Last Updated on September 4, 2026 by Karl Thompson
Social control refers to all the ways in which a society gets its members to follow its norms and values. This post covers:
- What social control means, and how it relates to deviance
- Formal and informal social control
- Internal and external social control
- The agents of social control
- Sociological theories of social control — Functionalist, Marxist and Interactionist
- Criticisms of the concept
Social control is part of the crime and deviance module, examined on Paper 3 of the AQA’s A-level sociology specification. It also turns up on Paper 1, where schools act as agents of social control, and in the beliefs in society topic, where religion does much the same job.
Most crime and deviance resources concentrate on the deviance half of the topic and skate over the control half. That is a mistake. The question of why most people obey the rules most of the time is just as interesting as the question of why a minority break them, and examiners ask about both.
[IMAGE: Social control in sociology mind map for A-level sociology]
What is social control?
Social control means all of the mechanisms a society uses to produce conformity — formal and informal, external and internal. Giddens and Sutton (2017) define it in roughly those terms, and the definition is deliberately broad because the mechanisms are so varied: a prison sentence and a disapproving look from your mother are both social control.
The concept is best understood as the mirror image of deviance. Sociologists of deviance ask why people break social norms and values. Social control theorists turn the question round and ask why people follow them.
That inversion is the whole point, and it is worth pausing on. Most people, most of the time, are not being watched, not being threatened with punishment, and not being paid to behave — and they conform anyway. Explaining that is the job of the concept.
The idea is often traced back to the seventeenth-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who argued that in a society of self-interested individuals a great power — the State — was needed to stop things collapsing into a war of all against all. Individuals give up some of their freedoms and promise to obey the law; in return the State protects them.
Formal and informal social control
This is the first distinction to learn, and the one most commonly asked about.
Formal social control is exercised by agencies with the official authority to enforce written rules and impose penalties. The police, the courts, prisons and the probation service are the obvious examples, but so are a school’s behaviour policy and an employer’s disciplinary procedure. The rules are written down, the sanctions are official, and there is usually a process for deciding whether someone has broken them.
Informal social control is everything else — the unwritten rules enforced by everyone around us, all the time. Disapproving looks, gossip, ridicule, being left out of a group, a parent’s raised eyebrow, a friend saying “you can’t say that”. Nothing is written down and nobody has any official authority, but it is remarkably effective.
Both work through sanctions, and sanctions come in two directions. Negative sanctions punish rule-breaking — a fine, a detention, being ignored at lunch. Positive sanctions reward conformity — praise, promotion, a good reference, being included.
Informal control does most of the work. Formal control is expensive, slow, and only reaches people after they have already broken a rule. Most of us are kept in line by the much cheaper mechanism of caring what other people think of us. Sociologists tend to be more interested in informal control for exactly that reason: it operates constantly, invisibly, and on everybody.
Internal and external social control
The second distinction cuts across the first.
External social control comes from outside the individual — the threat of punishment, the fear of being caught, the pressure of other people’s expectations. It works while somebody is watching.
Internal social control comes from inside — conscience, guilt, a sense that certain things are simply wrong. It works when nobody is watching.
This distinction matters because it explains something formal control cannot. Most people do not shoplift, and it is not because they have calculated the odds of being caught. They do not shoplift because it would not occur to them, and if it did they would feel bad about it. Their control is internal, and it got there through socialisation.
Agents of social control
An agent of social control is any person, group or institution that works to make individuals conform. The main ones:
The family. The first and arguably the most important. Primary socialisation teaches children the basic norms and values of their society before they meet any other institution, and it does so almost entirely through informal control — approval, disapproval, and imitation.
Education. Schools reach almost everybody and hold them for thousands of hours. They use formal control (attendance law, behaviour policies, exclusions, isolation units) and informal control (the hidden curriculum, teacher expectations, peer pressure) at the same time. There is a fuller treatment in my post on education and social control.
Religion. Religious institutions supply moral rules, and — for believers — the strongest form of internal control there is, since the rules are enforced by a conscience answerable to God rather than to the police.
The media. The media does not punish anybody, but it defines what counts as normal and what counts as outrageous, and it does so for millions of people simultaneously. Public shaming on social media is informal social control operating at a scale Hobbes could not have imagined.
The workplace. Contracts, line managers, appraisals, disciplinary procedures, and the simple fact that most people need the money.
The police, courts and prisons. The formal agents of last resort — the part of the system that deals with people the other agents have failed to control. Note how small a part of the picture this is: most people have no direct contact with the police in their entire lives.
Examples of social control in everyday life
| Agent | Informal control | Formal control |
|---|---|---|
| Family | Disapproval, guilt, withdrawal of affection | Parenting contracts, fines for unauthorised school absence |
| Education | Teacher expectations, peer pressure, the hidden curriculum | Detentions, isolation units, exclusions, compulsory attendance |
| Religion | Conscience, shame, community expectation | Excommunication; religious law where it operates |
| Media | Ridicule, public shaming, defining what is normal | Regulation by Ofcom; libel law |
| Workplace | Office culture, reputation, informal hierarchies | Contracts, disciplinary procedures, dismissal |
| The State | — | Laws, police, courts, prisons, surveillance |
Theories of social control
Conformity-producing and deviance-repressing approaches
One useful way of sorting theories of social control is to divide them into two kinds (Hudson 1997).
Conformity-producing theories focus on how people learn to conform in the first place — by internalising norms and taking on social roles. The Functionalist accounts of the family and education are of this type.
Deviance-repressing theories focus on the relationship between deviant behaviour and the measures used to reduce it. Right and left realist approaches to crime are of this type.
The best accounts do both. A society that only repressed deviance without producing conformity would need a police officer for every citizen.
Parsons: control through socialisation
Talcott Parsons developed one of the earliest sociological accounts of social control. He was interested in how societies produce enough conformity to reproduce themselves across generations, and he pointed out something easily missed: most people do not seem to mind conforming to most of society’s norms for most of their lives. They conform willingly.
Parsons argued that socialisation is what makes this possible. Institutions such as the family and education get individuals to internalise a society’s norms and values, and to accept that a “good person” is one who follows the rules. Conformity is not only produced by external agencies threatening punishment; it is produced by people who have taken the rules inside themselves.
This is the Functionalist position, and it is the clearest example of a conformity-producing theory.
Sykes and Matza: techniques of neutralisation
Sykes and Matza (1957) argued that even people who break the law generally share the values of the society they are breaking the law in. When they commit deviant acts, they use techniques of neutralisation to explain the contradiction away.
Techniques of neutralisation include things like “I was drunk, so I was out of control”, “they had it coming”, “nobody actually got hurt” and “everyone does it”. They allow an individual to account for a particular deviant act as an exception while still thinking of themselves as someone who normally conforms.
This is important evidence for the strength of internal control. If offenders had genuinely rejected society’s values they would not need to neutralise anything — they would simply not care.
Note: Matza’s own later work, Delinquency and Drift (1964), develops the idea that most delinquents drift in and out of deviance rather than committing to it. The techniques of neutralisation argument is the earlier, jointly authored one.
Hirschi’s control theory
Travis Hirschi (1969) argued that deviance does not really need explaining: it happens whenever an individual is cut loose from their bonds to society and has the opportunity. What needs explaining is the bonds. The more attachments a person has — to family, to friends, to school, to work — the less likely they are to offend.
This is the single most influential control theory in criminology and it has its own full treatment, including Hirschi’s four bonds of attachment and the criticisms of them, in my post on Hirschi’s control theory of crime.
Marxist approaches
Unlike the three consensus approaches above, Marxists see social control as engineered — consciously or unconsciously — by the capitalist class and the State.
On the conformity-producing side, Marxists argue that the norms and values taught in education produce a docile and passive workforce, as set out in Bowles and Gintis’ correspondence principle. The media performs a similar function: agenda setting and gatekeeping present the elite’s view of the world as simple common sense, producing ideological control.
On the deviance-repressing side, Marxists are critical of who gets controlled. Working-class street crime is heavily policed and prosecuted; corporate crime, which does far more financial damage, is not. See the Marxist theory of crime for the fuller argument.
Interactionist approaches
The labelling perspective sees the relationship between social control and deviance as ironic. The harder the agencies of social control work to prevent deviance — by labelling certain behaviours as deviant and policing them — the more deviance they create.
Much interactionist research has focused on how it is certain types of people, rather than certain types of behaviour, who get labelled as deviant, and how that label then becomes self-fulfilling.
Criticisms of the concept of social control
It can be too broad to be useful. If a prison sentence and a disapproving look are both social control, the concept covers so much that it risks explaining nothing. Used carelessly it becomes a label for anything that produces conformity.
Functionalist accounts assume conformity is a good thing. Parsons treats willing conformity as evidence that a society is working. Marxists and feminists point out that it may instead be evidence that a society has successfully persuaded people to accept arrangements that do not serve them.
Feminists argue the concept has been applied unevenly. Heidensohn and others argue that women are subject to considerably more social control than men — at home, in public space and at work — and that this, rather than any difference in criminality, explains a good deal of the gender gap in offending. See feminist perspectives on crime and deviance.
Control has become more subtle, not less. Foucault’s work on surveillance argues that modern societies control people less by punishing them and more by watching them, until they watch themselves. That is internal control produced by external means, and it does not fit neatly into either category above. See Foucault, surveillance and crime control.
How social control comes up in the exam
Social control appears in the specification alongside crime, deviance and social order, and it is examinable in three main ways:
- As a 10-mark question in its own right, usually asking you to outline and explain ways in which some institution acts as an agent of social control
- As evaluation material in essays on crime prevention, punishment and the role of the criminal justice system
- As application material on Paper 1, where the social control function of education is a criticism of the Functionalist perspective on education
A practice question, written for this site rather than reproduced from a past paper:
Outline and explain two ways in which agents of social control produce conformity. (10)
Remember there are no marks for evaluation on the no-item 10-markers. Two points, each developed properly, is what earns the marks.
A strong answer would take one informal mechanism and one formal one rather than two of the same kind. Point one might be internalisation through primary socialisation, using Parsons: the family teaches norms so effectively that individuals police themselves, which is why conformity persists when nobody is watching. Point two might be formal sanction through the criminal justice system, using the deviance-repressing side of the distinction: the courts and prisons deal with the minority the informal agencies have failed to reach, and the threat of that outcome deters others.
For more on exam technique see my page on exams, short answer questions and essays.
Crime and Deviance Revision Bundle
If you like this sort of thing, then you might like my crime and deviance revision notes bundle — which contains the following:
[IMAGE: Crime and Deviance Revision Bundle Cover — linked to Sellfy product]
- [BUNDLE CONTENTS — copy the numbered list from the existing crime and deviance CTA block]
Signposting and Related Posts
This post has been written primarily for students studying the crime and deviance topic, as part of the AQA’s A-Level Sociology course.
The natural next step is Hirschi’s control theory of crime, which is the fullest version of the argument that weak social bonds cause deviance.
For how one institution does this in practice, see education and social control, which asks how effectively schools actually control pupils.
For what happens when informal control fails, see crime prevention and control strategies and sociological perspectives on punishment.
More material on this topic is available on the crime and deviance page.
Please click here to return to the homepage – ReviseSociology.com
Sources
Giddens, A. and Sutton, P. (2017) Essential Concepts in Sociology, 2nd edition. Polity.
Sykes, G. and Matza, D. (1957) ‘Techniques of Neutralization: A Theory of Delinquency’, American Sociological Review 22(6).
Hirschi, T. (1969) Causes of Delinquency. University of California Press.