Social Control Model

A social control model is a collection of rules describing how a social unit works. The most common social control model is the one used by families, which is the most basic social unit.

Once a social control model is perfected, it can be used over and over. Examples of modern social control models are the ones used by school systems, countries, congregations, and corporations. Each social agent type has an unwritten and/or written set of rules that describe how that social unit should work. For example a legislative body follows the rules of a constitution and, during deliberations, follows Robert’s Rules of Order or some other set of debate rules.

From the viewpoint of solving the global environmental sustainability problem, the most important social control model is the one that global civilization is using to run itself. This is the model in crisis.

The power of the concept of a social control model is that if you know what a model's rules are, two things become apparent: You can understand why that social unit behaves the way it does, such as how it may be contributing to a problem under analysis. And you can predict how the social unit will respond to changes in those rules, such as if various solutions are tried. If your analysis of the social control models involved in a particular problem are reasonably correct, then solution of the problem is relatively trivial, and boils down to selection of those changes to the models that have the highest probability of solving the problem in time at the lowest cost, and any other constraints that may apply.