In Search of Social Control: Conceptual Tools for Control in the Sociologies of Erving Goffman, Pierre Bourdieu, and Michel Foucault

The theoretical framework provided by the works of Erving Goffman, Pierre Bourdieu, and Michel Foucault on social control through discipline, Symbolic Violence, and Total Institutions offers us conceptual and methodological tools for a broader study of the social realm. These tools were and continue to be indispensable for understanding situations of social domination, discipline, and the maintenance of order. However, to the traditional use of these frameworks, we must now add broader social spaces resulting from globalization and technology, making a deep understanding of their theoretical and conceptual contributions necessary. This knowledge allows us to explore classic mechanisms of power and control, but also the new challenges posed by the use of technologies. From Goffman's microsociology, with his exhaustive analysis of techniques for securing compliance and subjugating personality, to Bourdieu's opening of spaces through fields and different forms of capital that constitute the basis of _habitus_, or Symbolic Violence, shared by Foucault, who also provides us with models of discipline, I have sought to assemble a conceptual toolkit. This toolkit can serve to deepen the study of both classical and new variants of social control.