Normative control and the constitution of social bonds: Finding *respect and forging trust in California prison communities

The purpose of this dissertation is to understand how normative control affects the quality of social bonds among prison inmates; specifically focusing on the status and trust dimensions of those bonds. I articulate divergent interest-based and identity-based motives and argue that these motives alter the quality of social bonds in the context of prison.;The central premise of my research is that the inferred motives for social behavior, whether identity-based or interest-based, are consequential to the constitution of social bonds. I argue that singular concepts such as 'status' or 'trust' take on different meaning depending on the motivational lens being used. The fundamental proposition explored is whether increasingly strong normative control shifts the actual and perceived motives for social action away from intersubjective identification and towards those based on depersonalized interests. While I explore only two relational qualities in this dissertation; status and trust, other qualities that constitute the social bond likely fall within the scope of this argument as well.