be detected by people in private environments. In contrast to common descriptions the proportion of Gestapo cases made up by denunciations does not reflect the extent of regime support in the population. A large percentage of Gestapo cases, because of being trivial, merely led to dismissal or warning. Besides the Gestapo existed a more encompassing system of social control that ranged from the “Blockwart” to the “Kreisleitung” to the SD. They dealt with “deviance” by their own and might have played a more important role than the Gestapo in the social control of daily

A Letter from China: Social Control in China—A Formal or an Informal Mechanism?

Many think that formal social control refers to a criminal justice system in which there are rather many state organs/agencies (eg, police, courts, prisons) to maintain public order, while informal social control refers to the broader social system. This paper argues that China has traditionally established a social control system by making use of the societal inner layer (belief controls such as Confucianism and socialization programmes) and the exterior layer (structural controls such as the baojia system and auxiliary institutions, or the work-unit, danwei), and that this system has continued in the People's Republic. Although this mechanism is generally recognized as an informal social control, it is argued that, historically as well as theoretically, China has regarded this mechanism as constituting formal social control.

Fire Scenarios in the Enforcement of Performance-Based Fire Safety Regulations

The critical problem in any performance-based regulatory sys tem is "linking" the social objectives to the technical requirements. Since there is no technical method of deriving technical requirements directly from social objectives, society must express the social requirements in a technical form. Fire scenarios are one of the key methods for society to articulate technical require ments for fire safety in performance-based codes. Society must specify both de sign fires and the acceptable "conditions" for any analysis. Proponents of performance-based design must articulate methods for keeping all "estimates" within the approved range of values. Implementation of this social control sys tem can take place in a "regulatory design review" as part of the perfor mance-based code process. Examples are given of such reviews in the UK performance-based code environment.

Emerging styles of social control on the internet: Justice denied

The rapid growth of the Internet during the past 10 years has resulted in many disagreements over who should have the power to make and enforce the rules of on-line content and conduct and what form, such rules and enforcement should take— informal or formal. The extremes at which each of these potentially complementary systems of social control are currently practiced have contributed to an atmosphere of inconsistency, contradiction, uncertainty, and excessive discretion amongst state agencies, Internet service providers, system operators, and Internet users. If the Internet is to serve as a major communication, entertainment, and information medium in the 21st Century, a system is needed that integrates the strengths of both informal and formal systems of control while respecting the social, intellectual, and political freedom of the Internet community.

Powers and Limits of Transnational Corporations: The Case of ADM

Abstract This analysis employs the case of lysine price fixing involving the food‐processing transnational corporation (TNC) Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) and Asian‐based firms. In an “economy and society” conceptual framework grounded in the sociology of agriculture and food, we investigate the powers and limits of TNCs in the global era. We argue that TNCs maintain significant powers which allow them to avoid the laws and regulations of nation‐states. ADM was able to organize an illegal global cartel to control the world production and price of the feed supplement lysine. In addition, TNCs' actions in the global arena are limited by their inability to trust business partners and to organize and maintain systems of social control; these roles historically have been played by the nation‐state. We conclude that despite their significant powers, TNCs' contradictory position in the global arena provides opportunities that can be used to democratize society.

The Therapeutic Corporation.

A growing number of contemporary organizations have management structures that are less centralized and hierarchical than the traditional bureaucratic model. This book takes a close look inside one such organization: an employee-owned manufacturing corporation. It addresses the question of how conflicts are handled when bureaucracy is greatly reduced-and its findings will surprise and enlighten many readers. Therapy, a behaviour or practice normally thought to be confined to the offices of psychiatrists and the wards of mental hospitals, turns out to be the most common way of handling conflict in the postbureaucratic work environment. James Tucker reveals that this therapeutic system of social control contrasts sharply, and tellingly, with the more authoritative-often violent-systems of social control found in more centralized and hierarchical work settings, especially those of the past.

Random Fractal Time Series and the Teen-Birth Phenomenon

The number of babies born to teenagers ranging in ages from 10 to 19 in the state of Texas during the years 1964 to 1990 is not strictly regular, but has both a systematic and random component. Herein we use the relative dispersion, the ratio of the standard deviation to the mean of a time series, to show by systematically aggregating the teen-birth data, that the correlation in the number of teen births is a modulated inverse power law. This scaling of the aggregated relative dispersion indicates the existence of long-time memory in the underlying control process and that the social process leading to teen pregnancy and having a baby are random, fractal and nonlinear. It is shown that this statistical behavior is the same as that observed in other sexual partner selection processes. We discuss the possible allometric nature of time series having such an inverse power-law character, and the implications of such memory for the properties of social control systems.

Public legal education and inmates' perceptions of the legitimacy of official punishment in China

Although it is widely recognized that an offender's perceptions of the legitimacy of legal sanctions are directly related to his or her subsequent behavioural adjustment, few studies examine the factors that affect such perceptions. The present study addresses this issue by examining a unique social policy - public legal education - that is part of the Chinese system of social control. We describe the rationale, content and implementation of this policy. We speculate that public legal education may serve a positive function in legitimizing the Chinese criminal justice system and that offenders' perception of sanction fairness may be an indicator of this function. Our specific hypothesis is that the availability of public legal education in an offender's neighbourhood is positively related to his or her perception of sanction fairness. Using data from the city of Tianjin, we assess this hypothesis in a multivariate analysis. The data support our hypothesis. In addition, we also find that severity of punishment is negatively related to such perceptions, consistent with distinct features of Chinese criminal justice practice.