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The Behavior of Social Control

-- By ChaseLax - 19 May 2015

Beyond Law

In the initial chapters of The Behavior of Law, Donald Black conveys that “law” is simply one form of social control. While he primarily focuses on the direction and scope of law specifically, the author nonetheless notes that social control more generally is “the normative aspect of social life…the definition of deviant behavior and the response to it.” (emphasis added)

Black’s analysis of the law as a social phenomenon reveals troubling patterns regarding the functioning of communities; as it results from neatly drawn generalizations and propositions about the quantity of legislation, litigation, and adjudication, however, his insight produces a sense of inevitability and may lead one to discount the impact of individual motivation in effectuating the social realities that he describes. Part of the power of the piece stems from its insistence on not saying “[anything] about social life that is beyond a test of the facts,” but what happens when we apply the facts that Black uncovers to the variable expressions that constitute normative societal responses to deviant behavior? Analysis of these specific responses might reveal a truth that is even more discomforting than Black’s zoomed-out hypotheses: maybe individuals are implicitly aware and protective of the social dynamics that Black quantified.

Not Simply Splitting

When I read Dean Lester’s email announcing the death of Jackson Alberts, both the tone and substance of the message induced an all-too familiar feeling of emptiness. The cause of Jackson’s passing was never announced; nonetheless, five of my classmates committed suicide during my senior year of college, so I recognized the hollowness of statements like “We know we are united in mourning the loss of such a promising member of our community” and knew that the stress of exams would quickly override the momentary sense of shock.

Harkening back to our class discussion on the lack of human capacity to fathom tragedy, one might view our tendency to quickly move past student deaths as another example of splitting, a means of reconciling our inability to internalize great loss. Yet, more than a year removed from those five suicides, the news of one in particular, the athletically gifted and socially involved Madison Holleran, continues to reverberate. If we habitually repress reminders of events with which we cannot cope, why did Madison’s death command so much more attention from the community in its aftermath and why does it continue to today?

A Clear Message

Thinking about the loss of Madison and its social impact from Black’s angle, one could point to her radial location within UPenn’s community in order to explain the increased attention. In line with Black’s theory on centrifugal and centripetal social forces, an integrated victim who had connected with more individuals might logically garner more sympathy. In examining the nature rather than just the magnitude of the mourning over Madison, however, it becomes evident that other elements must have been highly influential. Instead of the non-descript announcement that was employed for the other suicides, the national news articles that covered the story underscored the fact that this student was “beautiful.” With the additional details of her athletic prowess and immense popularity, the clearly perceptible sentiment from the public reaction was that Madison was not the type of person who was supposed to want to kill herself.

The Implication

The unfortunate converse of such a response is that it was not so unexpected for the other suicidal students to have that desire, and this implicit justification of the outsider’s plight became even more apparent in subsequent coverage of the incident. Many outlets began to focus more on Madison’s mental health issues, and others allocated the blame towards feelings of inferiority engendered by social media. Regardless of the proffered explanations, the societal insistence that something had gone wrong in this case and the prolonged effort to deduce what exactly that was suggests that not only do we condone and accept Black’s insight on the relative value and importance of individuals on the periphery, but also that we actively seek to preserve the dynamic of what a particular status within a community entails.

“Unprofessorial”

This maintenance and reinforcement is also apparent in regards to other societal forces detailed by Black, such as etiquette. The author states that etiquette varies directly with stratification and that higher ranking individuals have more of it, but explains that the pattern inverts when individuals from varying status-layers intermingle. How, then, can we reconcile this theory with societal responses to episodes like Ben Edelman’s infamous harassment of a family-owned Chinese Restaurant? Does the fact that the Harvard Professor’s petulant emails resulted in viral outrage cut against Black’s findings? Although the sociologist’s work predicts that society would be more outwardly tolerant of Edelman’s conduct, the conclusion of the conflict, a mere apology, lends some credence to Black’s propositions concerning downward versus upward etiquette.

The existence of that extra social control in the form of the public backlash remains noteworthy, however. Once again, the societal response works to reinforce notions of how members of a certain status and vertical or horizontal location should behave, turning an incident that might effectively blur these lines into one that preserves predilections and accentuates stratification within society.

An Instructive Framework

Moving forward, Black’s work can operate as a lens for viewing and assessing specific expressions of public sentiment and social control, and it only continues to gain utility as society becomes more highly stratified yet interconnected. Just above the recent ESPN article that featured a segment on Madison Holleran, for instance, the company announced the reinstatement of Britt McHenry? , a reporter who aroused public ire (but only received a one-week suspension) after the leaking of a video in which she verbally abused and demeaned a tow-truck company employee. Accordingly, while Stratification is the basis of Black’s detached, quantitative analysis, perhaps our qualitative societal responses are aimed at preserving it.

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