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- Title
Changes in Social Control.
- Authors
Messinger, Sheldon L.; Greenspan, Rosann
- Abstract
The article discusses the changes in social control studies over the years. The most stimulating ideas to appear in social control studies are that a society's mechanisms of control form a coherent whole; that the principles of that coherence change over time; and that examining the mechanisms of control, their principles of coherence, and the processes through which both change provides a window on larger matters. Among the first works clearly to throw an historical net around these phenomena was sociologist David Rothman's analysis of the shift in ways of dealing with the poor, the mad, and criminals in the U.S. Rothman's thesis explicitly employed a social control perspective. Sociologist Michel Foucault's work on France dealt with the same period and threw an even wider net. One result of making the connection between the mechanisms for the control of deviance and social control broader has been the elevation of studies of the operation of deviance control processes. In their collection sociologists, Stanley Cohen and Andrew Scull underline reforms that should be examined as events in the history of social control. Sociologist Steven Spitzer's essay on the rationalization of crime control in capitalist society locates legal coercion as part of the broader process of rendering social relations consistent with the demands of capitalist production.
- Subjects
UNITED States; SOCIAL control; SOCIOLOGISTS; CAPITALIST societies; ROTHMAN, David; FOUCAULT, Michel, 1926-1984; SOCIAL conflict
- Publication
Qualitative Sociology, 1986, Vol 9, Issue 1, p58
- ISSN
0162-0436
- Publication type
Book Review
- DOI
10.1007/BF00988250