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Socialization: The Concept

• Socialization is the process by which individuals internalize the values, beliefs, and norms of a given society and learn to function as a member of that society.

Limits of Socialization

• The concept of socialization if useful for understanding how people become functioning members of society, yet it cannot explain everything about a person's development and personality. Biology is also a very important component, and it is a combination of biology and social interactions that makes us who we are.

Theories of Socialization

• Charles Horton Cooley theorized that the "self" emerges from our ability to assume the point of view of others and imagine how those others see us.
• George Herbert Mead developed a theory about how the social self develops over the course of childhood. Infants know only the "I," but through social interaction they learn about "me" and the "other." Finally, they develop a concept of the "generalized other," which allows them to apply norms and behaviors learned in specific situations to new situations.
• Mead stressed the importance of imitation, play, and games in helping children recognize one another, distinguish between self and other, and grasp the idea that others can have multiple roles.
• The psychologist Eric Erikson established a theory of psychosocial development that identifies eight stages that span a person's lifetime. Each stage involves a specific conflict that a person must resolve in order to move on to the next stage.

Agents of Socialization

• Families, school, peers, the media, and total institutions are all important socializing agents or environments. A total institution is an institution in which one is totally immersed that controls all the basics of day-to-day life
• Adult socialization simply means ways in which people are socialized as adults.
• Resocialization is the process by which one's social values, beliefs, and norms are challenged and perhaps reformulated in response to spending a significant amount of time in a very different environment.

Social Interaction

• Robert Merton's role theory provides a way to describe social interaction. Key concepts include status, roles, role strain, role conflict, status set, ascribed status, achieved status, and master status.
• Gender roles are a set of behavioral norms associated primarily with males or females in a given social group or system. Gender theorists argue that gender roles can be more powerful and influential than other roles that people fill.

The Social Construction of Reality

• To say that something is socially constructed is to say that people give meaning or value to ideas or objects through social interactions. Social construction is an ongoing process that is embedded in our everyday interactions.
• Symbolic interactionism is a micro-level theory based on the idea that people act in accordance with shared meanings, orientations, and assumptions.
• Erving Goffman's dramaturgical theory views social life as a theatrical performance in which we are all actors on metaphysical stages with roles, scripts, costumes, and sets.
• Ethnomethodology is an approach to studying human interaction that focuses on the ways in which we make sense of our world, convey this understanding to others, and produce a mutually shared social order.
• Harold Garfinkel developed a method for studying social interactions, called "breaching experiments," that involved having collaborators exhibit "abnormal" or "atypical" behaviors in social interactions in order to see how people would react.
• The Internet has created new types of social interaction that don't incorporate verbal and visual cues people are accustomed to relying on. It has also changed society by creating new types of crimes and new ways of communicating.
• Because our reality is socially constructed, an unexpected change in that reality can be upsetting, frustrating, or just plain incomprehensible. We all have a stake in maintaining consensus on shared meanings so that our society can continue to function smoothly.

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