Modes of Control of Society

Is it possible to control society – a society described on the basis of structures of differentia-tion and processes of sociocultural evoludifferentia-tion? First of all, we have to know what the concept of control means. If you look at an organisation, you may have a controlling interest in this organisation. This will normally mean that if in a conflict situation in this organisation a vote on a certain decision should become necessary, you will be in a position to enforce your will.

However, this may be true in an organisation but would be an unrealistic understanding for a society or a functional subsystem of a society where no actor will ever have a controlling interest. Therefore, we need a more modest concept of control in looking at society. We could speak of limitations of possibility and of a space of alternative courses for a system which is definitely limited by control positions in society.⁴

In this understanding, all structures of a system and all selective features of internal and external environments have a somehow controlling influence on society. It is never about de-termination which looks only at one solution and enforces this one solution, but only about a selectivity which limits the space of possibilities.

4 The most systematic concept of control in sociology has been formulated by Talcott Parsons. He works with a binary distinction of ‘information’ and ‘energy’ (which he took from Norbert Wiener) and understands control as the use of information for controlling energetic aspects of the realities of systems. This understanding is well compatible with our understanding here, to look at control as something which resides in structures and memories (= stabilised information); Parsons 1977.

Rudolf Stichweh

Under these premises, there are many modes of control. One can try to control a system with goals and then one will select actions and strategies of which one believes that they allow approximations to these goals. It is, again, not direct determination but a selection among alternative options. And one can try to control society by expectations. There are norma-tive expectations and cogninorma-tive expectations. In the case of normanorma-tive expectations, one will normally announce these normative expectations and will threaten some sanctions which one will use if these expectations are not met. Regarding cognitive expectations, somehow it is the other way around. Cognitive expectations regard states of the world and formulate how one expects these states of the world to be. But in formulating them one makes clear that one will change cognitive expectations if the respective states of the world prove to be otherwise.

Therefore, cognitive expectations are no way to control society. It is exactly the other way around. By formulating cognitive expectations, one makes clear that one is willing to be controlled by society and one will change one’s own state depending on the changes of state occurring in society.

To be controlled by society is nearly always much more realistic than to hypothesise that one can somehow control society. And there is one last remark which should be made. There are always control projects which accept the limitations and fulfil the conditions stipulated in these few remarks. But there are always many of them instituted by many individual and collective actors. And in this plurality of control projects lies at the same time their most important limitation. What none of these individual and collective actors can anticipate are the many other control projects which are instituted concurrently. And this is the point where sociocultural evolution takes over once more and is selective and determinative in shaping the conditions of success for these competing projects in a way that no one can anticipate.

Therefore, in the end, sociocultural evolution is the force which brings about results which nobody anticipates or predicts and which can only be understood when they are realised and cognitive expectations are restructured. Sociology as the science of sociocultural evolution then becomes  – like evolutionary biology (Mayr 2004)  – a historical science which does not know how to control society but mainly has to wait until something has come about and then – retrospectively – often is able to explain why it happened. And historical explanation does not mean explanation by one reason or cause, but explanation by a long and useful list of conditions (Diamond 2017) which participated in bringing about something relevant.

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