Formal Vs Informal Social Control

Society existence and development must not leave constant sequences and if human need to live and production with the constant order, it need social control: social control could separate into two basic forms--- informal and formal. Formal control is the government uses the power or laws to control the chaos or anomie in the society. Comparing to the formal control, informal control didn’t use in a wide range; informal social control is confined to the narrow range of the acceptable for people by the morality standard; informal social control also defined as “the process by which an individual”.

Nevertheless, both of the formal and informal social control has negative and positive aspects. Social control are positive is general use reward

For example, we always could see street peddler everywhere, and they didn’t have a business license; therefore the urban management officers will make them pack up their commodity and they need to pay the ticket. However, most of them didn’t want to pay for the ticket, and they will have a argue with the urban management officer; some of the officer will beat street peddler to make them left; although the method the urban management officer use is violent, it could work as a warning for the other street peddler; therefore I thought this case is a negative and relatively strong formal social control, although the controllers’ methods could be

Should young people offer seat to elder people or not had already been a popular topic in recently days. Once upon a time, when we take the bus or subways, we could see that many young people offer the seat to pregnant women, disable person or elder people, and if young people don’t want to offer, nobody will beat them. Nevertheless, I saw news that recently, it said that a girl whom got sick and didn’t offer her seat to the elder people who stand near her, and the elder man began to yell with her; he said that the girl had a bad ethics. Offering seat to elder people is a type of informal social control, and it doesn’t manage by the religions, culture or laws, it even didn’t have a expressly stated. In my opinion, offering seat to elder people could be both a negative and positive informal control, it depends on different situations; if you offering the seat to elder people, the passenger around you praise you, and it is a kind of positive social control; however, the elder man’s behavior should get a ridicule, which is a negative social control; and I thought both of the negative or positive social control in this case is