Formal and Informal Social Control

In one line

Informal control is the pressure of people who know you; formal control is the machinery of an organisation or the state, which does not need to know you at all.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: informal social control is exercised by the group itself through unwritten norms, applied spontaneously by its members by means of praise, approval, ridicule, gossip, criticism and ostracism, without any specialised agency; formal social control is exercised through deliberately created, written rules applied by specialised agencies vested with authority to enforce them, of which law, administered by the police, the courts and the prisons, is the principal instance.

Informal social control

Its agencies and means

Agencies: the family, the peer group, the neighbourhood, the caste or community, the workplace group, and public opinion generally.

Means: praise, approval, respect and honour on the positive side; ridicule, gossip, criticism, disapproval, satire, contempt, boycott and ostracism on the negative side.

Its characteristics

1. Unwritten and unspecified. The rules exist in expectation rather than in text.
2. Applied by everybody, and not by any appointed agency.
3. Spontaneous and continuous. It operates whenever people are together.
4. Personal. It works because the person cares what these particular people think.
5. No formal procedure, and therefore no defined charge, no hearing and no appeal.
6. Sanctions are social: shame, exclusion, loss of standing.
7. Highly effective in small, stable, face-to-face groups, and weak where people are anonymous.

Its strength, and why it is the greater part

The reason informal control does most of the work is that it operates on conduct that no agency can reach. It reaches what is unobserved by any official, it costs nothing, it acts immediately, and above all it acts through the person's own conscience, which was formed by these same groups. No state can place an officer in every household; every household places itself there.

Formal social control

Its agencies and means

Agencies: the state, through legislature, police, courts, prisons and administration; and private organisations, through their own rules, disciplinary machinery, professional bodies and regulators.

Means: law, punishment, fines, licensing, registration, inspection, dismissal, suspension of a licence, disqualification, and the professional discipline of bodies such as bar councils and medical councils.

Its characteristics

1. Written, specific and published, so that what is required is ascertainable in advance.
2. Applied by specialised agencies, appointed for the purpose.
3. Backed by organised power, and ultimately by force.
4. Impersonal, applying alike to persons the enforcer has never met.
5. Procedural. There is a defined process, a standard of proof and, ordinarily, an appeal.
6. Deliberately created and deliberately changeable. This is decisive: informal norms change slowly and by drift, while a law can be altered on a stated day.
7. Costly and slow, requiring investigation, adjudication and enforcement.