Social Rule System Theory - Adherence To and Compliance With Social Rules

Adherence To and Compliance With Social Rules

Actors adhere to and implement rule and rule systems to varying degrees. Compliance with, or refusal to comply with, particular rules are complicated cognitive and normative processes. Typically, there are diverse reasons for rule compliance. Several of the most important factors are:

1. Interest factors and instrumentalism (stressed by public choice and Marxist perspectives on self-interested behavior). Actors may advocate rules to gain benefits or to avoid losses.
2. Identity and status. Adherence to rules – and commitment to their realization – may be connected to an actor's identity, role, or status, and the desire to represent self as identified by or committed to particular rules. It follows that a major motivation in maintaining (or changing rules) – e.g. role complexes or distributive rules – is to maintain or change their social status.
3. Authoritative Legitimacy and Sacrality. Many rules are accepted and adhered to because persons or groups with social authority have defined or determined them, possibly by associating them with sacred principles or identifying their causal or symbolic relationship to actors' interests and status. In the contemporary world, we find the widespread institutionalization of abstract meta-rules of compliance that orient people to accepting particular definitions of reality and rule systems propagated by socially defined and often certified authorities, e.g. scientists and other experts. The authority may be scientific, religious, or political (for instance in the latter case, the fact that a democratic agency has determined the rules according to right and proper procedures). Certain rules may even be associated with God, the sacred, and, in general, those beings or things that actors stand in awe of, have great respect for, and may associate with or share in their charisma by adhering to or following their rules.
4. Normative/Cognitive Order. Actors may follow rules – and try to ensure that others follow them – because the rules fit into a cognitive frame for organizing their perceptions and making sense of what is going on. People react negatively to deviance – even in cases where they are not directly affected (that is, there are no direct apparent self-interests), because the order is disturbed, potentially destabilized, and eroded.
5. Social sanctions. Laws and formal organizational rules and regulations are typically backed up by specific social sanctions and designated agents assigned the responsibility and authority to enforce the rules. There are a variety of social controls and sanctions in any social group or organization which are intended to induce or motivate actors to adhere to or follow rules, ranging from coercion to more symbolic forms of social approval or disapproval, persuasion, and activation of commitments (in effect, "promises" that have already been made). In order to gain entrance or to remain in the group, one must comply with key group rules and role definitions. Exclusion from the group, if there are no alternative groups, becomes a powerful sanction.
6. Inherent sanctions. Many rules, when adhered to in specific action settings, result in gains or payoffs that are inherent in following those rules, such as going with (or against) automobile traffic. In many cases, the reasons for compliance are consequentialist. As many social scientists point out: in automobile traffic, we adhere to or accept as right and proper traffic rules, in particular those relating to stopping, turning, etc. because without them, we recognize that the situation would be chaotic, dangerous, even catastrophic. Most technical rules, for example relating to operating machines or using tools, entail inherent sanctions. Following them is necessary (or considered necessary) for the proper functioning or performance of the technology, or achieving a certain desirable outcome or solution.
7. veil of ignorance. Actors may not know the consequences of rule compliance and follow rules because they are given, taken for granted, or believed generally to be right and proper. The benefits of adhering to some rule systems can, however, mask hidden costs.
8. Habits, routines, and scripts. Much rule-following behavior is unreflective and routine. Many social rules are unverbalized, tacit, that is, part of a collective subconscious of strategies, roles, and scripts learned early in life or career, and reinforced in repeated social situations, for instance sex roles, or even many professional roles. Human beings acquire and learn cultural rules and roles – in part through being taught, in part through observing and learning the patterns generated by others (that is, both through verbal and non-verbal communication). Of particular importance is the fact that rule systems learned in early socialization are associated with very basic values and meanings – even personal and collective identity – motivating at a deep emotional level commitment to the rules and a profound personal satisfaction in enacting them. Conformity is then a matter of habitual, unreflected and taken-for-granted ways of doing things.

As indicated above, some social rules are enforced, others not: indeed, rules can be distinguished on the basis of the degree to which, and the circumstances under which, they are socially enforced or enforceable. Of course, regardless of the degree of enforceability, they may be complied with because of a desire for order, intrinsic sanctions, or realizing one’s role and self-identity. Many rules that actors rigorously adhere to are not socially enforceable, but nevertheless actors utilize them in organizing social activities and in shaping social order. Harre and Secord (1972:17) emphasize the freedom of choice in relation to rules and roles:

"The mechanistic model is strongly deterministic; the role-rule model is not. Rules are not laws, they can be ignored or broken, if we admit that human beings are self-governing agents rather than objects controlled by external forces, aware of themselves only as helpless spectators of the flow of physical causality."