Formal and Informal Social Control

The comparison

The relation between them

The two are not alternatives, and the best answers say how they interact.

They usually reinforce each other. A rule supported by both is obeyed almost universally, at almost no cost.

Formal control expands as informal control weakens. This is the central proposition of the module and the one to carry into Module IV. In a village where everyone knows everyone, informal control is nearly complete and law is barely needed. In a city of strangers it fails, and formal machinery must take its place. Every function that a community stops performing reappears as a legal or administrative rule, and Module I gave the examples: the maintenance of parents, the registration of marriage, the regulation of workplace conduct.

Formal control cannot fully replace informal control, and this is its limit. Law reaches only what is detected, costs a great deal, acts long after the event, and cannot supervise ordinary daily conduct. A society in which informal control has collapsed cannot be held together by law alone, whatever resources are given to it.

Informal control can defeat formal control. Where a group's own norms conflict with the law, the group's norms usually prevail in practice: the witness who does not testify against a neighbour, the community that shelters an offender, the workplace that closes ranks. This is why laws opposed to strongly held mores are so hard to enforce, from [Norms and Values].

Informal control has no safeguards, and that is a serious matter for a lawyer. It requires no proof, permits no defence, allows no proportion between the offence and the sanction, and provides no appeal. Social boycott, ostracism and the punishment of a family for a member's marriage outside the caste are informal social control operating exactly as designed, and they are among the reasons the law intervenes against such practices. An answer that presents informal control as benign and formal control as harsh has it backwards as often as not.

A worked example

In a village of four hundred people, a man finds a wallet. He returns it, and the mechanism is entirely informal: he is known, everyone will learn what he did, and his standing depends on it. No law is consulted and no agency is engaged. Rate of return: high, cost of enforcement: zero.

In a railway station used by two hundred thousand people a day, the same man finds a wallet. Nobody knows him, nobody will learn what he did, and his standing is unaffected either way. Informal control is absent, and only two things can operate: his own internalised conscience, which is the residue of informal control acting from inside, and the formal law of the offence, which requires that he be detected.

The comparison gives the module's conclusion. Urbanisation did not make people dishonest. It removed the mechanism that had made honesty visible and therefore cheap, leaving a much more expensive one to do the same work much less well. That is why legal regulation grows as societies urbanise, and it is the sociological explanation of the volume of modern law.

Quick revision

1. Informal: unwritten, applied by everyone, personal, immediate, free, no procedure, sanctions of shame and exclusion; highly effective in small stable groups, weak where people are anonymous.
2. Formal: written and published, applied by specialised agencies, impersonal, procedural, backed by organised power, slow and costly, and deliberately changeable.
3. Ostracism is the strongest informal sanction; law is the principal formal one.
4. Formal control expands as informal control weakens. Every function a community stops performing reappears as a rule.
5. Formal control cannot fully replace informal control: it reaches only what is detected, costs heavily and acts late.
6. Informal control can defeat formal control where the group's norms conflict with the law.
7. Informal control has no safeguards: no proof, no defence, no proportion, no appeal. Social boycott and caste ostracism are informal control working as designed.

Test yourself

1. Distinguish formal from informal social control on six points. Source, deliberate written enactment against unwritten custom and expectation; who applies it, specialised agencies with authority against everyone in the group; its force, the organised power of the state against approval, shame and exclusion; its character, impersonal and effective between strangers against personal and dependent on being known; its procedure, a defined process with proof and appeal against none at all; and its cost and speed, slow and expensive against immediate and free.

2. Why does informal control do most of the work of regulating behaviour? Because it reaches conduct that no official can observe, costs nothing, operates continuously and immediately, and acts through the person's own conscience, which those same groups formed. No state can place an officer in every household, whereas every household supervises itself. Formal machinery is therefore engaged only in the residue of cases that internalisation and group pressure have failed to reach.

3. Explain the relation between the two as a society urbanises. Informal control depends on people being known to one another, so it weakens as populations grow anonymous and mobile. As it weakens, the functions it performed have to be taken over by formal rules and agencies, which is why legal and administrative regulation expands with urbanisation. Formal control cannot fully replace it, however, because it reaches only what is detected, costs a great deal and acts long after the event.

4. Can informal control defeat formal control? Give an example. Yes, and frequently. Where a group's own norms conflict with the law, the group's norms usually prevail in practice: witnesses who will not testify against a neighbour, a community that shelters an offender, a workplace that closes ranks against an inquiry. This is why legislation opposed to strongly held mores is so expensive to enforce, and why the effectiveness of a statute depends on whether custom and opinion run with it or against it.

5. Why is informal social control not simply benign? Because it operates with none of the safeguards that formal control carries. It requires no proof and permits no defence; it observes no proportion between the conduct and the sanction; it gives no hearing and allows no appeal; and it may be applied to a person's whole family. Social boycott, ostracism and the punishment of a household because a member married outside the caste are informal social control functioning exactly as it is designed to, and they are among the reasons formal law intervenes against such practices.