A disapproving look can govern behaviour more firmly than any written law
At a Women's Institute meeting, a single disapproving look can tell someone that flirting with the minister is off limits. In a criminal gang, threatening to go to the police invites something far harsher. Both are social control, the web of pressures that keeps people within a group's norms, and most of it never involves a court.
Social control covers the rules, sanctions and systems that restrain behaviour in line with a society's norms. Sociologists split it in two. Informal control works through socialisation, as people absorb values from customs and mores, often without noticing the indoctrination. Formal control means external sanctions enforced by the state to prevent chaos, which Émile Durkheim called regulation. Anthropologists, criminologists, legal scholars and political scientists all study it.
Informal pressure is often the stronger kind. Shame, ridicule, sarcasm and criticism steer people back toward the norm, and in extreme cases exclusion follows. Because the values become part of personality, they bind tightly; sociologist Edward A. Ross argued that belief systems of any kind restrain behaviour more than government laws do. Traditional societies rely mostly on this customary control.
Formal control runs from fines and imprisonment to censorship, expulsion and restrictions on political freedom, and governments tend to lean on punishment rather than reward. Economist Mancur Olson's idea of selective incentives adds a subtler lever: private benefits handed out or withheld depending on whether someone contributes to the common good. Oberschall grouped modern practice into confrontational control such as crowd policing, preventive legislation setting boundaries, and punishment for crimes.
The concept is old even if the name is not. Criminal prosecution emerged in Athens around the sixth century BC as formal control, and religion long supplied informal moral pressure. Thomas Hobbes described the state keeping order through civil and military power in Leviathan, and Cesare Beccaria's On Crimes and Punishments argued that harsher penalties deter offending. Albion Woodbury Small and George Edgar Vincent brought the term into sociology in 1894. At first it meant society's capacity to regulate itself; by the 1930s it had come to mean pressure pushing individuals to conform.
Source: Social control
