Status, role and social control

Status is a socially defined position in a group or society, with rights and duties attached. A role is the expected behaviour of a person holding that status. In short: status is occupied, role is played.

• A person holds many statuses at once: student, daughter, sister, customer, patient, team captain. Together these form a status set.
• Over a lifetime, one status follows another: child, student, worker, parent, grandparent, retired person. This is a status sequence.
• Ascribed status is given by birth or by things we cannot choose: age, sex, family, caste.
• Achieved status is earned by effort and choice: doctor, engineer, elected leader, champion athlete. Traditional societies rely more on ascribed status; modern societies stress achieved status, though ascribed status still matters.
• Prestige is the value or respect society gives a status. Status and prestige do not always match: in many places a soldier or a nurse earns less than some businesspeople yet receives more respect.

Role conflict arises when the roles of two or more statuses clash.

• A working parent may have an important meeting at work and a child's school event at the same hour.
• It is commonly assumed that men do not face role conflict, but sociology, comparing societies, finds otherwise. The book's case is the Khasi of Meghalaya, a matrilineal society, where men too face intense role conflict.
• Role stereotyping: some roles are linked to one group as if 'natural', such as men as earners and women as homemakers. Sociology shows these roles are learned, and they change.
• Roles are not simply given: people also show agency, reshaping roles as they live them.

Social control is the social process, techniques and strategies by which the behaviour of individuals and groups is regulated, including the use of force, and the ways a society enforces its values and patterns to keep order.

• Informal social control is personal, unofficial and uncodified: smiles, praise, frowns, ridicule, gossip. The family, religion, kinship and the neighbourhood are its agencies. It works powerfully in daily life.
• Formal social control is codified, systematic and official: the law and the state, with police, courts and punishment.
• Sanctions are the tools: positive sanctions reward expected behaviour (a medal, a certificate, a pay rise); negative sanctions punish breaking the rules (a fine, a reprimand, being left out).
• Functionalists see social control as needed for order and stability; conflict theorists ask whether it serves the dominant groups.

Deviance is behaviour that does not conform to a society's norms or expectations. Not all deviance is crime: crime breaks written laws, while other deviance breaks unwritten norms. What counts as deviant varies between cultures and over time: a woman choosing to become an astronaut might be called deviant in one period and applauded in another, even in the same society.

Example (new): a young man who chooses to stay at home to look after his baby while his wife works may face teasing (informal control) from relatives. Twenty years later, the same choice may hardly be noticed.