ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses around the following lines of argumentation: social control is a foundational concept of American sociology that was severely truncated in the 1960s and 1970s, allowing it to be placed within the relatively exiguous conceptual trophy case of critical criminology. The truncation of the concept of social control, which led to the current criminologically orthodox social reaction to deviance perspective, operated by the indictment of previous uses of the concept for the blind spot they created on issues of power and normative conflicts. The re-imagination of social control proposed in the chapter is done by mobilizing the complex jargon of social theory, particularly Luhmannian jargon, frequently associated with the unintelligibility of Parsonian grand theory. Mills' adaptation of Mead's work on the generalized other as the locus of social control stems from an alternative standpoint that is both normative and cognitive.
