SOC100 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Peer Pressure, Renormalization, Social Control
CHAPTER 11 - SOCIAL CONTROL, DEVIANCE
Overview:
- Social control
- Individuals and social and state institutions participate in social control
- Not entirely negative: both positive and negative. You must control people's behaviours
(we agree, but we do not like having our behaviours controlled)
- With too much freedom, people say horrible things and cannot control what they
say (like internet trolls lol)
- Lots of people cannot control what they do without regulatory forces
controlling their behaviour
- It’s like how if you have an anonymous account, because it’s not
tied with a person, this may cause them to speak out of control
(which is the loophole of social control). At the same time, it can
manage the DARK SIDE of people (positive)
- Goal is to ensure conformity and compliance to societal norms
- We are quite functionalist in this sense → we are actually quite willing to
conform. Even though we agree with democracy and doing whatever you wish,
people usually aim to tell people to conform and comply to societal norms, which
is what thEY think is right. (eg: peer pressure)
- We control others through our behaviour (peer pressure), but we are also controlled bY
others (registration process of getting into university) → ensures everyone is similar so
we can maintain social uniformity
- Social control may be (necessary but problematic)
- Formal (institutionalized/law/religion) or informal (peer pressure, cliques)
- Retroactive (rehab programs in prisons; rehab for addiction) or preventative
(education systems; you are given information that is selected through a specific
type of lens by oTHER people → the earlier you reach a child and teach children
how to behave, the more they can internalize information)
- The idea for retroactive is that you are trying to FIX people and
renormalize their behaviours
- Directed at others (imposing ourselves on other people; that you know better and
you are trying to do for the greater good. You know what REAL good people act)
or directed at ourselves (like we all have different ideas of how YOU should act
yourself; you are always policing yourself)
- Deviance (deviating from norms)
- “Objective” and “subjective” - how do we know precisely which behaviours or
characteristics are unacceptable?
- It can be subjective in that we only believe behaviours to be unacceptable based
on our OWN beliefs (so in a sense it is a social construct)
- Taboos → are they INHERENTLY wrong? Or are they things that
deviate from norms
- Why are some behaviours and/or characteristics “unacceptable” while others are not?
- Overweight and obesity → how fat someone is used to be based on health, but it
was revealed that it is not ACTUALLY based on health; rather the definition of
fatness as health is something to cover the underlying belief that fatness is
deviant from norms and appearances (TLDR: FATNESS IS A WAY TO
ENFORCE WHAT IS AN “ACCEPTABLE” APPEARANCE)
- Objective can be based on
- Statistical rarity (so if many people do it, then it is acceptable; if not a lot
of people do it, unacceptable)
- However something that not a lot of people do can change with
the days or seasons (just because it isn’t good now, doesn’t mean
it isn’t good forever)
- Common things can become unacceptable, and rare things can be
acceptable (like not wearing sunscreen during the summer; it is
rare to do so, but people accept it)
- Harm (if it harms others then it is unacceptable)
- But what defines harm?
- Normative violation (does it violate social norms)
- Standards in society → which is problematic since standards are
always changing (eg: smoking in school 40 years ago was fine;
now it is no good)
- Negative societal reaction
- Subjective
- Deviance is socially constructed → an act becomes deviant when it is
defined as such, and relative to society’s norms/interests of power
- Something is deviant “if enough important people think so”
- High consensus deviance vs low consensus deviance → changing all the
time
- High consensus → widely acceptable characteristics (need social
control)
- Low consensus → there is a disagreement as to whether or not
they are accepted
- Crime → who is breaking what law → the extreme form of deviance in a sense
- “Deviance specialists” study non-criminal forms of deviance
- Criminal behaviour is a specific form of deviance (because if they are doing crime, then it
deviates from the lol norms → against the lAW!)
- Studied by criminologists (frequency, distribution of criminal acts by certain types of
groups compared to others) → not a lot of theorizing
- Legal definitions of crime
- Criminal law is part of public law → AGAINST THE LAW
- Criminal code of Canada
- Youth criminal justice act
- Controlled substances act
- Is intended to apply equally to all, but in practice is not always neutral