TEXTBOOK SOCIOLOGY 9699

Socialisation and the Creation of Social Identity

Contents

• Introduction to the book's contents and structure.
• Syllabus coverage for AS and A-Level Sociology (9699) examination from 2021.
• Chapter 1: Socialisation and the creation of social identity - process of learning, social identity, and change.
• Chapter 2: Methods of research - methods, strengths, limitations, research design, and debate from natural sciences.
• Chapter 3: The family - theories of the family, social change, family roles, and changing relationships.
• Chapter 4: Education (compulsory) - education in social context, structures, and processes within schools.
• Chapter 5: Globalisation (optional) - globalisation, social change, and consequences of globalisation.
• Chapter 6: Media (optional) - ownership and control of the media, media representations, and effects.
• Chapter 7: Religion (optional) - religion, social change, and religious movements.
• Chapter 8: Preparing for assessment - tips and techniques for exam preparation.
• Key concepts: inequality, opportunity, power, control, resistance, social change, development, socialisation, culture, identity, structure, human agency.

Syllabus Coverage

• Paper 1: Socialisation, Identity and Methods of Research
  • Chapter 1: Socialisation and the creation of social identity
    • 1.1 The process of learning and socialisation
    • 1.2 Social control, conformity and resistance
    • 1.3 Social identity and change
  • Chapter 2: Methods of research
    • 2.1 Types of data, methods, and research design
    • 2.2 Approaches to sociological research
    • 2.3 Research issues
• Paper 2: The Family
  • Chapter 3: Theories of the family and social change
    • 3.1 Perspectives on the role of the family
    • 3.2 Diversity and social change
  • 4. Family roles and changing relationships
    • 4.1 Gender equality and experiences of family life
    • 4.2 Age and family life
• Paper 3: Education
  • 5. Education and society
    • 5.1 Theories about the role of education
    • 5.2 Education and social mobility
    • 5.3 Influences on the curriculum
  • 6. Education and inequality
    • 6.1 Intelligence and educational attainment
    • 6.2 Social class and educational attainment
    • 6.3 Ethnicity and educational attainment
    • 6.4 Gender and educational attainment
• Paper 4: Globalisation
  • 7. Key debates, concepts, and perspectives
    • 7.1 Perspectives on globalisation
    • 7.2 Globalisation and identity
    • 7.3 Globalisation, power, and politics
  • 8. Contemporary issues
    • 8.1 Globalisation, poverty, and inequalities
    • 8.2 Globalisation and migration
    • 8.3 Globalisation and crime
• Paper 4: Media
  • 9. Ownership and control of media
    • 9.1 The traditional and the new media
    • 9.2 Theories of the media and influences on media content
    • 9.3 The impact of the new media
  • 10. Media representation and effects
    • 10.1 Media representations of class, gender, ethnicity, and age groups
    • 10.2 Different models of media effects
    • 10.3 The impact of the media on behaviour
• Paper 4: Religion
  • 11. Religion and social order
    • 11.1 Religion and society
    • 11.2 Religion and social order
    • 11.3 Religion as a source of social change
  • 12. The influence of religion
    • 12.1 The secularisation debate
    • 12.2 Gender, feminism, and religion
    • 12.3 Religion and postmodernity

How to Use This Book

• Each chapter begins with learning objectives.
• Before you start activities are designed to activate prior knowledge.
• Activities are a mixture of individual and group tasks to help develop skills and practice.
• Key terms Important terms are highlighted in black bold and defined.
• Key concept boxes contain questions that help you develop a conceptual understanding of sociology.
• Reflection boxes help you to think about your learning.
• Think like a sociologist boxes contain prompts and questions that go beyond the syllabus.
• An orange line in the margin has been added to identify areas of content that go beyond the syllabus.
• What's the evidence? boxes highlight important case studies.
• Key sociologist boxes highlight important sociological figures.
• Each chapter ends with a Summary, Exam-style questions and a Sample answer and activity.

Socialisation and the Creation of Social Identity

• Learning Objectives:
  • Understand the process of learning and socialisation.
  • Understand social control, social conformity, and resistance.
  • Understand social identity and change.
• Before You Start Reflection:
  • How much control have you had over things that have happened in your life so far?
  • How much has been decided for you by others?

The Process of Learning and Socialisation

• Culture, roles, norms, values, beliefs, customs, ideology, power, and status as elements in the social construction of reality.

• Sense of belonging and identification: developing the view that 'our' society is different from other societies.

• The social construction of reality: Societies are mental constructions; thus, their reality is socially constructed.

• Culture: A 'way of life' taught and learnt through primary and secondary socialisation.

  • Cultures are dynamic and constantly changing.
  • Material culture: Physical objects (artifacts) a society produces that reflect cultural knowledge, skills, and interests (cars, phones, books).
  • Non-material culture: Knowledge and beliefs valued by a culture (religious and scientific beliefs).

• Merton (1957):

  • Objects can function in two ways:
    • Manifest function: The purpose for which they exist (clothes keep you warm).
    • Latent function: Hidden functions (material objects as status symbols).

• Defining society:

  • People see themselves as having something in common with others in their society, distinguishing themselves from other societies.
  • Involves two types of space:
    • Physical space: A distinctive geographical area marked by a physical or non-physical border.
    • Mental space: Separates people based on beliefs about similarities with people in 'their' society and differences from people in other societies.
  • Anderson (1983) describes societies as 'imagined communities' - things that exist only in the mind.
    • Societies are mentally constructed by:
      • Geographic borders that set physical boundaries.
      • A system of government.
      • Common language, customs, and traditions.

• Customs: Established and accepted cultural practices and behaviours.

• Socialisation: The process through which people learn behaviour that goes with membership of a particular culture.

• Social construction: The idea that our perception of what is real is created through historical and cultural processes.

Interaction and Meaning:

• Cultural objects can have different meanings, indicating sophisticated and complex cultural interaction.
• Societies require order and stability, achieved through patterns and regularities in behavior.
  Roles, Values, and Norms:
• Cultures are constructed from roles, values, and norms.
• Roles: Expected patterns of behavior with each position (friend, student, teacher).
• Values: Beliefs about how something should be.
• Norms: Socially acceptable ways of behaving in different roles.
• Roles:
  • Played in relation to other roles.
  • Demand social interactions and awareness of others.
  • Involve role-sets (different relationships with different people).
• Every role has a name (or label) that carries with it a sense of how people are expected to behave in any situation.
• Values:
  • Roles have a prescribed aspect based on beliefs about how people should behave.
  • Values provide broad guidelines for role behavior.
  • For example, teachers should teach; parents should care for their child.
• Norms:
  • Norms are specific rules showing how people should act in a particular situation.
  • Norms help us to perform roles predictably and acceptably.
  • Merton (1938) notes that without norms, behavior becomes risky and confusing.
  • He used the term anomie to describe the condition where people fail in understanding norms operating in a particular situation and react in a range of ways.
• Beliefs:
  • Important, deep-rooted ideas that shape our values.
  • Beliefs do not necessarily express a value.
  • More general behavioral guidelines that include ideas, opinions, views, and attitudes.
  • May or may not be true; what matters is belief.

Biology vs. Culture

• Importance of Socialisation in Influencing Human Behavior: The Nurture vs. Nature Debate
  • Socialisation teaches behavior rules needed to become a society/culture member and a social actor.
  • Biology may influence some behaviors: drives for procreation, self-preservation.
  • Genetics: Behavior may be guided by instincts based on biological instructions.
  • Instincts are fixed human features: things we are born knowing; cultural environment plays little/no role in development.
    • Example: many females have a mothering instinct.
• A weaker expression implies people are born with capabilities put into practice through experiences.
• Nature hints at behavioral rules, but people can ignore.
  * If women have greater child-caring ability, it makes genetic sense for them to take on the caring role but genes do not force the issue.
• Feral children are sociologically significant for 2 reasons:
  • Children without human contact fail to show social/physical development one would expect (walking, talking, using a knife and fork).
  • If human behavior is instinctive, it's unclear why the children develop differently from children with human contact (they should quickly pick up behaviors).
    * Feral children do not tend to pick up normal skills, suggesting that missing human contact at a young age can't be corrected later.
  • Evidence for the significance of socialisation:
    * Different cultures develop different ways of doing things.
    * If human behaviors were governed by instinct, there would be few variations between societies.
    * Billikopf (1999) found: in Russia, a man peeling a banana for a woman means he has a romantic interest in her.
    * Wojtczak (2009) claims: In Victorian Britain, most women ‘lived in a state little better than slavery’: ‘women’s sole purpose was to marry and reproduce.’. That is not the case in British society today.

Presentation of Self

• Who we believe we are, our sense of identity, is also constructed socially through how we present ourselves to others (Goffman, 1959).

• Social life as a series of dramatic episodes:

  • People as actors.
  • Personal identity: writing/speaking their own lines.
  • External influences: following lines written for them.
  • Adjust behavior to make the desired impression on others.
  • Identity performance: acting in ways believed to be liked.

• Cooley (1909):

  • Looking-glass self: other people are used as mirrors reflecting our self as others see us.

• Presentation of self always involves:

  • The importance of interpretation: identities are broad social categories whose meaning differs historically/across cultures.
  • The significance of negotiation: identities are always open to discussion; meaning male, female, etc., is constantly changing as people 'push boundaries'.

• The 'I' and the 'Me'

  • Basic human skills have to be taught and learned; so too advanced social skills. (George Herbert Mead, 1934)
  • Social context conditions behavior; self-awareness is learned.
  • 'The Self': an awareness of who we are.
    • An 'I' aspect based around our opinion of ourselves (the 'unsocialised self').
    • A 'Me' aspect consisting of an awareness of how others expect us to behave (the 'social self’).

• Basic instincts are conditioned:

  • An example is experiencing pain; behavior will be conditioned by factors such as gender or location.

Alternatives

Not all scientific disciplines place the same emphasis on socialisation:

• Biological ideas about evolution used to explain social development.
• Evolutionary psychology explains contemporary psychological and social traits with principles of natural selection: successful behaviors are selected and reproduced.
• Family development and gender roles are adaptations over the centuries to raise children and provide for the family.
• Psychology places more stress on environmental factors on development.
• Meins noted genetic instinct for babies to become attached but environmental factors such as caregivers’ ability to recognize and understand affect that.

Socialisation Process

• Primary Socialisation (mainly within the family) is essential for initial human development; for example, learning language.
  • Socialisation in the family means copying, while also negotiating behavior.
  • Human infants need other people to develop as human beings and members of a particular culture.
• Different messages can come from different people: relatives rewarding behavior that parents punish.
  • Children can judge how different people will react to behavior. *Secondary Socialisation consists of broader groups and can take place without close personal contact.
    • Its purpose is liberating dependence on primary attachments from the family group; it is in effect more impersonal.
    • Instrumental relationships are those based on what people can do for each other; formality and anonymity.

Family:

• Shapes basic values such as how to address adults and moral values, and the range of acceptable behavior.

Agencies of Socialisation and Social Control

• Socialisation process = order/stability to people’s behaviour
• Family = role development over time. Child development also involves a range of roles: baby, infant, child, teenager, and adult, with children of their own.
• Socialisation = Social control (limiting range of behaviors open to individuals).

Agencies of Socialisation & Social Control

• Primary: Family
  • Adults learn roles ranging from husband/wife to parent/step-parent. Child development also involves a range of roles: baby, infant, child, teenager, and an adult with children of their own
    • Parents are significant others.
    • Basic norms are taught.

Secondary Socialisation

• Peer groups

  • Models for appraising/shaping attitudes, feelings, actions (reference groups.)
  • Norms often relate to age-appropriate behavior; peer sanctions are mainly informal.

• Education

  • Formal curriculum specifies subjects and skills; hidden curriculum involves learning to deal w/strangers.
  • It’s also “limited individual desires” and thinking as those of others. Children are separated from their parents, providing challenge and opportunity.
  • It “internalises a level of society’s values” to be higher than those within the family ( interaction with authority/strangers). Educational system promotes social solidarity.

• Colleagues/ Role-set also extends cultural relationships because people are fixed into a range of expected behaviors.

• Schools also teach the values of competition, for academic rewards, as well as teamwork and conformity to authority.
  * Positive sanctions lead to qualifications/prizes/encouragement. Negative is a reputation of being bad or unintelligent.
  * From a Marxist point of view, it prepares adults to be workers by “socializing them into uncomplaining workers.”
  Mass media:

• Inpersonal: Short-term effects include desensitisation, learning immitation
  ** The media also habituates certain perceptions and ideas

Religion:

• Religions apply positive sanctions on their followers: reincarnation/sin and rewards
  ** It serves as a source of safety and belonging for people

• Social Control involves limiting range of behaviors available to individuals/ learning role to “fit into” an area of responsibility.
  ** As agencies act as social control, they also use the various roles to teach lessons/impose sanctions

Structural and Interactionist Views

• Macro vs Micro scale actions & theories on order

• The main theories in sociology, functionalist theory and Marxist theory, provide different interpretations of how order and control are created and maintained

• Both perspectives are structuralist (or macrosociological); they argue that how societies are organised at the level of families, governments and economies

• However another approach has always been present in sociology, the interactionist view, which focuses on the microsociological and how
  individuals can shape the social world. Human lives are not seen as decided by social forces; rather, people have agency
  For structuralists, the established social order represents a powerful force that the individual has little or no freedom to opposeFor various reasons, people accept the established institutional patterns of behavior as ifthey were a hidden force controllingtheir actions
  By followingsocial rules in this way, each person’s actions reflect the strong influence ofthe social structure
  Structurists theones originated in the work or Durkhneim amd Marx
  From a structuraList perspective social action is the product or deep underiving force in society to reach beyond the level or individual consciousness and conrol

• These structural forces share our behavior and major influence on our thought process

• Social order represents a powerful hidden force where an individual has little freedom to oppose.
  Each person reflects the strong influence of the social structure by following its strong influence.

Types & Models of Power : How is all this imposed / controlled.

A. Consensus structuralism approach : stability created from basic functional parts

• To have long-term survival, there's is a level of integration to ensure stability, in which all parts are inter-dependent

1. Each part must develop ways to conform needs of themselves & for the whole. “Social order cannot just come about willy nilly.” Therefore it is:

Conflict structurism.

1
The political and ideological superstructure rests on the economic base:
this involves political institutions government and agencies of social control (the police, judges and courts)
and ideological institutions including religion, education and the mass media
3 People get exploited with political and ideological power within work so they need agreements and agreements

2 Societies may be appear stable, but based on conflicts of interest between groups
The leading conflict structuralist approach, Marxism, sees this in economic terms with different social classes fighting against each other.
Feminism expresses this conflict in gender terms , with men as more powerful than women in most, or all, societies.

Marxism

** How can all this be done, from top down, to a community in a controlled and exploitive way.
** Ideologies are what creates overall structural roles to give the social world more structure/stability.

Althusser

Religious and state values are implemented. State institutions use a dominant ideology. It also can be effective if they're built into social values. Economic and political agreements ensures cooperation of the system, creating socialisation.

Feminism: How power is enacted from top down with gender as a central method of control

A. Interpersonal: such as physical violence, to labor Exploitation
B. Social & Economical structures: Male dominate the largest levels of social and economic systems

• Radical feminism- “patriarchy is the force of female oppression” and leads men “in charge” of both economic/financial areas and private

General Microsociological Approach - Control From the Bottom Up

*Create order everyday and re create social order through individual combined daily

• Societies are created through social interaction and based on meanings - not the other way around
  In a school classroom, if a teacher defines the situation as a period oftime for teaching, but her students define it as a time for messing around and having fun, this will almost certainly result in disorder.

Social Life being “Like acting in a Play”/ and using the “Looking Glass”

• The context of a situation creates its meaning.
• It is more psychologically desirable than disorder; people want order.
  *The symbolic interactionist - the meaning is never really clear and must be re discussed as situations and change

Interacting w/others “a Weak Nature of beliefs”

There must be defined meaning of the situation and context. The meanings can change at moment Notice

"Identities are open for group discussion “Male, female, young, old, all will alter"

• People are able to exercise freefrom the influences of their social environment ( Wrong, 1961)

This gives people more autonomy as there is a weakness of beliefs.
1
This “Labely” Demonstrates the how’s that societies are all made up of social interaction. When we name something (categorising) and giving it traits we use an identity to guid our behavior!
In Western societies, female identity has changed dramatically Today, there is a wider range of definitions, such as the single career woman, which reflects changing ideas about equality and perceptions of women.
Concepts of structure and action are both important in helping us understand the relationship between society and the individual, Structuration.
Structuration is the idea that as people develop relationships, the rules they use to guide their behaviours are formalised into routine ways of behaving towards each other (practices).

• Factor of Conformity :
  Sanctions , social pressure, self interests,

Factors of Individuals’ Conforming.

*Positive: Rewards
*Negative Punishment -

1 Power and ideologies give people the thought of acting together and getting to understand those reasons
This way both long and short-term ideas are enforced/agreed with
3 There is also pressure of belonging and being ostracized if they don't

Under-Socialisation
Individuals “over -learn”” the norms

4. Non - Conformity