Abstract

One basic assumption in cross-cultural sociolegal studies is that every society must have social control, even though scholars have had to modify this concept in studies of some cultural others. Social control has been treated as a true universal and a concept independent from or without a theory. ;Through examination of the conceptual history of social control, this dissertation argues that social control is a concept premised upon certain deep assumptions about human beings, and their relations with other beings, society and state. The invisibility of theory or metatheory stems from the normalization of these assumptions in the socio-discursive schema. ;The dissertation furthers the argument that social control is a socio-cultural construction by locating the conception of social control in a comparative and socio-historico-cultural context. It argues that the conception of social control is related to the dominant conception of human nature of western cultural traditions, the development of an individualistic world view, and the separation of society from state and the development of the modern regulative state. In contrast with Chinese views the dissertation intends to show how the conception was not possible in Chinese socio-cultural context due to its very different cultural assumptions. ;Concluding that social control is a culturally bound concept, the dissertation discusses the danger of uncritically extending the concept social control to the studies of cultural others. By locating them in the international economic power relationship, it stresses the political consequences of cross-cultural studies based upon the assumption of a universalist conception and definition of social phenomena. It ends with a call for reorientation of cross-cultural studies as a dialectic process of understanding cultural others as well as researchers' native cultures