Social Control: Mannheim, Gibbs, Chapin

Social Control: Mannheim, Gibbs, Chapin James J. Chriss Cleveland State University Introduction These are some scattered writings—I usually title them “snippets—on various aspects of social control. Here I deal with the thought of Karl Mannheim, Jack Gibbs, and Stuart Chapin relating to social control. It is interesting to compare Mannheim and Chapin, both of whom were writing in the 1930s from (respectively) German and American vantagepoints. Chapin’s work, now long-forgotten, probably deserves to be rediscovered. It seems to have informed some of the later work of Don Martindale who himself contributed to aspects of social control during the 1960s and 1970s. Gibbs, on the other hand, did much of his writing on social control during the 1980s and 1990s. Karl Mannheim German sociologist Karl Mannheim, actively publishing from the 1930s through the 1950s, contributed to many areas of sociological inquiry including that of social control. Consistent with my definition of social control which will be introduced shortly, Mannheim defined it as “the sum of those methods by which a society tries to influence human behavior to maintain a given order.” Mannheim (1957, p. 125). Mannheim goes on to argue that over the course of societal evolution human beings slowly and inexorably became more conscious of their own activities. This new level of self-understanding changed the way human beings organized their lives, bringing planning and administration to bear on more of their activities. Mannheim (1951). At the grandest level, Mannheim argues that the progression of human thought over time, particularly with respect to how and why human beings sought to organize and direct the activities of fellow human beings, passes through the three stages of chance discovery, invention, and planning. Let us look at each of these. First, with respect to chance discovery, Mannheim is referring to the primitive condition of human existence (for example, mechanical solidarity as described by Durkheim in chapter 1) based on isolated families and clans, and later developing into larger groups known as tribes. Within primitive humanity, control projects were simply local solutions with regard to living in harsh physical environments. Each small group hit upon certain notions of what to do and what not to do, based upon the particular geography of the area and the unique plant and animal life contained therein. No organized way of dealing with these problems were yet developed, and it was left up to the individual will and initiative of persons to establish practical solutions for the tasks at hand. The various and variable controls developed within any assemblage of humanity—especially in the areas of work, religious festivals, and the relationship between the sexes—were spontaneous and based on the “intuitive consent” of the people rather than on the “deliberate calculation” of planning authorities. Ibid., p. 328. With continuing upgrading through physical and social evolution, early glimpses of task specialization came into focus, including specialized activities that were coordinated more broadly across the community. This is the second stage of control, namely invention, which “…has been reached when a special institutional organization is set up, with express authority to govern, enforced by sanctions.” Ibid. On top of folkways, customs, habits, and traditions, there is now the addition of bureaucratic organization with specific procedures in place which identifies authorities who carry out the specialized tasks of the organization. The customs originally developed within the previous stage of chance discovery are still important, but they are preserved in a rationalized form and textualized (that is, committed to paper) in bureaucratic directives, codes, statutes, and ordinances. These early forms of organization are the precursors to government and the state, the latter of which will not be fully developed until the third stage. This third stage is planning, the culmination of the process of rationalization (a concept of Max Weber, which we will return to in chapter 1) which began in the invention stage. Societies that successfully made it through earlier, primitive stages experienced population growth, and the informal systems of control based on folkways, mores, and tradition were rendered less effective because of the rise of anonymity and the fact that persons were less likely to know other members of society. In other words, once the stage of mass society is reached within the planning stage, centralized control of growing populations was needed, giving rise to the political state (or government). The softer version of government control is laissez-faire liberalism, whereby the government allows the informal systems of socialization and morality to guide the actions and interactions of persons in everyday life, while creating more coordinated structures, institutions, and organizations to service a mass public. For example, within capitalism government intervenes only to the extent that distribution and production systems are protected so that persons may freely enter markets as they see fit with very little regulation. In liberalism, persons are more or less invisible to the state, and civil rights are (ideally) ensured to maximize the liberties of all persons regardless of race, creed, national origin, gender, and so forth. The planning that happens within the liberal state is supposed to produce those things desired and authorized by the people themselves through representative democracy and collective actions taking place across local communities. This is the idea of “planning for freedom,” a benevolent government apparatus found in various configurations (whether democratic or republican constitutions, parliaments, or some combination of these). The harder version of government is totalitarianism, where all facets of the citizens’ lives are controlled by the central authority of the state. Mannheim argues that some hybrid forms of government, such as semi-totalitarian democracies, may emerge before the development of full-blown totalitarian states often headed by an iron-fisted dictator. These usually emerge in preparation for war, when such societies are convinced that they are surrounded on all sides by hostile enemies and states. Ibid, p. 338. At the time of writing this Mannheim had just witnessed the end of World War II in which world forces—headed by an alliance between the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union—had finally defeated the fascist totalitarian regime of Hitler’s Nazi Germany. Similar attempts at fashioning systems of total government control emerged in communist dictatorships beginning in the late 1800s in Russia, China, and elsewhere, although by the late 1980s many of them lost power and introduced, to varying degrees, market-based economies closer in spirit to capitalism. See Dahrendorf (1988). In whatever form it takes, Mannheim describes government as the “control of controls,” whereby mass society is manipulated consciously by planning officials for the (hoped for) greater good of society. Mannheim (1951, p. 344). Mannheim argues that the ideal activities of planning in the modern state amount to the “rational mastery of the irrational.” Ibid., p. 265. The “irrational” from the quote refers to the slapdash and relative unpredictability of our lives as they are lived from moment to moment. Although we settle into routines and try to minimize random or surprise occurrences, all of us realize as well that life is a crapshoot and that there is a limit to individual initiative and foresight. Staving off the unpleasant and the perilous is a collective effort of the total society spearheaded by the resources of planning experts at the heads of government, industry, education, community, and so forth. These heads of state and industry receive specialized training and education and are especially well-equipped to deal with contingencies so as to minimize their deleterious effects. But as such expert knowledge is applied to more and more areas of life, the rational planning of which Mannheim spoke so highly threatens to become a runaway norm such that the ability of everyday persons to decide things for themselves is imperiled. This culminates in concerns over, as Habermas has described it (see chapter 10), a “totally administered society” whereby the system colonizes the lifeworld and informal control is rendered less effective or useful in the face of the rise of an expertocracy fashioning more formalized interventions into the lifeworld utilizing varying combinations of legal and medical control. For a systematic overview of the growth of an expert class steering the activities of citizens in modernity and beyond, see Turner (2003). Out of this, there is also the possibility of the emergence of dystopian “societies of control” which are much more concerned with ensuring social control while less concerned with protecting individual liberties and the informal processes of socialization, integration, and solidarity taking place in the lifeworld (or everyday life). See Deleuze (1992). Overall, Mannheim’s articulation of the three stages of chance discovery, invention, and planning is a useful complement to any study of social control. Jack Gibbs An alternative theory of control has been developed by Jack Gibbs. Unlike Mannheim, whose theory of social control emphasizes the historical progression of thought culminating in the development of the modern, totally-administered society, Gibbs has fashioned a unique conceptual framework for explaining control in general and social control in particular. This theory of control is summarized in Gibbs (1989a, 1994). At the grandest, most abstract level of his theoretical system, Gibbs argues there are three basic forms of control: inanimate, biotic, and human. Inanimate control is the human attempt to control, modify, or affect an inanimate object or its characteristics. Examples include throwing a rock to ward off a predator, as well as many forms of technology, which after all are attempts by humans to gain greater control over their environment through the development and creation of these various technologies. Biotic control is the human attempt to alter, affect, or change the characteristics of plant or animal organisms. Examples include food quests, the creation and maintenance of monoculture forests, and the use of animals for various purposes including transportation, as beasts of burden, in medical research, or even in warfare. This means, for example, that genetic engineering would fall under biotic control. The third category, human control, amounts to the diverse ways humans attempt to control human behavior. Within human control there are two subcategories: internal and external control. Internal human control equates simply to self-control. Going on a diet to lose weight, changing jobs to reduce depression or increase salary, or even trying to stop smoking are all examples of self-control, according to Gibbs. These examples are taken from Gibbs (1994, p. 44). But self-control does not count as social control according to Gibbs’ analytical framework. External human control refers to the human attempt to control the behavior of human beings, excluding self-control (which is covered under internal control). External control consists of three subcategories, which are proximate, sequential, and social control. Proximate control refers to attempts at direct or unmediated control of other human beings. Examples include coming into physical contact with another person (a pat on the back, a kiss, or an assault), or acts that do not require direct contact such as inviting someone over for dinner, saying hello, or hailing a cab. The category of sequential control is necessitated because not all social life is conducted in face-to-face settings with co-present others. That is, often persons try to control others when there is spatial distance between the parties. Examples of sequential control include the chain of command in the military, use of communications technologies such as the telephone or the Internet, or person-to-person communications dispersed across social networks. For more on sequential control across social networks, see Friedkin (1983). With regard to the category of social control, Gibbs breaks from the traditional understanding of the term, which typically emphasizes norms and conceptualizes control as the counteraction of deviance. (Indeed, in the modern era the most influential theory of social control as the counteraction of deviance was developed by Talcott Parsons, whose ideas we will examine shortly.) In contrast, Gibbs believes defining deviance and social control with reference to norms is overly narrow, primarily because such an approach cannot account for large-scale attempts at social control such as mass media advertising or state terrorism. Gibbs attempts to overcome the deficiencies of traditional approaches by defining attempted social control as …overt behavior by a human, the first party, in the belief that (1) the overt behavior increases or decreases the probability of a change in the behavior of another human or humans, the second party in either case; (2) the overt behavior involves a third party but not in the way of sequential control; and (3) the increase or decrease is desirable. Gibbs (1989a, pp. 58-59). The main thing to note about Gibbs’ theory of control is that the typology is generated on the basis of the objects of control. To summarize, control efforts aimed at inanimate objects is inanimate control, control efforts aimed at biological organisms (other than human) is biotic control, while control efforts aimed at human beings is human control. Within human control, control efforts aimed at oneself is internal control, while control efforts aimed at other humans is external control. Finally, external human control may be in the form of proximate control, sequential control, or social control. Also notice that, according to Gibbs’ definition, social control must always involve at least three parties (but not in the way of sequential control). This leads to some complexity in that there are five different types of social control, namely referential, allegative, vicarious, modulative, and prelusive control. The term for one type of social control, “allegative,” is not a typo. In allegative social control “the first party communicates an allegation about the second party to the third party” in the belief that the allegation will prompt the third party to change the behavior of the second party (Gibbs, 2008, p. 32). An example of allegative social control is the police interrogating a suspect to see if they can prod him or her into naming an accomplice, which of course amounts to an allegation which awaits verification through further investigation. In order to better understand Gibbs’ theory of social control, some concrete examples of referential social control are provided here. In referential social control, the first party makes reference to a third party in order to influence the behavior of a second party. So, for example, a little boy might tell his brother “Give me back my candy or I’ll tell mother!” This example is from Gibbs (1994, pp. 51-52). Not all referential social control occurs at the small group or micro level, however. For example, law is a type of referential control according to Gibbs. In the courtroom lawyers direct their arguments to a third party (the judge, the jury, and a mass public if the trial is being televised) in an effort to win a conviction against the defendant, the second party. Creating a general theory of control on the basis of the objects of control is ingenious, but Gibbs’ system may also be too radical for purposes of social control specifically. One source of radicalism is Gibbs’ rejection of the traditional emphasis on norms, which we have already discussed. Another, perhaps even more important aspect of this radicalism is that the complexity of social control itself, with its five types, may discourage any attempt to utilize or test the theory within the research setting. Finally, the notion that social control occurs only in situations involving three or more parties appears to exclude from consideration or treatment a vast array of dyadic, or two party control situations. Gibbs’ solution is simply to treat such dyadic situations as proximate control, a move which makes sense only with a full-blown commitment to Gibbs’ theory of control. F. Stuart Chapin At about the same time that Mannheim was developing his views on social control, University of Minnesota sociologist F. Stuart Chapin developed a view of social control from within the context of the broader effort to fashion definitive statements on the nature of social institutions. Chapin was influential throughout the 1930s, reflected in his elevation to the presidency of the American Sociological Society in 1935. In his book Contemporary American Institutions: A Sociological Analysis, Chapin (1935, pp. 291-316) included a chapter on the topic of leadership and planning in the New Deal. The Great Depression of 1929 crippled the presidential administration of Herbert Hoover, who was seen as ineffective as a leader and indifferent to the suffering of Americans as the depression dragged on through the 1930s (Gibbs, 2008, pp. 53-65). In the presidential election of 1932, challenger Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) defeated Hoover in a landslide, winning 46 of 48 states. FDR set about to create a larger and much more aggressively interventionist federal government than had previously been conceptualized, predicated on the urgent need to attend to the emergency of the Great Depression and its fallout. Some of the areas of targeted legislation included: regulating finance; lowering tariffs; mortgage and unemployment relief; control and new construction of infrastructure, including utilities; raising wages; and reducing working hours (Rauchway, 2019, p. 205). There was also an attempt by FDR to pack the Supreme Court in the face of unfavorable rulings which delayed or halted a number of his executive orders, but the plan ultimately failed (Gibbs, 2008, pp. 66-73). In his discussion of the new levels of bureaucratic control necessitated by New Deal policies, Chapin (1935) provides an early and important conceptual distinction between informal and legal control. Informal control is basically self-help or self-policing, whereby persons acting in their capacity only as fellow human beings seek to steer others toward norm-conforming behavior. This type of control appears in the form of agents of socialization (families, friends, members of the local community, schools and churches) using their influence and/or status to steer persons toward norm-conforming behavior. This represents the realm of morality or the “ought” rather than the mandates or compulsions of legal control, that is, the “must.” Informal control is felt as concrete and palpable insofar as those carrying out guidance and meting out sanctions in the face of norm-violation are known persons operating at the level of face-to-face contact. As Chapin (1935, p. 304) explains, in informal control “The controls over total behavior exercised by such groups involve the primary virtues of cheerfulness, courtesy, friendliness, helpfulness, kindliness, loyalty, obedience and trustworthiness—in short, traits of character.” With the rise of new formal organizations or bureaucracies tasked with the carrying out of services associated with the various aspects of New Deal legislation and policies, with their location in distant centers rather than in the cozy confines of everyday life, and staffed by “unknown and usually unknowable individuals,” the traits of character central to informal control cannot be made use of. In legal or bureaucratic control, a new regime of control-at-a-distance emerges utilizing impersonal machinery such as the “telephone, telegraph, radio and the printed executive order, decree, or administrative rule” (Chapin, 1935, ibid.). This type of control favors the value of efficiency over character, with emphasis shifting over to “accuracy, brevity, clarity, promptness, speed, and conformity” (Chapin, 1935, ibid.). This type of formal control may indeed be efficient, but it lacks the ability to integrate the individual’s behavior into a stable personality pattern. This is because new, distant centers of power staffed by unknown individuals gives persons dealing with such agencies “nothing familiar to grasp” (Chapin, 1935, p. 305). Chapin’s main recommendation for implementing New Deal policies in these faceless and remote bureaucratic settings is to decentralize agencies as much as possible, in effect meshing them into the social institutions of local communities. This means that there would be a necessary period of experimentation and adjustment so that the overhead agencies of the New Deal could be coordinated with local institutions. And although a modicum of centralization will still be required even after such integration with local communities, one solution to ease the decentralization process would be to staff agencies “with men and women with striking and colorful personalities” who will fit in with the ethos and flavor of the local community. In effect, by carefully selecting personnel to staff and agencies, these persons will “come to stand as symbols of the more abstract entity—the XYZ Administration” (Chapin, 1935, p. 306). Even so, formal organizations are characterized by bureaucratic inertia whereby tenets of the policy goals being pursued on the basis for why the organization was set up in the first place—to provide social welfare in the case of New Deal agencies—will overwhelm and outstrip the capacities of agency personnel to actually pull off the kind of interactions that represent humane face-to-face contact. Typically what will happen, even with the best intentions of populating agencies with colorful “locals” who presumably can better connect with clients, is that the drudgery of bureaucratic work will effect a snobbish in the public servants who are servicing welfare clients.  References Chapin, F. Stuart. 1935. Contemporary American Institutions: A Sociological Analysis. New York: Harper & Bros. Gibbs, Jack P. 2008. Colossal Control Failures. Boulder, CO: Paradigm. Rauchway, Eric. 2019. “The New Deal Was on the Ballot in 1932.” Modern American History 2:201-213. Notes 12