Unit 7

• Language- members of the same society can communicate effectively because they appropriate standard meanings to symbols.
• values- members of a culture are able to define what is desirable and what is undesirable, hence directing not just actions, but also points of views.
• norms- that members of society gain a sense of security and trust in their personal interactions.
• social control- referred only to a society’s capacity to regulate itself, but in

  recent years, it has been altered to reflect its capacity to influence human behavior towards the

  maintenance of a given order.
• Edward Alsworth Ross- he refers to social control as the “foundation of order within a society.” According to him, without social control, there can be no successful cooperation, where the fruits of cooperation of individuals are enjoyed and shared to the society as a whole.
• Symbols- through this the members of the same culture recognize each other.
• Informal Means of Control- refers to an individuals inner capacity to sense what is right and what is wrong, which decreases the tendency of an individual to deviate from norms.
• social control theory- which proposes that individuals will tend to uphold the norms and values of society because they attribute significance and meaning to such.
• The informal means of social control is a subject of an entire field of study called the social control theory
• Informal means of control have three components:- social values, sanctions, reward and punishment
• Edward Ross provides us with an insight He says, “sympathy (the capacity to connect with another person), sociability (the instinct to facilitate harmony in one’s interactions), the sense of justice (the mental capacity to appropriate that one’s desires, interests and rights are the same as that of others), and resentment (taken to mean individual reaction) are competent…to workout by themselves a true, natural order”
• Formal means of control- are the system of rewards and punishments that become structuralized in an institution.
• Education- is an extension of socialization because it inculcates moral, intellectual, and social values in individuals.
• Law - is a system of rules created to reinforce social values and to regulate behavior.
• coercion- the use of force against social deviance is a formal means of control that is utilized only by the state.
• proscriptive- focuses on what cannot be done, for example: abortion is still illegal
• prescriptive- focuses on what should be done, for example to prevent abortion, schools are required to offer age-appropriate reproductive health and sex education to all its students.
• social contract- where individuals agree to follow the rules set by an authority they have chosen in order to ensure peace and prosperity for everyone in the society.
• Deviance - refers to recognized violations of cultural norms.