Socialization

The peer group

The first agency the person chooses, and the first among equals rather than superiors. Its influence peaks in adolescence and it is the only agency capable of transmitting norms that oppose the others. It teaches negotiation, cooperation and competition between equals, and it is where much deviance is learned, which is the basis of differential association theory in [Explaining Deviance: The Sociological Theories].

The school

The agency of formal, deliberate socialisation. It transmits knowledge and skills, and along with them the hidden curriculum: punctuality, obedience to a timetable, competition, respect for impersonal authority, and the habit of being evaluated by strangers according to written rules. The hidden curriculum is arguably the more important half, since it is the training for participation in secondary groups and bureaucratic organisations.

Religion

Transmits values, a moral vocabulary, a sense of the sacred, and ritual. Its socialising power is greatest where practice is regular and the community is closely knit.

The workplace and the occupation

Adult socialisation happens mostly here. A person learns not just a job but an occupational culture: how members of this trade speak, what they think important, whom they defer to, what they may say to an outsider. Professional socialisation is an intense instance, and it is a subject of [Sociology of the Legal Profession].

The mass media

Now among the most powerful agencies, reaching a person continuously and largely without supervision. Its distinctive features are reach, repetition, and the presentation of models of behaviour, appearance and success. Its effects are contested, and the debate is in [Mass Media and Its Impact].

The state and the law

Often omitted and worth including. The state socialises through compulsory schooling, the curriculum, national symbols and ceremonies, and through law itself, which teaches by declaring what is unacceptable. That teaching function is one of the strongest arguments for legislating ahead of public opinion, taken up in [Law and Social Change].

The types of socialization

• Primary socialization, in early childhood, in the family. The most consequential.
• Secondary socialization, in later childhood and beyond, in school, peer group and workplace.
• Anticipatory socialization, learning the ways of a group one hopes to join before joining it, as in [In-groups, Out-groups and Reference Groups].
• Resocialization, the deliberate replacement of a person's previous norms and values with new ones. It occurs in prisons, the army, religious orders and rehabilitation programmes, and the more thorough versions occur in what Goffman called total institutions, where a person's whole life is conducted in one place under one authority, cut off from the wider society. Prisons and mental hospitals are the standing examples, and the concept has been influential in criminology.
• Developmental socialization, the ordinary building of new skills onto existing ones through adult life.

Theories: the two that carry marks

Cooley: the looking-glass self. We come to know ourselves through the imagined judgments of others, in three moments: imagining our appearance to another, imagining their judgment, and feeling pride or mortification. Worked in [Symbolic Interactionism].

Mead: the stages and the generalized other. The child moves from imitation, through the play stage of taking one role at a time, to the game stage of holding all the roles in mind at once, and so arrives at the generalized other, the internalised attitude of the community. The self divides into the I, the spontaneous responder, and the me, the organised attitudes of others taken into oneself.

Freud is usually added: the personality divided into the id, the pool of biological drives; the superego, the internalised moral demands of society; and the ego, which mediates between them and reality. Freud's contribution to sociology is the idea that socialisation is not painless: it requires the renunciation of desires, and the conflict is permanent.

A worked example

Take a person from first year to the fifth year of practice.

Anticipatory socialisation begins before enrolment: the student changes how they speak, what they read, how they dress, on the model of a group they have not joined.

Formal socialisation teaches doctrine, but the more durable teaching is the hidden curriculum of legal education: that an argument must be authority-backed, that both sides of a proposition can be argued, that emotion is not an argument.

Occupational socialisation in chambers teaches what no syllabus contains: how to address a registrar, when a matter is really going to be heard, what may be said to an opponent outside court, how much confidence to show a client. It is learned by watching, and it is transmitted by a primary group inside a secondary institution, which is exactly the structure identified in [Primary and Secondary Groups].

Role distance appears around the third year: the person can perform the role fully and simultaneously signal that they see it as a performance.

The professional self is complete when the person's judgment of their own conduct is made by reference to the profession's standards rather than to those of their family or their college batch. The reference group has changed, and that change is what socialisation into an occupation actually is.

Limits, failure and criticism

Socialisation is never total. Every society produces people who do not internalise its norms, which is why it also needs the formal controls of Module II.

It is not deterministic. People resist, select and reinterpret. A model in which the person is simply moulded is the standard objection to the functionalist account of socialisation.

Its content can be examined critically. Socialisation transmits the inequalities of a society as readily as its virtues: gender roles, caste attitudes and class expectations are learned in exactly the way that honesty is.

Conflicting agencies. Family, peer group, school and media frequently teach incompatible things, and a person is not a passive recipient of a single message. This conflict is itself a source of social change.

Over-socialised conception of man. The influential objection that sociology sometimes describes people as though they were nothing but the sum of what they absorbed, leaving no room for the choosing individual.

Quick revision

1. Socialization is the lifelong process by which a person learns and internalises the norms, values, language and roles of their society and develops a self.
2. It is lifelong, two-way, largely unconscious, social, universal in occurrence but varied in content, and never complete.
3. Agencies: family (primary and most powerful), peer group (the first chosen, and where deviance is learned), school (the hidden curriculum), religion, workplace, mass media, the state and law.
4. Types: primary, secondary, anticipatory, resocialization (Goffman's total institutions), developmental.
5. Cooley: looking-glass self. Mead: play stage, game stage, generalized other, the I and the me. Freud: id, superego, ego, and socialisation as renunciation.
6. It explains why behaviour is regular although almost none of it is enforced.
7. Criticism: never total, not deterministic, transmits inequality, agencies conflict, and the over-socialised conception of man.

Test yourself

1. Define socialization and give four of its characteristics. The process by which a person, through interaction with others, learns and internalises the norms, values, beliefs, language, skills and roles of their society and thereby becomes a functioning member of it. It is lifelong rather than confined to childhood; it is a two-way process in which the person interprets and resists rather than merely absorbing; it is largely unconscious on both sides; and it is universal in occurrence though its content differs completely between societies.

2. Why is the family the primary agency? Because it acts first, on a person with no prior norms and no defences; because it acts continuously through the years in which capacities are formed; because the child has no alternative source and no choice of membership; and because it acts with an emotional force no later agency matches. It transmits language, elementary morality, sex roles, religion, and the family's own class and caste position.

3. Distinguish primary, secondary and anticipatory socialization. Primary socialization occurs in early childhood, chiefly in the family, and is the most consequential. Secondary socialization occurs later, in school, peer group and workplace, and builds on it. Anticipatory socialization is the learning of the ways of a group one hopes to join before joining it, which eases entry if one is admitted and leaves one stranded if one is not.

4. What is resocialization, and what is a total institution? Resocialization is the deliberate replacement of a person's existing norms and values with new ones, as in prisons, the army, religious orders and rehabilitation programmes. A total institution, in Goffman's phrase, is a place where a person's whole life is conducted under a single authority, cut off from the wider society, so that the previous self can be stripped away and rebuilt; prisons and mental hospitals are the standing examples.

5. How does socialization explain social order better than the threat of punishment does? Because most conduct is never observed and most rules are never enforced, yet behaviour remains highly regular. Socialization explains this by showing that the norms have been internalised: a person conforms not from calculation about sanctions but because they have become the kind of person for whom the alternative is unthinkable or shameful. Formal punishment deals only with the residue this process fails to reach.