THE MANY FOLDS OF SOCIAL CONTROL


Bobbie Clearly explores the ways in which the small, fictional town of Milton, Nebraska, contends with a murderer who attempts to re-enter their tiny community years after his brutal, high-profile crime rocked the town. Each citizen of Milton responds to the criminal’s return in complex and conflicting ways, and through their responses they reveal their individual modes of social control—that is, the ways in which they attempt to maintain a “social order” and punish those who violate their rules. Methods of social control differ from community to community and from person to person, but sociologists have identified patterns of social control that can help us understand how and why the characters in Bobbie Clearly—or the members of any community, for that matter— punish their society’s transgressors, and can help us explore the psychological implications of enduring such retribution.


Sociologists tend to define two forms of social control: formal and informal. Formal social control refers to laws and regulations that governments impose onto their constituents in order to maintain stability and organization within a society. Fees for traffic violations, prison sentences for felonies, and capital punishment for murder or treason all fall into the category of formal social control in the United States. Informal social control, on the other hand, encompasses the actions of community members to pressure one another into conforming to often unwritten social “codes” that uphold the community’s standards of decency and morality. This might refer to actions as overt as “taking the law into one’s own


hands” by intervening in a crime or engaging in an act of vigilante justice, or as subtle as shunning or excluding rule- breakers from social groups. All these forms of social control aim to correct perceived unruly behavior or deter citizens from creating any form of “instability” or “chaos” within a society.


Bobbie Clearly specifically explores the mechanisms and effects of informal social control, and in particular social ostracism. Social ostracism is a form of informal social control that involves intentionally excluding and ignoring a member of a society in an attempt to punish them for a perceived crime or banish them altogether—and it is as effective as it is painful. Indeed, human beings (and many other animals) seem to be hard-wired to avoid social ostracism; being excluded from a community can quite literally sentence an animal or person to death, whether in the wild or on the streets of a big city. Classic research in psychology has shown that people will go to almost any length to avoid exclusion or ostracism from their community, including wholesale conformity, uncharacteristic violence, and refusal to extend assistance to those outside of the group who need it. Recent studies have revealed the deep psychological pain of social ostracism and its negative effects on one’s sense of self-esteem, control, and purpose. The threat of social ostracism is often enough to encourage compliance and rehabilitation in those who have transgressed.


Brian Quijada and Gabriel Brown


in rehearsal for Bobbie Clearly Photo: Jenny Anderson


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