Socilisation: Learn the key ideas, concepts and details!

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.

  • Key Questions to Consider:

    • How do we learn to get on with others?
    • Is our behavior shaped more by nature or nurture?
    • How do we learn to judge others' perceptions of us?
    • Can we affect the social reality around us?

The Process of Learning and Socialisation

  • Elements in the Social Construction of Reality:
    • Culture, roles, norms, values, beliefs, customs, ideology, power, and status.
Defining Society
  • A society is where people see themselves as having something in common with others in their society and different from people in other societies.
  • It 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 their society and differences from other societies.
  • Societies are 'imagined communities' (Anderson, 1983).
Social Construction of Reality
  • Societies are mental constructions, so their reality is socially constructed.
  • Culture is a ‘way of life’ taught and learnt through primary and secondary socialisation.
  • Cultures are dynamic and constantly changing.
  • All cultures have two basic parts:
    • Material culture: physical objects ('artefacts'), such as cars, phones and books.
    • Non-material culture: Knowledge and beliefs valued by a particular culture (religious and scientific beliefs).
Functions of Objects (Merton, 1957)
  • Manifest function: The purpose for which they exist (e.g., clothes keep you warm).
  • Latent function: Hidden functions, such as status symbols (e.g., owning something a culture feels is desirable says something about you to others).
Roles

  • Roles are a building block of culture because they are played in relation to other roles.

  • They contribute to the creation of culture because they demand social interactions and awareness of others.

  • They help individuals develop the ability to form groups and communities.

  • Role-sets: When the role involves a set of different relationships with different types of people.

  • Every role has a name (or label) that identifies a particular role and carries with it a sense of how people are expected to behave in any situation.

Values
  • These common expectations provide a sense of order and predictability because role play is guided by behavioural rules in two ways:
    • All roles have a prescribed aspect based on beliefs about how people should behave.
    • Playing a role is guided (governed) by values that provide general behavioural guidelines – a teacher should teach their students, a parent should care for their child and so on.
  • Values provide only broad guidance for role behaviour.
Norms
  • Norms are specific rules showing how people should act in a particular situation (whereas values give only a general idea).
  • Norms, therefore, are rules used to perform roles predictably and acceptably.
  • Without order and predictability, behaviour becomes risky and confusing (Merton, 1938).
  • Anomie: A condition where people who fail to understand the norms operating in a particular situation react in a range of ways – from confusion, through anger to fear.
  • Norms are more open to interpretation and negotiation than either roles or values (Goffman, 1959).
Beliefs
  • Beliefs are the important, deep-rooted ideas that shape our values and are, in some respects, shaped by them.
  • All values express a belief, beliefs do not necessarily express a value.
  • They are more general behavioural guidelines that include ideas, opinions, views and attitudes.
  • These may, or may not, be true; what matters is that they are believed to be true.

The Importance of Socialisation

Nature vs. Nurture
  • Socialisation describes how we are taught the behavioural rules we need to become both a member of a particular society/culture and an able social actor.
  • Biology, rather than culture, may influence some of the ways people behave.
  • Instincts are fixed human features. These are things we are born knowing and our cultural environment plays little or no role in the development of these instincts, for example many females have a ‘mothering instinct’ . A weaker expression of this idea is that people are born with certain capabilities that are then put into practice through environmental experiences.
Feral Children

  • Feral children have missed out on primary socialisation by humans.

  • Evidence of human infants raised by animals is rare and not always reliable.

  • Feral children are sociologically significant for two main reasons:

    • When children are raised without human contact they fail to show the social and physical development we would expect from an ordinary raised child
    • If human behaviour is instinctive it is not clear why children such as Genie should develop so differently from children raised with human contact.

The 'I' and the 'Me'

  • Basic human skills have to be taught and learnt.
  • The social context in which behaviour occurs conditions how people behave (George Herbert Mead).
  • Self-awareness is learnt and involves developing a concept of Self.
  • 'The Self' (an awareness of who we are) has two related aspects:
    • 'I' aspect: Based around our opinion of ourselves as a whole (the 'unsocialised self').
    • 'Me' aspect: Awareness of how others expect us to behave (the 'social self').

The Presentation of Self (Goffman, 1959)

  • Our sense of identity is constructed socially through how we present ourselves to others.
  • Social life is a series of dramatic episodes; people are actors.
  • Personal identity involves writing and speaking your own lines.
  • External influences inform how people behave in particular situations and roles.
  • Identity performance is about achieving a desired result.
  • 'Looking-glass self' (Cooley, 1909): Other people are used as mirrors reflecting our self as others see us.
Elements of Self-Presentation:
  • The importance of interpretation: identities are broad social categories whose meaning differs both historically and across different cultures.
  • The significance of negotiation. Identities are always open to discussion.

Alternatives to Socialisation

  • Biological ideas about evolution have sometimes been used to explain social development.
  • Social Darwinism: Social life involves 'the survival of the fittest'.
  • Sociobiology: Biological principles of natural selection and evolution are applied to human behavior.
  • Wilson (1979) argued is a ‘biological basis’ for all human behaviour, strongly influenced by ‘biological programming’ or ‘biogrammars’ .
  • Evolutionary psychology explains contemporary psychological and social traits in terms of natural selection.
Functionalist Perspective
  • Parsons (1959a) argued that family roles reflect the belief that women play an expressive role (caring), and men play an instrumental role (providing).
Social Psychology
  • Places greater stress on how environmental factors affect the development of genetic or psychological predispositions.

Agencies of Socialisation and Social Control

Primary Socialisation
  • Occurs mainly within the family and is the first stage of socialisation.
Secondary Socialisation
  • Involves secondary groups and is characterised by a sense of detachment.
  • Aims to liberate the individual from dependence on primary attachments (Parsons, 1959a).
Social Control
  • Socialisation brings order, stability, and predictability to behavior.
  • It is also a form of social control, limiting the range of behaviors.
  • It involves a life-long process of rule-learning, built on sanctions.
Family as an Agency of Socialisation

  • Adults may have to learn roles ranging from husband/wife to parent/step-parent.

  • Child Development also involves learning roles: baby, infant, child, teenager and, eventually perhaps, an adult with children of their own.

  • Mead refers to parents as significant others.

  • Basic values and norms are taught within the family.

  • Sanctions in the Family:

    • Positive Sanctions: Facial expressions (smiling), verbal approval, physical rewards.
    • Negative Sanctions: Showing disapproval (shouting), physical punishment.
Peers as Agencies of Socialisation

  • Peer-groups are made up of people of a similar age, for example, teenagers.

  • Influences behavior from how we dress and talk to the things we love or hate.

  • Peer-groups can be reference groups that we use for appraising and shaping our attitudes, feelings and actions’ (Hughes et al. 2002).

  • Peer-group norms often relate to ideas about age-appropriate behavior.

    • Peer-group sanctions, or social sanctions, are generally informal and vary considerably; some examples include disapproving looks and negative comments.
Education as an Agency of Socialisation
  • Education involves two kinds of curriculum:
    • Formal Curriculum: Subjects, knowledge, and skills explicitly taught.
    • Hidden Curriculum: Learning how to deal with strangers, listen to authority, and respect the system.
  • Parsons (1959a) argued that school plays a particularly significant role in secondary socialisation.
Marxist Perspective
  • Bowles and Gintis (2002) argue that there is a correspondence between school norms and workplace norms.
Mass Media as an Agency of Socialisation
  • Our relationship with it is impersonal; we are unlikely to meet those doing the socialising.
  • Potter (2003) suggests that short-term effects include:
    • Imitation
    • Desensitisation
    • Learning
Religion as an Agency of Socialisation
  • Plays a significant role in the general socialisation process, especially in relation to ceremonial functions
  • Important moral values are influenced by religious values.
  • Religious values are powerful forces for those who believe.
  • Religions apply positive sanctions on their followers in different ways: Hinduism involves a belief in reincarnation based on how well you observed religious laws in your previous life; the reward for good behaviour in one lifetime is rebirth into a higher social position..
  • Negative sanctions are also many and varied. Catholicism, for example, has the sanction of excommunication (exclusion from the church), whereas some forms of Islam specify a range of punishments for those who break Shari’ah law.

Social Control, Conformity and Resistance

  • Structuralist (macrosociological) perspective: Argues that how societies are organised at the level of families, governments and economies (the institutional or system level), determines how individuals view their world and behave within it (structural determinism).
  • Interactionist view: Focuses on the microsociological and how individuals can shape the social world.

Structuralist Theories

  • Originated in the work of Durkheim and Marx.
  • Social action is the product of deep, underlying forces in society.
  • Marx claimed that the capitalist relations of production were the main structural force.
  • The functionalist perspective sees the structure of society more in terms of the institutional arrangements required to ensure the smooth running of society.

Consensus Structuralism (Functionalism)

  • Any explanation of how order and stability are created involves looking at how societies are organised at the level of the social system.
  • The various parts of a society work in harmony.
  • Parsons (1937) argued that every social system consists of four ‘functional sub-systems’ – political, economic, cultural and family.
  • For individuals to survive and do well, they need to be part of larger cooperative groups .
  • Every social institution, from families to schools to workplaces, must develop ways to ensure that individuals conform to the needs of both the institution and society as a whole.
  • For Parsons, institutions do this by developing ways to solve ‘four problems of their existence’:
    Adaptation, Goal maintenance, Integration, Latency.
  • Each of these sub- systems performs a different but related function that addresses certain ‘problems’ faced by every society.

Conflict Structuralism

  • Shows how society determines our lives so that powerful groups can control society at the cost of relatively powerless groups.
  • Leading conflict structuralist approach is Marxism.
  • Societies may appear stable but are based on conflicts of interest between groups.
Marxism

  • How work is socially organised is the key to understanding how all other social relationships are organised.

    • Economic base: The world of work and involves particular types of relationships (the relations of production), such as owner, manager, wage labourer and organisation.
      • Workplace is organized with one group above another; those further up have more power and control.

  • Political and ideological superstructure ‘rests’ on the economic base and involves political institutions, such as government and agencies of social control (the police, judges and courts) and ideological institutions including religion, education and the mass media.

  • Means of economic production are owned by the bourgeoisie.

  • The workplace is a key area of conflict because of its organisational structure.

  • Emphasizes that capitalism is naturally weak and unstable and that the ruling class has economic & political power. In turn, they control RSAs and ISAs.

Feminist Theory

  • All share the belief that contemporary societies are patriarchal.

  • Order and control are based on male power expressed in two ways:

    • Interpersonal power things like physical violence or the various ways that female labour is exploited within the family group.
    • Cultural power how male-dominated societies are structured to oppress and exploit women.
Liberal feminism,
  • The key form of control is sexual discrimination
Marxist feminism
Class inequality provides the context in which female oppression, exploitation and discrimination occur.
Radical feminism,
  • Patriarchy is the source of female oppression; results in men dominating the social order in two areas.
    the public - such as the workplace, where women are paid less and have lower status,
    the private - the home, where women carry out the majority of unpaid domestic work.

Interactionism

  • Claims that order and control are created ‘from the bottom up’.

  • People create and re-create ‘society’ on a daily basis through their daily routines.

  • Social life involves separate but linked episodes that give the appearance of order and stability.

  • Order is more psychologically desirable than disorder, and people try to impose order through the meanings given to behaviour in two ways:

    • To interact, people must develop shared definitions of a situation.
    • Where meanings are negotiated, they can easily change.
Labelling Theory
  • Argues that when we name something, we associate the name with a set of characteristics that are then used to guide our behaviour.
  • Through interation one's social context can determine or change the meaning of something.
  • Male and female social identities have changed over the past 50 years

Structuration (Giddens, 1984)

  • Outlined the importance of both structure and action in considering the relationship between society and the individual.
  • As people develop relationships, the rules they use to guide their behaviours are formalised into routine ways of behaving towards each other (practices).
  • A sense of structure develops in our social world - and this involves rules.
    *Giddens says that such rules become externalized and that we can use social resources & power relationships to explain some rules created & accepted, but other rejected..

Factors Explaining Conformity

  • Agencies of socialisation act as agencies of social control.
  • They apply pressure to make people act in some ways and not others through positive and negative sanctions.
  • Positive sanctions (rewards) range from smiling to gifts; Negative Sanctions (punishments) range from not talking to people to fines and imprisonment.
  • Formal controls tell everyone within a group exactly what is and is not acceptable behaviour; breaking these rules may result in formal sanctions.
  • Informal controls reward or punish acceptable/unacceptable behaviour in everyday, settings (such as the family) not involving written rules & procedures.
  • Belonging to group with approval of other members is strong form of social pressure.
    *Ostracism is exclusion of someone from group which is strong negative sanction and reason to conform.
    *It's self-interest to conform. One conforms due to consequences of decisions, and that it benefits people to conform to social expectations by following socially approved norms and values.
    *

Mechanisms Through Which Order Is Maintained

Ideology
  • Sets of beliefs whose ultimate purpose is to explain something.
    *For example, the meaning of life, the nature of family organization, superiority/inferiority of social groups or even how societies should be organised and governed.
    *A dominant ideology is the most widely accepted set of ideas in a society, usually imposed by a powerful group.
    *MARXISTS: Ruling class has the political power and control over institutions (media) to enforce ideology and manipulate the masses. Those people then have false conscious and accept their social role as reality.
    ALTHUSSER: Repressive State Apparatus (police, army, etc), can be used to enforce ruling class ideology, OR there's Ideological State Apparatuses (family, education, etc).
    Adorno & Horkheimer part of The Frankfurt school- said ruling class ideology passed on through forms of popular culture, consumed passively by people.
    There could be the repressive state apparatus- who'll control W/C by force!

Power

  • The capacity to bring about change (Dugan, 2003).

  • Power to 'do nothing' by making others believe nothing has to change (Lukes, 1990).

    • Weber (1922) distinguishes between two types:
      • Force or coercive power
      • Consensual power (authority): Charismatic, Traditional, and Rational/legal

    *FOUCAULT: Believed that power in modern societies is now difficult to see and be aware of, but power still constricts.

Consensus

  • The functionalist view is that order is maintained through a consensus, a general agreement on a set of values.
  • Collective rituals reinforce the consensus.
  • The consensus can change over time, reinforcing the strength of its value system.

Explaining Deviance and Non-Conformity

Subcultures
  • There will be more than one single value system within complex societies; there will be groups which have different values- Subcultures.
    • Normal or normal features of working class subcultures is that that often get those involved into trouble with society because they are considered nonconformity.
      There is willingess to accept that life involves conflict & to become involved with rights.
      There's the showing of physical strength through drinking.
      There's the status of dressing as best as you can.
      There is value to work & enjoyment!
      Autonomy is important because they will not listen to authority figures. (Miller- 1962)
Under-Socialisation
  • Deviance is caused by when socialisation has been partial or unsuccessful.
    *The family may fail to scocialise their child adequately, so the child does not learn normal values or appropriate behaviours in different situations.
Marginalisation
  • Some groups and individuals are pushed to the fringes of society both economically and politically
    *May result in deviance such as drug taking or minor crime!
Cultural Deprivation
  • Some groups in society lack in attitudes and values that are considered to allow them to be successful (the working class)
Resistance
  • Associated with conflict views of society, because it assumes a dominant group resists power.
    *The anger that comes with capitalism can make those with less understanding perform poorly and is a type of showing anger that will strengthen the system.
    *Teenagers can often resist because they dont have those holding on back factors as much in their lives as adults do(families to support; finances to take care of). Therefore it can be used to define the deviant behaviour of youth subcultures!
    These include showing styles and behaviours that reject the dominate values of society!

Social Identity and Change

Class Identities

  • Social class can be difficult to define, but Crompton (2003) suggests that occupation is a good measure/grouping (working, middle, and upper class)

    *Occupation indicates ways in which class identities develop out of work-related experiences.
    *Traditional working- class identities are fixed around manual work and manufacturing industry, with their contrast being middle and upper classes; built not just around what people are or believe themselves to be, but also around what they are not!
    *New work in service industries like the working class has generated new forms of identity (Goldthorpe et al. 1968)
    Privatised or home centred.
    *Devine (1992) has indicated there's a difference between new working class & the middle class; and old working class retained its identity.
    *Occupation Identities: the upper class are based on two groupings;
    *The landed aristocracy who have traditional land ownership & political connections & influence!
    *The business elite with great income & wealth based on ownership of significant companies! (Self and Zealey 2007- note the 21% number of amount of wealth owned by 1% of the population)

Gender Identities

  • While biological sex refers to physical characteristics that label people as male or female, gender refers to social characteristics given to each sex.
    *Gender identities differ historically and cross culturally- they are learnt and relative!
    There can be hegemonic or emphasized femininities in these dominant genders(Connell 1995)
    There are different forms of masculinity (Schauer- 2004)
    Alternative masculinities that challenge and undermine hegemonic masculinity.
    Complicit masculinities refers to newly feminized masculinities such as the ‘new man’; men who combine paid work with their share of unpaid housework and childcare, taking on aspects of the traditional feminine role;
    Marginalised masculinities refer to men who feel they have been ‘pushed to the margins’ of family life due to long-term unemployment
    There are female identities shaped in childhood; they are socialised into gendered roles involving gender identities.
    Ann Oakley has indicated multiple ways children are socialised into gender roles.
    According to Oakley, there are 3 forms of feminine identity in contemporary societies;
    contingent femininities framed by male behaviors and commands, assertive identities, and hollow identities!

Ethnic Identity

  • Ethnicity is a combination of cultural differences from religion to family structures, values, and beliefs.
    *Ethnic Identity does not neccesarily relate to actual evidence of cultural distinctiveness; it can negotiate through being external & internal factors
    Ethnic Identities involve a relationship btwn beliefs, ideologies (structure of the culture) and everyday ideas about roles, values, and norms! (page 41)
    *

Age Identities

  • Age is a social construction meaning that what it means to be young or old depends on the society at the time.
    *Chronological age may not be recognised or considered unimportant.
    *Industrial Societies; often children are unable to work so they're dependent on adults and Older people may be prevented from working and have low income which means less status (African Elders vs Industrrial Societies!)
    *People of the same age group through history share a common experience of growing up which cohort age
    *Older people give guidance based on the experience they offer to communities.
    *
    In industrial societies you can be considered among three categories of elderly (65-74, 75-84, and 85 over) to recognise the differences within the category of age. One roles for older people is that they can be grand parents, which is common in modern industrial society! However recent trends have been showing those of younger generations are living at home with their families with lower life qualities to have living situations and costs that fit their needs.
    There are children from traditional societies who have greater freedom to roam over a wider area; in Western societies, concern over safety means that children are watched over more and kept closer to home. Adults also decide whether a child is old enough for particular activities or privileges. Children have ways of resisting adult authority, can also