Social and ecological control: Ross's early contribution

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1108/S1521-6136(2010)0000015007
• Date: 21 December 2010
• Pages: 91-107
• Published date: 21 December 2010
• Author: Matthias Gross

SOCIAL AND ECOLOGICAL

CONTROL: ROSS’S EARLY

CONTRIBUTION

Matthias Gross

ABSTRACT

This chapter revisits some of the early contributions of classical sociologist

Edward A. Ross (1866-1951) and his reflections on ecological influences

in the development and progress of modern societies. Ross, who is known

for his writings on social control, developed the notion that nature can

strike back and thus reveal vulnerabilities of modern society. This idea is

discussed to illustrate the tension between a purely sociological perspective

on the natural world and attempts at integrating environmental variables

into a social theory of interaction and causal influence. Building on Ross’s

insights, it is argued that 21st century sociological theories might consider

unexpected ecological influences as unavoidable and thus as a ‘‘normal’’

control factor of modern society itself.

INTRODUCTION

Ever since Edward A. Ross’s book Social Control (originally published in

1901, last reprint 2009), the notion of control has remained pivotal in the

social sciences, although its meanings have changed over time. In Ross’s

Social Control: Informal, Legal and Medical

Sociology of Crime, Law and Deviance, Volume 15, 91–107

Copyright r2010 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited

All rights of reproduction in any form reserved

ISSN: 1521-6136/doi:10.1108/S1521-6136(2010)0000015007

91

treatise, social control referred to regulation capacities that lead to certain

group compositions and, by so doing,certain types of social orderor disorder.

The general idea of ‘‘social’’ control as much as social facts (Durkheim) or its

North American counterpart, social forces, where invented and developed in

the late nineteenth century to point to the uniqueness of sociology as a

discipline dealing with something more than the individual (psychology) but

also aiming at something different than rational action (economy). In

particular, sociology understood itself as a social science discipline which,

because of its emphasis on the social, was thereby able to divest itself of the

naturalism inherent in environmental determinism. Consequently, sociologists

often viewed with some hostility explanations about human social phenom ena

that emphasized their biological or material bases.

Even so, in light of new ecological problems and the rise of the modern

environmental movement since the late 1960s, the newly emerging field of

environmental sociology is now claiming some of these long rejected and

neglected ecological studies as part of sociology. In this stream of thought,

modern environmental sociologists haveoften attacked the anthropocentrism

underlying classical mainstream sociology. The critique of the classical

tradition since the 1970s has been that it did not pay much attention to

the nonsocial, that is, the ecological basis of human society. As noted

by Frederick H. Buttel, reflecting on the past 25 years of environmental

sociology, ‘‘the assertion that the classical tradition was irrelevant to

environmental sociology remained an article of faith within North American

(and to a considerable, but lesser, extent in European) environmental-

sociological circles’’ (Buttel, 2002, p. 38; see also Dunlap, 2002).

It is thus interesting to note that Edward A. Ross (1866–1951), who

popularized the notion of social control as part of sociological studies, in

many of his writings also discussed the other side of the explanatory equation,

what in this essay I call ecological control – although Ross never explicitly

used the term himself. Much has been written about Ross’s ubiquitous usage

of the term social control (cf. Bernard, 1939;Chriss, 2007;Gibbs, 1989), but

only recently have a few environmental sociologists rediscovered Ross’s

writings on the importance of the natural world for understanding social

development (cf. Alexandrescu, 2009). However, the conceptual relation

between social and ecological control in the way outlined by Ross has not

been adequately addressed. Hence, the aimof this chapter is to bring together

Ross’s two notions of environmental and social control factors in the

development of modern society. In the following I discuss the historical

specificities of sociology in dealing with natural and ecological issues.

Subsequently I discuss how Ross focused on ecological issues in relation to

MATTHIAS GROSS92