Social Organization and Control
Overview
• need for human social contact and the
rewards that it can bring leads most people to
become members of numerous social groups
– family members, employees, citizens of towns,
states, nations, clubs, political parties, and
religious groups
– our individual identities are greatly defined by the
groups to which we belong and by our positions
within them
Status and Role
• status is our relative social position within a
group
– for example, a man may have the status of father in his
family
• role is the part our society expects us to play
in a given status
– for example, a man’s role may require him to provide for,
guide, and protect his children
• Acquiring Statuses
– achieved statuses
• acquired by doing something
– someone becomes a criminal by committing a crime
– a soldier earns the status of a good warrior by achievements
in battle and by being brave
– a woman becomes a mother by having a baby
• reinforced in N. America
– ascribed statuses
• the result of being born into a particular family or being
born male or female
– being a prince by birth
– being the first born
• India
– ascribed status has been strongly reinforced for
more than 3,000 years
» as a result, social mobility has been very
difficult to achieve until recent generations
» castes
• these are carefully ranked, rigidly
hereditary social divisions of society
• the Indian government has attempted
to encourage achieved status by
outlawing many of the traditional
aspects of the caste system
Social Control
• all societies impose social control on their
citizens to some degree
• large-scale societies
– mechanisms are laws, courts, and police
• small-scale societies
– maintain social control without complex legal
institutions
• the most effective form of social control is not
laws, police, and jails
– it is the internalization of the moral codes by the
members of society
• inner directed, or conscience controlled, in regards to social
norms
• cultures with a high degree of cultural homogeneity, such as
Japan, have a far lower crime rate
– as children grow up they normally learn what is
proper and improper, right and wrong, good and bad
– if a society is able to indoctrinate all of its members to
accept its moral code, it will not need to use police or
other external means of social control
• social norms
– commonly held conceptions of appropriate and
expected behavior
• in Arab nations, norms generally change very slowly
• in large, multi-ethnic societies such as the United States
and Canada, norms change rapidly
– sometimes the laws change before the norms do
for large sections of a society
• if one portion of a society has changed its norms but
another has not, conflict can result
– "political correctness"
• example: civil rights acts called for the legal
enforcement of "racial" integration
– it took nearly a generation before the majority of Americans
in the southern states accepted these new laws
Law
• large-scale societies
– laws are usually written down formally so that they
can be known clearly to everyone
– social control is more difficult because their
populations are larger, more dense, and usually more
diverse culturally, socially, and economically
• small-scale societies
– more informal, rarely written down
– they are part of the evolving oral tradition that is
familiar to members of these societies and there is no
need to explain them to anyone
Warfare
• among the primates, it may only be humans and
chimpanzees who conduct war-like activities
• violent physical fighting is primarily a male
activity among humans and chimpanzees
– intimidate, scheme, and form short-term alliances
with other males to be able to move up the
dominance hierarchy
– rewards are gaining more access to what their society
values, whether it be food, sex, land, or simply control
over others
• armed conflict can be divided it into three
categories– feuding
• prolonged hostility and occasional physical fighting
between individuals and their supporters rather than
whole societies
• both sides in feuds believe that they have been
wronged and seek to settle the score
– raiding
• surprise predatory attacks directed against other
communities or societies
• primary objective of raiding usually is to plunder and
then to escape unharmed with the stolen goods
• warfare
– larger scale and more sustained form of fighting than
feuding and raiding
– involves organized combat usually between clearly
recognizable armies
– revenge, a desire to gain or control more land and
other resources, and/or motivated by religious or
political ideals
• societies have gone to war believing that they were morally
justified and that their god was on their side
– occurs between large-scale farming or industrial
societies
• only kinds of societies that can afford to have large numbers
of men not be involved in food production for prolonged
periods of time