Historians use of "social control"

Historians have a tendency to try and grab ideas and theory from sociology, anthropology and other studies (perhaps as they go out of fashion in their original field) so it's quite easy to then criticise them for a relatively loose use of those concepts. Social capital might be one of those concepts which can be used now (which is part of my approach in probably a very clumsy way) and social control would seem to have filled a similar role in the past. From the seminars I've been to recently it seems to be "space", which is a shame as that's another concept I'm going to use. Anyway, I've been re-reading two criticisms of its use by historians.

Michael Thompson has a good go at historians use of it in a ReFresh article from 1987. Because of its inherent ambiguity (as both a general statement and a term drawn from theoretical sociology) historians have ended up spreading "confusion and incoherence" and led to "superfluous and redundant verbiage". He seems to see the term as simply having "descriptive but no explanatory power" in relation to its early development, but that it's been seized on by historians eager for a number of reasons:

to explain how the nineteenth century working class settled for their lot

to show how the various voluntary associations and clubs created an intergrating framework for the poor

to justify the study of less obvious topics like parks, pubs or sport by fiting them in to a wider more serious context for historians

Thompson doesn't have much time for any of this, particularly arguing that social change (the rise of respectability) was more down to "the discipline of factory work, the enforcement of law through more professional police, an improvement in living standards, and, related to this, a process of emulation of embodying a self-induced socialisation of ambition and aspiration". As a theory for explaining class relationships, it's not necessary (you can just say that employers manage and control workers and ministers lead congregations) and all that is left are "a couple of words that act as a salutory reminder that all political, social and economic institutions have some effects on types and standards of behaviour and contribute to the shaping of cultures or life styles". Those moral reformers of the nineteenth century were more "socialisers" rather than "controllers". Which maybe brings us back to social capital...

Marco van Leeuwen's The Logic of Charity also discusses social control in an appendix. He also criticised historians who are in danger of seizing on it in their desperation for a theoretical concept to underpin their work. He points out that it's important to consider who is controlling whom, how they do this and whether it is still taking place. He is also good on the importance of evidence. Sociologists are often dealing with more comprehensive evidence, and often the opportunity to test hypotheses with their own research, but historians are dependent on available source material. For instance he considers three kinds of power analysis in this context:

positional (eg a prime minister)

reputational (eg informal power)

decisional (who actually takes the decisions to proceed or veto change)

Historical sources will tend towards the positional in the absence of other sources. He therefore suggests that "a rigorous positional approach combined with more fuzzy reputational and decisional analysis may...be sufficient for a preliminary account of charitable power".

In other sections of the book, van Leeuwen suggests that charities in Amsterdam did have a social control function in that relief would be offered in return for accepting the social order and that "taking charity meant abstaining from illegal survival strategies and bowing to certain forms of behavioural pressure by the elites". Dutch charity was also keen to maintain those from the middle and upper classes who had fallen on hard times, and was more generous to them - as was also the case in England. In England, this could be justified in terms of it not being their fault (they were more deserving than the idle poor) but it was surely more a case of Victorian hypocrisy mixed with a desire to maintain people in their station and thus social order.