Crime Prevention and Community Safety: An International Journal
Social Control and Deviance: A South Asian Community in Scotland by Ali Wardak Aldershot: Ashgate (2000) ISBN 1 840145 88 9 (288 pages, £39.95)
Reviewed by Colin Webster This is the first in-depth study of social control and deviance within a British Pakistani community. The study is clearly written and rigorous. If these were not reasons enough to read the book, then the fact that little systematic social scientific knowledge is available about this community offers further enticement. Readers with a specific interest in adapting social control theory to specific community and cultural contexts will directly benefit from reading this book, as will those with a more general interest in how British Pakistani communities are socially organised. Ali Wardak’s timely survey and ethnographic study of young male conformity and deviance in the Scottish Edinburgh Pakistani community sets out to refashion social control theory to take account of culturally specific institutional mechanisms of social control found in this community. He concludes that certain mechanisms are more important than others, and that social control and social deviance act together to socially organise the community. The first part of the study examines how the fundamental community social institutions of family, Biraderi (social network of kinship/friendship relationship), mosque and Pakistani Association interconnect, operate and are maintained as agencies of social control. However, social control and deviance are necessarily linked because ‘social control defines what deviance is, and specifies how it should be dealt with’ (page 4). Consequently, the second part of the study discusses deviance. The first part deals with the historical background to discrimination and with the exclusion of Edinburgh’s Pakistani community from mainstream Scottish society. The community reacted by becoming relatively ‘closed’, reinforcing a sense of social belonging and strengthening common social bonds. It is this context and response that promotes order and regulates behaviour through the social bonding of members to the community’s moral and social order. Part two looks at how these agencies define deviance, and at the reception of these definitions among a sample of sixty British-born Pakistani boys attending religious instruction classes at the local mosque/community centre. Whether a boy is regarded as deviant or not, and if so his degree of deviance, depend on his adherence to the fundamental norms and rules of the mosque/school and the community. Against social control theory’s abstract notions of social control, social bond and society, Wardak suggests that these require more specification and refinement if they are to have meaning at the local community level and in ethnically diverse situations. Indeed, the support that Wardak’s findings lend to the main tenets of control theory may have resulted in part from the diligence with which he specifies the social and organisational context of its use. Thus Hirschi’s elements of the social bond become operationalised, so that ‘commitment’ becomes ‘family Izzet (honour)’, ‘involvement’ becomes ‘participation in the activities of Mosque/community’, ‘belief’ becomes ‘the extent to which one follows Islamic teachings’, etc. Although the Pakistani community shares some of the values, norms and rules of the wider British society, particularly the rule of law, it also holds different values. Wardak’s argues that in a ‘normative’ cultural/religious community ‘the main patterns of compliance to the community’s norms are “attitudinal”’ (page 16). Attitudes indicating attachment
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Crime Prevention and Community Safety: An International Journal
to family, school, friends and community produce a four-fold typology: conformists, accommodationists, part-time conformists and rebels, representing a continuum from the least to the most deviant. The study found that the general theoretical assumptions of control theory were supported, but that attachment to peers and friends and association with delinquents/deviants had little relationship to deviance and conformity. More than anything Social Control and Deviance reveals how mechanisms and processes of conformity and deviance relate to the Islamic teachings that govern individual conduct over a wide range of issues related to obligations (Awamir) and prohibitions (Nawahi). These operate on private and individual (internal) and on public and social (external) levels. The most important agency of social control is the Biraderi, where Izzat and Bizati (honour and dishonour) determine social standing. This dense network of controls and obligations provides the context in which conformity, deviance and delinquency are defined and given meaning. This reviewer is sceptical of Wardak’s claim of a clear-cut demarcation between this ‘closed’ community and wider Scottish society. His own description of the range of meanings and behaviour found in the sample suggests a more culturally and socially heterogeneous community than the study implies. In reacting to rejection by the wider majority ethnic society, the community is said to have reinforced its controls on deviance through offering its younger members the ‘inclusion and acceptance’ (page 253) denied elsewhere. Yet as Wardak tantalisingly concludes, social processes of deviance from the community’s norms prompt revaluations, stimulate social change and pave the way for cultural and normative innovations. Nevertheless the paradoxical effect of racism on this community is to strengthen and revive its traditional cultural institutions in the face of ‘little positive interaction with the wider exclusive society’ (page 253). Colin Webster University of Teesside
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