SOCI 2445 Chapter Notes - Chapter Part 1: Neighbourhood Character, Exhibitionism, Academic Dishonesty
Document Summary
Social rules define situations and the kinds of behaviour appropriate to them, specifying some actions as right and forbidding other as wrong. When a rule is enforced, the person who is supposed to have broken it may be seen as a special kind of person, an outsider. The rule-breaker may feel his judges are outsiders. Rules may be of a great many kinds. They may be formally enacted into law, and in this case the police power of the state may be used in enforcing them. They represent informal agreement, newly arrived at or encrusted with the sanction of age and tradition; rules of this kind are enforced by informal sanction of various kinds. Blue laws, which remain on the statute books though they have not been enforced for a hundred years, are examples. Informal rules may similarly die from the lack of enforcement.