Social Systems and Social Regulations

Elaine Cumming

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138533042
• eBook ISBN: 9781351489454
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Work
• Index: Social Sciences

In Social Systems and Social Regulations, Elaine Cumming describes attitudes of patients and clients toward health and welfare organizations. The focus is on the complex relationships between regulative agents, as revealed by the movement of clients through health and welfare systems. The author observes how doctors, clergy members, police officers, welfare officers, psychiatrists, social workers, and other social agents relate to one another and to their clients and charges.Cumming selected Syracuse, New York, typical of many middle-sized American cities of the 1960s, for her field studies. These involved several agencies and thousands of individuals. The result is a thoughtful analysis that can readily be applied to many aspects of the entire social system. Who are the clients? What are their problems? How do agents respond to them? These are some of the topics dealt with at length.From the view point of the agents, the author discusses how they see their own roles in the overall regulative system; how areas of operation interact and overlap; how the network of agencies changed over a five year period; what major problems remained to be overcome at the time; and what changes could and should have been made. When initially published, this was a new examination of the regulative system in America. Students and scholars will still find this work invaluable in the study of social control. Professionals will find many points for contrast and comparison and an analytical framework for evaluating and solving problems faced in health and welfare operations throughout the country.

I
The Regulative Agents

This study concerns the systematic regulation of social behavior. It reports a series of studies of the ways in which doctors, clergymen, policemen, welfare officers, psychiatrists, social workers, and other social agents divide the task of maintaining social order. Part I discusses the general problem of order, sets it in a theoretical perspective, and then describes, in terms of this perspective, a series of regulative agents and the encounters between them and the people approaching them. Part II discusses the regulative system taken as a whole and examines the relationships among its various elements, and Part III focuses upon the kinds of problems that the members of the regulative system must solve.

The Process of Social

Regulation

1

The General Problem of Order

Social order is defined here as that state of affairs in which it is possible to predict with reasonable accuracy what other people will do in routine situations. The nature of the order may change, but a range of behavior at once acceptable and predictable is imperative if any society, whether a large one like a nation, or small like a family, is to survive.

Social survival can be considered in terms of four standing problems that must continually be solved (Parsons, 1960). First, there is the problem of adapting to the environment, both physical and human—that is, food and shelter must be produced and danger fended off. Second, goals must be identified clearly enough to ensure some agreement about what the members should be doing day by day. Third, some method of inculcating in the young and reinforcing in the mature the values and moral codes that enlighten and control everyday behavior must be agreed upon; and fourth, the problem of coherence, or the integration of the different elements of a society, must be solved if the whole is to be more than the sum of the parts.

When social roles are specifically designed to forward society’s goals by adaptation to the environment, they are called instrumental; when they are designed to regulate relationships among the members or to maintain acceptable standards of conduct, they are called socioemotional (Bales, 1953). It is on these latter roles, specifically designed to maintain the internal order of society, that this report is concentrated.

Informal versus Formal Social Regulation

Informal Regulation

Social order arises, in a sense, from a permanent running compromise between constraint and freedom, between the interest of the individual and the goals of society (Shils, 1956). This compromise takes place informally wherever people interact, and it is possible only because most people most of the time are willing to place themselves under one another’s control and to submit to many kinds of correctives. Without this willingness, the problem of social integration could not be solved. It is assumed that although everyone learns to submit to the control of others, there remain, even among the most conforming, fleeting tendencies toward unpredictable or unacceptable behavior that arise from ignorance, error, incomplete learning of the rules, or circumstances beyond human control. Most illness, for example, is unintended, but it is in a sense unacceptable because it disrupts the orderly carrying out of social obligations. Mental illness, although still unintended, is even less acceptable because it raises possibilities of the unpredictable as well as the disruptive. Crime, unlike illness, appears to be willful, and therefore it is totally unacceptable because it is both disruptive and morally wrong. The criminal act, in other words, holds the moral order in contempt and symbolizes the possibility that society may lose its hold on its members.

In everyday life we monitor one another constantly, and this monitoring maintains predictability in face-to-face interactions. The very fact of being watched is a constraint against certain kinds of actions. A lifted eyebrow, a sharp word, an eloquent absence, a hovering presence—all these symbols control behavior.* Parsons’ shorthand phrase for it is “ego’s role expectations are alter’s sanctions,” which means that whenever two people (the smallest possible society) meet, the expectation each has of the other will exert a control over the other’s behavior. Furthermore, the situation in itself is a source of control. As Naegele (1961) says, “Even a child knows that a church and a department store, a doctor’s office and a wading pool, a home and a hotel stand for characteristically different courses of conduct.” Whenever people care what others think of their actions they are under social control, even if, as often happens, those others are distant, either in time or place (Parsons, 1953).

Informal controls are most complex and binding in groupings like families whose members cannot escape from one another. They are simpler and less binding among strangers, who can choose to leave the group (Lemert, 1964). Even among strangers, however, informal controls are surprisingly potent; in a public waiting room, the newcomer scans those already there for clues about how to proceed, and even in a foreign country it is not too hard to take hints about what may not be done. In everyday life, furthermore, people whose jobs are not directly concerned with social regulation often engage in it; bartenders and beauticians get accustomed to supplying advice and counsel to some of their clients.

Formal Regulation

Informal regulation alone cannot maintain order in societies complicated enough for groups to have conflicting goals and for individuals to become alienated from all or part of the social order, and hence unable or unwilling to abide by its norms. In such situations, informal controls are supplemented with formal ones; many implicit rules become codified, and relatively private sanctions are supplemented by relatively public ones. When large social groupings, rather than individuals or families, must have their interests reconciled and their activities brought into harmony, religious, political, and other regulatory and integrative institutions become involved. When individuals rather than groups escape from the informal control of their fellows, either because their disorders are refractory to everyday control or because special resources or skills are required to handle them, formal institutionalized controls can be brought to bear in the name of social order by doctors, social workers, policemen, and so on. All complex modern societies have a proliferation of agents and agencies charged with the social control of individuals; the response of these agents to those applying to them for service, the relationships among these agents, and the kinds of problems they must solve are the subjects of the studies reported here.

Support versus Control

General Frame of Reference

Any act of social regulation, formal or informal, can be classified as relatively supportive or relatively controlling. In this view, support has the diffusely positive quality of encouragement or reward; it is offered to the individual to keep him performing acceptably, or, when necessary, to persuade him to return to conformity. Control always has at least the overtones of punishment; it is meant to suppress or isolate disruptive behavior or to enforce prescribed behavior in the interest of the common good.

It is difficult for anyone to offer both support and control simultaneously. In the world of informal sanctions, supportive and controlling acts tend to be strung out in time—the mother scolds the child, and then she forgives him and comforts him. When both support and control are offered at once, the recipient is said to be in a “bind,” not knowing where he stands (Bateson et al., 1956). Such contradictory messages are not infrequent in everyday interaction among people who know one another well, but they can be so frustrating that they tend to disrupt rather than regulate the flow of social events. In most social relationships, the expectations that act as controls tend to have their supporting side uppermost, with the potentiality of a more controlling sanction held latent. Everyday friendliness and responsiveness only turn to disapproval and coldness when expectations are badly upset.

While it is difficult to perform individual acts of support and control simultaneously, support without potential control is overprotection and invites passivity or manipulation, while control without potential support is tyranny and invites rebellion or despair. Furthermore, any society that tried to eliminate control would end in unpredictability and chaos, and one that tried to eliminate support would be decimated by the isolation or expulsion of its members. Both elements are essential to social regulation, the one affirming the individual; the other, the social order.

In the formal system, it is more difficult for the specialized agent to be at once overtly supportive and controlling because support and control require different skills. Furthermore, to be at once on the client’s side and on the side of society can involve intolerable role strain (Davis, 1938; Goode, 1960). The difficulty of performing contradictory acts and adopting conflicting attitudes is one reason agents and agencies tend to become specialized in one or another aspect of the integrative process. Even a highly specialized agent, however, may be considered controlling when he is compared with some agents and supportive when compared with others. The probation officer, in his ordinary role, is more inclined to be on the client’s side than is the policeman, but less so than the psychiatrist. Furthermore, an agent may consider himself supportive but be experienced as controlling, and vice versa; the prisoner remanded by the court for psychiatric treatment may experience his hospitalization as incarceration while a vagrant may be grateful, in midwinter, for a night in prison.

The balance of support and control within a role seems to shift not only when different roles are compared and when they are viewed from different perspectives, but also when the context in which the role is acted out changes, or when the target population is different. For example, the psychiatrist who spends part of his time in a public mental hospital and part with private patients can move in minutes from a controlling to a supportive role.

The balance of support and control can also vary throughout the time that the client is under the agency’s care. Parsons (1955), for example, has suggested that psychotherapy progresses from support toward control. The patient is first accepted and encouraged, and then, as he achieves insight and competence, is persuaded to abandon his neurotic patterns through the use of interpersonal sanctions. A similar pattern probably holds for all overtly supportive services in which the client presents no major threat to any large sector of the society in which he lives. In contrast, in the most controlling agencies the balance probably moves in the opposite direction. The prisoner suffers maximum constraint at the beginning of his sentence; but as time goes by and if he keeps the rules, control is lessened until finally the supportive time off for good behavior is reached.

Undoubtedly an agency’s choice of whether to specialize in one aspect of social regulation or to phase its activity between support and control is influenced not only by law, and by professional standards, but also by the over-all division of labor in the regulative system. In a finely divided system, there is room for specialization; in one in which there is duplication of services, both functions will have to be performed in each agency, perhaps by using different kinds of staff members for different phases.

While any single agent may specialize most of the time in either support or control, he must, nevertheless, have both in his repertoire in order that he neither tyrannize nor overindulge his clients. Both physicians and clergymen are generally supportive of people who come to them in pain or trouble; but they expect, in return, performances appropriate to the role of patient or parishioner. The support is a formal part of their interaction while the control is part of the informal structure of their relationship. Conversely, when the policeman arrests a suspect, a measure of support for going along quietly is usually forthcoming. In general, the agent’s training and professional ethic are reflected in the skills needed for the overt part of his role, while the latent aspects are derived from and governed by the norms and values that characterize the informal controls of everyday interaction.

Whether support or control is manifest in any single interaction between client and agent will depend, obviously, upon the nature of the problem about which the client is complaining, the mandate of the agency, the agent’s training, and a number of more idiosyncratic issues such as the client’s characteristics. At times, in any regulative system, either support or control is used inappropriately, but this may be invisible at the time that it is happening. Throughout the studies reported here, it is assumed that both support and control are necessary elements in social regulation, and that a certain minimum of each is present in the activities of each agency, even when only one is singled out for special comment.

A final complicating feature of the balance between support and control is the long-term shift in the value placed on each element. Unquestionably, the first half of the twentieth century saw a value shift toward the individual and away from the social order at the same time that an over-all disciplinarian mood was giving way to a much more libertarian one (Russell, 1945). At the time that these studies were undertaken, the pendulum seemed to have swung to the point where a higher value was placed on the individual than ever before.

The Specific Frame of Reference

From the point of view of any particular regulative agent, the client is under adequate social control when he is meeting the agent’s standards of acceptable beha...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Preface
• I The Regulative Agents
• II The Regulative System
• III The Population and Its Problems
• Appendix A. Sources of Error: Stability versus Change
• Appendix B. Sources of Error: Incidence versus Prevalence
• Index