Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 2.djvu/569

 SOCIAL CONTROL 555

The diversity of conduct and character required in the highly differentiated society is so great that if it were sought to use one concrete type for all this type would be so generalized as to be valueless. How few are the moral elements that the schoolboy, the scout, the mother, the bank clerk, the boss, the nurse, and the stock jobber have in common ! How unlike the qualities that will make each one good of his or her kind ! The variety of place and function is therefore met by a certain variety of type. In an advanced society there is quite an elaborate hier- archy of types answering to all the principal and many of the minor situations of life. Besides such patterns as the son, the lover or the father maintained on behalf of the family, we shall find types of the friend, the neighbor, the partner, the business man, the teacher, the servant, the policeman, the citizen. How- ever fluid and indistinct in the literature and debate of the day where variants get most of the attention, these types will be found quite definite for each family or neighborhood. Vague though they may seem for the whole nation, they are precise enough for each little local group ; and it is just in such little groupsjthat everybody is born and raised._These types, then, are very real things in the lives of people. A girl is impressed at home with the daughter pattern, at school with the pupil pattern, with her teens she is confronted with the young lady type and later she encounters the reigning standard of wife and mother.

If, however, she varies her life to the extent of becoming saleswoman, milliner, or accountant, she finds no specialized model held up to her. This brings us to the truth that the molds provided by society are, after all, few, while nowadays the vari- ety of situation and requirement is all but infinite. It would seem, then, that this species of control is useless for detail regu- lation. But this difficulty has been triumphantly met. Symmet- rical types complete in every feature are provided only for the chief positions which one may occupy. Fpr the rest society by dissecting and comparing normal conduct for all sorts of exigen- stem brings to light certain resemblances. Social conduct under all sorts of conditions is found to repeat