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Article Excerpt
More than a decade after the influential publication of Michael Gottfredson and Travis Hirschi's (1990) A General Theory of Crime and Robert Sampson and John Laub's (1995) Crime in the Making: Pathways and Turning Points through Life, there remains some confusion in control theory circles regarding the relative theoretical and empirical utility, compatibility, and primacy of the concept of self-control, which is at the heart of Gottfredson and Hirschi's general theory, and the concept of informal social control, which is at the heart of Sampson and Laub's theory (Brannigan, Gemmell, Pevalin, and Wade 2002; Brownfield and Sorenson 1993; Forde and Kennedy 1997; Le Blanc 1997; Le Blanc, Ouimet, and Tremblay 1988; Li 2004; Martens 1997; Mason and Windle 2002; Nagin and Paternoster 1991; Nakhaie, Silverman, and LaGrange 2000; Simons, Stewart, Gordon, Conger, and Elder 2002; Wright, Caspi, Moffitt, and Silva 1999). However, close examination of the two theories reveals that there is little reason to hypothesize that self-control and informal social control should both maintain substantively significant direct effects on delinquency and crime when simultaneously present in the same empirical model. Instead, it is evident, with respect to their hypothesized direct effects, that the role of self-control vis-a-vis informal social control makes the two concepts necessarily mutually exclusive.
Sampson and Laub (1995: 2, 7) acknowledge that self-control may be very important to understanding the genesis of adolescent delinquency. Unfortunately, the suggestion (1995: 7) that their model had acknowledged the "importance of early childhood behaviours and individual differences in self-control" left the impression that informal social control theory had accounted for and incorporated self-control into its theoretical and empirical understanding of the factors directly responsible for the genesis of adolescent delinquency. However, self-control was not adequately represented theoretically and was not adequately tested in their empirical models. Some interpreters have suggested that the tests presented in Crime in the Making actually showed that processes of informal social control (in the family, at school, and with peers) had effectively mediated ontogenetic influences like self-control (Simons, Stewart, Gordon, Conger, and Elder 2002), although such evidence was never convincingly presented.
It is important to note that Gottfredson and Hirschi's understanding of self-control represents a crucial test of informal social control theory. For example, within the context of the family, Gottfredson and Hirschi (1990: 94-108) hypothesize that self-control should mediate processes of informal social control rather than those processes mediating self-control. According to A General Theory, the major cause of delinquency and crime over the life course is low self-control and the major cause of low self-control is family processes of informal social control (i.e., ineffective parenting). At no point in the life course should informal social control have a direct effect on delinquency or crime in the presence of self-control.
More troubling are current interpretations that suggest that informal social control theory represents a "mixed" model that can adequately (theoretically and empirically) account for ontogenetic as well as sociogenic factors (Mason and Windle 2002; Simons et al. 2002; Wright et al. 1999). With respect to primacy, ontogenetic and sociogenic approaches are not compatible. Either the ontogenetic approach or the sociogenic approach is correct, and thus only one of these two approaches can sufficiently account for the most important direct influences on delinquency and crime. Interestingly, Sampson and Laub have repeatedly rejected ontogenetic models (Laub and Sampson 1988; Sampson and Laub 1990, 1993, 1995). They (1995: 12, 148, 181) are highly critical of models of childhood, adolescent, and adult development extracted from biological and psychological perspectives "for their exclusive 'ontogenetic' focus." Ontogenetic perspectives focus on the inherent (yet not necessarily unchanging) personality traits or predispositions of individuals as the main organizing principle for understanding behavioural patterns (see Morizot and Le Blanc 2003, 2005). How can a theory that explicitly rejects ontogenetic understandings adequately represent them?
Rather than integrating ontogenetic perspectives, Sampson and Laub instead introduced three measures--the early onset of delinquent behaviour, a (single) measure of "restlessness," and violent temper tantrums--to evaluate the efficacy and primacy of sociogenesis versus ontogenesis. After the inclusion of these measures, they (1995: 93) claim that their version of informal social control theory survived a "strict" test of the competing ontogenetic perspective. However, difficult temperament is a multidimensional personality concept, which was not adequately captured by the behavioural measures introduced by Sampson and Laub. In fact, Sampson and Laub (1995: 86-87) themselves describe a "host of traits" linked to difficult temperament, including restlessness, hyperactivity, whining, inadaptability to change, strong-willed resistance, troublesomeness, and hot-temperedness. (2) A sufficiently strict test of the family model of informal social control should capture the full complexity of difficult temperament. Notably, the Glueck and Glueck (1950) Unravelling Juvenile Delinquency (UJD) data is rich enough to capture many of the dimensions of difficult temperament, yet Sampson and Laub chose to include essentially only two. Consequently, we contend that Sampson and Laub's test of the influence of ontogenetic versus sociogenic factors in childhood and adolescence was not "strict" at all.
In order to begin to address our concerns with the prevailing interpretations of the utility and compatibility of the concepts of child effects, self-control, and informal social control, we propose to reanalyse the efficacy of informal social control within the context of the family using the same Glueck and Glueck data and empirical framework employed by Sampson and Laub. In our analysis, we intend to introduce self-control as well as more complete measures of difficult temperament in order to more accurately assess the primacy of ontogenetic factors versus sociogenic factors and, hopefully, clarify at least some of the persistent misperceptions.
The rise of ontogenesis within a control theory framework
Gottfredson and Hirschi's (1990) General Theory of Crime acknowledged the central role of family attachments, and to a lesser extent the school, in monitoring, tagging, and punishing unacceptable behaviours in children, and thus instilling an appreciation in children of the consequences of misconduct and providing them with the ability to curb their appetites for immediate gratification. However, their theory claimed that before children reached the age of eight, individual differences in impulse control were already established. People lacking self-control would be impulsive, insensitive, risk-taking, and short-sighted (1990: 90). Furthermore, these individual differences would persist over the life course and significantly condition the nature and quality of social interaction. Even allowing that some increase in impulse control could emerge with age, people with low self-control would be more prone to delinquency and crime at all ages compared to persons with higher levels of self-control. Furthermore, persons lacking self-control would engage in a wide range of "criminally analogous" behaviours (1990: 90).
Not only were the characteristics of low self-control responsible for a wide range of impulsive acts, they also had important social consequences that extended beyond deviance, delinquency, and crime. The specific forms of these consequences were hypothesized to be a direct result of the inability of the individual with low self-control to form and manage social relationships and social bonds. Therefore, low self-control
would not only affect delinquency and crime, but also negatively condition the restraining forces of the social bond and social capital. Once the individual was afflicted with low self-control, attachments to the school, peers, the labour force, and marriage would be determined largely by the characteristics and consequences of a person's level of self-control.
Importantly, for Gottfredson and Hirschi, social bonds in the family and parenting practices no longer had a direct influence on delinquency. Instead, the effects of social processes at the family level were mediated through the actor. The effects of family and socialization were "absorbed" by individual differences in impulse control. So, while ineffective socialization in the family was largely responsible for the emergence of low self-control, those parenting practices no longer had a direct influence on behaviour.
The distinct ontogenetic flavour of A General Theory sparked enormous attention and controversy. References to the book appeared in every issue of Criminology for a decade after its publication, and a "flourishing criminological cottage industry" emerged by appropriating self-control as a research topic (Geis 2000).
The re-emergence of sociogenesis
Sampson and Laub's (1990, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995; Laub and Sampson 1988) informal social control theory seriously challenged the momentum that ontogenetic perspectives had started to accumulate in the early 1990s. Their challenge represented an attempt to re-shift control theory back to its classic (Hirschi 2002) roots and once again focus the attention of criminological theory on child-rearing practices and social bonding (Laub and Sampson 1988; Sampson and Laub 1994, 1995). Their reanalysis of the Glueck and Glueck data suggested that the conditions responsible for the onset of delinquency as well as for desistance were tied directly to informal processes of social control in the family and the school at the dawn of the criminal career, and in marriage and the employer at the twilight of the criminal career.
On the basis of the concept of informal social control, Sampson and Laub presented a hypothesis that linked social structure with social processes. Structure, they suggested, had only an indirect effect on delinquency and crime via social processes that were sensitive to the influences of negative structural background. For example, Sampson and Laub (1994,...
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