social control

Featured References

• Media influence: An instrument for social control

  Social scientists have made efforts to integrate the study of the mass media as instrument of control with the study of political and economic developments in the Afro-Asian countries. David Lerner(1958) has emphasised the general pattern of increase in standard of living, urbanization , literacy and exposure to the mass media during the process of transition from traditional to modern society. According to Lerner, while there is a heavy emphasis on the expanding of the mass media in developing societies, the penetration of the central authority into the daily consciousness of the mass has to overcome profound resistance.

• Social control: Applications of social control theory

  According to the propaganda model theory, the leaders of modern, corporate-dominated societies employ indoctrination as a means of social control. Theorists such as Noam Chomsky have argued that systematic bias exists in the modern media.[4] The marketing, advertising, and public relations industries have thus been said to utilize mass communications to aid the interests of certain business elites. Powerful economic and religious lobbyists have often used school systems and centralised electronic communications to influence public opinion. Democracy is restricted as the majority is not given the information necessary to make rational decisions about ethical, social, environmental, or economic issues.

• Temne people: Social Control

  Among nineteenth-century Temne, the law did not have the preeminent place in the resolution of disagreements and conflicts in the way court systems do in twentieth-century democracies. There was no separate, largely independent judiciary; sociopolitical leaders tried certain cases as a prerogative of their positions. Rather than applying abstract ideals of justice, equity, and good conscience, these leaders made decisions in light of the particular political and social settings in each specific instance. Disagreements and conflicts between individuals and groups were adjudicated at, first, the kin-group and residence-group level; second, at the association level (especially the Poro and Bundu societies); and third, at the chiefdom and subchiefdom level (in a chief's court). The first level used primarily moot proceedings, the second usually inquisitory techniques, and the third, a kind of adversarial contest. In the colonial court system, only courts of those chiefs recognized as paramounts served as local courts. Somewhat modified, the system continues today.