sanction
sanction, social sanctionAny 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,...
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