Social control operates through voluntary organizations rather than formal coercion

Evidence

“No one must go hungry or thirsty; if anyone does, he’s for the concentration camp!” This joke from Hitler’s Germany might shine forth as a maxim from above all the portals of the culture industry. With sly naïveté, it presupposes the most recent characteristic of society: that it can easily find out who its supporters are. Everybody is guaranteed formal freedom. No one is officially responsible for what he thinks. Instead everyone is enclosed at an early age in a system of churches, clubs, professional associations, and other such concerns, which constitute the most sensitive instrument of social control. Anyone who wants to avoid ruin must see that he is not found wanting when weighed in the scales of this apparatus. — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 115

Categorization

• DEFINE: Articulates the culture industry’s key mechanism: informal associational enclosure as social control, standing in for formal coercion.
• XREF: Connects to Foucault’s disciplinary power via institutions and to the reader’s planned book linking Adorno’s culture industry to Burns’s later invocation. — connects to: Social control includes winning consent, not just coercive punishment; Civil society functions as a management apparatus for social domination — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 229; Coercive government power depends on voluntary cooperation from many (+8 more)

Broader Connections

• Social control includes winning consent, not just coercive punishment #expands (0.95)
• Civil society functions as a management apparatus for social domination #expands (0.90) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 229
• Functional civil societies depend on self-governance rather than fear and surveillance #corroborates (0.90) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 70
• Coercive government power depends on voluntary cooperation from many #corroborates (0.85)
• Ordinary organizations can also socialize members into harming others, not just coercive ones #complicates (0.85) — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 3992
• Coercive State power can progressively wither into regulated civil society #expands (0.80)
• Social hierarchy is maintained by dominants and subordinates cooperatively #corroborates (0.80) — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 3212
• Subordinate groups strategically deploy difference to resist dominant control and revalue themselves #complicates (0.75) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 115