I am interested in the concept of control and the ways that it reflects a complex system of social and cultural divisions, and in how it shapes power and constructs social performance in our everyday lives. I understand control primarily as a response to behavior, that are constructed as deviant, problematic or undesirable in some way or another. This response appears as crime control, punishments, moral panics, social exclusion, treatment, and social work (Cohen 1985, 1). However, I also believe control is ‘dynamic’, and thus as a response to ‘wrong’ behavior, it also generates a
72
‘response to response’. The response to control is what makes human being creative and cultural (Ferrell 1999).
The term control is ambiguous in the many sociological and criminological disciplines. Nevertheless, social scientists tend to talk about control as a social construction, thus often referred to as ‘social control’ (Cohen 1985, 2). This does not make it much clearer. As Stanley Cohen (1985, 2) puts it in his book Visions of Social Control:
“In sociology textbooks, it [social control] appears as a neutral term to cover all social processes to induce conformity ranging from infant socialization through to public execution. In radical theory and rhetoric, it has become a negative term to cover not just the obviously coercive apparatus of the state, but also the putative hidden element in all state-sponsored social policy, whether called health, education or welfare. Historians and political scientists restrict the concept to the repression of political opposition, while sociologists, psychologists and anthropologists invariably talk in broader and non-political terms. In everyday language, that concept has no resonant or clear meaning at all.”
The concept of social control in the discipline of sociology has a long history, and the origins can be traced back to European classical philosophical thoughts on the nature of the State by Thomas Hobbes (2011) and Jan-Jacques Rousseau (2003), followed by the works of Emilé Durkheim (1947), and Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (1978), and with a North American sociology on ‘social systems’, both in functionalist and interactionalist strands (Chriss 2019; Mead 1925; Merton 1938;
Ross 1969). Social control is then broadly related to the organization and patterns of institutionalization, in other words the ‘social order’ that maintains cohesion in the society. Social control is also connected to the regulations of norms and socialization, and is allied with the constitution of power and authority, both informally in small social settings, as well in more highly formalized settings on the large-scale level of societies (Cohen 1985; Deflem 2019; Heidensohn 1996). As a general concept, social control is affiliated with what we think is ‘normal’ to think, to say and do. Sociologists then often identify between formal (law, regulation, governmental action) and informal (beliefs, norms, values, traditions, social interactions) means of social control (Deflem 2019; Heidensohn 1996; Honkatukia & Keskinen 2017).
We may also recognize a manifold of usages of the concept of social control in a range of very different and conflicting criminological works, which has resulted into a further unclear meaning of the concept (for reviews, see e.g. Chunn & Gavigan
73
1988; Cohen 1985; Deflem 2019). However, critical criminology has sought to define social control within a critique against positivist criminologies, and instead of using it as a functional variable in crime-causal settings, critical criminology primarily studies social control as response of economic and cultural inequalities in capitalist societies (Deflem 2019, 2; Cohen 1985; Taylor, Walton & Young 1975; Young 2011).
Above all, critical criminology has challenged rigid definitions of deviancy and crime that operate by a logic of ‘self-fulfilling’ control and criminalization processes (Cohen 1985, 167), that is “imposed with a varying degrees of success upon those in lower structural positions through a social control apparatus ranging from mass media to the criminal justice system” (Young 2011, 202).
Critical criminologist Stanley Cohen (1985) developed his vision of social control under the influence of Michel Foucault’s (1977) ideas of disciplinary power and punishment in modern societies. Cohen’s interest is focused on the transition and overlapping mechanisms between the formal and informal construction of a control system. While analyzing reforms in punishment systems, from closed prisons to new forms of penalty, such as half-way houses, probation, and community services, Cohen provides a dystopian scenario of the ‘net widening’ systems of social control.
Cohen (1985, 194) describes the ways that this ‘net widening’ control system operates through logics of professionalism and classification by seeking new forms of deviancy; the criminals and the poor are separated from each other, criminals are pathologized as mad and/or bad, and the poor moralized as deserving or undeserving of social benefits. While closed systems perform the roughest form of control in filtering out the ‘hard’ end represented by dangerous cases, community programs and therapy work at the opposite ‘soft’ end to represent cases considered to be not as hopeless. Social control is shaped by the crime control system that expands from formal control into novel sites within society, and consequently increases its influence by penetrating into new informal positions of social life and producing new deviant categories, such as ‘youth at risk’, ‘ADHD kids’ and students of the ‘special schools’.
In a similar approach, Gilles Deleuze explores the emerging subtle control technologies which were a result of moving from a disciplinary state into a late modern ‘rhizomatic’ controlling society (Oksanen 2006, 52 - 57). When control operates through rhizomes, it is not only in schools, at work, in the army and the prisons, but ‘everywhere’. These perspectives of a visionary criminology pointed out the emergence of meanings for control in more narrowly and informally structured
74
settings, and became the start of critical surveillance studies (Deflem 1992; Garland 2001; Koskela 2004). This approach has sought to relate social control to the cultural changes of late modernity and linked the concept to wider social changes in labor, increasing technological solutions, and knowledge production for regulation and exclusions in public space.
The term social control appears, as well, in some of the early works in cultural criminology (Ferrell & Websdale 1999; Manning 1999), however it is rather loosely defined, and as such it exists as a vague reference to rationalising practices on a societal level (Hayward 2004, 7) or as the agencies and institutions of crime control that operate as cultural enterprises (Ferrell 1999, 408). In a critique, Martin O’Brien (2005, 610) argues that without a “commitment to theorizing the role of specific institutions in the process of social control”, such as the state, or social relations, such as gender and class, cultural criminology is in risk of romanticizing its research subject, while giving less emphasis on structural realism. The ‘net widening’ scenario of social control, however, appeared in one of the early introductory articles on cultural criminology; Ferrell (1999) uses the concept of social control as an agent for the criminalization processes of subcultures, and claims that the common thread that connects cultural criminology is the presence of power relations and the emergence of a “complex web of social control” at the intersection of crime and culture (Ferrell 1999, 408). The notion of a complex web of social control is related to the power of media in late modernity and its ability to construct representations of crime, which according to Ferrell (1999, 409) tend to legitimate political agendas regarding crime control. Moreover, the complexity of social control and its constitution as a complex web is not only connected to symbolic representations of power, but also to the information age and its mediated enforcement; subcultures launched by alternative forms of art, music and entertainment are also audiences for mass media and therefore also recontextualize, remake, and reverse mass media representations by incorporating them into subcultural meaning-making (Ferrell 1999). Thus, Ferrell (1999) states that cultural criminologists should investigate emerging forms of social control, such as in the mediated form, and the many forms of subcultures that resist these.
Cultural criminology has a tradition in critical criminologies, and thereby a reference point to the critique of social control (Ferrell & Hayward 2014). However, given the many different meanings of social control, and the scantly usage of the concept in cultural criminology, I will hereafter primarily refer to the term control.
75