Social Control.

All the ideas we've looked at so far have been implicitly concerned with the various ways that people attempt to create order, stability and predictability in their own and other people's behaviour. In this respect, we have been indirectly talking about the various ways that any society attempts to control the behaviour of its members. These controls affect not just the way people actually behave, but also the way they think about the nature of the social world.

In this section, therefore, we can start to bring all of these ideas together under the general heading of social control and look a little more closely at the various forms of social control that exist in any society.