ACHIVEMENT

The successful accomplishment of, or performance in a socially defined tasks or goal. Talcott Parsons a sociologist in his book Social Theory and Modern Society suggests that modern societies use indices or achievement- examination credentials or performance in role-based tasks-rather than ascriptive criteria to recruit, select, and evaluate individuals for particular roles.

Abolitionism

A term associated with protest on grounds of inhumanity and call for the abolition of first, slavery and more recently, prisons and imprisonment, The latter stance developed within Scandinavian criminology but has since been taken up within wider critical criminology.

Ability

The power to perform a mental or physical task - either before or after training. Social psychologists usually distinguish ability from aptitude, the natural ability to acquire or learn knowledge, sometimes measured by an aptitude test. Sociologists would probably distinguish ability and skill, the former being relatively specialized and task-specific, the latter referring to a wider set of learned techniques which could be applied to a number of cognate tasks.

Aberrant Behaviour

Aberrant behaviour is a irregular behaviour that deviates from what is considered normal. In sociology, the use of the term implied that the behaviour in question is performed in secret and mainly for reasons of self- interest, as for example in the case of certain unuusal sexual practices. This may be contrasted with non conforming behaviour, which usually reffers to public violations of social norms, ofter carred out specifically in order to promote soical change.

Social Formation

A Marxist concept, largely synonymous with "society", which refers to the institutional context which provides the conditions of existence of the mode of production. The term was devised by the structuralist Marxist Louis. Alehouse as a substitute for society, because he thought that the latter was too strongly marked by what re regarded as pre-Marxist humanist conceptions of social life as being (ultimately) the product of individual human beings. For this reason, its presence in a text normally indicates that the author works with a structuralist conception of social life, according to which social relations as such-rather than their bears- are what determine what happens within societies. (It is worth nothing that Marx himself rarely used the term) For Althusser, a social formation is a complex of concrete economic, political and ideological relations, bound together and given their particular character as capitalist, feudal, or whatever by the fact that the economic relations are, in the words, determinant in the last instance, many of those continue to use the term now reject this residual reductionism.

Social Crime

Crime is sometimes regarded as social when it presents a conscious challenge to a prevailing social order and its values. Example cited by Marxist historians include forms of popular action and popular customs in early mordern England (including poaching, wood theft, food riots and smuggling which were criminalized by the ruling class, but were not regarded as blameworthy, either by those committing them, or by the communities from which they came. The concept is contraversial but des point to the fact that there may not be consensus as to which consitutes a criminal act.

Social Control

A term widely used in sociology to refer to the social processes by which the behaviour of individuals or groups is regulated. Since all societies have norms and rules governing conduct (a society without some such norms is inconceivable) all equally have some mechanisms for ensuring conformity to those norms and for dealing with deviance. Social control is consequentyly a pervasive feature of society, of interest to a broad range of sociologists having differing theoretical persuasions and sunstantive interest, and not just to sociologists of deviance. The sociological issue is not the existence of social control, but determining its presice nature, and identifying the mechanisms at work in particular social contexts. By whom is control exercised? What techniques of control are employed? How far can and do individuals or groups resist process of social control? In whose interests does control operate? The answer to such questions vary greatly. Normative functionalists tend to suggest that social control is of value to society as a whole, since it is essential to the maintenance of social order: other point to the sectional interests that are served ub the process of social control, emphasizing the lack of normative consensus, the differences in power that are involved, and the close linkage between power and control. Analyses of the main forms of social control differ. A common distinction is between represive or constraint and the softer ideological forms of control that operate through the shaping of ideas, values and attitutes. The former techniques are particularly characteristic of institutions such as the police and the military, the latter of institutions such as the mass media. The best recent discussions of the topic are stanley Cohen's Visions of Social Control (1988) and jack P. Gibb's Control " Sociology's Central Notion (1989). See also criminology. Criminology, Feminist; Foucault, Michel; Sanction; Trust and Distrust.