sanction

sanction, social sanction

Any means by which conformity to socially approved standards is enforced. Sanctions can be positive (rewarding behaviour that conforms to wider expectations) or negative (punishing the various forms of deviance); and formal (as in legal restraints) or informal (for example verbal abuse). The term ‘informal social controls’ is sometimes applied to the last of these. As will be obvious, the list of possible sanctions in social interaction is huge, as is the range of their severity. Sanctions do not have to be activated to be effective; often the anticipation of reward or punishment is sufficient to ensure conformity. For example, in his famous article on vocabularies of motive , C. Wright Mills argued that the availability of a socially acceptable motivational account of behaviour was crucial to facilitating social action-and that, where such a rhetoric was lacking, the mere anticipation of probable sanctions (ranging from embarrassment to imprisonment) was often sufficient to restrain the behaviour in question. There is considerable latitude in the sociological interpretation of sanctions and their functioning. For example, Marxists and conflict theorists are likely to situate the terminology of sanctions in a conceptual context dominated by notions of power and social control , whereas systems theorists and normative functionalists will emphasize socialization and maintenance of value consensus.