2016 Mcgraw-Hill Ryerson Limited

4 / SOCIALIZATION

Contents:

Learning Objectives

4-1

Using the Text Boxes to stimulate discussion
Classroom activities
Video suggestions
Key points from the text
Additional lecture ideas
Class discussion topics
Topics for students research
Additional readings
Thinking About Movies

4-1

Learning Objectives:
4.1. What is the role of socialization?

4.2. What are some major theoretical perspectives on socialization?

4.3What are some agents of socialization?

4.4. How does socialization occur throughout the life course?

Using the text boxes to stimulate discussion:

Research Today:Impression Management by Students after Exams.As an example of impression management, the box uses the example of how, after receiving an exam back, students will act differently depending on who they are with. The Apply the Theoryquestions are: 1) What theoretical perspective would most likely be employed in the study of students’ impression management strategies? 2) How do you think some feminist sociologists might approach the study of impression management on the part of their students?

Sociology in the Global Community: The Resettlement of Syrian Refugees. This box provides an example of resocialization, from the perspective of Syrian refugees. The Apply the Theory questions are: 1) How would an interactionist describe the experiences of Syrian refugees in Canada?2) From a conflict perspective, how might adjustment to life in Canada be influenced by the social capital refugees bring with them from their home country?3)How might functionalists view the arrival of refugees to Canadian communities?

Sociology in the Global Community:Aging Worldwide: Issues and Consequences.This box discusses the issues and consequences of aging populations around the globe with focus on policies and programs which address this population shift... The Apply the Theory questions are: 1) For an older person, how might life in Pakistan differ from life in France?2. Do you know an elderly person who lives alone? What arrangements have been made (or should be made) for the person’s care in case of emergency?

Social Policy and Socialization: Child care around the world.) The rise in the number of single-parent families, increased job opportunities for women, and the need for additional family income have all propelled an increasing number of mothers of young children into the paid labour force of Canada. In 2010, 67% of women with children under the age of 6 were in the paid labour force. Who, then, is responsible for children during work hours? For many preschoolers with employed parents, the solution has become day care programs. The box goes on to discuss the implication of day care as an agent of socialization. The Apply the Theory questions are 1) What importance would liberal feminist thinkers place on the establishment of a national childcare program for Canada? What about radical feminist thinkers? 2) If you were a conflict sociologist, how would you view the establishment of such a program in light of the overall belief in the need to eliminate social inequality? 3) What role do you think a national childcare program might serve in terms of the socialization of Canadian children?

Suggestions for in-class activities:

The opening vignette to the chapter features a story of a family who chose to keep the gender of their baby a secret, opting to raise a genderless child. The parents believed they were giving their child the freedom to choose who the child wanted to be, unconstrained by social norms related togender. Socialization experiences related to gender contribute to the shaping of our personalities. A personality is used to refer to a person’s typical patterns of attitudes, needs, characteristics and behaviour.

Use Your Sociological Imagination: Students are asked the following questions: What do you think the impact would be for a child who was raised in a gender-free world? Can you envision this world ever happening?

Video suggestions:

Quinceañera ( 2006, Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland). Magdalena (Emily Rios) is excited about her quinceañera, a 15th birthday celebration that is for many Latinas a rite of passage into adulthood. While her family fights over the party arrangements, Magdalena becomes pregnant by her boyfriend and must cope with adult issues sooner than expected. Her parents treat her harshly when they hear the news, forcing her to take refuge with her uncle Tomas. There she meets a young cousin who is experimenting with his sexuality. Magdalena begins to rethink her values and her definition of family.From a sociological point of view, Quinceañera shows a young girl goingthrough a difficult stage of the life course. As Magdalena struggles to managemultiple social roles, we see her rebel against her nuclear family, oneagent of socialization, and turn instead to her extended family, where she isexposed to cultural influences that differ from those she was raised with.

Killing Us Softly 3 (2000, Media Ed Foundation,Jean Kilbourne; Directed, edited & produced by Sut Jhally, online teaching supportsat This film links to the opening vignette on advertising, which cites Jean Kilbourne. Shows how advertising socializes us into regarding an unattainable female body type as ideal. Unequal treatment of men and women. Argues that messages received over and over help to objectify women, and that objectification is the first step towards legitimating violence.

Mickey Mouse Monopoly (2001, Produced & written by Chyng Sun, Directed, filmed and edited by Miguel Picker. An ArtMedia Production. Educational Distribution by the Media Education Foundation. Information at:

A Girl Like Me ( YouTube, 2005, 7:15m). This short documentary film by Reel Works Teen Filmmaking explores young African American women’s views about race, racism, and standards of beauty.

Key Points from the Text:

Socialization:Socialization is the process whereby people learn the attitudes, values, and behaviour appropriate to individuals as members of a particular culture. From a microsociological perspective, socialization helps us to discover how to behave properly and what to expect from others if we follow (or challenge) society’s norms and values. From a macrosociological perspective, socialization provides for the transmission of a culture from one generation to the next and thereby for the long-term continuance of a society.

Environment: The Impact of Isolation:Text cites the case of Isabelle, a child that lived in seclusion for six years. When found, Isabelle could not speak and reacted like an animal to strangers. After systematic socialization training was developed, Isabelle became well adjusted.Studies of animals raised in isolation support the importance of socialization in development. Harry Harlow (1971), a researcher at the primate laboratory of the University of Wisconsin, conducted tests with rhesus monkeys that had been raised away from their mothers and away from contact with other monkeys. As was the case with Isabelle, the rhesus monkeys raised in isolation were fearful and easily frightened. They did not mate, and the females who were artificially inseminated became abusive mothers. Apparently, isolation had had a damaging effect on the monkeys.

Use your sociological imagination:Ask the students to think about which events in their lives had a strong influence on who they are.

The influence of Heredity:Text uses the example of Oskar Stohr and Jack Yufe who were identical twins separate soon after their birth, and raised on different continents in very different cultural settings. When they were introduced as middle aged adults, they shared many things in common. However, they also had many differences. Twin studies are the main methodology used to study the influence of heredity and environment on social development. The preliminary results from twin studies indicate that both genetic factors and socialization experiences are influential in human development. Certain characteristics, such as temperaments, voice patterns, and nervous habits, appear to be strikingly similar even in twins reared apart, suggesting that these qualities may be linked to hereditary causes. However, identical twins reared apart differ far more in their attitudes, values, types of mates chosen, and even drinking habits: these qualities, it would seem, are influenced by environmental patterns.We need to be cautious when reviewing the studies of twin pairs and other relevant research. Overgeneralizing and granting too much importance to the impact of heredity may lead to blaming the poor and downtrodden for their unfortunate conditions. As this debate continues, we can certainly anticipate numerous efforts to replicate the research and clarify the interplay between hereditary and environmental factors.

Sociobiology:Sociobiology is the systematic study of the biological bases of social behaviour. Sociobiologists basically apply naturalist Charles Darwin's principles of natural selection to the study of social behaviour. In its extreme form, sociobiology suggests that all behaviour is the result of genetic or biological factors and that social interactions play no role in shaping people's conduct.

Socialization: The Major Theoretical Perspectives:

Social Psychological Perspectives: Sociologists and psychologists alike have expressed interest in how the individual develops and modifies the sense of self as a result of social interaction. We all have different perceptions, feelings, and beliefs about who we are and what we are like. How do we come to develop these? Do they change as we age?

Cooley and the Looking-Glass Self:In the early 1900s, Charles Horton Cooley advanced the belief that we learn who we are by interacting with others. Cooley used the phrase looking-glass selfto emphasize that the self is the product of our social interactions with other people. A subtle but critical aspect of Cooley’s looking-glass self is that the self results from an individual’s “imagination” of how others view him or her.

Mead: Stages of the Self:George Herbert Mead continued Cooley's exploration insocial psychology. Mead developed a useful model of the process by which the self emerges, defined by three distinct states. During the preparatory stage, children merely imitate the people around them, especially family members with whom they continually interact. During the play stage, the child learns to pretend to be other people. Just as an actor “becomes” a character, a child becomes a doctor, parent, superhero, or ship captain. Finally, in the game stage, the child of about eight or nine years old no longer just plays roles but begins to consider several actual tasks and relationships simultaneously.

Use your sociological imagination:Ask the students to think about how the generalized other influenced the decisions they have made. You could also ask them to think about conditions under which their behaviour is governed by the generalized other.

Goffman: Presentation of the Self:Early in life, the individual learns to slant his or her presentation of the self in order to create distinctive appearances and to satisfy particular audiences. Erving Goffman refers to this altering of the presentation of the self as impression management. He makes so many explicit parallels to the theatre that his view has been termed the dramaturgical approach. According to this perspective, people resemble performers in action. Face-work refers to the need to maintain a proper image of the self if we feel embarrassed or rejected, in order to continue social interaction.

Functionalist perspectives on socialization:Functionalist perspectives stress the importance of consensus, stability, and equilibrium in society; therefore, socialization of society’s members is essential to meet these goals. Socialization, according to functionalists, serves to ensure that the members of a given society share or buy into the basic values of that society in order to promote consensus or agreement and stability. Without high levels of agreement on the core values of society, functionalists argue that society will become destabilized and its survival may be threatened. Overall, functionalist perspectives stress the importance of the status quo. Socialization, therefore, is viewed as a way to ensure that a society’s members share values, beliefs, and goals that contribute to the maintenance of society as a whole.

Conflict perspectives on socialization:Like the functionalist theorists, conflict thinkers agree that the socialization of a society’s members by the major institutions (e.g. the economy, the state, the mass media) contributes to the perpetuation of the status quo. For conflict thinkers, however, this is not viewed as desirable, given the inherent inequalities of the capitalist society. Since capitalist society is based on the unequal distribution of power and resources, conflict thinkers advocate that the messages communicated through various forms of socialization will reflect this inequity. Karl Marx, for example, believed that the dominant ideas of a society at any given time will be the ideas of the dominant ruling class.

Feminist perspectives on socialization: Some feminist theories believe that what a society believes to be ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ is culturally imposed through systematic socialization of girls and boys, as well as women and men, according to sex. This systematic socialization takes place in the family, among peers, in the school, in the workplace, in religious organization, and through the mass media. Liberal feminists, who are sometimes called equality feminists, stress the importance of avoiding this type of socialization in order to achieve equality of the sexes.

Psychological approaches to socialization:Freud stressed the role of inborn drives. He suggested that the self has components that are always fighting with each other.According to Freud, our natural impulsive instincts such as sex and aggression, which he referred to as he id, are in constant conflict with societal restraints of he superego, while the ego is the part of he personality which mediates between the id and the superego. Piaget found that newborns have no sense of a looking glass self. In his well known cognitive theory of development, Piaget identified four stages of child development. 1) sensorimotor stage (use senses to make discoveries); 2) preoperational stage (begin to use words and symbols); 3) concrete operational stage (children engage in more logical thinking); and 4) the formal operational stage (adolescents are capable of sophisticated abstract thinking. Piaget believed that social interaction is the key to development.

Agents of Socialization

The Family as an Agent of Socialization:Almost all available research shows that the role of the family in socializing a child cannot be underestimated. Obviously, one of its primary functions is the care and rearing of children. The lifelong process of socialization begins shortly after birth. Most infants go through a relatively formal period of socialization generally called habit training. An infant enters an organized society, becomes part of a generation, and typically enters into a family. Gender socializationis an aspect of socialization through which we learn the attitudes, behaviours and practices associated with being male or female (called gender roles). As the primary agents of socialization, parents play a critical role in guiding children into those gender roles deemed appropriate in a society.

Schools and Socialization:Like the family, schools have an explicit mandate to socialize people in Canada—especially children—into the norms and values of the dominant culture. Functionalists point out that, as agents of socialization, schools fulfill the function of teaching children the values and customs of the larger society. Conflict theorists agree but add that schools can reinforce the divisive aspects of society, especially those of social class. Conflict theorists such as Bowles and Gintis (1976) have observed that schools foster competition through built-in systems of reward and punishment, such as grades and evaluations by teachers.

Peer groups as an Agent of Socialization: Peer groups can ease the transition of children into adult responsibilities. For adolescents, family diminishes in importance, and peer groups increasingly assume the role of significant others. Peer support can be both negative and positive toward socialization of values. Teenagers imitate their friends in part because the peer group maintains a meaningful system of rewards and punishments. Gender differences are noteworthy in the social worlds of adolescents, as considerable gender role socialization happens in peer groups.

Mass Media and Technology as an Agent of Socialization:In the past 75 years, media innovations – radio, motion pictures, downloadable music, television, the Internet and cell phones – have become important agents of socialization.

Television has certain characteristics that distinguish it from the other agents of socialization. It permits imitation and role playing but does not encourage more complex forms of learning. Issues have been raised regarding the content of television, popular music, music videos, motion pictures, video games, and Internet Web sites. These forms of entertainment serve as powerful agents of socialization for many young people in Canada and elsewhere.