Socialization, Identity, and Interaction

Chapter 4
 Concepts
• Socialization; the process of learning the roles,
norms and values of a culture; becoming a
member of that society
• It is through socialization that people learn
specific skills and abilities and what kinds of
people they are.
• Most of the things we do are learned. Children
learn from their parents and from other adults
how to speak, study, work, marry, vote, pray,
steal and many other things.
• Humans learn to be conscious agents capable
of reflecting upon their own behavior and
modifying it.
• Distinction between action and behavior.
• Action is a behavior to which a subjective
meaning has been attached. To be a person is
to act not simply behave.
• Through socialization we become conscious,
reflective agents, capable of social action.
• There are two types of socialization: primary and
secondary.
• Primary socialization takes place in infancy and
childhood within a family; it provides foundation for
later learning; children learn specific skills as the ability
to speak their own language, to interact and
communicate with others.
• Secondary socialization begins in latter childhood when
children begin to interact outside the home with
teachers, other children; they learn new social skills,
roles outside home. Peer group socialization occurs
during adolescence and continues throughout one’s life.
• It is through socialization that a person acquires a sense
of social identity and image.
• Distinction between social identity and personal identity.
• A social identity marks people as sharing an identity with
others; label to indicate the type of person; cluster of
personality characteristics linked to certain social or
occupational roles, categories and groups e.g. doctor,
woman, child, father, Jew, Asian, Black, mechanic,
homosexual; fundamental to a person’s way of being.
• Personal Identity: names; links social identity and the self
which is a person’s sense of individuality or uniqueness.
• Primary Identities: It is through primary socialization that
primary identities of personhood, gender, and possibly
ethnicity are built up. Primary identities are far more
stable than those acquired later in life.
• Gender identity: Clothes, toys, and the use of language are
all differentiated by gender from the very earliest stages of
a child’s life.
• Ethnic Identity: membership of a particular ‘race’, religion,
language – children learn this very early.
• Secondary Identities: acquired during secondary
socialization; occupational identity; leisure and
consumption-related identities, e.g. antique collector;
national identity, e.g. British,
 THEORIES OF SOCIALIZATION, IDENTITY, AND INTERACTION

• Three theoretical approaches to socialization

and social identity:
Role-Learning theory,
Symbolic Interactionism,
Psychoanalytic theory
 Role-Learning:
• Developed by structural-functionalists.
• Socialization is the process through which individuals learn
how to perform social roles. This approach puts the emphasis
on the link between roles and socialization. People become
social by learning social roles.
• Socialization is the process of learning normative
expectations, learning norms, that make up social roles;
people learn roles and then reproduce learning in behaviour.
• Social roles treated as social facts; they are seen as
institutionalized social relationships that are matters of
constraint rather than choice. i.e. people cannot negotiate
what it means to be a doctor or teacher or mother.
• Conformity to learned role expectations results from
external pressure through the rewards and
punishments.
• Internalization of roles, the process through which
people learn the expectations that define particular
roles and make them an integral element in their own
personality and motivation. They become an inner
source of commitment rather than an external source
of constraint. That is to say, individuals must not only
learn the expectations that define particular roles,
they must also to see these as requirements, as
obligations.
 Symbolic Interactionism:
• Mead argues that sociological analysis must
always start from out the meanings that
objects have for individuals. But a meaning is a
social construction; it is decided through
communication and negotiation within and
between social groups.
• The social process is a complex pattern of socially
constructed meanings.
• A man identifies other people with whom he
interacts as, for example, his wife, his boss, his
friend, his shuttle driver, and so on.
• Similarly, the various objects used in interactions
are also socially constructed.
• They have no intrinsic meaning as physical objects.
• A particular knife can be defined as a cooking
implement, a letter opener, or a means of suicide.
• Creation and use of meanings are possible when
individuals develop a sense of their own self.
• A self is constructed through a process of socialization
in which children and adults must continually come to
terms with the reactions of others to their actions.
• Mead saw play activities as the means through which
young children initially develop social beings. In their
games, children imitate what they have seen their
mothers, fathers and other adults doing. By playing
house they gradually begin to learn how it might feel
to be a mother or father.
• Goffman took up central themes from Mead’s work to
develop a powerful theory of social action as
“performance”. Goffman argues that people continue to
play with one another when they interact in adult life.
• People must play their social roles in the same way that
professional actors play theatrical roles.
• People are like actors on the stage; they try to convince
others that they really are what they claim to be.
• For instance, a man who is employed as a hospital doctor;
to sustain this acceptance, doctors must give a convincing
performance through their actions.
• Social interaction is a process of self-presentation. We are
always presenting ourselves for others to observe.
 Psychoanalytic approach:
• At the heart of this theory is the idea that human
behavior can be explained in terms of the
relationship between the conscious and unconscious
elements of the mind.
• Surface structure of consciousness and the deeper
structure of unconsciousness.
• People are seen as being motivated by unconscious
drives (drive towards pleasure and drive towards
aggression). Their conscious lives are dominated by
the attempt to control the expression of these drives.
• Human action is shaped by the continuing struggle
between the unconscious, instinctive drives and
the conscious, rational control exercised by the
ego.
• The conscious ego responds to emotional drives
and learns to control them them until they can be
safely expressed, some may be denied altogether.
• Emotions that are denied are pushed back to form
the unconscious part of the mind called the ‘id’.
• The ‘id’: mass of forces formed from biological
drives and their repression by the conscious mind.
• Through repression these drives can be modified
into socially acceptable forms of behavior.
(But, repressed sexual desire may also show itself
in the form of slips of the tongue (Freudian slips),
anxiety, hysteria, disguised form while dreaming,
mental disorder.)
• Relationship between conscious and unconscious
mind – creative and destructive or pathological.
• Core elements of the personality are formed
in childhood.
• It is through their experiences of satisfaction
and frustration that infants gradually become
aware of themselves as individuals.
• The conscious ego and the id are products of
social interactions through which children
learn how to respond to satisfaction and
frustration.
 Socialization and family relations

• We have discussed socialization can be considered as

having primary and secondary phases.
• Primary socialization occurs in infancy and childhood,
largely within family.
• Secondary socialization involves later learning that takes
place outside the family household.
• Stages of life; infancy, childhood, adolescence, youth,
adulthood, maturity, old age
• The number and length of these stages is culturally and
historically variable; socially constructed categories, not
biological stages.
• The idea of childhood, for example, is a relatively recent
• Family relations; central to primary
socialization
• Newborn child requires the care and support
of its parents for its physical survival and
security.
• Psychoanalysis; early socialization within the
family as holding the key to adult emotional
development.
• The mother is central to this. The emphasis on
the role of mother
• Children who are deprived of the close and
sustained attention of their mother will be
inadequately socialized. Maternal deprivation
• Bowlby; maternal deprivation in early life can
lead to anxiety in a child, expressed in a
growing depression and withdrawal from
social contact.
• But is ‘mothering’ a natural or biologically
fixed activity or socially constructed or
gendered task?