This paper contends that sociological understandings of the ways in which social control activities are carried out are both too general and lack sophisticated analytical conceptualis ations of the way such processes operate. Using data collected in a study carried out by the author, which examines the re sponses taken by three categories of official personnel to sec ondary school children in Melbourne who fail to attend school, an analysis is made of the operation of social control in a spe cific area. On the basis of the findings of this study it is argued that distinctions must be made between different kinds of con trol agents and different kinds of control and that the assump tion of comprehensive and coherent ideologies underpinning systematic and co-ordinated social control activities should be discarded. Attention must be directed to the structural location (both organisational and inter-organisational) of agents, and the notion of 'system', except as a shorthand term for ongoing relationships, should be treated with scepticism as a descrip tion of inter-organisational connections in the field of social control.
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