Social Control as Dependent Variable

Mills>>Sociology>>Ryan>>SOC112

Assigned Reading

D Black "Social Control as a Dependent Variable," pp. 1-26 (be sure to read the footnotes)
R Ellickson, "The System of Social Control," pp 123-36 in Order Without Law

Take-Away for Today

SC as DV
SC varies in kind and amount (qual and quant)
Useful question is how much, what kind, where?
"Where" means location in "social space"

Logic of Presentation

Social research -- variables and such
Raises Q of how to do a sociology of social control
Black gives us an answer
Ellickson gives an alternative approach -- helps appreciate the genre of "a theory of social control"

Introduction

Before we start into Black and Ellickson, we should probably review a few basic ideas about social science theory and methods.

As you have heard many times, sociology studies patterns in ensembles of people, groups, events, etc. As Kai Erikson has described it, we take the "view from the fourteenth floor" and look down at the patterns of coordination and organization on the street below. Our "scientific" endeavor attempts to understand and explain these patterns.

But how do we extract the patterns and the things we use to explain them when we do not have the luxury of an aerial view?

Suppose for example, we wanted to study small claims court. What IS small claims court?

"The small claims court is a special court in which disputes are resolved inexpensively and quickly. The rules are simple. The hearing is informal. Attorneys are not allowed. The person who files the lawsuit is the plaintiff, and the person being sued is the defendant.

"The claims are limited to disputes up to $5,000. ...

"Small claims courts can order a defendant to do something, as long as a claim for money is also part of the suit. The court can cancel a contract. The court can order your neighbor to pay you for your lawn mower or to return it promptly.

"Examples of other disputes that might be resolved in small claims court are:

Your former landlord refuses to return the security deposit you paid
Someone dents your fender and refuses to pay for repairs
Your new TV will not work, and the store refuses to fix it
Your tenant caused damage to the apartment in an amount that exceeded the security deposit (Note: You can't file an eviction action in small claims court.)
You lent money to a friend, and he or she refuses to repay it"

Using the Small Claims Court - California Department Of Consumer Affairs
[http://www.dca.ca.gov/legal/small_claims/basic_info.htm]
Accessed 9 Feb 04

So, suppose we head off to study small claims court. The first thing we have to think about as researchers is what our units of observation and analysis will be. Will we be looking for patterns in how the courts are set up from one county to another? Or will we want to compare how the court works on one day as compared to another? Or maybe we will want to observe the behavior of all the individuals who appear in the court. Or perhaps we are interested in what the cases are about and who wins. Depending on what we are interested in, our "research question," our unit of analysis/observation (there are subtle differences but they won't concern us here -- if we gather info by interviewing plaintiffs and defendants, we observe at this level but our analysis might still be at the case level) will vary:

Question	Unit of Analysis
Are there patterns to how courts are set up differently in different counties?	county
Are there patterns in how court procedings differ from day to day?	days
Are there patterns in the way people behave in small claims courts	persons
Are there patterns in who wins and who loses?	cases

For the purposes of our example, let's assume we have selected the last question. We start out by learning something about small claims court, perhaps by reading about it or by visiting and observing. We also immerse ourselves in theoretical writing about the legal system. From this preparatory work will emerge our first basic observation : what are some of the ways that one case can differ from another?

Cases differ in the amount of money at issue.
Cases differ in terms of whether the defendant shows up (the plaintiff must or else there is no case).
Cases differ in terms of how familiar the parties seem to be with the process (some are "old hands," some have never been here before)
Some parties seem well off and some not very well off at all (note that this is a change of our unit of observation -- we return to our unit of analysis by noting that some CASES are between people who appear to be equally well off, and some between a wealthier and a poorer person).
Similarly, sometimes the plaintiff or defendant is a corporation or business and sometimes it is an individual. Again, this is a different unit of observation. At the case level, what we have is cases between individuals, cases between corporations, and cases between individuals and corporations.
Who wins and who loses

Note that part of the logical process here was to identify a "thing" or "property" and then to suggest what different "values" this property could have. Something like this that can take on different values is called a variable. If we went back and identified these a little more explicitly we might have

Description	Variable Name	Possible Values
amount of money at issue	AMOUNT	0-$5000
whether the defendant shows up	SHOWUP	Yes/No
how familiar the parties seem to be with the process?	P-D EXPERTISE	Both experience (+), P+D-, P-D+,P-D-
how well off are parties?	P-D AFFLUENCE	P+D+, P+D-, P-D+, P-D-
the plaintiff or defendant is a corporation or business and sometimes it is an individual	P-D CORP-INDIV	PCDC, PCDI, PIDC, PIDI
who wins	WINNER	P/D

A preliminary question is whether or not there is actually variation in these "variables." Are there different kinds of cases? And so we might examine records of a thousand cases and ask about each of our variables, "how is it distributed?" By this we mean how do the cases spread out in terms of each variable? Are most of the cases for very small amounts or very large amounts or are both equally represented? How often do defendants not show up? Of the four possibilities in terms of expertise, what proportions of cases fall into each category?

This question of the distribution is a question of the frequency with which each of the possible values shows up. It is easy to think about how a situtation in which 1000 cases are distributed such that 100 are for $1000 or less and 900 are for $4000 or more is different from a situation in which 200 cases are below $1000, 200 between 1 and 2 thousand, 200 between 2 and 3, 200 between 3 and 4 and 200 between 4 and 5. In the former situation the pattern is that cases divide neatly into small cases and big cases. In the second scenario, no such pattern exists.

We might also ask what the pattern of CORP-INDIV looks like. How many cases are between corporations? How many between individuals? How often is a corporation sued by an individual? Vice versa?

And there is a pattern in the distribution of winners and losers. Do plaintiffs win more or less?

After looking at individual variables it is quite natural for us to ask the big question : are there any patterns in how variables relate to one another? For example, do corporations win more vs individuals than individuals vs. corporations?

Suppose that were the case. What would we be thinking? One logic would hold that it might be the case that the process somehow favored corporations, that the "corporation-ness" of corporate plaintiffs and defendants gave them an advantage.

The WINNER variable, we would be saying, depends on the PDCORP-INDIV variable. The latter is an influence on or cause of the latter. We don't know how it happens, but we are noticing a pattern involving these two variables.

When one party in small claims is a corporation and the other party is an individual, place your bets on the corporation we'd say.

In formal terms we are taking CORPORATENESS, to change the language a little, is out INDEPENDENT variable and WHO-WINS is the DEPENDENT variable.

What should you take away from this? First is a sense of what a variable is and what we mean when we say that something "spreads out along a dimension" and that it has a particular "distribution." And then is the distinction between dependent and independent variables. But most important is the point that a DEPENDENT variable is something whose distribution we wish to explain: why does it happen this way sometimes and that way other times? why does it happen a little sometimes and a lot other times?

Black's "social control as dependent variable"

Let's first consider the outline of Black's chapter -- based only on section titles -- to get a sense of the argument of the chapter:

1. Introduction	Black says that our goal should be a general theory of social control that explains how it varies from one setting to another. Remember that when we said "deviance is relative" what we meant was that the same behavior elicits different reactions in different places at different times.
2. Beyond Law	Law is a special kind of soc cont. But even the "amount" of law varies. Overall, law is not used a lot, and its use is not spread uniformly across social space (which we'll get to below).
3. Concept of Social Control	Term from 1901. Two possible questions : how effective? or what kinds/how much where?
4. Varieties of Normative Behavior	"Normative behavior" refers to all the ways we react to "right and wrong." Black claims it varies and that we can nail down some of the dimensions along which it varies.
a. Form	Mechanism for expressing grievance, for conducting normative business. Uni-, bi-, tri-, multilateral. Who is involved?
b. Style	Logic of response (compensatory, therapeutic, penal, conciliatory and prevention, reform)
c. Quantity	Degree, magnitude, etc
5. Quantity of Normative Variation	To what degree is social control uniform -- same circumstances, same response.
6. Models of Social Control	A goal of "science" of social control is to produce models that agree with observation and that do so across the entire range of social life.
7. The Good, The True, and The Beautiful	Right/wrong, true/false, and beautiful/ugly as fundamental dimensions of evaluation. Black suggests that societies may engage in a sort of division of evaluative labor in terms of which of these applies in which circumstances.

And then, let's consider what Ellickson has to offer in the short selection from Order Without Law.

In the brief section we looked at, he describes a "system of social control" and unlike Black he distinguishes first among types of behavior -- prosocial, normal, and antisocial.

He then says that we should think about this in terms of five "controllers"

self
other
third party social forces
third party organizations
third party state

Each controller has an associated set of rules and a generic type of sanction. Eventually, he will put these together to describe a "system." What I want us to get out of this quick preview of Ellickson's book is to see another attempt at a "theory of social control" so that we have an appreciation of the GENRE of Black's chapter.

In Erikson we had our perspective shifted from looking at "deviants" and wondering why they did it, the old etiological approach, to a view that saw deviance defined by community reaction and the patterns revealed in that reaction were explainable at the level of the community. As I said at the end of the last lecture, the big take away in Erikson is an appreciation for social control as something that communities, groups, and societies DO. It's an inherent part of these entities.

In Black, and later Ellickson, we get the outlines of a theory that tries to explain the ways in which different types of social control are distributed OVER the SOCIAL SPACE of communities and societies.

Social Space

Let's go back to our small claim's court example. Let's consider just the dimension of how well off the parties are. In sociology we have a general term for the position one occupies in society and its associated advantages, disadvantages, and such. It's a term that ends up being used to mean many things but we'll ignore that for the moment and just use it simply. STATUS is a dimension along which entities can be located. Some are high status, some low. It partly refers to access to wealth and power, but also the respect of others, connections and so on. It turns out that it's not easy to measure even though we are sure that it is there. Be that as it may, the parties to a small claims court case can be of higher or lower status.

We can draw lines representing the status dimension for the plaintiffs and for the defendants. And we can observe how they tend to be distributed along these dimensions.

When we bring the two together, though, we create something altogether new, a "two dimensional space" in which each point represents a different combination of defendant status and plaintiff status. Now, any given case will be located at a particular location in this space.

We can talk about directionality -- are more suits brought looking up or down? And we can think substantively about the fact that very different phenomena are going on in these different locations. Over here we have high status entities suing low status (we can imagine this is often bill collection and the like) whereas over here it is low status going after high (which might be about consumer rights and such). And then, who wins?

Other social spaces related to the status-status space involve race, gender, organizational role, and etc.

MORE

Introduction

Key insight in the setup to this chapter is to get that author is trying to construct a general theory of social control. This means that it will be (1) abstract so that it can (2) apply to all instances of social control. Two major elements of the theory will be (1) a way to talk about different kinds (and amounts) of social control and (2) different conditions or settings (or structural locations). The theory then links these together by predicting what kind of social control arises under what conditions.

A note on method. The theory here is primarily deductive -- it moves from principles and ideas to propositions -- but the author is also building it inductively by gathering widely disparate studies of social control and translating them into the theory's language and then putting these together as a growing theory. Both of these approaches help to build a theory that can begin to indicate "what needs to be studied next" which is a basic requirement of science.

Beyond Law

Founders of sociology/anthropology (Durkheim, Weber, Ross, Malinowski) looked at SC in general but law has dominated the intellectual landscape in this area. Our task: remind ourselves that law is just one variety of social control. Even as we do that, though, it's useful to think of Black and other's work on things like "how much law?" and "where does law happen?"

Answer is not so much and not so common.

If folks often do NOT use the law to resolve conflicts and disputes about behavior, what do they use?

criticism, ridicule, ostracism, deprivation, third parties, scorn, desertion, self-destruction, violence

Concept of Social Control

Definitions. (1) practices that contribute to social order (but what is that?) (2) how people define and respond to behavior considered deviant.

Useful to consider wide variety of examples: physical violence; seizure of property; banishment; marking; compensation; casting spells; gossip; scolding; scowls; holding someone in low esteem.

In short we associate social control with all the ways that people express grievances against one another. Hence, it is associated intimately with social conflict.

Two ways to study social control. One asks what influence or effect it has; if you make the unruly student sit in the corner, does she tend to behave properly tomorrow? This is looking at social control as the cause or the independent variable. It is the more conventional way of thinking about deviant behavior and control. More recent thinking looks instead at the enormous variation in responses to deviance and asks why do different kinds show up where they do. This is looking at social control as the depedent variable.

Old
Variations in social control	=======>>>>	Variations in behavior
New
Locations in social space	=======>>>>	Variations in social control

Varieties of Normative Behavior

Form

Mechanism for expressing grievance, mode of conducting normative business. Uni-, bi-, tri-, multilateral. Examples are courts, discussion, protest, violence, letter to the editor. The dimension of variation concerns first of all WHO is involved and also degree of formality/informality.

Theory is SELF HELP + AVOIDANCE + SUPPORT + SETTLEMENT

Style

Logic of response (compensatory, therapeutic, penal, conciliatory and prevention, reform)

style	focus	commonly found where	associated professions/institutions
penal	conduct	criminal law	police/prisons/lawyers
compensatory	torts and contracts	lawyers/arbitrators/ADR
therapeutic	person	juvenile justice/psychiatry	social workers medical psychologists
conciliatory	relationship	marital counselors management consultants diplomacy	unions corporations states families lawyers
prevention	opportunity	space	security design
reform	causes

Quantity

Degree, magnitude, etc.

Ordinal vs. interval vs. ratio variables. Some things easy to "measure" but lots of stuff can be at least rank ordered.

Quantity of Normative Variation

To what degree is social control uniform -- same circumstances, same response. We observe first the fact that there IS normative variation. Deviance IS relative which is to say, social control is relative. To what? To something. To location in social space.

Models of Social Control

The Good, The True, and The BeautifulElements of the Theory

Looking at "The Theory"

Consider these propositions found in this chapter:

Normative variation is a direct function of the quantity of social diversity (11-2).
Normative variation is a direct function of the quantity of social control (14).
Settlement behavior is a curvilinear function of relational distance (15).
Intimacy breeds partisanship (15).

Take each one in turn and explicate the structure of its claim and then interpret it for us in "common sense" terms. The first half of this involves clarifying the meaning of the phrases "is a direct function of" and "is a curvilinear function of." The second requires us to define concepts such as "normative variation," "social diversity," "settlement behavior," "relational distance," "intimacy," and "partisanship."

Since each of these can be translated into everyday language, what is the utility of expressing them as above? One advantage is that it allows us to connect our theorizing to actual research and to design research that grows out of and attempts to test and or extend our theory. Another is that it allows us to combine our theoretical propositions into a body of knowledge about social control.

Leading Questions

In the most general terms, what does Black want to accomplish in this chapter?
What is the relationship between social control and law?
Who first advanced the concept of social control when?
Give two definitions of social control.
What is an independent variable? A dependent variable?
Which is the "old" and which is the "new" theory: social control as independent or dependent variable. Explain.
Social control varies by form -- how so?
Social control varies by style -- how so?
Social control varies by amount -- how so?
What is normative variation?
What is the connection between conflict and social control?

Concepts You Should Understand

compensatory
conciliatory
conformity
conflict
dependent variable
form of social control independent variable
normative life
normative variation
penal
prevention

quantity of social control
reform
social space
status
style of social control
therapeutic