First we need to introduce you to Michel Foucault
And then we can delve into his theory of power: control in more detail
What we have learned from watching the two films above picks up on and develops in more detail the work of C Wright Mills (remember him, ‘the sociological imagination’?). C Wright Mill’s work was also focussed on the question of power, and powerful elites.
‘Power’, C. Wright Mills wrote in an article first published in 1958, ‘has to do with whatever decisions men make about the arrangements under which they live, and about the events which make up the history of their times’. He continued, ‘in so far as such decisions are made, the problem of who is involved in making them is the basic problem of power. In so far as they could be made but are not, the problem becomes who fails to make them?’ (Mills 1958; Mills 1963: 23).
Michel Foucault, particularly in his work on Discipline and Punishment (1975), explained that the powerful, the elites in society, have exercised that control over the subordinate (less powerful, less privileged, more disadvantaged) peoples in society through two main strategies; firstly through ‘spectacle’ and then more recently through invisible methods that he called ‘governmentality’ (literally the ‘mentality of being governed’).
The ‘spectacle’ method, in Foucault’s example, was the guillotine during the French Revolution: an efficient machine to kill enemies of the state, but which also creates ‘shock and awe’ in the rest of the French population. ‘Shock and awe’ was a military tactic used by the USA armed forces during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. It was designed to literally shock the Iraq military and security forces into submission.
In modern times, however, powerful elites have become more subtle, and make you think that you are not being controlled, but they still are. Foucault uses the example of the panopticon design for a jail, but in very recent years the ways in which CCTV cameras are everywhere means that we modify our behaviour if we see a CCTV camera (or at least kids do!), even if we don’t know whether the camera is working or not.
Similarly, our internet searches influence the results we get on google searches, and our Facebook chat directly affects the adverts we get. These are relatively innocent techniques, and they make sure that we don’t get irrelevant search results or adverts, but powerful elites can also use the data to predict and ‘nudge’ our behaviour. There is now an official government department nicknamed the ‘nudge unit‘ that tries different tactics to make us behave in certain ways without us realising that we are being manipulated.
Having explored how society controls us through obvious (spectacle) or invisible means (governmentality), we can look in more detail about deviance (how we resist those attempts at control); and social control. In this film, you will see how the different lenses of sociology (functionalist, conflict or interactionist) work to look at a sociological phenomenon.
A great book on aspects of this is Dick Hebdige’s Subculture: the meaning of style https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subculture:_The_Meaning_of_Style
Here are some of these ideas in more detail
At a more micro-level, the Milgram experiments in the 1950s showed how easy it was to control someone; and make them commit terrible acts of violence
This is a psychological experiment, but it has a sociological importance because it affects the way in which we think about social relations. In particular, we should note that those who thought that someone else would take responsibility for their actions, they continued to obey.
Foucault, Michel (1975). Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, New York: Random House.
Mills, C. Wright (1958) ‘The structure of power in American society’, British Journal of Sociology IX(1). Reproduced in Mills, C. Wright (1963) Power, Politics and People. New York: Oxford University Press.
Mills, C. Wright (1963, 1967) Power, Politics and People. The collective essays of C. Wright Mills. Edited by Irving H. Horowitz. New York: Oxford University Press.
