System Of Social Control Research Articles

Differential Labor Force Participation of Women in Latin American and Middle Eastern Countries: The Influence of Family Characteristics

The relative importance of marital and fertility characteristics upon female employment rates is tested in an attempt to explain the significant differential in women's nonagricultural participation rates between Latin American and Middle Eastern countries. Despite the striking differences in characteristics between the two populations with respect to variables centrally related to woman's employability, there is not enough evidence of the influence of these differences upon female employment rates. When the female population in Chile is subjected through standardization analysis to the same marital and fertility characteristics of Egypt, they continued to manifest high overall participation rates. Estimation of the womanpower potential in three Middle Eastern countries given their present marital characteristics shows that if women in these societies had the same propensity to be employed as women in Latin America, the overall nonagricultural female activity rate would increase threefold in Morocco, fivefold in Egypt and sevenfold in Pakistan. It is suggested that the explanation for the regional differential has to be sought in a comparative study of family and kinship organization between Latin American and Middle Eastern societies with special reference to the role of the kinship unit in the system of social control.

Peasants and revolution: the case of Bolivia

At the beginning of Part One of this article, an approach to an explanation of the survival of serfdom in Bolivia until 1953 and of its breakdown, is made by means of the analysis of the system of social control which was maintained, in the context of the absence of strong market currents in agricultural products. The workings of the system were demonstrated with reference to the peasants' revolt of 1899, an episode which was shown to have been possible because a fraction of the elite was prepared to suspend the rules which governed the system.

Prostitution and virtue in nevada

Some of the most direct, vicious and persistent attacks by one class of American women against another occurred in the guise of crusades aimed at punishment and abolition of prostitution. Respectable women's antagonism against shady ladies was particularly visible in late nineteenth-century frontier boom towns, where prostitutes often outnumbered married women. Prostitutes were the first female settlers in many such towns, and the arrival of upright women produced many tensions and overt conflicts, some of which led to passage of laws limiting and regulating prostitution. Between 1860 and 1875, Virginia City, Nevada, the great Comstock boom town, grew from a crude shanty town of 2,500 to a relatively sophisticated city of 25,000, making it imperative that a system of social control develop in a short time. The whole pattern of legal development from informal social control, to semi-formal vigilante rule, to formal law making and enforcement occurred in less than a decade, reflecting the arrival of powerful new social groups bringing new definitions of deviance. Rapid changes in Virginia City's demographic composition and economic organization affected the community's ethos and its labeling of behavior. The arrival of relatively large numbers of upright matrons brought the iron Victorian distinctions between good and bad women into focus, where they previously had been blurred because of the absence of females other than prostitutes. As Virginia City developed a differentiated status structure and imported culture from established cities, the hard-working, tenacious frontier woman faded as a social ideal, to be replaced by the delicate, passive lady. Ladies seldom labored outside the home, and women who did often had their moral standards both questioned and assaulted. Thus the classifications of women as either good or bad were strongly (though not entirely) class related. In this sense, the Virginia City campaigns against prostitution were female class wars, and laws resulting from them affected working men's prostitutes who lived in cribs and wretched houses rather than the mistresses of rich or middle-class men. The presence of this large, visible group of poor women thought to be irrevocably tainted served as both impetus and weapon for the upperand middle-class woman's fight to sustain her own precarious social and economic position at the expense of her less fortunate sisters. Information on prostitution in early Virginia City is somewhat sketchy--few prostitutes left the letters or diaries commonly providing information about respectable women of the era. Instead, painted women's lives must be pieced together, from various sources such as histories of the period, personal documents, city council minutes and even coroner's reports. A random sample of 30 Virginia City Territorial Enterprises published between 1860 and 1875 proved helpful in this respect, as did census records listing sporting women in categories such as housekeepers, courtesans, hurdy girls, prostitutes, and prostitutes of the lowest order. In order to understand the roots of this conflict between matrons and prostitutes, it is essential to understand Victorian definitions of female sexuality which constrained in different ways the lives of all women of the period.

Presidential Address: The Place of Force in Human Society

H UMAN beings learn early that almost everything they want can be obtained only through each other's cooperation, whether their need or goal is a mother's breast or a love potion, a slave uprising or a new colony, a Nobel Prize or protection against a bullying policeman. Everyone learns, consciously or not, accurately or not, various ways of controlling others for one's own ends. Few people spend much time calculating how to control others, but everyone does so part of the time. Whatever people do, for whatever goals, will be evaluated by others, who will become thereby more or less willing to cooperate, more or less likely to resist, more or less likely to continue in the relationship. We all interact with others, engage in a flow of transactions with others; and whatever we do has some effect on others, to our advantage or not, in conformity with our wishes or not, and whether or not we will it so. Consequently, however else we might classify the wide range of human acts, we can also view them as samples of social control processes, i.e., the ways by which people shape the flow of each other's behavior. Almost all can be grouped into a small number of tvyes of social control forces. One of these is force and forcethreat, which I shall henceforth simply call force; when I mean only I shall so label it.' The use of force-and I repeat, I mean by this term both force-threat and overt force-is as ubiquitous as the preachments against it. Whatever else social systems are, they are also force systems. Force constitutes one of the major foundations of all social structures. The processes by which the command of force is expended, exchanged, accumulated, or lost, are universal in social interaction, because force is one of the fundamental resources people and groups need to elicit cooperation, help, and conformity from one another. Force constitutes one of the four great social control systems in all societies. For two millennia, social analysts have given much attention to three of these-which they have variously termed force, prestige, and wealth-because these underlie all stratification systems.2 The fourth, which

Die begrip kultuur

Abstract Culture can be studied from many angles. It can be considered as being on a par with acquired social behavioural patterns, the social inheritance and superorganic aspects of society. It can furthermore be seen as man's adaptation to his environment, a configuration of symbols and also as man-controlled nature. It is often equated with the way of lift of a poeple. Culture fulfils specific functions for the group as well as for the individual Man's humanity is the product of his culture and culture enables him to adapt to his total milieu, that is to group life as well as his physical environment. Culture further serves as the system of social control. Culture embodies both material as well as non-material aspects. The non-material culture is contained in norms. social institutions and WeDS. Norms are comprised of mores, folkways and enacted laws. Although culture can for analytical purposes be broken down into its constituent parts it should always be viewed as a whole.

Fighting with Food. Leadership, Values and Social Control In a Massim Society.

The Melanesians of Goodenough Island, off the eastern coast of New Guinea, have developed the principle of gift-giving to an extraordinary degree. Instead of resorting to arms in their quarrels or demanding compensation for offences, they present enemies and offenders with pigs and yams in order to shame them. This custom of coercive gift-giving operates at various organizational levels and through two main institutional forms: competitive food exchange and festivals. Dr Young analyses in depth the social and political structure of a single village, dealing in detail with its system of social control and those vexed topics of Melanesian ethnography - leadership and sorcery. Of particular interest is the author's description of the configuration of values which makes food-giving-to-shame meaningful to the Goodenough Islander for whom 'happiness is a rotting yam', and the worst evil 'hunger-producing sorcery'. The careful use of case material gives vivid insights into the lifestyle, world view and humanity of these proud and fractious people.

On Reading Bentham

WE STILL read bits of Bentham today-or anyway expect undergraduates to read them. For we do not look for much illumination there. We understand him so well, we see his defects so clearly, that we need hardly attend to the actual texts. But Bentham does have his uses. His books illustrate pure and simpleminded philosophical positions. And he proves the virtues of the younger Mill, measured by the degree John Stuart broke loose from his Benthamic shackles. Such attitudes may encourage the irrational distortions that we find. If we are Natural Lawyers we tend to see Bentham's distinction between and morality as a lack of healthy moral partisanship. We confuse his insistence upon the reality of law as it with an acceptance of it. On a different plane, we blame Bentham for the ruthless sacrifice by statesmen of whole nations, because these men calculate. We do not ask whether human welfare could justify the means or the ends, as Bentham would have demanded. If this is what Bentham has become to us, why bother with the monumental task of producing a new Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham, which now yields the third and fourth' of thirty-eight projected volumes? Well (some may feel), it is there, waiting to be done. The mountain of manuscripts is there, indeed, many never having found their way into print (and some, as we have already found, well worth printing). So is the chaotic jungle of Bentham's actual publications, including the unfortunate Bowring edition of Bentham's Works (published 1838-43). As well as the treacherous bogs and swamps of revisions, redactations, rearrangements, and translations, which obscure not only the sequence and development of Bentham's thought, but even what is Bentham's own among the ideas of his sometimes too helpful collaborators and editors. The editors, quixotically, must expect-or at least hope-that Bentham will be read. I may perhaps be excused, therefore, if I dwell upon the history and talk about the content of these two important books even though they are not now published for the first time. For the history is revealing and the contents are not what we have learned to expect. If we asked Bentham to place his work within the categories now in use among philosophers, he would no doubt choose the label political or legal rather than moral. Mill says as much in his commentaries, but he also seems to condemn Bentham partly for this reason. And yet Bentham's concentration on the law, politics and government might be defended from his own utilitarian point of view. For he conceives primarily as a system of social control whose special features and whose place in human life provide it with the greatest potential for producing positive good but also the capacity for bringing about great evils. Government therefore demands our most serious and sustained attention. Law and politics were accordingly the focus of Bentham's theoretical as well as his practical concerns, and he was more intent upon applying his criterion of utility than with defending it. What he called private ethics never captured much of his attention. But he also saw, quite early, that we need to understand the (and related matters such as human action and motivation) before we can effectively change it-before we can even hope to criticize it accurately. He found himself driven again and again to break new philosophical

The Practice of Fidelity to Law

What is it that sets legal systems apart from other kinds of systems of social control? Traditionally, legal philosophers have tried to answer the question in terms of some uniquely essential quality which distinguishes law from everything else. It now seems clear that the concept of law is best understood, not in terms of any single feature to be taken as the essence of law, but as a whole set of family resemblances between the various things we call legal systems (Hart, 1961: 1–17, 234). What I propose to do here is to deal with one particular facet of the concept which, I think, has not been given sufficient attention by the currently dominant positivist school of legal philosophy.

The Army psychiatrist--an adjunct to the system of social control.

The Army psychiatrist--an adjunct to the system of social control.

Trends and Projections in Social Control Systems

This paper considers certain aspects of social change and its relation to the necessity for variety in a dy namic social system. Certain consequences for social control in the future can now be predicted by references to techno logical developments. It seems unlikely that the rate of tech nological change will be diminished, and it is essential that social changes be made which can accommodate the techno logical innovations. The problems which can now be fore seen form a basis for considering the priorities which should be accorded to different forms of social research. It may be that the pressing demand that social research should be de voted to the current social problems may have many undesir able consequences. Perhaps social science today is in an unsatisfactory state because ten years ago it was too much concerned with problems of ten years ago! Most of the simple models which were thought to suffice in social research are now clearly unsatisfactory. A revolution in social science method ology is necessary.

Allegiance and Lawful Government

W HEN we say of a given government that it is lawful or legitimate or de jure, having in mind here a contrast with merely de facto governmental status, we use concepts which are initially resistant to clear analysis. Classical legal theories are of no immediate help, for the distinction we are employing appears to be denied by realism, denied or overlegalized by positivism, and overmoralized by natural law doctrines. The distinction is overlegalized when it is claimed that one can give an account of the lawfulness of an entire government which is logically on all fours with the account that would be given for the lawfulness of particular rules within that government. It is overmoralized in theories which fail to appreciate that the circumstances in which one would say that a government is not legitimate or lawful constitute, if moral at all, a very restricted class of moral circumstances. If a government was merely disutilitarian, for example, we would not be likely to condemn it as unlawful or illegitimate on that account alone-though we might condemn it in other ways. If legitimacy claims were just ordinary legal claims or ordinary moral claims, we would not find them nearly as puzzling as we do. And so the concepts of legitimacy and lawfulness, when predicated of governments, stand in need of analysis. We need to inquire into what, if anything, is marked by the distinction between de jure and de facto governments. And if we ultimately con.clude that no coherent distinction is marked, we ought to be able to explain why this is so. In a recently published paper,' Professor R. M. Hare has addressed himself to these troublesome issues. Since I think that what he says is quite instructively wrong, I should like to discuss his account in some detail. After exploring the errors of that account, I shall attempt to map, these concepts (law ful, legitimate, de jure) in a way that will explain why it is that claims involving them are indeed puzzling. As a start, it will be useful to consider the character of the view Hare has in mind to attack. This view is generally that of legal -positivism, a position which Hare somewhat uncharitably refers to as the Might is Right theory.2 He believes that the theory entails that the lawful government is simply that government which has the power, that it in effect denies that there is any legitimate de jure-de facto distinction. In what sense is this an entailment of legal positivism? Though various positivistic theories differ in detail, legal positivism typically gives the following general characterization to legality: A social system S is a legal system if (a) S is a coercive system of social control and (b) S provides, through a hierarchy of normative rules, for a distinction between valid coercion and invalid coercion (violence). The theories of Hobbes, Austin, and Kelsen all have this general structure; but it is the second condition, much emphasized by Kelsen, which is of primary importance. For it makes the

Crimes Without Criminals

The sociological study of deviant behavior has begun to focus less on the deviant and more on society's response to him. One of several implications of this perspective is that a major concern of the sociology of deviance should be the identification and analysis of different kinds of systems of social control. Particularly important is the analysis of the impact of different kinds of control systems on the way deviant behavior is perceived and expressed in societies.By playing down the importance of intrinsic differences between deviants and conventional people, and between the social situation of deviants and that of nondeviants, the focus on social response implies much more than the commonplace idea that society defines the kinds of behavior that will be considered odd, disgusting, or criminal. It implies that many elements of the behavior system of a given kind of deviance, including such things as the rate of deviance and the kinds of people who are identified as a deviant, will be significantly affected by the kind of control system through which the behavior is defined and managed.

Death as a Way of Life: The Increasing Resort to Homicide in a Maya Indian Community

The breaking-down of a social-control system based on belief in the guardianship of the spiritual ancestors and their temporal agents, the curers, is reflected in a rising homicide rate as people turn to individual sanctions when threatened. The acts of homicide differ in their social significance according to who is killed, the context, the agency, and the motivation of the killer. Thirty-seven homicides between 1938 and 1965, analyzed in terms of these component variables, reflect the conflicts arising from competition in new economic enterprises, the rising suspicion of curers' abuse of their supernatural power, and the loss of belief in the guardianship of the ancestors.

Variants of Integration of Social Control Agencies

Interaction between social control personnel about situations of mutual concern is assumed to be eufunctional. Propositions pertaining to avoidance of such interaction are derived and then examined with data collected from 743 social control personnel. Some conclusions are that agency personnel avoid their own agency personnel less and hold them in higher esteem than other agency personnel. Low intra-agency avoidance appears more strongly related to high intra-agency esteem than to intra-agency adherence to normative prescriptions for interaction. High negative associations between esteem and avoidance suggest that social control system interaction can be characterized as voluntaristic. Functional similarity increases interagency esteem. This latter finding suggested possible ideological antagonisms between agencies because of authoritarian-punitive versus humanitarian-welfare orientations.

Scholastic Dishonesty Among Undergraduates in Differing Systems of Social Control

Extensive scholastic dishonesty was found in two large Southern universities, although not to the same extent in each. This contrast raised the question of whether the observed differences in frequency were due to different personal background characteristics of the 8tudents at the two universities, or to the different forms of social control in use at the two institutions. This investigation indicates that both types of characteristics may be related to deviation, but that social control, or collectivity characteristics are more closely associated with deviation and better explain thte differences found than personal background, or member characteristics.

Ethics and the Rule of Law

What is a businessman's moral duty when there is real uncertainty in the law? Uncertainty in the meaning of legal regulations must be distinguished from uncertainty that the law will be enforced and uncertainty that the law will ac complish its intended purpose. Assuming a moral obligation to obey laws that are reasonably clear in their applications, a businessman has no obligations to guess that an uncertain law requires the greatest conceivable sacrifice. There is no moral culpability in trying to secure interpretations that are convenient and profitable. A manager does, however, have an obligation not to expose his enterprise to unbearable risks and not to sabotage the rule-making process, though there may be hopeless disagreement as to the identity of those who are doing these things. The common objections to bare compliance with law do not identify a fault in the attitude toward law but rather a defect in extralegal matters. As long as systems of social control are imperfect, there is good reason for not lumping legal and extralegal duties together under the word "responsibility."

Some Swazi Views on Land Tenure

Opening ParagraphVirtually all sub-Saharan Africa is in the throes of rapid social and economic change. The recent fashion for meteorological allegories has merely served to stress the fact that these changes are also causing very considerable problems. The dilemma facing most administrations throughout the continent is that while much of the old way of life must inevitably disappear if the tribal groups involved are to hope to survive as viable populations in the modern world, this same process can, if it occurs too fast, threaten the whole social order and the systems of social control and social organization, which have hitherto bound them together as groups and governed the day-to-day lives of their members.

Invisible Government and Democracy in the United States Today

M t j 'EANING OF Realistic study of social affairs today makes it increasingly evident that government, as the general system of authoritative social control, has two basically important, natural aspects: (a) the more concentrated, official, part; and (b) the more diffused, unofficial, and part. In the United States, the former is made up of the publicly chosen and established officials and agencies. The invisible part of the government, far less obvious but no less real, is made up of those more private, organized pressure groups that are continually working for the public assistance of their interests. Chart .r illustrates the more common distribution of functions in the invisible government in this country. Connected with each of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches in the different governmental areas, national, state and local, are the hordes of private and informal agents, bosses, advisers, fixers, attorneys, spies, and accomplices, that make up the special agents of the invisible government,-the functional interest pressure groups. The Democratic Evolution of Invisible Government. As social evolution increases its speed today, we are becoming more keenly aware of these parts of the government. They are powerfully affecting the course of affairs, and they are not under adequate and orderly control. The phase of social control in which they always center is in the struggle of the less privileged members of the community for larger rights of social membership, against the conditions of general ignorance and the usual alarmed resistance of the more privileged and comfortably fixed groups. Throughout the world, and especially in the West, the gradual extension of the right to vote for general public officers by increasingly larger groups of the population has been the common indicator of the growing national union and democratic relationships. Consider, for example, the advances of the suffrage in England: (i) the granting of Magna Charta, 1215 (admitting the greater barons definitely to the visible government); (2) The Bill of Rights, i689 (marking the rise of the lesser nobles and commercial gentry); (3) The Great Reform Bill, 1832 (the rise to power, in the Industrial Revolution, of business enterprise, with transition from aristocratic to more plutocratic leadership); (4) granting of national suffrage to the city