Most social analysis takes place at another level of theory, though, and that is examining the sociocultural forces or agencies that actually shape and enforces people's conformity to a society's ideology . Some of these forces are fairly straight forward, such as laws and law enforcement. Others, such as religious doctrine and the articulation of morality are more subtle because of the way they become internalized in the individual. Many agencies of force use a combination of language and physical force. Language plays multiple roles in both the formation and the enforcement of social norms.
Language is the most accessible and fullest embodiment of our world view, our ideology.
It is both the medium in which rules are discussed, formulated and encoded and it is the medium in which it is conveyed and enforced. By language we do not mean simply verbal language, but any symbolic system of communication, including visual and gestural communication as well. It is this broadening of the definition of language which has unified many approaches which had up to the 1950s been working separately on studying the various forces and agencies through which cultural ideologies are formulated and maintained. Groups which control a society's discourse control the way its ideology is continually shaped and implemented. In each of these cases we can trace the history of the discourse and we find that it does not present a fixed, God-given, natural Truth, but changes as the structure of America's wealth and power structure changes.