The Autonomous Child Theorizing Socialization: Ivar Frønes

SPRINGER BRIEFS IN WELLBEING AND
QUALIT Y OF LIFE RESEARCH
Ivar Frønes
The Autonomous
Child
Theorizing
Socialization
123
SpringerBriefs in Well-Being and Quality
of Life Research
More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/10150
Ivar Frønes
The Autonomous Child

Theorizing Socialization
13
Ivar Frønes
Department of Sociology and Human
Geography
University of Oslo
Oslo
Norway
ISSN 2211-7644 ISSN 2211-7652 (electronic)

SpringerBriefs in Well-Being and Quality of Life Research
ISBN 978-3-319-25098-4 ISBN 978-3-319-25100-4 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-25100-4
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Acknowledgments
I wish to thank Jill Korbin and Asher Ben-Arieh, who read and gave me feedback
on the book, Leah Florence for language editing, and Danel Hammer for comments
on content and readability from a student perspective.
v
Contents
1 What Is Socialization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.1 The Organisation of the Book . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.2 Understanding Socialization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
1.3 The Child as an Object or a Subject; Socialization
and the Question of Agency. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
1.4 Basic Dimensions of Socialization. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
References. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Part I Socialization in the Social Sciences

2 Socialization in Sociological Perspectives. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
2.1 Socialization, Social Structure and Cultural Patterns . . . . . . . . . . 11
2.2 Primary Versus Secondary Socialization. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
2.3 Socialization Through Role Models and Roles. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
2.4 Play, Role Play and the Perspective of the Other. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
2.5 Cultural Discourses and Socialization; the Cultural
Constitution of the Subject. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
2.6 The Cultural Landscape of Media and Consumption . . . . . . . . . . 21
2.7 Socialization and the Images of Children and Childhood. . . . . . . 22
2.8 Disciplination and Cultural Release. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
2.9 Individuation and Individualization. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
2.10 Socialization and Class Culture. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
2.11 Socialization and Well-Being. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
2.12 The Constitution of Meaning and Reflexivity. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
2.13 The Social Roots of Motivation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
References. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
3 Socialization in Anthropological Perspectives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
3.1 Socialization and Cultural Variation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
3.2 Culture and Personality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
3.3 Institutionalized Socialization. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
vii
viii Contents
3.4 Language Games; Socialization into the Unions

of Meaning and Praxes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
3.5 Transitions, Liminality and Twilight Zones. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
References. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
4 Socialization in Psychological Perspectives. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
4.1 Socialization in Psychoanalytic Understanding. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
4.2 Cognitive Developmental Psychology. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
4.3 Social Decentering; Taking the Perspective of the Other. . . . . . . . 56
4.4 Social-Cognitive Development . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
4.5 Phases in Childhood and Adolescence
in Psychological Theory. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58
4.6 Socialization and the Family. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60
4.7 Socialization and Peers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62
References. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64
5 Socialization and Life Course Analyses. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
5.1 Demographics, Life Course Analyses and Socialization. . . . . . . . 67
5.2 Life Course, Life Phases and Historical Change. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
5.3 Life Course and Identity Construction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
5.4 Generations and Generation Gaps. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72
5.5 Life Course and Generational Exchange. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74
5.6 Socialization, Life Course and Well-Being. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75
References. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76
6 Socialization as Biological-Social Interaction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
6.1 The Evolutionary Frameworks of Socialization. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
6.2 Vulnerability and Development. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82
6.3 Social Background as a Process. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
References. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86
7 Understanding Socialization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
7.1 Culturalization, Differentiation and Emancipation . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
7.2 Desire, Language and the Symbolic Order . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91
7.3 The Driving Forces of Socialization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92
7.4 The Desire for Recognition. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
7.5 The Will to Meaning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95
References. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96
Part II The Knowledge Societies and the Structuring

of Socialization and the Life Course
8 The Knowledge Society. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101
8.1 The Coming of the Knowledge Society. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101
8.2 Socialization in the Knowledge-Based Economies. . . . . . . . . . . . 104
8.3 Capability and Transformative Learning. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
References. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
Contents ix
9 The Knowledge Society and Life Phase Dynamics. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109

9.1 Life Course and Life Phases . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109
9.2 Babyhood and Toddlerhood: The Foundation of Development. . . 110
9.3 Middle Childhood: From Latency to Learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111
9.4 Tweens and Puberty: From Confusion to Navigation . . . . . . . . . . 111
9.5 Adolescence: From Liminality to Qualification. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112
9.6 Singles, Friends and Navigation: From Instant
Family to Emerging Adulthood. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113
9.7 Family and Peers in the Knowledge Society. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114
9.8 The Restructuring of Girls’ Social World:
From Family and Traditions to Peers. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115
References. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116
10 Understanding Socialization: Some Concluding Reflections . . . . . . . 117
10.1 The Autonomous Child: The Meaning of Agency. . . . . . . . . . . . . 117
10.2 Existence Precedes Essence. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118
References. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119
Chapter 1
What Is Socialization
Abstract Socialization is a fundamental concept in the social sciences, but the

different disciplines have only to a limited degree sought to provide a coherent
understanding of the processes of socialization, which has to encompass the
interplay of social, psychological and genetic factors. This introduction outlines
the organisation of the book, the basic dimensions of socialization, and underlines
an important an important perspective in the book: the child as a subject.
Keywords The child as a subject · Dimensions of socialization
1.1 The Organisation of the Book
The social sciences offer a variety of theories on how children develop, and vari-
ous theories and disciplines apply their own vocabularies and conceptualise dif-
ferent aspects of the processes of socialization. Socialization does not represent a
fixed trajectory into a static social order, and different disciplines meet the chal-
lenges of complex developmental processes and changing environments in differ-
ent ways. Socialization is a fundamental concept in sociology, but sociology has
only to a limited degree sought to produce a coherent understanding of the pro-
cesses of socialization, which has to encompass the interplay of societal, psycho-
logical and genetic factors. The present work has the ambitious goal of providing
such an understanding, by going through the various disciplines and perspectives,
and then –hopefully– drawing the different threads together.
The theorizing of socialization in sociology, anthropology, psychology, in
the life course approach and as the interplay of genetics and environmental fac-
tors makes up the major part of the book. The analyses of the various disciplines
and viewpoints seek to present the dominant perspectives within each discipline
© The Author(s) 2016 1

I. Frønes, The Autonomous Child, SpringerBriefs in Well-Being
and Quality of Life Research, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-25100-4_1
2 1 What Is Socialization
and field, and to offer a general framework for understanding socialization. The
final section attempts to provide an analysis of socialization in the post-industrial
knowledge-based societies.
The references represent a list of the sources cited, but also provide information
enabling the reader to find relevant literature. The reference list is organised in the
traditional way, but Internet references have been added as footnotes on some top-
ics and concepts to make it easier for the reader to find information. The author has
also used literature in languages other than English. In most of these cases English
sources on the same topic are offered; in a few cases the original references are kept.
1.2 Understanding Socialization
The definition given in Wikipedia can be understood to represent a mainstream under-

standing of socialization: “The lifelong process of inheriting and disseminating
norms, customs and ideologies, providing an individual with the skills and habits nec-
essary for participating within his or her own society.”1 Oxford Dictionary of
Sociology (Scott and Marshalls 1994) defines socialization as “the process by which
we learn to become members of society, both by internalizing the norms and values of
society, and also by learning to perform our social roles”. These definitions illustrate
the understanding of socialization as a core mechanism of social and cultural integra-
tion: we are all shaped into members of different societies and cultures. This under-
standing faces a variety of challenges in modern societies in which cultures and
values are heterogeneous as well as continuously changing. Heterogeneity and change
make the idea of cultural integration more complex; children can be members of the
same “society” or nation but socialized into different values, cultures or sub-groups.
That we acquire common traits as members of social and cultural groups does
not imply that we are all alike; through the socialization process we also evolve
into different individuals. In modern societies the construction and presentation of
the unique self is a basic task and a moral and cultural enterprise, in some life
phases and social groups more than others. The constructed self is multidimen-
sional and is supposed to signify uniqueness as well as social and cultural back-
ground. Identity is relational; it is understood related to other people and groups as
well as to cultural discourses.
Socialization influences children’s development and, by this, social and histori-
cal development, as Key (1909) illustrates in her statement that it is the future that
slumbers in the parents’ arms. Socialization contributes not only to the reproduc-
tion of society, but also to social change. In their famous book about “the social
construction of reality,” Berger and Luckmann (1966) sought to show both how
people are shaped by their historical conditions, conceptualised as internalization,
and how they influence the shaping of their society and history, termed
1http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialization.
1.2 Understanding Socialization 3
externalization. Externalization, based on the capacities of the acting and reflect-

ing subject, illustrates that part of the essence of a human being is the capacity to
negate, the capacity and desire to transcend the existing. This encompasses both
Keats’ romantic ideas about the ability to contemplate the world without the for-
mulation of theories and categories,2 as well as the capacity to transcend the exist-
ing in the form of systematic theorizing.
Socialization is often understood as shaped by the past; the older generations
transmit their beliefs and traditions to the younger. But socialization also reflects
beliefs and ideas about the future, as when parents seek to bring up their children
to cope with what they consider will be the requirements of the future. In tradi-
tional societies the past and future melt together, since the future is understood as a
continuation of the past. In modern societies, although it is assumed that the future
will be influenced by the past, the focus is on uncertainty; socialization will there-
fore be influenced by ideas of what may come. The discourses on socialization
have also increasingly become concerned with the interaction between cultural and
social patterns and biological/genetic profiles, ranging from brain development and
intelligence to specific syndromes and genetic factors that may influence the devel-
opment of behavioural problems. Resilience and vulnerability are both influenced
by genetic patterns rooted in human evolution, as well as by psychological and
societal factors. Socialization processes are also interwoven with social changes on
both the macro and the micro level. Social patterns may change rapidly; for exam-
ple, girls growing up in Scandinavia in the 1960s and the 1980s faced different
socialization processes and different horizons: in the 1980s, girls were expected to
be educated and, as opposed to the 1960s, were more likely than boys to complete
high school. Cultural patterns may also change quickly; a few decades ago people
would hardly have imagined marriage between persons of the same sex. This also
illustrates that profound social changes often are not politically planned or part of
a predicted future, but emerge through the interplay of a series of factors.
Socialization is interwoven with a changing present, and framed by evolution,
history and the future. We are socialized throughout the whole life cycle, but the
term socialization refers primarily to formation and development during childhood
and youth, from birth to adult status. This period, from early childhood to young
adulthood, is the subject of this book.
1.3 The Child as an Object or a Subject; Socialization

and the Question of Agency
There is a tension in the theorizing of socialization between children viewed either

as objects shaped by external forces or as active subjects in their own socializa-
tion. The first post-war period characterized the child as an object being shaped in
2Keats uses the concept of negative capability to refer to the sensitivity to the world and the
capacity to transcend it.

a harmonious process of social and cultural integration. The transmission of cul-

ture, norms and values occurred through agents of socialization. These can refer
to human agents, but also to other actors; in a list of the most important sociali-
zation agents, various Wikianswers include the state, educational institutions, the
mass media and religious and cultural factors, in addition to family, peers and
other human actors, all translating cultural patterns into individual meaning. Ideas
about the relationship between society/culture and the individual that dominated
the 1950s and 1960s were criticized for conveying an “oversocialized conception
of man” (Wrong 1961), in which acting subjects and the possible tensions between
them and the wider society were missing. In some cases, the social world could
appear as a form of “social nature” (Bauman 1976), the corresponding mission of
science was to uncover its laws and structural patterns.
Socialization became a central object of social scientific inquiry after the
Second World War, and the understanding of socialization changed gradually:
“This significant social scientific object was repeatedly altered: initially
representing a vision of conforming citizens who were free from certain troubling
characteristics depicted in psychoanalysis and well-suited to democracy, it later
was engaged to create a vision of autonomous, resilient, and cognitively active
actors able to negotiate a complex social world” (Morawski and St. Martin 2011,
p. 1). Society was no longer moulding passive objects, but negotiating with active
subjects.
Childhood and adolescence, two basic phases in life before adulthood, have
often been studied separately and understood in very different ways. In socializa-
tion theories children had been seen as objects formed by the family and society,
while adolescents were depicted as acting subjects and adolescence as a phase of
emancipation from the family. Mannheim’s (1952) understanding is illustrative:
childhood is seen as fundamental for the transmission of traditions and values,
while youth represents an existential confrontation between the active young per-
son and prevailing social conditions. Children are shaped by their parents, while
the youth oppose their parents. Children’s cultures frequently have been studied
from the point of view of traditions, toys, rhymes, games and play (see, e.g., Opie
and Opie 1959, 1969), while the oppositional character of young peoples’ styles
and actions have often become the focus of youth studies, as illustrated by stud-
ies on young subcultures (see, e.g., Williams 2011). In modern studies of child-
hood, children’s innovative positions are emphasized, and children are depicted
as actively relating to new social habits and technologies, a position not long ago
reserved for youth. The child as a subject could be found in some anthropological
and sociological studies in the late 1950s, which underscored the need to grasp
the children’s own voice, but the emphasis on the child as a subject and children’s
perspective did not really become salient until the 1980s and 1990s (Jenks 1982;
James et al. 1998; Corsaro 1992, 2005).
In psychological theories of cognitive development the child is basically seen
as an active subject, interacting with social and physical surroundings. In Piaget’s
descriptions (see, e.g. 1962) it is the tension between the active subject and his/her
surroundings that drives cognitive development; and in Kohlberg’s (1981, 1984)
1.3 The Child as an Object or a Subject … 5
view the acting subject gradually increases her capacity for moral understanding
and reflection through experience. In the psychodynamic understanding, the small
child’s increasing autonomy is at the core of the development of object relations,
vividly illustrated in Winnicott’s (1971)3 description of transitional objects sup-
porting the child in learning how to control his or her world.
The autonomous child appeared in children’s literature before it became estab-
lished in socialization theories. The agency of the child is clearly visible in one
of the most famous “classical” books for children, The Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn (1885). In Mark Twain’s novel, childhood is depicted as a separate adven-
turous world populated by active children, a kind of real version of the fantasy
childhood of Peter Pan. The children solve their own problems and often those of
the adults, too; and Huey, Dewey and Louie and other Disney children are often
smarter than their parents and uncles. While traditional fathers are strict, the moth-
ers exert control through care and worry; therefore, action-oriented heroines are
often without a mother. Both Hannah Montana and Detective Nancy Drew lived
with their father, and no mother would ever have left even the strongest daughter
alone with a horse, a monkey and a bag of gold coins, as Captain Longstocking
does with his daughter, Pippi. No fiction figure illustrates the child as subject bet-
ter than Pippi Longstocking; she is an acting, reflective and responsible subject,
but she is still a child, not a small adult, and sees things from a different perspec-
tive than the traditional adult (this combination is perhaps why author Astrid
Lingren felt it would be almost impossible to find anyone who could play Pippi).
Today the child is no longer perceived as either a small animal reluctantly
pushed into the culture (see, e.g., Berger and Luckmann 1966), or a blank slate
on which culture is inscribed (Pinker 2002). Modern research shows that chil-
dren take an active part in their socialization, acquiring language and culture in
interaction with their environment. The child as an active subject is fundamental
to understanding the mechanisms of socialization (Bråten 2007, 2009), and the
development of the autonomous reflective subject is a fundamental part of the
socialization process.
The traditional understanding of socialization emphasized integration into nor-
mative and cultural patterns, but the fulcrum of the discourses on socialization in
what OECD terms the knowledge-based economies4 is the relationship between
children’s development and the skills and capacities required by those societies. A
common concern in all post-industrial societies is that many young people seem
not to master the demands of modern professional life. Technically speaking,
“drop out” refers to someone dropping out of the educational process before fin-
ishing the upper secondary level, but the metaphor indicates that the young person
is also becoming marginalised in relation to his or her integration into the
3http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comfort_object.
4The knowledge-based economy is an expression coined to describe trends in advanced econ-
omies towards greater dependence on knowledge, information and high skill levels, and
the increasing need for ready access to all of these by the business and public sectors. http://
stats.oecd.org/glossary/detail.asp?ID=6864.
workforce and future life course (Bridgeland et al. 2006). Modern complex socie-
ties require the competencies to confront new labour markets; and both individual
life courses (Giddens 1991) and democratic institutions require reflexive capaci-
ties. Practical and discursive consciousness (Giddens 1984), the ability to act as
well as to reflect on actions, are developed through socialization processes.
Socialization rests on the interaction between the child as an acting subject
and the contexts, relationships and structural conditions that make up his or her
childhood; socialization involves both individual development and integration
into a culture and a society. The social integration of individual subjects is not a
simple or automatic process; the relationship between individuals, groups and the
wider community can be strained, and conditions may provide unequal opportu-
nity structures relating to social groups and gender. Modern social, cultural and
symbolic boundaries are elastic and continuously changing; social integration may
produce social change as well as maintain stability. As illustrated by the ubiqui-
tous advice to “follow your dreams,” socialization is not only about the internali-
sation of culture but also about the possible realization of individual and social
potentials.
1.4 Basic Dimensions of Socialization
We learn the practises of everyday life, culture and language, as well as basic val-
ues and beliefs, through the processes of socialization. Religion is illustrative: it is
to a small extent something we choose, but it is mostly something we are social-
ized into; whether we become Orthodox Jews, Catholics, Sunni Muslims, Hindus
or nonbelievers is highly influenced by where and how we grow up. This aspect
of the socialization process, integration into social and cultural patterns, is termed
culturalization. Traditional socialization theories understood culturalization as an
entry into the shared norms and values of a society, but modern complex socie-
ties may involve heterogeneous patterns of norms and values, life styles and lan-
guages, varying by ethnic group, culture, family and religion; this means that
children are socialised into a variety of life worlds at the micro-level as well as
into a wider society. We develop as individuals through the interaction between
cultural and social contexts and individual agency. Both our factual individual-
ity as well as our ideas about individuality have cultural roots; the idea of unique
individual personalities as well as individual tastes and choices is at the core of
modern culture. This aspect of the socialization process is termed socialization as
individualization, referring to how people develop as individuals and learn to rec-
ognize others as unique subjects.
Different societies require various types and levels of core competencies and
skills. The knowledge societies require advanced specific competencies and skills
for various professions, as well as a high level of basic competence, which refers
to a certain level of social and cultural skills as well as general and numerical liter-
acy. The required level of basic competence also defines the thresholds of
1.4 Basic Dimensions of Socialization 7
functional illiteracy. Knowledge societies require high basic skills for participation
in professional life and for navigating through the life course, and deliberative
democracy5 rests on the development of civic skills (Dryzek 2009). This aspect of
the socialization process, the development of required specific and general compe-
tencies/skills, will be referred to as socialization as qualification.
Humans have the potential to reflect critically on existing structures, and to
imagine transcending the limits laid down by conventions and cultural patterns.
This aspect of the socialization process, the development of what Bauman (1976)
termed “emancipatory reason”, will be referred to as socialization as emancipa-
tion. Emancipation involves self-actualization, and is based not on the internalisa-
tion of meaning but on the quest for meaning.
Socialization revolves around both homogenization—that which makes chil-
dren into members of cultures and societies, and differentiation—the development
of different competencies, values, life courses and personalities. Socialization
produces integration into communities as well as cultural differentiation between
communities and groups; social and economic equality as well as inequality; cul-
tural homogeneity as well as different lifestyles and different life courses; and
standardization as well as individualization and emancipation.
References
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London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Berger, P. L., & Luckmann, T. (1966). Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology
of Knowledge. Garden City New York: Anchor Books.
Bridgeland, J. M., DiIulio, J. J. Jr., & Burke Morrison, K. (2006). The silent epidemic; per-
spectives of high school dropouts. A report by Civic Enterprises in association with
Peter D. Hart Research Associates for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. https://
docs.gatesfoundation.org/Documents/TheSilentEpidemic3-06Final.pdf. Accessed July 4
2015.
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Part I
Socialization in the Social Sciences
Chapter 2
Socialization in Sociological Perspectives
Abstract The chapter outlines the basic concepts and theories of socialization in
sociology, and relates them to different arenas and agents of socialization, rang-
ing from family and peers to modern media. The chapter examines socialization
in light of social structures, social class and cultural patterns, emphasizing the
strength of the culture of the taken-for-granted, as well as the child as an active
subject constructing meaning in a variety of contexts. Socialization is related to
development and learning as well as to children’s well-being.
Keywords Sociology · Play · Primary socialization · Secondary socialisation ·

Childhood · Meaning · Cultural discourses
2.1 Socialization, Social Structure and Cultural Patterns
Studies of childhood have gradually come to underscore the social position of chil-
dren as children (Qvortrup 2009); a child is positioned at the intersection of child-
hood, class, gender and ethnicity, all framed by societal formations. Socialization
is influenced by the structural positions of children and by the cultural patterns
related to various positions. Cultural and social phenomena can be understood as
“social facts” (Durkheim 1938); norms, values and cultural beliefs are carried by
individuals, but are understood to exist independently of individuals. Culture acts
as an objective external “social reality”; children are born into languages, values,
ideas and beliefs that socialization transforms into an inner reality (Berger and
Luckmann 1966). The concepts of internalization and the unconscious, both
derived from psychoanalysis, provided sociology with a theory of how culture
could be translated into intrinsic motivation without touching conscious aware-
ness. Parents transmit cultural patterns to their children, and their shadows live on

12 2 Socialization in Sociological Perspectives
in the children as unconscious norms, beliefs and imaginations. The non-conscious

transmission of cultural patterns can also be related to the fact that social arrange-
ments as well as patterns of belief are experienced as obvious, as natural. The sym-
bolic power of that which exists is established by naturalisation,1 the
taken-for-granted assumption embedded in social structures and cultural patterns.
Socialization as the internalization of a unified culture suited the dominant
social understanding of the 1950s and 1960s, when Western societies, to a greater
extent than earlier or later, were supposed to socialize everyone into common
dominant cultural patterns. This was also the first period of consumerism and mass
production; the new wealth often took the form of a standardization of products
that many claimed forced everyone into the same mould, as told in the popular
song “Little Boxes” popularized by Pete Seeger: “And they’re all made out of
ticky tacky, And they all look just the same.”2 In Marcuse’s (1964) description of
the “one-dimensional man,” the dominant personality formation is supposed to
reflect the rationality of capitalism. The same logic can be found in Adorno’s
(1991) understanding of mass culture, consumed by a passive, homogenized pub-
lic that internalizes the values of the culture industry. In these theories, culture is
primarily seen as a mechanism that ensures that the dominant cultural patterns are
transformed into individual motivation and images. This functionalist perspective
is also visible in the interpretation of the new teenage culture that became salient
in the 1950s; the risk-oriented and oppositional behaviour of adolescents is under-
stood as part of the development of independence that is functional for society at
the macro level (Parsons and Bales 1956). Adolescence is therefore a natural risk-
taking period, arising from the necessary development of autonomy. Even if the
Sturm und Drang3 was understood as “natural,” the riskiness of the period was
also rooted in the lack of ritualization of the transition from childhood to adult-
hood, entailing that young people had to create their own risky rituals (Bloch and
Niederhoffer 1958).
In sociological understanding, institutions are at the core of socialization pro-
cesses. Schools and preschools impart knowledge of basic historical and cultural
relationships, and their institutional practises convey cultural patterns and values;
they also influence socialization by relating to gender, class and ethnicity in vari-
ous ways. Educational institutions also represent universalistic criteria that apply
to the wider society; everyone should in principle be treated equally. Other institu-
tions, like organizations related to culture and sports, and increasingly the media,
also fulfil important functions in the socialization process. Legal frameworks and
institutions that allow the enforcement of sanctions influence socialization both as
formal rules and as signifiers of the existence of the social and society.
1Bourdieu (1977, p. 164): “Every established order tends to produce the naturalization of its own
arbitrariness.”
2Written by Malvina Reynolds in 1962.
3Sturm und Drang refers to a German movement putting stress on “free” emotional expressions;
named after Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger's play, first performed in 1777.
2.1 Socialization, Social Structure and Cultural Patterns 13
Some texts emphasize that the primary function of socialization is the acqui-
sition and internalization of shared morals and common normative patterns. This
perspective includes the concept of “social deviance,” the violation of formal or
informal cultural norms. Some traditional parts of sociology saw deviance as an
important characteristic of certain individuals; criminals, single mothers, homo-
sexuals or others who broke dominant and naturalised norms belonged to deviant
groups, and the study of deviance was an extensive field in sociology. The concept
of “countercultures” illustrated some of the same assumptions about a common
culture to which some youth were in opposition. As societies gradually have come
to be understood not as culturally homogeneous but as multicultural and heterog-
enous, containing complex and sometimes contradictory cultural patterns, the idea
of stable deviant categories has gradually dissolved.
2.2 Primary Versus Secondary Socialization4
Wikipedia informs us that “primary socialization occurs during childhood and is

when a child learns the attitudes, values and actions appropriate to individuals as
members of a particular culture. For example if a child heard his/her mother
expressing a discriminatory opinion about a minority group, then that child may
think this was acceptable and could continue to have that opinion about minority
groups.”5 According to this statement, primary socialization refers to the internali-
zation of the fundamental culture and ideas of a society; it shapes the norms, val-
ues and beliefs of the child at a time when it has little understanding of the world
and its different phenomena, and the basic socialization agent moulding the child
is the family. As the example also illustrates, primary socialization in the family
might provide the child with understandings that are not in accord with the domi-
nant cultural viewpoint; thus, primary socialization only mirrors the dominant
norms if the family does. Some studies also indicate that family climate and forms
of upbringing as such do not have a strong formative effect on the child’s person-
ality (Harris 1998; Kagan 1998), as long as we keep within the normal range of
family behaviour. That siblings often are different from one another also indicates
that the family does not mould children into the same form (Plomin and Daniels
1987; Hetherington et al. 1994). But the family does influence the acquisition of
linguistic styles and cultural patterns which is understood as part of primary
socialization.
The claim that the family and family position overshadow everything else in the
lives of children is now being called into question since so many children spend
4The concept of re-socialization refers to socialization back into non-deviant cultures; that is, the
return to life outside the institutions where someone has spent a long period of time; it can also
mean socialization into organisations or institutions. Re-socialization is not part of the perspec-
tive of this book.
5http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primary_socialization.
their day in pre-school, are surrounded by peers, and have access to various media;
that is, even small children have sources of input other than their parents. Modern
Western upbringing, which emphasizes independence and the development of the
child’s own voice as an ideal, also breaks with the traditional idea of the trans-
fer of rigid norms from parents to children. In the classical theory of socialization
the family represented the voice of the wider homogeneous society; in the mod-
ern heterogeneous society the primary agents in the socialization of children are
likely to vary with subgroup and ethnicity. While classical sociological theories,
which rested on the industrial societies, understood primary socialization as the
basic culturalization (that was postulated to take place in the same way among all),
the knowledge societies also emphasize the acquisition of basic competencies as
part of primary socialization. The increased importance of competencies entails a
need for normative assessments related to primary socialization; every child is not
ensured the required level of basic competence even though primary socialization
always takes place.
In sociological theorizing, primary socialization was implicitly understood as
taking place in the family and during the first part of childhood. In this perspec-
tive the socialising agents in the primary process are the parents, especially the
mother. Secondary socialization came later and was related to agents as significant
others, educational institutions and the media. However, if we relate socializa-
tion agents to their function and position in the socialization processes, the cat-
egories into which they fit can be seen as more fluid, others than the parents can
also be defined as filling primary functions. While general sociological theory puts
the importance of peers in adolescence, particularly in relation to deviant group
socialization (see, e.g., Cohen 1955), others argue that peers are at the core of pri-
mary socialization since they are at the centre of children’s development of self-
understanding and identity (see, e.g., Harris 1998).
Secondary socialization is usually carried out by institutions and people in spe-
cific roles and positions. For most children the teacher will be a secondary social-
izing agent, but for some the teacher may have primary functions, which illustrates
that the borders between primary and secondary socialization are blurred.
Although schools and the dissemination of their curricula in general is understood
as part of secondary socialization, in the knowledge-based economies the funda-
mental numerical and alphabetical skills provided by the schools could also be
defined as belonging to primary socialization. The “hidden curriculum”6 of cul-
tural codes suggests that the major educational institutions influence young people
through more than just the mediation of the formal curriculum.
Secondary socialization refers to the acquisition of knowledge and conscious
learning, and thus opens for critical reflection, while primary socialization points
to the transmission of naturalised cultural patterns. Secondary socialization repre-
sents both an input into the wider society and a development of a reflexive capac-
ity related to the naturalised understanding of the primary socialization of early
6The term was coined by Jackson (1968).

2.2 Primary Versus Secondary Socialization 15
childhood. Some sociologists reinforced this understanding with a concept of

tertiary socialization, emphasising the development of new understanding by the
acquisition of new knowledge (see, e.g., Parsons and Bales 1956). The complex
modern landscape illustrates that the distinction between primary and secondary
socialization must be understood as an analytical distinction between primary and
secondary mechanisms, processes and agents, more than a distinction between the
family and the first years of life, and the institutions, media and friends the child
faces after the toddler period.
2.3 Socialization Through Role Models and Roles
Parents act as models for their children. That the children of welfare recipients
more often than others end up on the dole and that the children of university teach-
ers more often go on to higher education illustrates that life style and social posi-
tion may be passed down between generations. Although social inheritance may
be rooted in genetic profiles and in positions in social structures as well as in the
parents’ positions as role models, parents are anyway at the core of children’s
social environment. Parents act not only as models that influence children’s future
parenting, they convey norms and cultural patterns related to a variety of other
roles and contexts. The term “role model” refers to persons or figures representing
behaviours or traits emulated by others, as well as to the general cultural patterns
carried by the model. Celebrities, frequently cited by young people as role models,
illustrate both the specific and general aspects of models: the specific refers to the
choice of occupation, style or behaviour, while the general refers to the values,
ideologies and attitudes associated with the role model. A term like “gender roles”
does not refer to the imitation of specific models, but to gender-specific norms
applying to a variety of contexts.
Role models can be near or distant figures, local or media heroes, parents,
friends or neighbours. They may be directly imitated or may act as reference
groups. “Good” versus “bad” role models are a familiar issue; bad company can
lead children in dangerous directions, and many popular culture heroes have been
accused of being bad role models. Different cultures and social classes may have
different ideas about appropriate models, and the ideologies related to role models
change: in the industrial society the ideal mother was the housewife; a few dec-
ades later, a mother in Scandinavia without an occupational position could be seen
as a bad role model for her children.
In Goffman’s perspective (1967, 1959) roles are not only linked to particu-
lar positions and contexts, they are also the dramaturgical performance as such,
through which the actors seek to convey impressions of themselves and inter-
pretations of the contexts. From the perspective of socialization, children learn
to develop their social strategies relative to various contexts, which form arenas
of socialization that provide learning by doing. The dynamics of age, gender,
class and culture continuously provide new contexts; socialization can be seen
as a movement through a set of changing stages or positions and related roles.

Transitions and role patterns are shaped through the social structuring of the life
course; some transitions that may look superficial from the outside are seen as
important from the inside. The child who emphasizes that there are certain “child-
ish” things she no longer does, and justifies this by saying that she is now “a
preschool child” (the last year before school starts), in contrast to being a “kinder-
garten child”, illustrates how positions, transitions and roles that may seem unim-
portant to adults are important from the child’s perspective. For children, age is a
status position that brings norms and expectations, and institutional transitions that
follow age underscore the move into new life phases. A new age phase includes
new role expectations related to school, associations, sports, peers, etc.; entering
new stages and contexts requires new competencies and performances. The same
roles also change character with age and contexts: the roles of “friend” and “best
friend” vary with age and gender. As related to friendship, socialization is not
about the internalisation of general norms, but about a gradual development of val-
ues and competencies through practise.
Roles and models are also disseminated through toys and the media. While tra-
ditional toys often related to a gallery of factual adult roles, modern toys often
point to fantasy universes. Toys and modern media are interwoven; the toy figures
appear in TV series and in product lines. The discourses related to dolls and toys,
and the introduction of dolls adapted to various religions and cultures, illustrate
the concern about the influence of dolls as role models. Dolls represent cultural
patterns and ideologies, as do styles and fashion. Simmel (1904) emphasized the
ambiguity of fashion, which represents a visualization of individual style, attitudes
and social position, while at the same time concealing personal traits. This “hid-
ing in the light” (Hebdige 1988), is well suited for the presentation of positions
as well as individuality, and carries ideologies camouflaged as taste and individu-
alised styles. Studies of young people’s self-presentations on Facebook illustrate
variations with culture (Zhao 2011) as well as changes in representation with age:
while young teens emphasise simple symbols of style, gender and attitudes, older
teens underscore authenticity and individuality (Livingstone 2008).
Socialization is influenced by traditions and existing social patterns, but the
challenge for modern young people is to adapt to the future; that is, to their ideas
about the future. Merton (1938) called this “anticipatory socialization”, illustrated
by young people who imagined themselves at college and started to behave in
ways they associated with the student roles they expected were waiting for them.
The transition from childhood to youth—as in the move from primary to second-
ary school—illustrates anticipatory socialization: children and adolescents seek to
behave in ways they believe are expected of them in the next phase. This implies
not only that primary school students may begin to behave in correspondence with
images of youth behaviour and style, but that they are considering various future
possible roles and strategies (Wærdahl 2005). New social roles do not just mirror
new phases; roles and their dramaturgical repertoire are partly selected and devel-
oped by the actors, favouring some roles and types of roles and shedding away
from others.
2.3 Socialization Through Role Models and Roles 17
The axis in the modern version of anticipatory socialization is preparing for

complexity and uncertainty, illustrating that the capacity for planning and reflec-
tion is an essential part of growing up in the knowledge economy. The capacity for
anticipatory socialization is a fundamental mechanism in shaping children’s life
courses.
2.4 Play, Role Play and the Perspective of the Other
Roles are carriers of cultural patterns, and role performance develops skills as well
as knowledge about culture: we learn by acting in roles and interacting with others
in different roles. In hunting and gathering cultures, a child’s skills for future tasks
were acquired by observing adults, combined with playing in a multiaged play-
group with some direct instruction from adults (Frønes 1995). In more advanced
societies the function of play has gradually become less related to specific role-
or task-based imitations, and more related to conveying normative and social pat-
terns and developing social skills. Mead (1999), using baseball as an example,
illustrates the importance of play and games in understanding social relations. In
play children learn by doing, by relating to several positions and persons simulta-
neously. But whether the children are playing football, or pretending to be digger
drivers, parents, pilots or superheroes in role-play, play provides social learning
through social interaction with other children and the roles they perform while
playing. Play also represents learning at a meta-level: the structure, relations and
characters, and the discourse about what and how to play, all convey cultural and
social patterns.
With Mead, we term the aspect of the person that is shaped by society and envi-
ronment as the “Me”. But if we see a human as only a “Me”, we end up with an
over-socialized person, a puppet in a web of culture and norms, without the abil-
ity to reflect and to act. Mead avoids this understanding through the concept of
the “I”, which constitutes the acting reflective element of the Self. The “I” may
be compared to the Ego of psychoanalysis, but it stems from different theoreti-
cal grounds and involves spontaneity and energy being controlled by the Me. The
Self represents a nexus emerging out of the interaction between “Me” and “I”. The
Self cannot appear in the consciousness directly. We are all the obvious focal point
of our universe, but to appear to ourselves as a Self, we must objectify and see
ourselves from the outside. This ability to self-objectify develops through social
interaction; play is important for the development of the Self and for the ability
to reflect on the Self. Mead illustrates the importance of play in “games”, through
which participants see their own position and actions in relation to others. The
interaction of various roles and positions conveys understanding of social interac-
tions and relations; taking the role and the social perspective of others facilitates
children’s ability to grasp that others’ views may differ from their own. Role-
taking helps us to understand the feelings and perspectives of others, as well as
how our own actions influence others. Role-taking is most complex in role-play
contexts in which children themselves design the roles and the dynamics of the
play. While the frameworks and rules of the games are fixed, in role-play there
will be a parallel meta-discourse among the participants on how the roles are to be
played as well as about who will play whom or what.
Role-play contributes to the development of social skills in general, and to
the ability to grasp the other’s perspective, both through the roles in the play and
through the participants’ meta-discourses on the roles and content of the play. The
function of role-play is thus not to learn to perform certain roles, but to convey
social and cultural competencies, the capacity for seeing things from the perspec-
tive of the other (social decentering), and the ability for self-reflection. (Corsaro’s
1992, 2005) theory of “interpretive reproduction” represents the most systematic
development of a theory of socialization that emphasizes children’s active inter-
pretation and reproduction of cultural patterns through re-enacting them in play.
The term “interpretive reproduction” points to how children and children’s culture
actively contribute both to the preservation of social structures and culturalization,
and to the active subject’s development through self-socialization.
The “tweens phase” illustrates the relationship between life phases, play and
learning; from the perspective of socialization, the 11–13 year olds’ style of com-
munication can be understood as a form of social and cultural play. Social success
requires a capacity to “feel one’s way” in a field of fluid and unstable symbols.
The giggling and laughter of tweens emphasize that the signals and statements
are serious and non-serious metaphors at the same time; vague statements can be
“withdrawn” as unintended if they seem to be interpreted in unwanted ways. The
tweens phase represents social learning by doing; communication about social
relations and positions as well as role performances are constituted through com-
plex playful negotiations that can take place because of the embedded understand-
ing among the group members that this communicative style represents a kind of
play. This will later be referred to as a language game, a cultural frame providing
a set of specific social and communicative rules. In the particular language game
of social play among tweens, words and gestures are vague and often floating
signifiers, carrying layers of potential meaning open to negotiation, providing a
context for the development of social competence through participation. That the
same forms of communication are found in TV series directed towards this age
group (where girls constitute the main audience) is not coincidental; media charac-
ters and narratives both reflect and inform the style of this life phase.
Although children have in common educational institutions and media and
share most of the general culture, their significant others, conveying values and
beliefs at the local and personal level, may represent different social classes, reli-
gions, cultures and individual characteristics. The child’s interpretations of the
messages from his or her significant others also have subjective dimensions; chil-
dren never live in completely identical environments. Mead terms the generaliz-
ing of these values, beliefs and ideas about the world as the “generalized other”.
Among small children the “generalized other” is basically subjective and local; as
the child grows older these generalized ideas of the world are broadened through
confrontation with other environments and perspectives.
2.4 Play, Role Play and the Perspective of the Other 19
Play forms complex social fields wherein children do not learn primarily by imita-
tion, even if imitation is a component, but through experiencing positions and rela-
tions. Play develops world-views and, in Mead’s terms “generalized others”, as well
as differentiated images of the other. Through experiencing the other, the child finds
that the other not only represents a different position but a different perspective; the
other experiences and understands things differently; the other is not like myself in
another position. To see the other as someone different from myself, as a person I
cannot fully understand but seek to understand, is fundamental in understanding
social relations. The constitution of the other is also necessary for the self-objectifica-
tion that is fundamental for self-understanding; seeing myself from the perspectives
of others. Buber (1958) sees this as the I-Thou relationship, where humans meet as
subjects, while in what he labels I-It relations the other is viewed as an object.7
Through the variety of situations and relations in play, and the continuously
changing scenes produced by its dynamics, play represents learning to cope with
social complexity by doing. Play represents a basic mechanism in the development
of a differentiated social understanding; in a world where being able to cope with
social and communicative complexity and change is essential, play is essential.
Play also has a dimension of innovation, and creative zones of play, where general
rules and regulations are eliminated in order to try out new possibilities and new
frames of understanding, are pivotal in the knowledge societies.
2.5 Cultural Discourses and Socialization; the Cultural

Constitution of the Subject
The sociological perspectives focussing on institutions, roles and positions involve

socialization through roles, and cultural patterns as role-related scripts. A discur-
sive perspective emphasises the position of the dominant discourses, providing
general scripts of acting and meaning. The cultural discourses call or “hail” indi-
viduals into subject positions, a process Althusser (1970)8 termed “interpella-
tions”. The interpellations are understood as the processes by which the subjects
are assigned positions and scripts by the discursive patterns and underlying ideolo-
gies. The focus in this perspective is not on institutions and functions, but on dis-
courses and cultural patterns and their hidden or explicit ideologies. Discourses
may assign specific connotations to social categories, as illustrated by connota-
tions related to ethnicity, gender and class that influence the contexts of socializa-
tion. Discourses may change over time, as when the dominant public discourse on
homosexuality in many countries changed from condemnation to rights and inte-
gration. The variety of discourses illustrates that discursive ideologies are interwo-
ven with social practises and often represent social as well as economic interests.
7http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_and_Thou ; http://www.iep.utm.edu/buber/.
8http://www.ibiblio.org/nmediac/winter2004/gray.html.
Texts refer to coded systems of signs; architecture and films as well as printed
works are studied as texts embedded in wider cultural discourses. Texts may
contain different “voices” and may be read from different perspectives, but the
dominant readings are understood as the interpretations that impose themselves
as natural, as doxa (Bourdieu 1977). What is natural in one cultural context may
appear unusual from another perspective: that babies in Norwegian preschools are
put to sleep outdoors in down to ten degrees below zero (Celsius) was considered
strange by some European visitors from more southern areas, but in Norway this
was interpreted through the key narrative of healthy outdoor life and outdoor air.
In a structuralist understanding, cultural myths represent a form of underlying
grammar; beneath the surface are deeper structures that influence the systems of
social codification (Barthes 1972). These deeper narratives embody certain con-
texts of socialization, such as emphasizing what to eat, say or touch, or not. For
some cultures, meat from the pig is suitable for the dinner table, for others the pig is
impure. In some cultures, not just specific animals but groups of people are seen as
unclean and not to be touched. Religions distinguish between those who believe and
those who do not, and in some cases, between those who can marry or even interact
with each other. The boundaries between the sacred and the profane, between the
pure and the impure, are important distinctions and take a variety of forms. Power
structures, roles, myths and social identities can be given metaphorical and emo-
tional forms as rituals, ranging from religious ceremonies and national holidays, to
local institutional events such as weddings, funerals and family gatherings.
Socialization is interwoven in the discourses in which continuous interpellations
represent an important part of the processes of culturalization. Some concepts and
ideas that dominate such discourses are signifiers with no physical referents, “sig-
nifiers without a signified” (Lacan see e.g. Bracher 1993)9; Žižek 200610): con-
cepts like freedom, love, nation, or self-actualisation point to narratives, myths and
other signifiers, not to tangible phenomena. Concepts like motherhood refer to ide-
ological configurations and discourses as well as to biologic and social relations.
Through these master signifiers,11 representing core ideas of social praxes, classes
and status groups formulate and exercise their symbolic power. Master signifiers
constitute chains of meaning, sustained by dominant institutions and ubiquitous
systems of narratives and discourses, and represent an enormous symbolic power
as regards socialization. These signifiers are often areas of contestation between
paradigms and groups struggling for the power of definition, ideological power is
rooted in the naturalisation of cultural and social patterns. The ideological contents
implicit in cultural patterns are strongest when taken for grated.
Habermas’s (1984–1987) concept of colonization refers to the life-world being
penetrated by the instrumental rationality of bureaucracies and market forces. For
social relations, colonization implies objectification, that the relations between
9http://www.iep.utm.edu/lacweb/.
10http://www.iep.utm.edu/zizek/.
11http://nosubject.com/index.php?title=Master-Signifier.
2.5 Cultural Discourses and Socialization … 21
individuals and groups may take on market characteristics, transforming possi-

ble authentic relations between humans into relations between commodities. This
“thingification” may be naturalised through the dominant discourses and narratives
of modern media. As regards socialization, the theory of reification or “thingifi-
cation” implies that relationships between humans are understood within cultural
frameworks in which the other is valued as a commodity or as a position, but not
fully recognised as a subject. The dominating cultural discourses may contribute
to the transformation of possible authentic social relations, the relation between
subjects, into relationships between objects.
2.6 The Cultural Landscape of Media and Consumption
Contemporary social discourses and myths are given visual and narrative form
through media, and modern social media illustrate how the medium shapes the
message (McLuhan 1964). For instance, Facebook’s architecture encourages vari-
ous presentations of taste, identity and popularity assessment, structuring both the
form and content of the communication. The development of social media has
also brought mass media closer to the users; mass media events are often among
the themes on social media, and celebrities use social media to interact with their
audiences. Social media provide new communication structures connecting both
local and global peers and offering new tools for self-presentation and interaction,
as well as for informal learning (Boyd 2008). But modern social media also struc-
ture communication and content in specific ways. Their purpose, often the accu-
mulation of commercial value that is based on information gleaned about users
through their self-presentations, like/dislikes and social profiles, is influencing the
social and cultural landscapes of socialization.
The influence of the media is a much-debated topic, but their direct effects are
difficult to untangle. The debated possible effects of on-screen violence range
from copycat behaviour to desensitisation.12 Different media also involve different
groups in different ways: girls read more novels than boys and children of parents
with higher education read more than children of parents with low education.
Aggressive children more often choose to watch violent TV programming,13 and
users of different online games seem to vary by personal social and psychosocial
characteristics (Brandtzæg and Heim 2009). Usage profiles vary with the amount
of social and cultural capital of the users (Hargittai and Hinnant 2008), and the
new panorama of interactive media may increase these differentiations further.
Modern media also surround children with flagrant streams of events and narra-
tives, where celebrities are presented as characters in intimate biographical plots
12http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/games/screen-violence-changing-young-brains-researchers-
20131004-2uzom.html.
13http://www.apa.org/pi/prevent-violence/resources/tv-violence.aspx.
that blur the line between reality and fiction as well as between public and private
(Sennet 1977). In the perspective of socialization, these dramaturgically con-
structed realities provide underlying ideological messages, creating horizons of
ideas about what life could or should be and contain.
Modern prosperous societies are understood as consumer societies, based on
the amount of consumption and the cultural positions of the products consumed.
The level of consumption is an indication of the amount of economic capital,
and the symbolic profile of consumption is a signal of cultural and social capi-
tal as well. The symbolic dimensions of consumption, as presented in Bourdieu’s
famous Distinction (1984), illustrate socialization into the tastes and life styles of
different social classes. Certain products belong to certain life course phases, and
moving along the life course of modern childhood implies continuous changes of
products that indicate social identity. In young subcultures identity is expressed
through profiles of consumption, and new styles are actively generated within
groups in interaction with material, cultural and social contexts. The subcultural
scenery also illustrates what Douglas (1966) calls attention to; what you don’t
wear is as important as what you do wear, implying that symbolic silence is
impossible.
Consumption not only indicates the social identity of the bearer or wearer,
which is often emphasized in relation to youth; in relation to socialization con-
sumption also constitutes the cultural identity of parents and their styles of
upbringing. The highly codified consumption of modern products for children
assigns the products symbolic values in the different “communities” of parenting,
in which the moral economy of the family is mediated through consumer goods
(Brusdal and Frønes 2013). The commercial products carried by children represent
a visible indication of parental care and competence (Dedeoglue 2006), as well as
ethical and ecological concerns (Carey et al. 2008), thereby putting the parents’
position in the moral economy on display. Moral and cultural positions are visual-
ised through objects of consumption, where some products are especially impor-
tant because they carry information not only about what one is, but also about
what one is not. The markets for symbolic consumption are based on the transla-
tion of moral values and ideologies into tangible products; the commercial mar-
ket’s profound influence on socialization is based on this translation: the products
are carriers of cultural meaning. The cultural meaning constituted and signalled by
the consumption of parents is an essential part of the social environments of the
children.
2.7 Socialization and the Images of Children

and Childhood
The images and narratives of children and childhood influence socialization—

whether the child is seen as an innocent tabula rasa or as a malevolent creature,
as an active subject or a passive object. The images of the child are rooted in the
2.7 Socialization and the Images of Children … 23
social, economic and cultural conditions of an historical era, and in the knowl-
edge—or the lack of it—about the nature of the child. Societies change; in the
demanding knowledge-based economies, children are not seen as being at risk for
lack of food, but at risk for “dropping out” of the educational system. Cultures
change: not many decades ago the doll mother in a well-known Norwegian song
for children emphasized the need for the rod; today corporal punishment has been
relegated to the dark corners of deviance and abuse.
Children’s literature and media aimed at children are part of the discourses that
shape the culture of childhood as well as the understanding of the child. The clas-
sic tales of young heroes, and especially heroines, who were good by nature, illus-
trate how cultural narratives may influence the image of the child. Swiss Heidi14
was so naturally good that people close to her were transformed into being good.
In the great tales and stories good children are often loved by animals—little ani-
mals loved Cinderella—to be friends with nice animals indicate that you are good
by nature. The intention here is not to discuss children’s literature, but to illustrate
that the famous narratives carry images of children that affect the ideas about chil-
dren and the culture of socialization. When Sanchez, in the Children of Sanchez
(Lewis 1963), claims that he had no childhood because it disappeared in the heavy
burdens of work, he is contrasting his childhood with the image and idea of child-
hood as a period of play and joy.
Aries (1962) book about the history of childhood illustrates that childhood is
not just a biological phenomenon; it is shaped by the cultural discourses framing
the understanding of children and their development. The development of the
bourgeois family and educational institutions were essential to the historical con-
struction of childhood (Rutschky 1977). What is expected of various age groups
varies with cultures and historical eras, as can be seen by the different age levels
set for a minor or the legal age for marriage.15 Various professions and theories not
only present different perspectives on children’s position and development, to
some degree they construe different children and childhoods. The paradigm of
“new the sociology of childhood” that emerged in the 1980s emphasized that the
child had to be understood not primarily as a future adult, but as an acting subject
to be accepted in its own right (James et al. 1998). The sociology of childhood
also showed the different images of children and childhood and their possible
influence on the understanding of children, a perspective that also underscored that
children and childhood had to be understood as related to class, ethnicity, gender
and local environments. Studies of childhood and social class often emphasis par-
ent-child relations and the generational transfer of social and cultural capital, but
childhood and social class is also analysed in terms of life styles and life rhythms
anchored in social and material structures (Seabrook 1982). Historical eras create
different childhoods for different groups and classes. Among aristocrats the role of
14http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heidi.
15In 1823, the age at which a couple in the UK could marry was lowered to 14 for boys and 12
for girls.
a child could be overshadowed by the child’s position in the social hierarchy; the
Chinese emperor, even if he biologically was a child, was never a child understood
as a role and position. Children’s subordination in the past can be seen in the use
of words like “girl,” “garçon,” “lad,” “boy”, which refer to both servants and
children.
Childhood refers to both a period of life and to the set of social and cultural
structures that the child moves through in that period. From the perspective of
socialization (as well as from the perspective of children), children are passing
through the social and symbolic structures that form their childhood. The concept
of childhood refers both to the economic, social and cultural structures that frame
the lives of children - childhood as a framework, and to the children’s movement
through these structures - childhood as a process.
2.8 Disciplination and Cultural Release
The classical sociological perspective emphasizes socialization through institu-

tional patterns and roles; institutions represent basic mechanisms in the shaping
of children, as do traditions and habits. Discursive theories emphasize that cul-
tural and ideological patterns are a formative force, as illustrated by the Marxist-
inspired theories of cultural hegemony and their understanding of how discourses
are inscribed physically and mentally (Gramsci 1971; Althusser 1970) and by
Foucault’s (e.g. 2002). The basic symbolic patterns, representing power and ideol-
ogy, are internalized through being experienced as natural and taken for granted
(Bourdieu 1984). The power of symbolic patterns lies in their presumed mirroring
of the natural order of things; the postulated embodied internalisation of doxa—
the common belief- represents a theory of socialization as well as of disciplina-
tion. In the perspective of Foucault, in Habermas’ postulated tension between the
life world and the system, and in Adorno’s understanding of mass culture and cul-
tural industries, modern societies represent an intensification of the cultural power
of dominating groups and dominating rationalities. In some theories the power
structures act with a disciplinary force that finally collides with human nature;
from this perspective modern societies were seen as a “disease” forced on indi-
viduals through the process of socialization (Schneider 1975).
Other sociological theories characterize (young) people in modern societies as
set free from traditions and common cultural patterns. This is based on the reso-
lution of old authority patterns and on a postulated cultural fragmentation result-
ing from prosperity, globalization, the growth of the information and knowledge
economy, and the transition from a society dominated by production to a society
focused on consumption (Bauman 2007; Ziehe 1975; Stubenrauch and Zihe 1981)
described the breakdown of tradition as a “cultural release”; the general socio-
logical term individualization refers to the same trend (see, e.g., Bauman 2001;
Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002). While Marxist and Foucaultian theorists see
individual actors as increasingly shaped by the rationality of dominant social and
2.8 Disciplination and Cultural Release 25
cultural forces, the post-modern and post-structuralist understanding underscores

the dissolution of traditions and common patterns, and that there are many pos-
sible interpretations of reality. The great narratives of the common truths dissolve
according to Lyotard (1984); post-modern conditions represent not just heteroge-
neous norms, values, and lifestyles, but also a breakdown in the idea of common
truths or “meta-narratives” representing a common purpose. The culture industry
moves from emphasising standardization to focusing on differentiation; the mar-
kets of modern consumerism are differentiated in relation to social, ethnic and age
groups and are related to a variety of life styles and individual preferences.
Ziehe argues that the “escape” from the pressure of traditions and cultural pat-
terns, the cultural release, may entail an increased emphasis on intimate relations
and a focus on aesthetics in a broad sense. The term “potentiation” Ziehe (1989,
2004) points towards a quest for meaning not in terms of wisdom but as experi-
enced intensity, whether this refers to social relations, to semiotic expressions/art,
or to specific life styles. Potentiation strategies can be seen as defence mechanisms
rooted in the lack of meaning in culture and traditions, but also as fruitful attempts
to constitute a new basis for meaning in a context where shared meaning is no
longer embodied in traditions. The search for potentiation is influenced by culture,
but the experience of meaning is understood as an individual experience based on
individual actions and preferences.
2.9 Individuation and Individualization
Recent political and ideological developments in modern Western societies have

underscored the position of the individual. The last century has strengthened the
rights of individuals and provided women, and increasingly children, with rights,
as illustrated by the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which emphasizes
the right of all children to develop their potentials “to the fullest”. These increas-
ing formal and legal rights can be termed individuation, which implies that eve-
rybody shall be treated according to universal criteria and socialised into subjects
expecting and being able to act according to such criteria. Individualization refers
to an emphasis on individual uniqueness and on the individual as the source of
opinions, attitudes, tastes and lifestyles. Individuation emphasizes equal rights
and equal treatment; individualization underscores that people are different and
unique. The UN convention underlines both, as individuation implies the right to
individualisation.
Individuation refers to common rights, individualization to the construction
of individual identities. Marx described the experience of modernity as “all that
is solid melts into air” (see Berman 1982); traditions that used to frame people’s
lives and identities evaporated. In all descriptions of “post-modern”, “hyper-
modern”, “late modernity” or the like, cultural freedom is depicted as a challenge
related to social identity; persons must create themselves without the support or
the limitations of tradition. In Erikson’s theories (1968) and in the popular culture
of the 1950s–1970s, the construction of identity was understood as a challenge

during adolescence; a few decades later, Giddens (1991) stressed the development
of identity as an ongoing project throughout the life course. Freedom from tradi-
tion produces a world in which success is contingent on skills for social and cul-
tural navigation.
Individualization can be understood as individuals being released from culture
and traditions—but also as rooted in cultural and ideological patterns. Modern
educational and psychological ideology and practice emphasize that every child is
a unique individual; children learn this as they sing to the tune of “Frère Jacques”
in kindergarten: “I am special, I am special, Look at me, You will see, Someone
very special, Someone very special, It is me, It is me”. Children also face major
media stories in which the hero/heroine wins the decisive match when he or she
“finds” him- or herself and the corresponding unique inner strength. Be yourself—
be true to yourself—find your own way—our culture is packed with metaphors
pointing to the idea of the unique individual. Individualization grows out of cul-
tural narratives as much as out of their resolution; cultural release does not imply
that there are no narratives and norms on the construction of individuality or social
positions, but that traditions no longer function as stable cultural guidelines. The
changing expressions of fashion and the importance of the changing symbols also
underline the stability of symbolic hierarchies as such. That hierarchies are per-
manent while symbolic expressions are unstable implies that the interpretation of
signs requires intense attention.
2.10 Socialization and Class Culture
The relationship between children’s social background and their positions over the
life course is fundamental to sociological studies of socialization and social mobil-
ity. In the first decades after the Second World War educational expansion was
understood as an instrument for justice and equality; through success in the meri-
tocratic16 hierarchies of educational institutions children from all classes had a
chance to fulfil their potential. But empirical studies showed that social back-
ground still influenced success in the education systems; the most famous of these
was a comprehensive American report (Coleman et al. 1966) that stated that
school was a mechanism that transferred social inequality. Studies from different
regions and nations told the same story; social background, both as the resources
of parents and communities and as cultural and linguistic distinctions, influenced
children’s achievements in school. Middle-class language and culture matched
school codes better than working-class language and culture (Bernstein 1971,
1973), and middle-class upbringing cultivated educational achievement. Sociology
16The term meritocracy refers to Michael Young’s (1958) combination of a science fiction novel
and doctoral thesis.

2.10 Socialization and Class Culture 27
changed its perspective on education from a possible source for the development
of social equality to a fundamental mechanism for the reproduction of social ine-
quality; an emblematic work in this context is Bourdieu and Passeron (1970).
Bourdieu (1984) and Bernstein (1971) underscored the distance between vari-
ous class cultures and the educational systems through linguistic codes and posi-
tions in the systems of cultural distinction. Other theories focused on the various
actors’ choices under different conditions. Children from working-class back-
grounds viewed higher education as more risky and with fewer possible divi-
dends on their investment than did children from the middle class; children in a
working-class context required better grades in order to opt for higher education
(Boudon 1974). In this perspective class culture represents primarily a context that
influences the calculation of the possible advantages or disadvantages of higher
education; the social and cultural distance from the educational system is under-
stood as part of that calculation. As regards socialization, the two types of theories
represent divergent mechanisms: Boudon’s (1981) perspective emphasizes act-
ing subjects interpreting the social contexts differently, while theories of cultural
reproduction underscore the direct impact of different culturalization.
Social class and background were eventually conceptualised as economic, cul-
tural and social capital (Bourdieu 1986; Coleman 1988). Economic capital refers
to material conditions; cultural capital in general covers the level of education and
knowledge, as well as the embodied knowledge of the cultural codes of the upper
classes and status groups. Social capital can be seen as the network of the indi-
vidual, and as the resources of communities and groups. Coleman (1988) analyses
social capital both in local community contexts and in the family, and argues that
the rate of “drop out” in high school increases with the ratio of single parents in a
community; single parents have less time for their children than two-parent fami-
lies and represent fewer resources for the common local environment. The social
capital as well as the economic capital of a community decreases with a high num-
ber of single parents. The economic and social situations for different family types
also vary with political regimes; being a single mother in the U.S. represents a dif-
ferent situation than in Scandinavia.
Capital can be converted from one form to another; children’s social and cul-
tural capitals provide the basis for their future amount and forms of capital. While
social class is primarily related to economic capital, status groups–ranging from
the classical German stände17 to intellectual and cultural elites–are constituted
through lifestyles, consumption and social and cultural distinctions. Consumption
has social consequences for children not only related to identity and social posi-
tion, but because many products are necessary for social and cultural participation.
17Stände is translated as “status groups,” which doesn’t completely capture the stände as they
existed: groups that based their power on position and lifestyle, restricted intercourse with other
groups, certain status conventions and acces to economic positions that were denied to other
groups. Stände points to medieval guilds, and in more modern versions, to groups based on cer-
tain professions and lifestyles; the status mechanisms of “stände” are alive in a new and changing
landscape.
The rise of organized leisure activities implies the increased importance of equip-
ment, fees and transportation; social media and mobile phones illustrate the social
necessity of products that did not exist some years ago.
While socialization through roles and institutions emphasizes position in social
structures, and discursive understanding relates to the underlying ideological pat-
terns conveyed by the dominant discourses, the perspective of capitals focuses on
the differentiation in resources. Bourdieu saw social and cultural capital primarily
as part of the social heritage, while more recent studies also emphasize the family’s
transfer of genetic resources, as well as parents’ active efforts to support their chil-
dren’s accumulation of cultural and social capital (see, e.g., Lareau 2003; Reynolds
and Clements 2005). Cultural capital is developed by education and skills, and by
acquiring the right social codes; parents seek to facilitate the development of social
and cultural capital through the selection of children’s activities, schools, communi-
ties and friends. The ethnic distribution of educational success in the U.S., as well
as in the UK and other Western countries, illustrates that Asian immigrants with few
financial resources and little relevant cultural and social capital are often winners
in the educational system. This cannot be explained by the socioeconomic factors
normally used to assess educational success; the success is rooted in the children’s
intense efforts, which in turn are anchored in the family’s ability to support and push
the children in their educational endeavours (Abboud and Kim 2011). Parents and
children with low social and cultural capital depend on institutionalized avenues of
capital accumulation; that is, the educational system. The success of certain immi-
grant groups indicates that although the school system favours groups with high
and relevant capital and codes, the system does have a meritocratic dimension that
makes it possible for groups with low levels of social and cultural capital to succeed.
The school’s grading system is a scourge for weak students with little capital but a
support for poor talented students; the success of Asian students may indicate that
the meritocratic aspects of the educational institutions have been underestimated.
The perspective of capitals emphasizes the social inheritance and the active
subjects’ accumulation of resources, while normative theories and discursive
understanding focus on cultural patterns and social structures. Capitals can be
actively accumulated: for those with little cultural and social capital, school is the
arena for the accumulation of educational capital, which can later be transformed
into cultural or social capital; educational skills are acquired more easily than the
codes and networks of the elites. Knowledge and good grades are therefore often
the weapons of children with little economic or cultural heritage, while cultural
heritage and social hierarchies support the children of the elites.
2.11 Socialization and Well-Being
The efforts to measure the well-being of children (Ben-Arieh and George 2001,
Ben-Arieh et al. 2001, Ben-Arieh 2008) provided perspectives important to social-
ization by focusing on the complex interaction between the child and its envi-
ronment. Within the sociology of childhood, children’s living conditions in the
2.11 Socialization and Well-Being 29
present are conceptualised as “well-being”, while the future development and life
course of children are termed “well-becoming” (Ben-Arieh and Frønes 2011). The
daily lives of children are related to both dimensions: peers, friends and leisure
most often will be related to well-being in the present, while the educational sys-
tem will be understood primarily as preparing children for the future. In the per-
spective of socialization, an identification of children’s situation must include both
their lives as children and the possible consequences of the present on their future
development (Raghavan and Alexandrova 2014). Societal developments influence
the interpretation of children’s contexts: playing with friends has traditionally
been understood as belonging to the well-being of the present, while the modern
understanding of socialization as the accumulation of social and cultural capitals,
focuses on peers as social capital and play as the development of competence.
Becoming is the essence of childhood. In the perspective of Sen (1993, 2008)
well-being refers to both the children’s quality of life here and now, and to the
opportunity structures and resources related to their future development and life
course. The child is understood not primarily as a child in the present, as in the
sociology of childhood, or as a future adult, as in the traditional understanding of
socialization; the present and future are linked by understanding the child as a sub-
ject interacting with the present, and the present as a framework of resources and
opportunity structures directed towards the future. Opportunity structures, involv-
ing the freedom to choose and the rights that guarantee freedom of choice, are an
important part of children’s well-being. The child’s life in the present, the opportu-
nity structures and the child’s capacities to utilize them, represents the child’s
capability. Increased wealth and opportunities may entail less subjective happi-
ness, as illustrated by the Easterlin paradox18 of happiness and from a more com-
plex angle, by Maslow’s (1943) hierarchies of needs, where satisfaction of needs
at one level produces new motivation and higher-level needs.
The concept of capability grasps the core of the process of socialization: the
child is an active subject developing its capacities in interaction with a frame-
work of resources and structural opportunities. In modern Western societies, most
children enjoy formal educational opportunities, but dropping out of educational
institutions indicates that many do not develop the capacities to utilize the formal
opportunities, and that the opportunity structures are not well adapted to all groups.
Socialization is constituted as the processes of interaction of the child and its envi-
ronment; the child’s well-being is interwoven with the processes of socialization.
2.12 The Constitution of Meaning and Reflexivity
Socialization theories have primarily aimed at showing how children grow up and
become motivated to fill society’s roles and responsibilities, and to a small extent
have been concerned with the development of critical capacities for reflection and
18http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easterlin_paradox.
transcendence. Maslow’s (1943) theory of a hierarchy of needs approaches the

problem by emphasizing that the fulfilment of lower needs triggers the appearance
of higher-level ones, with the hierarchy ranging from physiological needs to the
need for self-actualisation. Self-actualisation, or self-realisation, requires the abil-
ity to reflect on “what I want from life”; that is, it raises the issue of meaning.
Habermas’s concept of communicative action (1984–1987) refers to actors who
seek to coordinate their actions and their constitution of meaning through critical
dialogue. Even if such communication is partly based on a culturally ingrained
pre-understanding, the meeting of different validity claims and mutual criticism
may lead to understandings and acts that transcend existing knowledge and norms;
new meaning is constituted through dialogues between subjects. Communicative
action is rooted not only in the individual’s capacity for reflection, but in dialogue
and intersubjectivity, involving that the actor must have the ability to grasp the
perspective of the other. Communicative action not only requires the capacity for
social decentering/decentration19(Piaget 1928), it also requires self-objectification,
the ability to see oneself from the perspective of the other; self-understanding is
based on understanding of the other.
Social and cultural change is often understood as primarily driven by economic
and technological structures; the changes in social and cultural patterns are under-
stood as adaptations to these deeper structural changes. In this scheme, inspired
by a simplified version of Marxian theory, socialization operates as a mechanism
of adaptation to structural changes. But change may also be understood as driven
by the internal dynamics of the social and cultural systems, termed emergence in
modern systems theory (Sawyer 2005). A basic factor in emergence is the desires
and the capacities of the actors, which are related to their socialization. The desire
to change social and cultural conditions is interwoven with the subject’s constitu-
tion of meaning. Desires, meaning and capacity evolve through socialization, cre-
ated in interaction between the subject, contexts and other subjects, and do not
just mirror cultural patterns. Emergence, the evolving of something new and the
transcending of the existing, requires both the desires and the capacities of the
actors. Changes in social and cultural contexts can contribute to the development
of new meaning and new understanding; Heller’s (1976) concept of radical needs
illustrates how new social conditions or new ideas may create new meaning and
visions, thereby producing new radical needs that can only be fulfilled through
social change. Radical ideas may have profound effects; the new ideas about love
spread the idea that marriage should be based on love, and that young people
should have the right to select their own spouses. The ideas of free choice and love
combined into radical needs. It is no coincidence that the contradiction between
love and tradition is one of Bollywood’s basic themes.
Inspired by Hegel, and by Whitehead’s process philosophy (Mesle 2008;
Whitehead 1979), the self and social identity are understood not as states but as
becoming, as processes; identity as the idea of a stable “Me” is understood as a
19The cognitive processes of taking into account anothers perspectives are referred to both as
decentering and as decentering, in the rest of the book the concept of decentering will be used.
2.12 The Constitution of Meaning and Reflexivity 31
narrative continuously constituted by the subject. My self and my biography are

a continuous constitution of meaning; that I experience myself as a stable entity
does not imply that I do not change. The language equips us with the “I” who
acts and thinks; “I” am a constant in my life seen from my own point of view.
“I” has—as “You”, “She”, “He” and them– a linguistic given position; “I” am the
obvious stable centre of my life, but a centre that is continuously being created and
re-created.
In accordance with Habermas’s perspective (1984–1987), a goal of sociali-
zation is to constitute the capacity for dialogue and critical reflection, which
Baumann (1976) termed emancipatory reason. Socialization as emancipation
implies the development of capacities to produce something new: socialization as
the foundation for transcendence. Socialization is not just about the formation of
meaning, but also about the capacity for a quest for meaning.
2.13 The Social Roots of Motivation
Malinowski (1922) argued that socialization into a culture was also functional
for the biological needs of individuals. But the social sciences primarily under-
stood socialization as functional for the needs of the social structures themselves;
through socialization, norms and cultural patterns are translated into individual
motivation. In Berger and Luckman’s (1966) phenomenological perspective, social
and cultural patterns are internalised by being taken for granted; cultural pat-
terns are transformed into individual motivation through naturalisation (see also
Bourdieu 1984).
Merton (1938) distinguishes between manifest and latent functions. The mani-
fest functions are intended; schools provide children with knowledge, military
forces protect the country. Latent functions are the unintended consequences that
have positive functions for the maintenance of the social structures without the
participants’ conscious intention. In psychoanalytic understanding unconscious
motivation is a fundamental concept, and modern marketing searches for latent
needs that products can be postulated to fill, be it economic status, popularity or
wellness. Understanding latent functions requires a distinction between how pat-
terns of behaviour occur and how they are maintained. Radcliffe-Brown’s (1940)
famous example of joking relationships—in which a jocular relationship between
two positions is explained by the fact that joking acts as a damper on tensions
between the positions—illustrates how the existence of certain patterns of behav-
iour is explained functionally. But latent functionality cannot explain how the
behaviour came into being: the joking strategy may have been chosen randomly
or deliberately, and after a while transformed into a naturalised cultural pattern
transferred to new generations through socialization. Radcliffe-Brown argued that
the social sciences should explain how and why stable patterns exist; in a func-
tionalist understanding they continue over long periods because they are useful for
the maintenance of the social structures. This maintenance of cultural patterns is
explained through latent functionally; that is, the joking relationship support the
existing structures, but the actors are not joking because they want to maintain the
social structures.
Structuralists (see, e.g., Lévi-Strauss 1963) understand cultural patterns as being
rooted in common underlying structures; social structures do not rest on specific
relations between structure and function. Socialization will then be influenced by
both the variations on the cultural surface and the deeper grammar of mind and cul-
ture. Material environments also represent frameworks that influence socialization.
In general the material landscapes are understood to represent a certain inertia, but
newer studies and experiments illustrate how even small changes in these structures
may influence behaviour. The concept of “nudging”, “pushing lightly” to influ-
ence decision making in a non-forced way (Thaler and Sunstein 2008) sees social
actions in light of the details of social and physical environments; this is illustrated
by the famous “fly” painted on urinals (which contributes to fewer men urinating
outside the urinal) or the increase in sale of fruits and vegetables when shopping
carts offer a special section for “fruit and vegetables”. The boundaries between
conscious and non-conscious actions are fluid and vary with individuals and con-
texts, but the basic idea behind “nudging” is that, without the intention of the sub-
ject, the landscape we are a part of can influence actions, and by this socialization.
The landscapes of socialization can also be related to the dynamics of the
various social fields, and to what we will later refer to as language games
(Wittgenstein 1965). In his example of the nobleman who is on a first-name basis
with the stable boy, Bourdieu (1984) underscores that this informal style in fact
emphasizes the difference between their positions, not social closeness; commu-
nicative style has to be interpreted in context. Social divides are maintained by
symbolic markers, and crossing the symbolic boundaries is made more difficult by
the fact that the codes and social habitus are part of naturalised embodied systems.
These cultural landscapes are essential to the processes of socialization into the
hierarchies of classes and status groups.
At the core of the processes of socialization is the development of motivation.
Motivation must not be confused with intention; the manifest intentions of an act
and its many possible social and cultural motivational roots must not be confused.
Motivation is understood as related to the constitution of meaning, rooted in a
complex interplay of actors and institutional, discursive and social contexts, while
intention is related to specific actions. The cultural influence and structuring of moti-
vation is highly visible in comparative analyses, illustrating that different cultures
and contexts may shape meaning and motivation in different ways (Korbin 2010).
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Chapter 3
Socialization in Anthropological
Perspectives
Abstract Anthropology illustrates the variations in the processes and institutions

of socialization, as well as how different children relate to various cultural pat-
terns. The chapter underscores the comparative perspective, discusses the relation-
ship between culture and personality, and relates socialization to the fluidity of
modern cultures and to what is termed the twilight zones, the risky and attractive
zones of modern socialization.
Keywords Cultural variation · Liminality · Language games · Parenting, twilight

zones
3.1 Socialization and Cultural Variation
The anthropological traditions have much in common with sociology (or vice
versa), since the disciplines share some of the same roots. As regards a theory of
socialization, the anthropological traditions focus on the meaning of cultural vari-
ation. Direct comparative analyses in terms of childhood are relatively few, but
anthropological studies often involve comparative perspectives by relating vari-
ous findings to the “domestic” culture. This has raised significant issues regard-
ing dominating socialization patterns, which are often understood as natural and
universal. Also within the modern educational societies essential differences
can be identified; the independence that is seen as the natural aim of socializa-
tion in Western (often termed “modern”) cultures is not representative of Japan,
where interdependence is at the core of the culture (Johnson 1993). Cultural, reli-
gious, regional and class differences in values and practise related to upbringing
and socialization are abundant (see, e.g., Bornstein and Putnick 2012), and con-
cepts like biosociality (Rabinow 1996) and “local biologies” (Lock and Kaufert
2001) indicate that biological factors cannot be understood as constants but as

38 3 Socialization in Anthropological Perspectives
interconnected with cultural factors. Henrich and Norenzayan (2010, p. 78) review
of cross-cultural findings concludes that “There is substantial psychological and
behavioral variation among human populations”.
Parent-child relationships and upbringing are central to socialization processes,
both as such and as indications of social practices and cultural patterns. Studies
indicate, for example, that the style of mothering and children’s involvement in
caregiving in the family, influence the development of “altruistic” or “selfish/ego-
istic” behaviour patterns. That mothers in some societies give authority to older
children regarding disputes among the younger illustrates how the different mean-
ing attributed to age in different societies may influence peer interaction and the
structuring of children’s social landscapes (Whiting and Edwards 1988). Egoistic/
selfish acts seem to be in general more prevalent among children in larger and
more complex societies; modernization generally implies an increasing emphasis
on the individual self (Madsen 1971; Whiting and Whiting 1975; Triandis 1989).
In societies that emphasize individual careers, upbringing will naturally focus on
the achievement of individual goals. Individualization may constitute a problem at
the societal level: if members of a society are primarily socialised to “selfishness”,
this may influence social cohesion at the macro level. Of course, socialization as a
form of traditional solidarity confined to the family or a specific group may have
the same disruptive effects on the societal level. Thus, the inverse can also be set:
a society in which individuals do not develop strategies to achieve individual goals
may come to lack innovative power and tend towards stagnancy and atrophy.
The importance of a cross-cultural perspective on socialization is illustrated in
the classic study Children of Six Cultures: A Psycho-cultural Analysis (Whiting and
Whiting 1975), which also underlined that socialization has to be studied within
the context of the local community and the wider framework of historical forces,
where the psychological, cultural and biological factors interact within a contexts
(Worthman 2011). As Margaret Mead (1972) points out, socialization is influenced
by both innate characteristics and cultural patterns, implying that children can
relate differently to the same cultural patterns; socialization is an interactive pro-
cess that involves active subjects, social positions and social and cultural patterns.
Social agency- the capacity for action and reflection- is shaped in the intersec-
tion of biology, living conditions, contexts and cultural patterns, and is expressed
through patterns of meaning (Korbin 2003). Studies of upbringing in China and the
United States illustrate both similarities in patterns of temperament and that cul-
tural variations influence children’s emotional styles and development (Ahadi et al.
1993). Recent studies seek to relate cognitive development and life course paths
to cultural patterns as well as to human evolution, illustrating that children are not
born as blank slates (Keller 2010). Cross-cultural research may not only contribute
to the understanding of the influence of the naturalised ideas of culture on motiva-
tion, but also function as an entrance to the understanding of biological factors with
their roots in the evolution (Wood and Eagly 2002; Rohner and Khaleque 2002).
That children in different cultural settings may present themselves in different
ways in social media (Zhao 2011) illustrates the need to clarify the meaning of
actions and signs in different contexts. The challenge is to conceptualise cultural
3.1 Socialization and Cultural Variation 39
variations in a way that is relevant to socialization (Lewis 2006). As contexts of

socialization, different cultures represent various landscapes that provide different
significant others, different practises and different assumptions that are taken for
granted. In some societies children will primarily deal with the immediate fam-
ily, in others they will relate to a wider network of people in the extended family
and the village. Cultures may be different as regards the expression of emotions
such as anger and shame, which in turn influences the patterns of upbringing and
socialization (Cole et al. 2006). Cultures also vary in terms of what is expected
of children of different ages, and anthropological studies show large variations in
family forms and a spectrum of relationships between children and parents (for a
discussion, see Montgomery 2008). Such variations show that identical functions
for socialization can be filled in a number of ways. The many ways of upbringing
illustrate not only the array of social practises, but that the ways of relating to chil-
dren are rooted in a variety of discourses, ideologies and cosmologies.
Cultural variations have been studied by comparing existing communities, cul-
tures and subcultures, and by comparing communities, groups or regions over
time. Extensive studies have analysed childhood in European history; Aries (1962)
argues that the perspectives on childhood changed with the rise of the modern
family and the modern world; psychohistorian De Mause (1974) considered child-
hood throughout history as a nightmare from which children woke up with the
advent of modernity. Both authors saw sensitivity to children’s needs as part of the
culture of modernity, while other studies (Pollock 1983; Shahar 1990) argued that
this sensitivity was also present in earlier periods in European history.1
The subsistence patterns and way of life in hunting and gathering societies did
not provide favourable conditions for stable social hierarchies and social differ-
entiation; it is therefore likely that for most of human evolution, children were
growing up in a way similar to what has been seen in studies of small bands of
still-existing hunting and gathering cultures Frønes 1995). Throughout most of
human history children have spent their time at play, in a mixed-age group of other
children; studies suggest that children were given autonomy to learn by doing,
with some instruction from nearby adults now and then (see e.g. Frønes 1995).
In general the burden of work was quite light (Sahlins 2004), and there was little
need for small hands. The development of agrarian societies produced a use for
child labour, creating new conditions of socialization; with the agrarian societies
came the working child. Childhood has been through a series of transformations
with historical changes, and the consequences of such changes for children may be
different than for other generations, as illustrated by the coming of the knowledge-
based economies and the corresponding expansion of educational institutions.
Culture can be understood as a set of skills and communicative tools as well as
an internalized cage of norms and values. From the perspective of socialization it
is important that the child interact with the material level and the taken-for-granted
routines, practices and significant others dominating the micro ecology (Rogoff
1For a short overview of the debate on the history of childhood: http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/

culturebox/2002/03/farewell_to_minime.html.
2003). Socialization is not directly related to the macro level, but to the structural
relations between the macro and the micro. This provides for a variety of microen-
vironments, with a variety of degrees of freedom and structural pressure.
3.2 Culture and Personality
In the first half of the twentieth century some areas of anthropology were
greatly concerned with the relationship between culture and personality.
Psychoanalytically inspired theories postulated that cultures had their different
core or ethos, which was imbued in their members through socialization. The soci-
eties examined were often seen in relation to “modern” societies; in her studies
of young people in Samoa, Margaret Mead found that attitudes towards sex were
more open and “natural” on Samoa than in the U.S./Europe, and that the teenage
period was not marked by the emotional stress often understood as an unavoid-
able part of modern adolescence. Benedict (1934) observed that American culture
emphasized the difference between children and adults, with adults shown as com-
petent and children as incompetent, while the other cultures she studied empha-
sized their similarities and the gradual transition from childhood to adulthood.
In parts of classical anthropology (see, e.g., Malinowski 1922) there are
assumptions about the functionality of social patterns for individual needs, which
easily blend in with the romantic idea that in small simple societies social ritu-
als and cultural patterns are in harmony with human biological needs. It is tempt-
ing to imagine that in such societies children’s socialization is “natural”, and that
complex modern societies have moved away from this harmonious socialization.
In contrast to Freud, this romantic idea postulated a “natural” way of life, not an
indissoluble tension between nature and culture. Other anthropological classics
from the same period (see, e.g., Radcliffe-Brown 1940) argued that rituals and cul-
tural patterns supported the social structures and the equilibrium of a society, but
did not postulate that some societies provided any kind of natural balance between
nature and culture.
Cultural patterns may influence children’s personality formation by emphasiz-
ing certain ways of acting and thinking, and by the fact that the roles related to
certain positions must be expressed in specific ways. Marx’s concept of a char-
acter mask refers to cultural traits and acts that are rooted in social positions.
The idea of social character formation, which for a period was a major topic in
many studies on socialization and childhood, refers to a shaping of the person-
ality that goes deeper than cultural scripts related to position. Erikson’s (see e.g.
1950) cultural-psychoanalytic analysis illustrates how, through styles of upbring-
ing, core cultural patterns shape personality traits (which again maintain the cul-
tural patterns). Erikson saw the youth issues that emerged in the post-war United
States largely as an expression of the lack of emotional integration, rooted in the
long period of childhood/adolescence. What he sought to show was the relation-
ship among societal formations, rearing patterns and personality types: “The fact
3.2 Culture and Personality 41
remains that the human being in early childhood learns to consider one or the
other aspect of bodily function as evil, shameful, or unsafe. There is not a culture
which does not use a combination of these devils to develop, by way of counter-
point, its own style of faith, pride, certainty, and initiative” (1950, Chapter 11).
Child rearing styles are not only supposed to influence the shaping of the person-
ality; personality emerges as a kind of social character, in the sense that differ-
ent traits dominate in different societies. The relationships between culture and
personality are interpreted in different ways in different theoretical approaches:
among the classical works, e.g., Benedict’s (1934) and Mead’s (1928) analyses,
culture and personality are woven together.
Modern popular culture postulates tensions between individuals and cultural
patterns; in popular narratives the individual often confronts “the masses” in the
fight for his or her uniqueness. The movie hero or heroine succeeds when tapping
into the strength of the inner unique self, and popular songs underscore the need
to be yourself “no matter what they say”. Cultural studies emphasize that the idea
of the unique individual is produced by the culture, not in contrast to it; that the
preoccupation with the individual is rooted in cultural patterns. As illustrated by
titles like the “Culture of Narcissism” (Lasch 1979) and the “tyranny of intimacy”
described by Sennet (1977), the key cultural markers stress the need for authen-
ticity and uniqueness, implying the celebration of intimate expressions in public.
From this perspective the individual does not emerge because of the dissolution
of cultural cohesion, but because the idea of the individual and the uniqueness of
the self is at the core of the culture. As regards socialization, the constitution of
the unique self, often formulated as “finding yourself”, is an important part of the
modern processes of culturalization.
3.3 Institutionalized Socialization
In sociological and anthropological theorizing, the family constitutes the central

institution of socialization; but “institutionalized socialization” in general refers to
arrangements outside the family. In modern societies this is associated with educa-
tional institutions, with institutions for children in need of care, or with institutions
of incarceration. An anthropological perspective provides a broader understanding
of institutional socialization, often referring to periods of age- and gender-specific
collective arrangements, which are often based on contact between peers and exploit
the potential of peer relationships in terms of learning and identity development. In
some cultures, groups of young men go off (or did go off) for a period to live apart
from their families to guard livestock; although this has an economic function, it can
also be understood as an institutional arrangement that provides functions for social-
ization (Spencer 1970). When the Zulu chief Shaka based the organisation of the
military services on age cohorts, this both dissolved traditional loyalties (to family,
kin or clan) and created cohort- and peer-based identifications with the regiments,
which also secured loyalty to the central government (Frønes 1995).
Religious institutions like monasteries recruit young people for life-long or

shorter membership. In 1959 it was estimated that approximately 25 % of the
male population in Tibet were monks. Monasticism exerted a strong influence on
Tibetan society, both by its ideological content and because so many young men
lived in the monasteries. Educational institutions were also often aimed at repro-
ducing specific elites, such as Calmecac of the Aztec, where children of the aris-
tocracy got their rigorous and extensive religious and military education (Frønes
1995). Spartans developed a state system in which girls also took part in an educa-
tion that focused largely on physical fitness. Spartan women in this period were
possibly the world’s best educated, partly rooted in the Spartan idea that strong
women bore strong children (for a discussion, see Frønes 1995).
Socialization institutions apply active tactics to integrate newcomers into their
social lives and customs, an integration newcomers in general also actively seek.
The normative integration may take place as instruction and teaching, but it also
follows from the process of social integration. Institutionalized socialization will
easily create in-group feelings and internal solidarity, which is actively reinforced
by ritualization and icons that draw symbolic boundaries against the outside
world. The efficiency of institutional socialization is related to this interplay of
social and normative assimilation. The Spartan-inspired English boarding schools
provided an internal peer-group dynamic that merged the development of peer cul-
ture and class culture. Boarding also secured an extensive network within the right
social circles at a national or regional level, while local private schools reached
only a smaller area. Elite educational institutions weave the symbolic power of the
class society into the rituals of peer culture and ensure an innovative dynamics in
the continuous transfer and development of elite cultures.
Modern educational institutions also represent social control, and dropping out
of them is perceived as an indication of future marginalization. The competition
within educational institutions produces a situation that disciplines parents as well
as students. As described earlier, the power of educational institutions rests partly
on the convertibility of capitals; parental support of the children’s accumulation
of social and cultural capital aims implicitly at the accumulation of educational
capital, which may later be converted into economic capital. Lack of educational
capital increases the risk of future social exclusion (Frønes 2010; UNICEF 2007).
Educational institutions also have the potential to produce transgressive and
radical subcultures through peer dynamics that find fertile ground in institutions
packed with young people in the same life phase.
Educational institutions produce different childhoods for different groups of
children through their differentiated educational achievements, ranging from mar-
ginalisation to success. The expansion of basic education, from kindergarten to the
upper secondary level, represents a structural homogenization of children’s lives,
while the importance of academic achievement produces an increased differentia-
tion in life course careers. Although educational systems around the world have
basic structures in common, they are still different: upper secondary levels vary
between countries, vocational training may have different positions in the systems,
preschools have different ideologies and practices, and the level of educational
3.3 Institutionalized Socialization 43
pressure varies. But educational institutions are everywhere built on age differen-
tiation, which entails that social networks and friendships often are based on birth
cohorts. That Facebook was founded as a way to keep in touch with classmates
is illustrative; these relationships represent emotional and close ties made in the
formative years, and they act as social capital throughout the life course.
3.4 Language Games; Socialization into the Unions

of Meaning and Praxes
Anthropology illustrates the variety of cultural patterns and praxes into which chil-
dren are socialised. Modern anthropological studies underline children’s agency
(Bluebon-Langner and Korbin 2007) and children as meaning makers. The acqui-
sition of language is related to the development of both a sense of self and an idea
of the image of the self, and the social mirror expresses itself in language. The
local worlds created and populated by children are essential to this making of
meaning. Children are socialised in a variety of contexts that are not only open
to the production of meaning, but meaning making is required in a series in new
situations. Language is developed in the socialization process, both as a commu-
nicative tool and as a carrier of meaning and social patterns, and is interwoven
with contexts, class and cultures. Bernstein’s concepts of restricted and elaborated
speech codes examined how the different codes and languages of social classes
may influence socialization (Bernstein 1971, 1973), while Labov (1969) under-
scored both the different logic of codes as well as that children interpreted situa-
tions and relevant codes differently.
Language is a system of signs in which words make sense in relation to each
other; words are not just labels for things. While Saussure’s structural linguis-
tics emphasized the structural properties of the language, and the perspectives of
speech act the performative functions for the user (Austin 1962), Peirce (see e.g.
Liszka 1996) keeps the perspective of language as a system, but underlines the
signifying element of a sign, in which a sign becomes a sign when it produces an
interpretation. An interpreter responds to the meaning he or she gives to a sign.
From this perspective words are linked as a system, but interpretations are con-
textual as well as processual, involving the processes of interpretation and mean-
ing-making of the actors. The use of language is also woven into various genres
associated with different contexts; friends communicate in different ways than
do strangers, and mothers and children have their own forms of communica-
tion. Language also contains meta-codes indicating which codes are in force: the
chairman’s introduction reflects the context of a meeting; the mother’s tone and
gestures inform us that the young person is her child. Such meta-codes may be
chosen strategically; one actor may signal that he or she defines a context as a
conflict, another may respond with markers rejecting or supporting that definition.
Narratives establish codes that provide meaning to symbols: the cross is assigned
meaning through the narrative of Christianity; our ability to interpret a TV genre

tells us that a certain camera angle indicates that the heroine is in danger. De-
coding the messages requires knowledge of the possible contexts; when we inter-
pret the dramatic headlines of newspapers as directed towards us not primarily as
readers, but as potential buyers, this produces new interpretations of headlines.
De-coding implies translating the messages into the reader’s contexts and terms.
These capacities are gradually acquired by experience, and are based on the capa-
bilities of the subjects as well as on qualities of the contexts.
Language cannot be understood simply as a fixed pattern of distinctions, but as
a set of unions of signs and meanings interwoven with social praxis. The relation
between signifier and signified is not stable; a word has many meanings and con-
notations, and language has expressions other than words. This set of codes that
combines words, gestures, acts and symbols into a meaningful whole, can be
understood as a language game (Wittgenstein 19652), a language game is a system
of codes indicated by meta-codes. Language games not only grow out of specific
contexts, they define the contexts; adherence to the codification of friendship is
part of the constituting of friendship. Lovers’ gestures are private, but they are also
public clichés defining them as lovers. The strength of a cliché is to function at the
private and public level at the same time. It is the merging of a social praxis and a
system of signs (as symbols and gestures and as language), that assigns language
games their strong position as areas of socialization. At the centre of a language
game is the privileged signifier, that provides the codes that give meaning to the
other elements (Laclau and Mouffe 1985). A smile in the language game of flirting
has a different meaning than a smile at a meeting, or the soothing smile of a doctor
to a patient. Socialization into classes and status groups implies the development
of the competence to master the various class-related language games as well as
the meta-codes that identify the contexts. The complexities of language games
illustrate that mastering complex and subtle language games develops as embodied
habitus through primary socialization, which may make the crossing of cultural
boundaries complicated.
Language games are related to material, social and symbolic patterns. A
Norwegian study3 found that in some rural communities the same local environ-
ment provided very different environments for boys and girls related to both lei-
sure activities and future work. The difference expressed itself in the profiles of
activities and interests and in different language games: boys conversations related
to hunting, fishing and motor vehicles, while the girls talked about social relation-
ships, which were not related to specific aspects of the local environment (the only
comment on the local environment was that is was boring). The girls’ social and
symbolic world could easily be moved to another location, while that of the boys
2http://postmoderntherapies.com/word.html.
3Frønes (1987), only available in Norwegian.
3.4 Language Games; Socialization into the Unions of Meaning and Praxes 45
was deeply rooted in local conditions.4 Boys and girls lived in the same commu-
nity but in different language games. In recent decades, anthropological studies of
children and adolescents have sought to understand the dynamics of the language
games that constitute gender and age as well as ethnic and social position in
schoolyards, communities and kindergartens, and in various groups and subcul-
tures (Thorne 1993; Graue and Walsh 1998).
Language, as the philosopher Taylor emphasizes, is “mysterious” (2010); signs
are not fixed description of things and are not strictly defined within a given sys-
tem of distinctions; signs are ambiguous. Signs may mean something in one con-
text and something else in another; signs become poetry as well as military orders;
metaphors and metonyms illustrate the relationship between sign, context and cul-
ture. Words have parallel common and private content: an event can be both a pub-
lic and a most private experience; a popular song is both a hit from a certain period
and “our song”. Signs are often without simple referents, and the content of love,
hate, nation and freedom are constituted through narratives and metaphors that
open up for struggles between different social groups or individuals on the mean-
ing of the concepts. Language provides tools for maintaining symbolic and social
structures, but also for transcending these structures.
Everyday culture contains meta-communicative frameworks that interpret signs
and symbols as part of language games, narratives and contexts. We expect cer-
tain symbols to be linked; we assume that the children with backpacks on Monday
morning are on their way to school, but such a simple pre-interpretation is not
provided if we meet them on a Sunday. People who use certain sociolects are
believed to have cultural backgrounds in common, and people wearing uniforms
are believed to perform certain functions. This is the metonymical aspect of the
production of meaning; through socialization we learn to expect certain things to
be connected spatially or over time, as when genres of narratives are expected to
provide a story with a known structure containing certain characters, like heroes,
lovers and villains. We presume that certain characters belong to certain stories,
and the media convey continuously how things are supposed to be connected.
Things we learn to be connected in time and space are gradually transformed into
part of the “generalised others” in Mead’s sense; assumptions about how the world
is put together shape the maps through which we navigate our social and cultural
landscapes. Socialization is a process in which children gradually are introduced
to meaning through myriads of contexts, metaphors, codes, narratives and lan-
guage games, the “unions of meaning”, that proliferate in complex societies. With
increasing age the child moves from a few and simple language games, genres and
contexts, to the many and complex.
4Not many years after the study, most of the girls had moved away, while many of the boys had
became another of the “bachelors” in some rural areas.

3.5 Transitions, Liminality and Twilight Zones
The concepts of rites de passage (Van Gennep 1960) and transition rituals (Turner
1967, 2008) point out the importance of a major move from one role or position
to another, such as from being a child to being a young adult, from unmarried to
married, from a lower position to a higher, from life to death. Rituals help to ease
difficult transitions and situations, as when the funeral script carries and expresses
sorrow while also structuring a complicated social event. Rituals may emphasize
that the person is now becoming a member of a particular group or entering a spe-
cific position. Some subcultures have rituals that confirm the motivation of the
novice, as when applicants endure humiliation or, in the case of criminal gangs,
commit a felony (criminal actions also insure that the new members stick with the
group, making the distance back to the “decent” mainstream greater).
The concept of liminality, rooted in Van Gennep’s and Turner’s studies, is of
particular interest as regards socialization. Liminality refers to a phase in transi-
tion rituals where the initiate is understood as being in a particular “betwixt and
between” position relative to general social structures as well as to daily life. From
this perspective students are in a liminal position by being outside the normal rou-
tines of work and family life while qualifying for a high position in the future.
Students’ liminal position was more evident when they were fewer and good posi-
tions were likely to be waiting; the period of bohemian life style among some
young people of the upper classes is also illustrative of this. The liminal period
may develop distinctive cultural expressions and values; from a liminal position
one may notice and express perspectives that those “within” cannot see or at least
not express; liminality is both a characteristic of the actor and the structure, and
of the actor’s position in the social structure. Liminal actors may be perceived as
dangerous—as ambiguous—but liminality is not marginalization. Liminality is
the promise of a transition to a new position and underlines the future communi-
tas, while marginality represents a process towards social exclusion. Hall’s (1904)
depiction of adolescence as an anarchic period between childhood and adulthood
corresponds to the idea of liminality. Manheim’s (1952) understanding of youth as
a period marked by an existential confrontation with society’s dominant cultural
patterns points in the same direction.
Adolescents are assigned a particular position in which turbulence and prob-
lematic behaviour are expected to some degree, as the social identities of child-
hood dissolve and the young person enters a period of identity confusion. James
Dean, Elvis Presley and Marlon Brando were among the first to give cultural form
to the angry and confused liminal young men who were tough on the outside but
vulnerable and honest on the inside. This period is also expected to have an end;
the turbulence will evaporate when the young person reaches an adult position.
The liminal phase is often understood as a psychosocial moratorium, in Erikson’s
sense (1959); a phase of social and philosophical reflection producing a search for
new sources of meaning. Liminality underscores that an actor in certain periods is
in a specific position as a kind of outsider, but the periods of liminality are
3.5 Transitions, Liminality and Twilight Zones 47
understood to represent integrative function at a structural level (Turner (1967,

2008). But the characteristics of liminality may for some young people increase
the risk of marginalization and future exclusion. In periods when the position that
was supposed to be waiting at the end of the liminal period has dissolved, re-
assimilation may fail, and for some young people the distinction between margin-
ality and liminality may gradually break down. Anthropological studies have
mostly analysed liminal periods related to specific transitions, but liminality may
also be understood as periods or moments enabling individuals to examine and
rethink their life course and identities. As such, liminal positions point to the space
“in between”, to the cracks within the social structure, which, according to song-
writer Leonard Cohen’s famous expression, is “how the light gets in”.5
Every society has a variety of “twilight zones” that illustrate liminality as a spe-
cifically structural in-between space that for moments or periods can be experi-
enced by all. The twilight zones may represent intense experiences of meaning as
potentiation in Ziehe’s (2004) sense; the experience of meaning through the inten-
sity of the moment. The attraction of risk and extreme sports (as well as drugs)
and travelling to exotic places can also be understood as the seeking of the intense
meaning of the moment (Celsi 1992). Available twilight zones are continuously
produced by modern heterogeneous cultures, providing possible experiences of
meaning as moments of potentiation, influencing socialization as experience and
as zones of attraction. Modern cultural landscapes merge the evolving of discipli-
nation and cracks; post-structural landscapes are characterized not by lack of
structural powers, but by complexity, change and multiculturality that produce the
cracks, ranging from youth subcultures to religious sects and myriad “alternative”
movements, all providing possible meaning both as content and as potentiation.
The desire for self-actualization and the corresponding quests for the experience
of meaning that especially attracts young people create sensitivity to the strange
light of the cracks and the twilight zones. The quest for meaning may represent
innovation and transcendence and a force for social change. “His songs were the
soundtrack to my life,” author Neil Gaiman writes after the death of Lou Reed,
and underlines the creative power of the wild side by quoting Brian Eno’s state-
ment that “only 30,000 people bought the first Velvet Underground album when it
came out, but they all formed bands”.6 The longing for the intense experience of
meaning also represents a risk of the loss of footing and future social exclusion;
some of the cracks may be dangerous places.
Youth subcultures have been understood as deviant, dynamic collective answers
to the conflictual life situations of groups of young people (Hall and Jefferson
1993; Cohen 1972); but they also are embraced as being more authentic and
“meaning seeking” than mainstream lives. Some parts of the subcultural scenes
base their attraction on their capacities for transgression. The fascination and
5http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/leonardcohen/anthem.html.
6The Guardian, Monday, 28 October 2013.
attraction of transgression (Jenks 2003) can be understood not just as the attraction
of confronting taboos, but also as a quest for meaning.
The attractiveness of subcultures has been related to style, rebellion, authentic-
ity, music and fashion, and not least, to liminal quests for meaning and identity.
As the mass-producing cultural industry is understood as being unable to produce
authentic products, the marketing of styles and fashion needs the stamp of authen-
ticity brought by the twilight zones and the subcultures.
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Chapter 4
Socialization in Psychological Perspectives
Abstract The chapter presents an understanding of socialization in the dominant

psychoanalytic theories, ranging from Freud to Lacan, and in cognitive psychol-
ogy, rooted in Piaget and Kohlberg, as well as relating socialization to learning
theory and to the framework of Vygodsky. Social cognitive development repre-
sents an axis in psychological theorising, with the family and peers the dominant
agents of socialization.
Keywords Development · Decentering · Phases of childhood · Family · Peers
4.1 Socialization in Psychoanalytic Understanding
Psychoanalysis has influenced the cultural understanding of childhood and ado-

lescence and has contributed to the image of childhood as the formative phase
in shaping personality. According to psychoanalysis, the child is born as a self-
centred, instinct-driven little animal that is gradually transformed into a social
individual and a member of a culture. The child is born into a family, and family
dynamics are at the core of a psychoanalytical understanding of socialization. In
the Oedipal phase the boy child withdraws from the symbiotic connection with the
mother and identifies with the father and, through this, increasingly with the social
rules and framework of the wider society. The Electra complex, the girl’s competi-
tion with her mother for possession of the father, never achieved the same status as
the Oedipal complex, but in both cases the child is detached from symbiosis with
the mother.
Identification with the father represents an important mechanism in the inter-
nalization of society’s values and symbolic patterns. As regards socialization,
internalization, according to Wikipedia, “involves the integration of attitudes,
values, standards and the opinions of others into one’s own identity or sense of

52 4 Socialization in Psychological Perspectives
self. In psychoanalytic theory, internalization is a process involving the formation

of the super ego.”1 Internalization occurs both through the unconscious and by
indirect influence, and through conscious processes of understanding. In the case
of small children and what is referred to as primary socialization, the indirect and
unconscious mechanisms are dominant. The child gradually becomes governed by
the “reality principle” and the ego, a process that is understood as the development
of self-determination and autonomy (see, e.g., Hartmann 1939/1958). In this per-
spective the relationship between society and autonomy emerges as relatively
unproblematic; the individual moves from being influenced by instincts and unreg-
ulated desires, through the influence of the superego and normative parental
voices, to autonomy through the development of the reality principle and the ego.
Parental influence is characterized differently by the various psychoanalytic
theories. In Melanie Klein’s understanding—she was also analysing small chil-
dren- the child’s inner life is not a reflection of the external world, but is a com-
plex imaginative dynamic that also acts as a defence (Hinshelwood 2003). Some
perspectives understand the age phase of up to 3–4 years as one in which the child
constitutes itself in opposition to parents and the symbolic order, while at the same
time incorporating them (Loewald 2000;2 see Ogden 2006); that is, autonomy and
integration are seen as two aspects of the same process. As regards socialization,
“attachment theories” (see, e.g., Ainsworth and Bowlby 1965) are significant not
only for their discourses on early attachment, but for their formulations of the rela-
tions between attachment patterns and life course development throughout child-
hood. As with Erikson (1968), the significance of a “secure base” is stressed; to
trust the world is a prerequisite for positive relations with others. Relationships
with significant others are part of a development that Winnicot describes as a grad-
ual evolving of autonomy (Winnicot 1971; Hart and Schwartz 2008). Transition
objects, often stuffed animals/plush toys that the child relates to and connects
with, function as objects that support this development by providing trust and
tying together the outer and inner world. Transitional objects are actively consti-
tuted by the child and illustrate the child’s position as a subject; children are
actively involved in constructing their relationships with the social world.
Lacan’s version of psychoanalysis is interesting from the perspective of sociali-
zation theory in that, more explicitly than Freud, he seeks to grasp the relationship
between the child and the symbolic order into which the child is growing (see e.g.
Bracher 1993, Žižek 2006). In the Lacanian understanding it is the “father” who
breaks the symbiosis between mother and child as with Freud; but “the father”
represents social principles and symbolic patterns more than he does the father
as a person. In ego-psychology instincts and drives are eventually overridden by
the superego and gradually by a strong ego; in Lacan’s understanding new desires
come into existence with entry into the reality of the symbolic patterns of lan-
guage and signs. The structure of the unconscious takes the form of cultural dis-
courses and narratives in a condensed form, a form that both expresses and shapes
1http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internalization.
2http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3330611/.
4.1 Socialization in Psychoanalytic Understanding 53
the desires of the subjects. The discomfort (unbehag, in Freud’s terminology) of

culture is not that cultural patterns prevent the satisfaction of drives or instincts,
but that the child’s entry into the world of language and symbols creates a form
of “lack,” a longing for wholeness, a desire for which the child seeks objects or
referents in the real world. But the lack takes the form of desires that cannot be
fully articulated in language, and cannot be fully met by material objects or rela-
tions. This understanding of desire may lead to the pessimistic idea of a life of
unfulfilled dreams, but the desire for meaning also represents a will for meaning,
and possibly for transcendence. The desire or will for meaning develops through
socialization, and gradually becomes a driving force in the socialization process.
The purpose here is not to describe Lacan’s psychoanalysis, but to apply his
perspective to socialization. Lacan’s theories have their roots in Freud, but also in
surrealism and its idea that there is a deeper truth behind surface patterns, and in
Hegel, that is, Kojeve’s (1969 account of Hegel, or more correctly, his dialogue
with Hegel (Butler 1987).3 Kojeve rejects Hegel’s idea of the harmonious end of
history; in the perspective of socialization the “end of history” takes the form of
the recognition of humans as subjects and of the constant need for reflexivity.
Human actions rest on the individuals’ desires and will, and thus ultimately on
their constitution of meaning. Meaning is rooted in the internalisation of cultural
patterns as well as in the interaction between subjects and individual development
and reflexivity; the constituting of meaning may therefore produce subjugation to
a culture as well as a desire for change and transcendence. As a subject, the human
infant/child is driven by needs and gradually by socially rooted desires; a funda-
mental desire is for recognition by other subjects. The desire for recognition
ranges from the acts of the two-year old who wants to exercise his or her will, to
later desire for love, friendship and professional status. The human urge to
appear—ranging from vanity to the desire to excel and be respected by equals in
public life—as well as the modern urge to “be seen”, are longings for recognition
in a Hegelian perspective. Desire is related to the symbolic order, as the symbolic
order influences what is desirable. Humans share biological needs with animals,
but the desire for the other’s desire, the desire to be desired, recognized by the
other(s), is human and social.
In Lacanian terminology, the concept of “the real” refers to the fundamentals of
existence that cannot be fully expressed in words, a desire for meaning and whole-
ness that is irreducible to the symbolic order (Žižek 2005).4 The real is a desire, a
purpose, a transcendental force found in the quest for love as well as in the quest
for faith, meaning, and identity. The desire for the real is a fundamental drive in the
socialization process, as the will to meaning. The notion of “master signifiers”—
the signs expressing fundamental ideas and concepts—may function as a center-
piece for understanding the real. For example, a master signifier such as education,
emphasized as the road to the future for children, is easily identified through a
3Lacan’s wife Sylva Bataille’s first husband was the surrealist and sociologist Georges Bataille.
4http://zizekstudies.org/index.php/ijzs/article/viewFile/274/372.
system of visible referents, the educational institutions. But a concept like “love”
has no simple physical referent, only manifestations in narratives and images; it
appears as a master signifier representing the idea of “real love,” of wholeness and
self-realization, of someone and something special; the idea and concept of real
love represents a desire. The power of signifiers is illustrated by human beings who
sacrifice themselves for symbols, ideas and cultural narratives (see, e.g., Becker
1964). The master signifiers– such as love, freedom, religion or utopia—invoke the
dreams and visions of the real, reaching beyond the given order. These visions also
provide possible coherence to the fragmented symbolic order and heterogeneous
realities; the realities may be fragmented, but the visions of love, utopia and para-
dise—the real—are whole. The narratives and images of life, love, and happiness
in modern commercial media create desires that are not met by the products they
advertise, and therefore produce desires for new products. Master signifiers are at
the core of visions and yearning and elude simple codification. The eternal quest
for happiness -for the real in Lacan’s sense- is based on its position as a floating
master signifier; if we knew exactly where to find happiness, the desire for happi-
ness would lose its power. Master signifiers create the search for deeper meaning,
but do not provide this meaning. Wealthy societies produce a particular landscape
of socialization; they cover needs and produce desires.
In the perspective of socialization, the child’s construction of the Self, a coher-
ent idea of Me, is rooted in the child’s experiences through others as social mir-
rors; but the construing of the Me, the image of the self, is also a social strategy.
The construction of the Self is influenced by the groups to which we compare
ourselves (Tajfel and Turner 1986); the term “impression management” refers to
strategies that are employed to create specific self-presentations (Goffman 1959).
The Self is necessarily an “imagined self” and, like the “imagined community”
(Anderson 1991), the Self is a unifying construct providing wholeness and con-
tinuity. The experience of a Self is also rooted in the linguistic structure in which
the pronoun “I” produces the subject “I” (“I” speak, “I” am, “I” think), and locates
this subject at the centre of events. The imagined Self develops as a form of narra-
tive that the child articulates; the constituting of the Self as the “story of myself”
takes place through socialization. Life is a continuous process, while the Self is a
construct formulated by the subject, creating a coherent idea of the Self out of the
flow of experiences and events.
4.2 Cognitive Developmental Psychology
The intention here is to grasp the principles of cognitive development that are
significant in relation to socialization. The works of Piaget dominate the field of
developmental psychology both in their own right and because later analyses and
theorizing are based on them. In Piaget’s understanding (see, e.g., Piaget 1928,
1962; Piaget and Inhelder 1958), cognitive development is conceptualised as the
development of knowledge structures, of cognitive schemas of understanding.
4.2 Cognitive Developmental Psychology 55
Child development is characterized thus not only by a gradual expansion of cog-

nitive capacities, but also by qualitative changes; when the child experiences
that the existing cognitive maps no longer grab the terrain, new maps- or sche-
mas- are developed. When performing an action, the actor is aware of how he or
she performs the act, but not of the cognitive patterns underlying it. The cognitive
schemas develop partly through experience, but are not themselves experienced
directly. The child is driven by intrinsic motivation and is seen as taking an active
part in it’s own development.
Cognitive development is dependent on biological maturation and on social
interaction. In the work of some of Piaget’s successors are found extensive analy-
ses of how cognitive development is driven by social interaction, often with an
emphasis on the interaction between peers (see, e.g., Doise et al. 1976; Doise
and Mugny 1979). Development takes place in the evolution of cognitive sche-
mas, either by the expansion of their existing form (assimilation), or by their
transformation into more advanced forms (accommodation). Adaptation to the
environment occurs thus not by an individual being moulded by social structures
and cultural contexts, but by the expansion and changing of the actor’s cognitive
capacities. Accommodation is the active organism’s cognitive adaptation to new
challenges, while assimilation means that the experiences are interpreted within
the existing structures of cognition. The acquisition of culture is not driven by pas-
sive internalization, but by active subjects relating to their surroundings. Human
beings are continuously being confronted by changing contexts; reflexive capaci-
ties are at the core of cognitive development.
The concept of self-efficacy (Bandura 1977, 1995) refers to an individual’s
belief in his or her abilities. In this perspective, individuals are provided with
agency and are not understood as puppets in simple systems of positive and nega-
tive reinforcement. Self-efficacy is rooted in socialization and illustrates that
development takes place in self-reinforcing spirals: competence and confidence
in one’s own abilities creates increased competence, which in turn produces
increased self-efficacy. Identical environments may produce different conse-
quences for different individuals; what is optimal for one child may be boring for
one or too complex for another; the individual adds value to the environment, as
will be discussed later.
In Vygodsky’s perspective, human activities, including the entirety of mate-
rial, technological, social and cultural patterns, form the basis for socialization
processes (Valsiner and van der Veer 2000). Vygodsky’s concept of the “proxi-
mal zone of development”, a context of learning in which the child is encouraged
by an optimal level of challenges, is important as regards socialization as well as
from an educational/pedagogical perspective. Proximal zones conceptualize how
social structures provide differentiated opportunities for learning and development
through the interaction between different groups and individuals and their environ-
ments. What is proximal for some children are impossible for others, and increas-
ing competence changes the level of proximality. Proximal zones illustrate how
the environment contributes to the child’s development not through imitation or
internalisation, but through challenges provided by social and cultural contexts.
Proximal zones represent a pedagogical strategy and a theory of motivation; a cer-

tain level of challenge creates the motivation to act and reflect. The more active
and more competent subject is able to develop more advanced understanding of
the various contexts than the less active and less competent. Children do not live
in identical social environments even if they live in the same social and physical
locations; an individual’s environment is the result of the interaction between the
individual and the surrounding material, social and cultural structures. The proxi-
mal zone is a relation between competence and contexts.
Kohlberg (1981, 1984) anchors moral understanding and reflection in social
and cultural interaction as well as in maturation. As with Piaget, children move
from a pre-conventional level, through a conventional level dominated by norma-
tive conformity, to a post-conventional level, where rules and norms are subject
to reflection. The moral and cultural categories may vary between social groups,
while the principles of development and hierarchies are stable, moving from sim-
ple to complex categories of understanding. Moral development illustrates the
relationship between social and cultural frameworks and individual understanding;
the development of reflexivity is driven by the subject’s experiences of social and
cultural complexity, of proximal zones. Moral development is an important aspect
of the socialization process in itself, and also because it illustrates the movement
towards the capacity for critical reflection and emancipation.
4.3 Social Decentering; Taking the Perspective

of the Other
A basic dimension of communicative competence is the capacity for social decen-

tering, the ability to take the perspective of others. Social decentering involves
my capacity not only to imagine myself in the position of the other but also my
capacity to grasp the other’s perspective; the other may interpret relations and
phenomena differently than I do. Social and cultural decentering are necessary
capacities in modern civilizations; they are conditions for the recognition of the
other as a subject and a prerequisite for self-understanding. Decentering, the abil-
ity to grasp both the uniqueness of the other and the other’s social and cultural
position, is at the core of the relationship between subjects. The capacity to recog-
nise the uniqueness of the other is in fact the constituting of the other as a subject.
Recognition of the other as a subject, and seeing myself through the eyes of the
other, are also prerequisites for self-understanding. Understanding of the other is
rooted in the face-to-face encounter with the factual other, not in general notions
of the other. The capacity for social decentering is the fundamental condition for
the development of insight into social processes—as well as into oneself. Othering
is the opposite of decentering, and is understood as viewing and treating someone
(or a class or group of people) as fundamentally different from oneself. The other
is understood not only as different, but as a position and an object, not as a indi-
vidual subject.
4.3 Social Decentering; Taking the Perspective of the Other 57
Habermas (1984–1987) uses Piaget’s dimensions of developmental stages to

describe modern post-conventional societies with their potential for reflexive com-
municative action. Through dialogue, individuals and groups will not only be able
to reach consensus, they may also produce solutions and perspectives that tran-
scend their starting points. Dialogue constructs something that is more than the
sum of the knowledge and capacities of the communicating parts. The develop-
ment of dialogical communicative competence takes place through socialization,
which implies that the level of communicative competence will vary among indi-
viduals and groups. The dialogues- possibly aiming at not only consensus but also
at transcendence—are based on the cultural and institutional frameworks, but also
on the participants dialogical competence, rooted in their socialization.
4.4 Social-Cognitive Development
Vygodsky related development to social contexts and social relations (Tudge and
Rogoff 1989), and social and contextual grounding is a cornerstone in his theo-
rizing, which is rooted in a classical Marxist paradigm. But cognitive psychology
and Piaget also underscore that the interplay between active subjects, and between
subjects and contexts, is a foundation of social-cognitive development. While
Piaget would stress the interactions between peers, Vygodsky would emphasise
the wider social contexts. The affective dimensions of social relations represent
a basic motivational drive in social-cognitive development (as illustrated by rela-
tions to peers), which undergoes qualitative transformations in the sense of the
development of new social-cognitive maps.
As a pedagogical model Vygodsky’s concept of the proximal zones of devel-
opment often puts the adult-child relationship at the centre, as does the notion of
“scaffolding”, the construction of frameworks that contribute to optimal develop-
ment. “Scaffolding,” which does not stem from Vygodsky but is based on the idea
of proximal zones, points clearly to a context in which the teacher sets up struc-
tures to help the student. But the focus on development through the relationship
between the competent and less competent misses the development that can arise
from the interaction among equals, where participants may lift themselves to lev-
els none of them had initially (see, e.g., Frønes 1995): the interaction produces
something that is more than the sum of the parts. A series of works emphasize
how development is facilitated by the interaction among peers (see, e.g., Rubin
et al. 2007). These social-cognitive processes also facilitate young peoples’ capac-
ity for social decentering, making them sensitive to their peers’ perspectives. An
important dimension of the interaction between peers is the desire for recognition.
Recognition from parents and teachers is important, but children’s desire for social
recognition is primarily related to those who represent their reference group in
most arenas—their peers.
Social-cognitive development is shaped by the interplay of the child’s inter-
action with other subjects and social contexts and by biological maturation.
Psychological studies have moved further into the dynamics of contexts and sub-
jects by distinguishing between shared and non-shared environments (these con-
cepts will be further discussed later). The environment of a child is composed of
the interplay of the qualities of the subject, the context and basic societal struc-
tures. From the perspective of socialization, children with the same amounts and
forms of economic and social capitals do not have the same social background.
In some sociological analyses it is fruitful to quantify social background to grasp
the relationships between life courses and social positions, but related to social-
cognitive development and socialization the social backgrounds of children have
to be understood as processes, not as positions.
4.5 Phases in Childhood and Adolescence in Psychological

Theory
Socialization and development are often depicted as taking place through phases,
in which certain forms of learning and development dominate; this is reflected in
everyday vocabulary and understanding. The psychoanalytical categorization of
child development has probably influenced the cultural understanding of the
phases of childhood. The concept of the Oedipal phase has contributed to the idea
that primary socialization takes place among small children internalising the
implicit ideological content and ideas of the parents. The period from 5 to 6 years
of age until puberty is understood as the latency phase; development is “latent”
until the child reaches the turbulence of puberty. The concept of latency has likely
contributed to the fact that, for a long period, “middle childhood” received much
less attention than either the infant/toddler stage or puberty. Middle childhood has
a strong position in Erikson’s understanding, in which the dichotomy of the period
is termed industry versus inferiority; the period is at the core of the development
of competencies and self-efficacy. In Harry S. Sullivan’s understanding (1953),5
middle childhood is when children develop the ability for “deeper” friendships; it
is the period of “best friends” and intense discourses on the meaning of friendship
(for a discussion, see Youniss 1980; Frønes 1995). Different theories and perspec-
tives underscore different aspect of the various phases.
In psychoanalytic understanding, puberty represents a period of dramatic physi-
ological and psychological changes. Erikson emphasizes that sexual maturation
coincides with the role-confusion rooted in adolescence as a period of transition
between childhood and adulthood. In his understanding the basic task of adoles-
cence is identity development; identity issues are also central to the sociological
understanding of youth and subcultures. That psychoanalysis primarily concep-
tualised adolescence as Sturm und Drang, (as depicted in Halls’s (1904) work),
may have contributed to an image of puberty and adolescence as a period in which
5http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Stack_Sullivan.
4.5 Phases in Childhood and Adolescence in Psychological Theory 59
confusion, mood swings and self-centred behaviour predominate, as illustrated by

books and feature articles with titles like “How to survive with a teenager in the
house.” Some empirical studies have questioned this depiction of the hyper-prob-
lematic teenager, and pointed out that most conflicts between parents and adoles-
cents are about trivialities, and that in recent decades the relationships between
parents and children have constantly improved (Coleman 2011; Caplow 1982).
Freud termed the self-centredness of infants and small children “primary nar-
cissism”, while “secondary narcissism” refers to possibly pathological patterns in
adolescence and adulthood. Narcissism is generally understood as excessive self-
centeredness, with grandiose self-images and little capacity to recognise the per-
spectives and existence of others, as illustrated by Narcissus and his girlfriend
Echo.6 But we may also see the narcissism of puberty as a form of self-centred
sensitivity. The transition to adolescence creates a phase of “normal narcissistic
vulnerability”,7 shaped by the distance between old identities and symbols and the
call to establish new identities in changing landscapes. Modern culture, with its
emphasis on intimacy, worship of being “seen”, and the “likes” of social media,
provides a landscape in which a potential Narcissus has many mirrors for the elab-
oration of self-infatuation. The identity work of young people is not only a con-
struction of a social identity, but also a process in which they seek to develop and
stabilize the Self, looking for an answer to the questions “Who am I”, or “Who do
I want to be”. Identity is something continuously created and recreated. Peers are
particularly important in this period because they support the development of the
Self; the vulnerability of the period is actively met by tight relationships with oth-
ers in the same situation.
Cognitive theories emphasize puberty as a period of restructuring; the dissolu-
tion of former identities and cognitive schemas produces new opportunities for
social recognition and identity development. The child progresses from being self-
centred to gradually being able to see other people’s perspectives. In Piaget’s
understanding the capacity for abstract thinking develops in puberty; concurrent
with basic physiological changes come fundamental changes in cognitive capaci-
ties. Different cognitive domains or modules develop at different paces; studies of
brain development suggest, for example, that young people’s abilities to assess and
foresee the consequences of their actions develop later than their ability to carry
out such acts.8
Cognitive developmental theories, the recent understanding of brain develop-
ment, and psychodynamic thinking all emphasize early adolescence as a period in
which the child gets a “second chance” to re-form itself as a subject. Puberty is a
problematic phase, but also one in which the ability for social and moral reflection
6Narsissus’ only concern was himself; his unrecognized girlfriend gradually disappeared and all
that was left of Echo was her voice.

7Unlike pathological narcissism, young persons construe an ideal that guides them through youth
and do not develop the vision of an omnipotent self.

8 http://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/the-teen-brain-still-under-construction/
index.shtml.
is accentuated by both the child’s increasing cognitive capacity and the increasing
social complexity of the environment. Because puberty is often underscored as a
problematic and vulnerable phase of risk and transition, the qualities of the phase
as a unique period of psychosocial re-construction are easily overlooked. Leaving
behind old roles and positions and the dissolution of old cognitive and social struc-
tures opens for new choices and opportunities. This coincides with the shift to
middle school/junior high and to high school; each transition represents new roles,
new networks and new social and cultural patterns. Puberty represents a qualitative
leap in the development of capacities for autonomy, understood as a capacity to act
on one’s own terms, and a transition into contexts that require increased autonomy.
The development of operational thinking in Piaget’s sense, which occurs dur-
ing the transition to adolescence, does not in itself imply an elaborated ability for
social decentering or the capacity to reflect on moral principles, even if decenter-
ing is understood as a feature of operational thought. The capacity to reflect on
ethical and social principles is rooted in social and intellectual experiences; the
development of such capacities extends into young adulthood. The ability to
reflect on moral principles will thus be unevenly distributed between groups and
individuals, due to the interplay of diverse individual capacities and different
social environments.
4.6 Socialization and the Family
In psychological (and sociological) theories, as well as in common understand-

ing, the family is the cornerstone of socialization. Parents are responsible for their
children’s care and development, and children’s future life courses are strongly
affected by their parents’ resources as well as by their genetic profiles. Studies
suggest that personality traits are highly influenced by genetic factors specific to
the individual child, while the “family climate”, within normal variations, seems
to influence children’s development and personality traits only to a modest extent.
This may be because the effects are different for different children and fami-
lies; the effects of family climate are thus neutralized in studies using big sam-
ples (Maccoby and Martin 1983), or it may be that parenting style as such has
little effect on personality development (Harris 1998). Genetic dispositions influ-
ence the child’s interaction with the environment; for instance, traditional crime
is often related to low self-control, and low self-control among children seems to
be more related to genetic profiles than to parental style of upbringing (Wright
and Beaver 2005). But crime is also understood as being rooted in social positions
and sociocultural contexts, as illustrated by traditional theories on youth and crime
(Cloward and Ohlin 1960).
Although parenting style may exert little influence on a child’s future personal-
ity, the family’s amount and forms of capital do influence his or her future life-
course. Parents decide the local environment of their children and which schools
they attend; they influence their educational development as well as their choices
4.6 Socialization and the Family 61
of peers. Economic conditions affect children’s development, as a high standard of

living and a reasonably good economy prevent the stress that often can be found
among impoverished families. But the source of income is also important; in the
generous Norwegian welfare society, studies indicate that families with economic
resources from wage income are more often capable of meeting basic social and
material needs than families whose resources are primarily generated by transfers
(Andersen 2008), even if the purchasing power of the families is about the same.
The explanation is probably that wage income is an indicator of social integra-
tion, while economic transfers can be an indication of marginalization. The same
dynamic is also illustrated by the fact that in welfare societies parents on social
assistance are more likely than others to have children who will be on social assis-
tance (Lorentzen et al. 2012). This may be due to parents as role models for the
children, or it may be due to lack of social, cultural or genetic resources or related
to discrimination of social and ethnic groups. Genetic profiles also create different
sensitivity to risk factors; dysfunctional family relationships are especially dan-
gerous for children with certain forms of vulnerability (Hetherington et al. 1994;
Turkheimer and Waldron 2000).
Psychological studies indicate that single-parent families are more prone to
stress and generally more vulnerable in different areas. A comprehensive study
on education indicates that in modern high-income countries, children living with
two parents do better in school than children living with one parent (Child Trends
World Family Map 2013). This may be because two parents represent more eco-
nomic, social and cultural capital, and it may be due to selection; the most suc-
cessful families are the least likely to dissolve. In poorer countries no such direct
relation is documented; this may be because single mothers often live with mem-
bers of the extended family, and it may be related to the fact that relatively few
children in poor countries get more than a basic education.
The social background of a child involves not only the economic, cultural
and social resources of the family, but also the parents’ efforts related to their
children’s development, and the social and cultural horizons parents convey.
Academic and social problems are often linked; risk factors in the family or indi-
vidual factors influence academic achievements and behaviour problems (Katz
and McClellan 1997; Gutman et al. 2003). Middle-class parents often provide
intense “micromanaging” of their children (Lareau 2003; Lareau and Weininger
2008), and this has triggered discussions about children’s lives being too organ-
ized. Research suggests that although there certainly are children who could have
profited from fewer organized activities, over-organized children may be a myth in
the United States (Mahoney et al. 2008). In parts of Asia the situation is perhaps
different; many Chinese and Korean children have very little time left when all the
activities and homework related to ensure educational success are finished.
The importance of parental support extends throughout childhood and adoles-
cence. As children get older, parents’ availability becomes more important than
their proximity; parents support their children practically, economically and emo-
tionally. Modern societies increase children’s need for their parents’ active support
and availability, also in the period of young adulthood, making children vulnerable
to inadequate family environments. Modern emerging adults (Arnett 2004) may

have reached sexual and social independence early, but are increasingly dependent
on their parents’ economic and social support.
4.7 Socialization and Peers
In psychoanalytic thinking peers have largely been focused on in relation to

puberty and adolescence, and related to the transition to a life outside the fam-
ily, although some approaches also emphasise peer relationships throughout child-
hood. For Piaget, peer relations were at the core of the development of social
understanding related to equality and reciprocity, as well as related to the develop-
ment of language. Various theories and perspectives assign different functions to
peers, illustrating that they serve a variety of functions, relative to context, age and
gender (for an overview see, e.g., Gross-Manos 2014).
Adults will probably constitute the basic significant others in infancy and early
childhood, but peers will soon be important in children’s social lives; this has
been strengthened by the growth of preschools. Peer relations are essential for the
development of language, social competence and the capacity to take the perspec-
tive of the other. The ability to imagine and grasp the other’s perspective—to iden-
tify with the other—requires a certain equality and similarity in status and position
of the social actors. A 12-year-old can imagine and identify with another in the
same age group, but will find it difficult to grasp an adult’s perspective and posi-
tion. The development of decentering among peers rests on identification based
on equality as well as similarity; parents do not decide whether one is considered
good at soccer at the age of seven or cool at the age of thirteen. The power of the
peer group has been the subject of a series of studies, and terms like “peer power”
(Adler and Adler 1998) illustrate that children and youth are understood as being
exposed to pressure from the norms and values of their peers.
Parent-child relationships are ascribed, you can not choose your parents.
Friendship and peer relations have to be achieved; this creates a distinct motivation
for these relationships. The capacities for empathy and social decentering develop
primarily through children’s contact with various groups of non-adults, through
relationships ranging from distant peers to close friendships (Frønes 1995). In
regard to Vygodsky’s concept of proximal zones, the importance of peers is related
to the more competent peer, who often will be older. In a cognitive perspective,
interaction with others of the same age fuels cognitive development through the
social complexity of peer interaction, where both the contexts and actors vary
continuously.
Recent years have brought increased attention to children’s development of
social skills. Lack of social integration among peers is not only a potential prob-
lem for the child as a child; it may also be an indicator of lack of social integration
in later life. The greater the degree of freedom in the choice of social relations,
the more important are social and cultural skills. The child-child relationship, in
4.7 Socialization and Peers 63
which everyone is understood as being on an equal footing, implies that social

status or popularity in principle can be achieved by all. That status often fol-
lows characteristics beyond the child’s control, such as physical appearance or
parental resources, does not change children’s idea that they belong to the same
category. That relationship and social status must be achieved suggests that rec-
ognition—and the lack of recognition—in fundamental social areas is formed in
the peer group. Processes of recognition operate at both a social micro level and
a structural level; social hierarchies structure who may “exchange” recognition.
(As with duelling among the aristocracy, only people of the same social level had
“the right” to duel; the acceptance of a challenge was an indication of the recogni-
tion of rank). Recognition among peers is related to status within groups, but also
to honour and position between groups; a quest for recognition may not only be
refused but may also be disallowed. Some are out of your league.
Moffit (2006a) shows that boys with conduct problems in early childhood,
and when these problems are maintained throughout childhood, tend to end up in
groups of boys with behavioural problems in early adolescence. Studies indicate a
possible connection between children’s peer relationships as toddlers and relation-
ships later in childhood; being rejected by peers at an early age may influence later
well-being (McDougall et al. 2001). Peer relations in early years do not determine
the later life course, but do influence later development, dependent on the interplay
of many factors.
Although childhood before puberty represents a gradual development of auton-
omy in terms of mastery of cognitive skills and social relationships, puberty takes
the form of a break with the roles and peer relations of childhood and a transition
to possible new role patterns. Puberty illustrates the interaction between risk and
potential; new opportunities may provide new landscapes in which social and indi-
vidual characteristics pertaining to childhood no longer exert the same influence.
In this period of transition the landscape of peers will change, as will the mecha-
nisms of popularity, status and friendship; at puberty the cognitive structures and
the social landscapes dissolve and reorganise. The importance of friendship and
peer relations is illustrated in a Scandinavian study showing that lack of peer rela-
tions and loneliness even predicted students’ intentions to leave school before
completing the upper secondary level (Frostad et al. 2015).
Studies indicate that positive relationships with parents correlate with positive
peer and friendship relationships later (Younis 1980). Peer relationships can also
act as a buffer to problematic relationships in the family; this appears to be more
pronounced for close friends than for general contact with peers (Adams et al.
2011). Group dynamics illustrate that the self is a social category; my self is con-
strued in relation to and in contact with others. Peers differ from families in that
the individual child meets the various others both as individuals and as representa-
tives of different social categories, such as gender, age, interests, positions, etc.
(Turner et al. 1987). Key aspects of the processes of socialization are understood
to take place among the peer group (Hartup 1983; Hartup and Moore 1990; Harris
1998; Ladd and Troop-Gordon 2003); social interaction among peers is gradually
converted into social skills and social identities.
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Chapter 5
Socialization and Life Course Analyses
Abstract The chapter examines children’s life history, in light of demograph-

ics and the basic concepts of the life course approach, relating identity and social
development to the phases of childhood. Children move through childhood as
cohorts; their experiences as young generations vary with societal formation and
historical period. Socialization is related to life phases and generational exchange,
illustrating that childhood, identity formation and well-being have to be under-
stood in relation to life phases and generations.
Keywords Life course · Generations · Demographics · Generational exchange
5.1 Demographics, Life Course Analyses and Socialization
Socialization is influenced by a number of demographic factors: the age profile

of the population, birth age for mothers, divorce rates, educational profiles, the
religious and ethnic/cultural compositions, and not least the birth rates and age
composition of the population, shape the landscape of socialization. Most indus-
trialized countries are experiencing declining birth rates and a decreasing num-
ber of young people. Extremely high birth rates and a young population (in some
countries about 50 % of the population is under 20 years of age), which are con-
centrated in parts of Asia and Africa, imply, for instance, that it will be hard for
young people to find employment, thus producing unstable social structures. Birth
rates and age composition vary among cultural groups; some religious groups,
for instance, have maintained high birth rates while the surrounding population
in general has had declining fertility. Populations may experience changes in reli-
gious composition because of different fertility rates between religious groups; the
“ultra orthodox” now constitute a much larger proportion of the Jewish population

68 5 Socialization and Life Course Analyses
in the United States and Israel than they did a few decades ago. Such demographic
trends are self-reinforcing; high fertility also produces a young population with
more people at a fertile age. Variations in birth rates can be large even between
countries that are located not far from each other; while Italy has Europe’s low-
est birth rate (northern Italy has at times slipped below one child per woman), the
impoverished Gaza Strip in Palestine, just across the Mediterranean Sea, has one
of the world’s highest birth rates, with about five children per woman in 2011. The
sex of the child has different significance in different countries; the prioritising
of male children in some regions not only influences patterns of socialization, in
some cases it produces a surplus of boys and men.
Most children in modern societies are growing up in small families. In the
knowledge-based economies, where there is a strong emphasis on parents’ capac-
ity to support their children’s education and development, families with a large
number of children combined with low education and low integration in the labour
market place these children at risk. In a welfare society such as Norway, boys liv-
ing with four or more siblings and with parents with low education who are out-
side the labour market have a very high probability of being charged with criminal
offenses (Frønes and Strømme 2014).
UNICEF1 indicates that a large proportion of girls in some parts of the world
become mothers in their early teens, which prevents them from getting an educa-
tion. Studies of certain high fertility groups, such as the Roma population in
Hungary, indicate that fertility is influenced not only by this group’s distinctive
culture and values, but also by the position of women in the labour market. Low
integration in the labour market increases the likelihood of having many children,
and high fertility entails that women’s opportunities for education and employ-
ment decrease (Janky 2006). Children are locked into this poverty dynamic.
Norwegian data show the same structure; among immigrant families from high
fertility regions, there seems to be a strong relationship between mother’s partici-
pation in the labour force and the number of children (Frønes and Strømme 2014).
In recent decades, the age of parents has in general increased in modern soci-
eties. From a purely medical perspective, this may produce somewhat higher
health risks; from a sociological perspective mature parents with good financial
resources are better equipped to meet the needs of reflective and competent par-
enting. Establishing a family at a mature age may also contribute to the stability
of marriages: the parents are more experienced, and the cultural period of young
adulthood is over, making divorce and reestablishment less likely. This does not
imply that the medical risks should be overlooked; at a certain level the increas-
ing age of mothers and fathers may represent risk factors related to the children’s
development.
1http://data.unicef.org/child-protection/child-marriage.
5.2 Life Course, Life Phases and Historical Change 69
5.2 Life Course, Life Phases and Historical Change
Life course studies seek to identify the structure of the life course related to social
background, gender, generation, and historical periods, and how these factors
interact within various societal formations. The issues of life course studies are
thus close to the perspective of socialization theory. The perspective of generations
and life course underlines childhood as a relational phenomenon (Alanen 2014);
the social landscape of the child changes as the child moves through the life
course of childhood. Studying the interplay between conditions at different periods
and stages in the life course has been made possible by the development of exten-
sive longitudinal data resources. For example, the life course of birth cohorts may
change quickly relative to gender. Comparing children born in 1950 in a specific
rural county in Norway and in Oslo (the capital), more boys than girls had gradu-
ated from high school twenty years later, and more often in the capital than in the
rural area. This corresponded with the established truth that boys reached a higher
educational level than girls, and that young people achieved a higher education
level in urban than in rural areas. However, among the cohorts born in the 1970s,
many more girls than boys had completed high school within twenty years, and
more often in the rural areas than in Oslo. In twenty years the number of high
school graduates was turned upside down in relation to gender and urbanisation.2
Boys were traditionally seen as more academically strong than girls; today boys
are considered the educational under-achievers. This genderquake (Wilkinson
1994) came as a surprise; as the New York Times asked in 1998, when journalists
saw the campuses teeming with young women: “Where have all the young men
gone?” The gender educational revolution illustrates a relationship between histor-
ical change and life course structures. The coming of the knowledge-based econ-
omy and working mothers also changed socialization practises related to early
childhood; in Norway about 2 % of children had access to kindergarten in 1970;
thirty years later preschool was part of the childhood of more than 90 % of the
children.
That the sexual debut age has decreased while the age of financial autonomy
has increased is also related to societal changes; fewer children in the family, more
space at home, reasonably wealthy parents and the long educational period make
living with their parents an option for young people. Among ethnic Scandinavian
youth more women than men leave home at a young age; in Italy more than half
of the young men between 25 and 34 are still living at home (the mammoni have
become a well-known phenomenon). In rural communities in Scandinavia (as in
other places in Europe), many poor children left home early in the period between
the wars; “to seek service” was not just a nursery rhyme, but also a reality for
many children. Poor children had to fend for themselves financially in adoles-
cence, while marriage and sexuality came later. The specific characteristics of
2Frønes (1996).
different historical periods also produce different consequences for various social
groups and for different age groups and generations. Elder’s classic study (1999)
reported that young teenage boys in the 1930s had to go to work when the par-
ents were unemployed. Working gave the young social maturity and autonomy,
and working teens were more likely than younger siblings to escape the stress at
home that was rooted in parental unemployment and poverty. The same situation
in today’s society would have had other consequences, as work is no longer an
option for young teens.
Different individuals are likely to experience historical changes as well as life
course changes differently; “dandelion children” refers to those with a capacity to
flourish under rough circumstances, while “orchid children” are highly sensitive
to their environment. Studies suggest that both biological and social factors cre-
ate sensitivity and resilience in certain contexts and in certain phases (Rutter et al.
2006; Sugden and Chambers 2010). Specific phases are also sensitive in the sense
that important aspects of learning and development seem to have to take place
in these phases (see, e.g., Montessori 1949) and cannot always be acquired later.
Phases are not only biologically but also socially structured and are related to soci-
etal formations. Certain patterns of behaviour are legitimate in one age phase but
not in another; for instance, poor impulse control is reasonable up to a certain age
but not later. Young children can learn by “trying out” in certain contexts, while
older children are expected to know the rules. The modern tweens and young
teens are in phases in which exaggerations of certain cultural cues are allowed,
while in later adolescence such behaviours are understood as immature. The
term “childish”, which is present throughout childhood as something one should
not be, underlines the need for mature behaviour. Educational institutions influ-
ence life course development, as transitions between grade levels at school as well
as between schools often represent distinct phases. American high schools have
always had distinct levels (freshman, sophomore, junior, senior), preschools have
divisions into age categories, and the transitions from primary to lower and upper
secondary schools represent changes in expected behaviour patterns and attitudes.
But modern transitions are in general not formally ritualized, and expected pat-
terns of behaviour in the various phases are to a strong degree defined by the child
and youth cultures.
The individual life courses, developing in the interplay of contextual factors,
individual characteristics and basic social structures, represent a link between his-
torical development and individual biographies; life course theory conceptualises
this link. The development of phases and periods varies with historical eras and
social groups; for example, the “teenage” phase emerged as a common intermedi-
ate phase between childhood and adulthood in the post-war industrial societies.
Over the past decades the period has been restructured, and the transition between
childhood and adolescence now takes the form of a separate phase, in English
referred to as “the tween phase”. This does not imply that the traditional ado-
lescent period occurs at a younger age; rather it represents a new phase between
childhood and youth. Changes in life course phases also change the social inter-
play between the phases: the evolution of the tweens phase changes the period of
5.2 Life Course, Life Phases and Historical Change 71
childhood and adolescence; and the phase of “emerging adulthood”, the gradual
acquisition of adult status in the early twenties rooted in the educational society,
influences the whole life course of childhood.
5.3 Life Course and Identity Construction
The structuring of the life course is closely associated with social identity; identity
formations among children are about who and what they are, as well as about who
and what they want to become. For children the future identity is not primarily
about their future as adults—but about their identity in the next phase of the life
course.
Identity refers to both ascribed and achieved characteristics and to individual as
well as social identity, the latter understood as the identity aspects of, for example,
social position, ethnicity or gender. Identity can be represented by various social
and cultural symbols; when a magazine interviews a celebrity showing off his or
her home or clothes and saying: “This is me”, it underscores that these signs point
to some essential features of identity. Clothing, furniture, and activities illustrate
that consumption represents visible signs of both individual and social identity.
Self-presentations in social media illustrate strategies and symbols in the construc-
tion of identities; through the use of certain symbols and the active avoidance of
others, the presenters provide narratives and images of themselves. Transitions
between phases may entail the constitution of new images, requiring the adoption
of new styles in clothes, music, and behaviour; what used to be at the centre of
identity in one phase may have to be avoided in the next. You don’t play in junior
high the way you did some months before at primary school; playing may be an
indication of being immature. Social identity is not only about what and who one
is, but also about what one is not. Identity markers are rooted in the need for being
identical with someone and something, as well as in the need for being different
from specific groups, life styles, positions and attitudes.
The challenges of identity construction are intensified in late childhood and
adolescence because these are periods of change and transition, and because the
educational system puts all young people of the same age together from preschool
to university. Although the systems provide educational achievement as a possi-
ble identity source, identity will largely be rooted in the groups of age mates, and
markers of social class and ethnicity will work through the symbolic languages of
peers. With increasing age the ascribed aspects of children’s identities, like age
and size, grow less important; adolescence demands the construction of a personal
identity. Some ascribed characteristics, like ethnicity, may take on new meaning
with the transition to adolescence (Prieur 2004), and may in some contexts repre-
sent an aspect of social identity that dominates behaviour and style in most aspects
of life (McWhorter 2001). Identity construction in different age phases reflects not
only background and biography, but also ideas about near and distant futures. A
12-year old, who says she intends to stay a “horse girl” in her first year in junior
high, is not only remaining in a role she knows, but is actively considering this as
a good position in the near future. But perhaps not for too long; social identities
get re-interpreted, and what is legitimate at the age of twelve may be an indica-
tion of social marginalisation at fourteen. The status of educational achievements
also varies with age, place, and historical period; thus, a 17-year-old Norwegian
boy, who decided not to move with his parents back home to Norway from another
country, justified this by saying that in Norway he would not get high status for
being good at school; although later, as a student at university, he would also get
credit for excellence in Norway. There are possible tensions between assigned
social identity and the identity a young person seeks to achieve, tensions that may
become intense in periods of transition. Parents often worry that the emerging teen
will identify with the wrong group, as risky and visible styles may seem attractive
to the inexperienced.
The construction of continuity and biography is a core part of identity forma-
tion; in childhood only the preface of the biography is set and the possible images
and narratives of the self are open. Being able to plan for the future is an essential
capacity in modern societies, and one aspect of this capacity is to be able to reflect
on future identity. While adults construe their identity continuity through narra-
tives of their past, children have to project possible coherent narratives into the
future. To achieve coherence the identity construction has to stretch into both the
next phase of life and to the more distant adult period; identity issues are interwo-
ven with the images and ideas of the future life course.
5.4 Generations and Generation Gaps
The concept of cohorts (Ryder 1965) refers to a group of people who share com-
mon experiences within a defined period; most often the concept points to birth
cohorts—those who were born in the same year or grouping of years. The term
“historical generations” (Mannheim 1952) refers to cohorts with common forma-
tive historical experiences in the period of youth. They may be cohorts that expe-
rienced distinct events, such as the generation of men who were in the trenches in
the First World War; but historical events do not always produce historical gen-
erations. Weisbrod (2007) argues, for instance, that specific historical events in
Germany, such as the fall of the Wall and German reunification, did not produce a
specific historical generation. However, studies indicate that historical generations
can also be shaped by complex cultural dynamics. The cohorts born during and
just after the Second World War developed anti-materialistic attitudes (Inglehart
1977), while the cohorts that followed seemed to develop more materialistic atti-
tudes, without any of them having experienced dramatic historical events.
In analysing youth cultures, possible “generation gaps” have been a clas-
sic theme. In Coleman’s classic The Adolescent Society (1961), youth cultures
occurred as a counterweight to the school culture, drawing young people towards
arenas other than study. Coleman did not postulate that the values of the youth
5.4 Generations and Generation Gaps 73
were fundamentally different from the values of the parents, but rather that the
young people where seeking status and recognition from within their own social
environments; school achievements did not provide that status, while sports and
“popularity” did. In the 1950s, a series of films described the generation gap; in
movies like “The Wild Ones” and “Rebel Without a Cause,” the message was that
the older generations were not able to comprehend the emotions and behaviours of
modern adolescents. More than divergent values, the generation gap consisted of a
widening of the cultural distance between the adults and the youth, with their new
styles in clothes and music and intense peer relations.
In the 1960s a number of analyses emphasized that historical development had
produced a certain cultural, social, and political generation gap. The student unrest
of the sixties, the variety of new subcultures, and the position of young people in a
period of rapid cultural change, largely associated with such symbols as new sexu-
alities and lifestyles, produced the idea of countercultures—young subcultures
understood as being in opposition to the dominant cultural patterns. Kenniston
(1971) introduced “youth” as a term encompassing the period of (late) adoles-
cence and young adulthood, a concept that has much in common with Erikson’s
understanding of adolescence as a moratorium, and Arnett’s (2004) later concept
of “emerging adults”. In the 1980s the concept of subcultures increasingly came
under attack from those interpreting flagrant young groups not as a “resistance”
but in terms of fashions and life styles.
The idea of a generation gap was gradually substituted by theories on lifestyle
differentiations and “tribalization” (McCracken 1988; Kozinets et al. 2007), in
which cultural patterns are understood as a patchwork of “symbolic tribes” and
lifestyles, and consumption patterns understood as signals of social affiliation.
Even if young people often represent the “new” in lifestyles, there are a wide vari-
ety of lifestyles, expressing class, gender, environment, region, religion, age, and
cultural trends. The panorama of modern lifestyles dissolves the idea of a common
“youth culture”, but attitudes and activities are at the same time often distinctly
related to age groups. Young people were the first to take up social media, and
the various life phases use social media in different ways. That the older genera-
tion in certain periods knows little about the lives of the young in certain areas (as
when parents know little about their children’s lives on Internet sites) illustrates
the idea of a generation gap, in the sense that parts of the lives of the young are
foreign to older generations. But differences in media use, or that generations may
have different fashions and styles, cannot be interpreted as deep disparities in val-
ues. Studies indicate some variations in attitudes in certain periods, as when the
younger generations in Western countries were the first to support gay marriages,
but attitudes related to this issue also vary strongly with cultural and social factors.
The changing interpretation of the cultural patterns of youth, from countercultures
to life styles, also changes the position of young sceneries and styles as arenas of
socialization, from oppositional socialization to differentiation of life styles.
The distance between generations may increase during periods of rapid change,
as postulated by Mannheim (1952), as styles and values of young people may be
rooted in the present while older generations tend to have their roots in the past.
Mannheim’s term generation as locality refers to young people living in a certain

area/region. Historical events may transform them into a generation in actuality,
and perhaps contribute to the development of generational consciousness, a gener-
ational critical reflexivity based on common historical roots. From the perspective
of socialization, Mannheim’s underlining of the youth phase as a socially sensitive
and formative phase is crucial; experiences later in the life course tend be to be
interpreted through the experiences of the formative years. This Marxist-inspired
theory postulates historical generations as potential social and political groups,
able to reflect and act as such, being socialised into a generational consciousness.
A generation is composed of different generational units, based on location, cul-
ture, class, and other factors: under certain historical conditions, specific genera-
tional units will be constituted, and some of them may evolve into dominant units
that may come to represent a historical generation. Social change may bring dif-
ferent consequences for different generational units and groups; the rough guys
in leather jackets, who would be the working class heroes in the industrial soci-
ety, are likely to be “drop outs” in the knowledge-based economies. Nor are the
images of past historical generations necessarily consistent with the factual past;
in retrospect, eras can be depicted through groups and symbols that were periph-
eral in the actual period: few young men in the 1950s had motorcycles or leather
jackets, as did Marlon Brando, but the ones who did are often used in images of
the era when the past is reconstructed.
Whatever the relationship between the generations, a society’s ability for criti-
cal reflection rests partly on the interplay between the different perspectives pro-
vided by historical generations being socialised in different historical periods.
The importance of older generations is related to their experiences of change and
variations over the life course, while the importance of the younger generations is
related both to their lack of traditional roots and to their genuine experiences of
confronting the dominant traditions in their formative years.
5.5 Life Course and Generational Exchange
There is a point in the life course when the young will take over from the elderly;
such transitions can be problematic, culturally as well as economically. In an agri-
cultural community the son or daughter’s takeover of the farm may produce gen-
erational tensions, as when the older generation retains power for too long. In this
case, the possible conflicts between the generations in the family are primarily
financial, although the possible new ideas of the young may produce cultural ten-
sions, and the generational conflicts within the families may in specific periods act
as the focal point of conflicts between historical generations. But family genera-
tions are also interdependent, as the private transfer of money and support follows
family lines. Modern welfare societies are based on contracts between genera-
tions, as illustrated by pension systems, in which the young pay for the elderly.
Demographic profiles will influence the cost of this transfer; a society with many
5.5 Life Course and Generational Exchange 75
elderly and few young people make the elderly expensive, especially when they
are granted generous pensions. While the political contracts in modern societies
transfer money from the younger generations to the elderly, within families money
often floats in the other direction.
The notion of “lost generations” refers to young cohorts that because of his-
torical circumstances do not get integrated into the labour market and the expected
life course. On the individual level, young people may lose the chance to estab-
lish families and realize the expected life course; on the macro level, societies may
lose the young people who were expected to become part of the generational con-
tracts. The concept of lost generations illustrates broader issues as well: how open
are different arenas and positions to the young generations? The degrees of open-
ness and closedness vary not only with economic conditions, but also with demo-
graphic profiles. Small generations will more easily acquire positions in the labour
market than large generations, as illustrated by countries with extremely high birth
rates and corresponding unemployment, poverty, and instability.
Generational development has to be related to gender; modern societies have
seen dramatic changes in the educational level and the life course of young
women, both shaping and mirroring changes in socialization patterns. Gender pat-
terns may vary between social classes and ethnic groups, and produce differences
between regions. In Scandinavia, for example, cities and rural areas often have dif-
ferent gender ratios; the cities are filled with women with high education, while
men with low education dominate some rural areas. One possible consequence is
an increased frequency of marriage between educated city women in their thirties
and older men, influencing socialization through the age composition of families.
5.6 Socialization, Life Course and Well-Being
Well-being refers to both objective and subjective factors, to material condi-

tions and standard of living as well as to psychosocial conditions and happiness.
Children’s well-being has to be understood as related to the intersection of the
subjective well-being of the present and the development of the capabilities of the
future; cultures, social classes and status groups differ in how they understand the
balance between the pleasures of the moment and the development of the capabili-
ties of the future. In the industrial society deferring gratification was understood as
a middle class virtue; in the knowledge-based economies the pressure on children
in regard to planning and long-term navigation is a general issue. The good life of
the present is a right, but the pleasures of the present may also be a trap, related
to the demands of the future. The prioritizing of goals and values related to well-
being varies between groups and individuals, and individuals may choose to fulfil
other purposes than personal well-being. Sacrificing objective well-being may of
course produce some kind of psychological well-being, and to estimate total well-
being is an impossible task.
The individual level of well-being is related both to individual capacities and to

social structures. The ability to choose requires not only freedom and rights, but
also the capacity to choose; socialization theories emphasise the development of
capacities to reflect and choose in a process where the opportunity structures are
part of the development of capacities. Subjective well-being influences socializa-
tion—and is influenced by factors shaping the processes of socialization. But the
relationship between subjective well-being and material and social conditions is
complex (Ben-Arieh et al. 2013); some studies indicate that there is a weak cor-
respondence between the well-being of parents and their children (Casas et al.
2012), also raising questions about who has the defining power related to chil-
dren’s well-being. Aristotle underlined that well-being cannot be confined to opti-
mizing individual pleasures, but has to be related to a normative understanding of
the good life. The definition of the good life will vary, as will the understanding of
the relationship between the good life of some and the well-being of all. The nor-
mative dimension of well-being can only be met with capacities for moral reflec-
tion, which are developed through socialization. Capacities for reflection are thus
an aspect of well-being not only as the ability to choose, but as moral reflexivity.
In the perspective of socialization well-being has to be related to the future as
well as to the present; that is, the qualities of the present have to be understood as
related to both the pleasures of the present and the influence of the present on the
future life course. Parents may prioritize the pleasures of the moment, endangering
the future well-being of the child; or the other way around, sacrifice the present
for the future, as expressed by sayings such as “spare the rod and spoil the child”,
some times in the form of cruelty towards children (Miller 1990). The capacity to
achieve well-being evolves at the intersection of structure and agency as well as at
the intersection of the present and the future; the process of well-being is interwo-
ven with the process of socialization.
References
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on child well-being. In A. Ben-Arieh, I. Frønes, F. Casas & J. E. Korbin (Eds.), Handbook of
child well-being (pp. 131–160). Frankfurt: Springer.
Ben-Arieh, A., Casas, F., Frønes, I., & Korbin, J. (2013). Multifaceted concept of child well-
being. In A. Ben-Arieh, I. Frønes, F. Casas, & J. E. Korbin (Eds.), Handbook of child well-
being (pp. 1–15). Frankfurt: Springer.
Casas, F., Coenders, G., Gonáles, M., Malo, S., Bertran, I., & Figuer, C. (2012). Testing the rela-
tionship between parents’ and their children’s subjective well-being. Journal of Happiness
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details/absorbentmind031961mbp. Accessed July 2, 2015.
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Rutter, M., Moffit, T., & Caspi, A. (2006). Gene–environment interplay and psychopathology:
Multiple varieties but real effects. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 47(3–4),
226–261.
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Chapter 6
Socialization as Biological-Social Interaction
Abstract Socialization is a social process with strong biological components that

interact with social and cultural frameworks and factors. The chapter illustrates
the interplay of social and genetic factors, referring to studies that underline that
babies are biologically designed for moving into communities of signs, as well as
to meta-perspectives on the relationship between evolution and culture.
Keywords Genetic biological interaction · Evolution · Vulnerability
6.1 The Evolutionary Frameworks of Socialization
With more or less clear reference to Darwin, many analyses see human behav-
iour in the framework of evolution; Tiger and Fox argued, for example, that some
thousands of years of cultural development had not changed “the basic wiring of
the human animal” (1978, p. 62). The 1970s, saw an intense debate on biological
versus cultural explanations (Caplan 1978); recent studies indicate that the focus
should rather be on the complex interactions between those factors.
An insight into the fundamental relationship between evolution and socializa-
tion is given by zoologist Karl Groos in The Play of Animals (1976, original edi-
tion 1898), where he argues that the period of childhood/youth exists because the
function of play for socialization. Socialization develops gradually through the
long period of evolution, and play becomes a basic mechanism for learning and
development (Bruner et al. 1976). The more socially advanced the species, the
more advanced the social play. An evolutionary perspective tells us that peers and
play have been with us throughout human history, whereas the small nuclear fam-
ily as we now encounter it is a new development (Frønes 1995). (This does not
imply that the nuclear family is not an essential development in social history.)

80 6 Socialization as Biological-Social Interaction
Certain aspects of children’s learning have long been understood to have

genetic components; their rapid mastering of language, for example, is seen as
an indication of innate mechanisms (Chomsky 1965). Infants can imitate facial
expressions when they are only three weeks old, which tells the same story: chil-
dren are biologically wired to confront social and communicative environments
(Meltzoff and Moore 1977). That the child seems to be able to show empathy at
a very young age, long before the capacities for social decentering are developed
as a complex cognitive operation, indicates that the child as a biological subject
is specifically equipped to enter into social relationships. Dawkins (2006) argues
that children have learned to trust adults throughout evolution; the child who does
not believe it when Mom says there are crocodiles in the water disappears from
history.
Most of human history has been spent in hunting and gathering communities;
basic genetic wiring can therefore be sought in the social patterns that dominated
during that period. Studies of people living in hunting and gathering societies have
also contributed to the analysis of possible basic features of human socialization.
In most of human history children spent their lives in small social units, where the
relationship with the mother was crucial, there were long breastfeeding periods,
and child care and responsibility in general were largely an issue of the whole
social unit and the multi-aged peer group. Children had few tasks, and spent most
of their time playing with peers. Humanity’s history is probably not a story of toil,
but perhaps a story of “Kind of Material Plenty”;1 Sahlins (2004) estimated the
average working hours in the Stone Age economy at about three to five hours per
working day. The children spent most of their time playing; in contrast to in the
later farming communities, there was little work to be done and few tasks were
suitable for children.
Evolution constituted the long period of socialization as the basic period of
development and learning, and play as the central mechanism of motor and social
development. Advanced primates illustrate the importance of play in the develop-
ment of social skills, and the importance of social competence underscores the
functions of peers in social development. Suomi and Harlow’s classic experiments
suggest that monkeys prevented from contact with peers do not develop the nec-
essary social skills needed for adult life. Harry Harlow concluded: “Thus, when
playmates were denied, the infant monkeys were socially crippled, and when this
variable was provided early, the infants survived both passive and brutal mothering
and even no mothering at all” (Harlow 1962, p. 10; see also Vicedo 2010). Play
imparts social/communication skills as well as the understanding of cultural pat-
terns and social roles; with increasing age, play gradually becomes more social
and communicatively complex. A paradox of modern childhood is that the empha-
sis on organised activities may have decreased the social and interactive complex-
ity that is at the core of the learning capacity of play.
1See Sahlins: http://www.eco-action.org/dt/affluent.html (retreived January 4, 2015).

6.1 The Evolutionary Frameworks of Socialization 81
Evolution and culture meet in the socialization process. Dennett (2004), see
also Brook and Ross (2002) approaches the relationship between culture and
nature by distinguishing between the physical stance (which refers to mass,
energy, etc.), the intentional stance (which refers to the intentional actors usu-
ally presented in a social science) and the design stance (the first two will not be
discussed here). From a socialization perspective, the fundamentals of the rela-
tionship between biological and social factors are grasped by the concept of the
design stance, which explores how the evolutionarily-anchored human design is
a prerequisite for socialization as a cultural process. Dennett argues that the fact
that autism involves certain biological characteristics that prevent other people
from being perceived as subjects indicates that man is biologically predisposed to
define others as subjects (Lombardo et al. 2007). The human child is understood to
possess inborn dialogic capacities to grasp the other’s situation at an earlier stage
than their cognitive capacity would indicate (Bråten 2007). The child is not fight-
ing against culturalization but is biologically predisposed to the development of
language and integration in culture (Bråten 1998, 2007 and 2009; Frønes 2007).
Through the perspective of the design stance, Dennett raises questions about evo-
lutionary design in a different way than did Wilson (1975) and sociobiology; the
idea is not to explain human actions through “the behaviours and rules by which
the individual human beings increase their Darwinian fitness” (Wilson 1978,
p. 230). Cultural development, pro-sociality, and civilization are explained not by
the struggle for the survival of the (genetic) closest relatives, but by how evolution
has developed biological potentials for cultural development and the recognition
of the other as a subject. The desire for the other’s recognition cannot be reduced
to biology, but requires abilities that are rooted in the inborn dialogic capacities
of the human child. Intersubjectivity has evolutionarily-anchored genetic precon-
ditions, but biology does not control the culture, as Wilson could be understood to
argue in the chapter on “sociobiology and sociology” in his famous Sociobiology
(1975). Biology influences the socialization process, but primarily because evolu-
tion facilitates socialization and development (Dennett 2004).
A peculiarity of human culture is the development of free will, an intersubjec-
tively rooted intentionality that is qualitatively different from the intentions we
ascribe to bees and lions. Free will is a complex phenomenon as well as a natu-
ral prerequisite in the logic of everyday life. Dennet (2004) seeks to explain that
freedom can exist even in a deterministic world through the fact that even simple
systems may seek to avoid anticipated future events. The capability to avoid events
is understood to illustrate how intentionality and choice can exist in a determin-
istic world. To avoid events also implies a certain reflexive capacity, a capacity
that is at the core of more elaborated systems of self-determination. Habermas
(2007) understands free will is an ineliminable component of attributing respon-
sibility and agency to social actors, but freedom is related to the capacity and
opportunity for self-determination. Socialization represents a gradual develop-
ment of self-determination, as well as the acquisition of skills, norms and culture.
The proto-language of babies and small children illustrates that the child learns
through processes that are basically driven by the child (Bateson 1979); the child
actively establishes relations with others through processes in which vocalizing,

gestures and all forms of communicative actions can be understood as linguistic
expressions (Bråten 2009; Trevarthen 1979, 2011). The human child is designed
for the social world and social development, but evolution is also a factor in social
development through biological dispositions.
6.2 Vulnerability and Development
Some children are for different reasons more vulnerable than others to certain
environments, but this vulnerability is often only observed under specific condi-
tions: genetic susceptibility that often is not registered at all in functional families
may be influential in dysfunctional families. Some children are more easily than
others wound into spirals of risk, and may to a greater extent than others require
extensive social stimuli and guidance to ensure positive development. The dynam-
ics of the processes of socialization are cumulative, which implies that small dif-
ferences over time may become major differences.
In recent decades, longitudinal studies have stressed the importance of infancy
and preschool age for further development, also entailing a strong focus on the
relationship between biology and social development. Children’s brains undergo
intense development during the first year, a development based on biological-
social interaction. The interplay between social and biological factors is illustrated
by studies of children in extremely deprived environments, which showed that
“prefrontal-dependent electrophysiological measures of attention were reduced in
the low socioeconomic groups compared to groups with high socioeconomic score
in a pattern similar to that observed in patients with lateral prefrontal cortex (PFC)
damage” (Kishiyama et al. 2009, p. 1106). The interactions between biological
development and social environment may imply that some children are set far
back in development when they start school, while others have entered fruitful and
positive spirals of development. Some genetic qualities produce resilience in rela-
tion to abuse and poor environments, while others produce vulnerability (see, e.g.,
Caspi et al. 2002; Moffitt 2006). Social conditions express themselves in different
ways through different genetic profiles; or the other way around: genetic profiles
express themselves in different ways in different social environments. Some chil-
dren are particularly vulnerable to lack of social stimulation, and in deprived envi-
ronments stimulation is more important than it is under normal conditions
(Turkheimer et al. 2003). Factors like low birth weight increase the risk of later
developmental problems. Some studies suggest that risk factors like these can be
counteracted by social stimulation, although the biological conditions may limit
the developmental possibilities (Conley et al. 2003). Studies of autism illustrate
how biological dispositions impair the development of social relations, and studies
of children from Romanian orphanages indicate that deprived conditions may
6.2 Vulnerability and Development 83
impair both cognitive and social development. These studies also show the plastic-
ity of development: when transferred to other environments, many (although not
all) of the Romanian children seemed to reach normal development (Kaler and
Freeman 1994; Rutter et al. 2007). Plasticity seems to have has its limitations, and
early poverty and deprivation may influence children’s brain development (Hanson
et al. 2013).2
Different phases are sensitive to certain types of genetic and social factors, and
some factors are more strongly genetically controlled than others. Intelligence is
strongly influenced by genetics but not genetically determined (Gottesman 2003);
studies suggest that while children of parents with little cultural capital did not
increase their intelligence with increasing age, children of educated parents
achieved a gradual improvement in intelligence scores (Feinstein 2003; Waldfogel
and Washbrook 2010). The concept of sensitive phases (see, e.g., Montessori
1949), that the mind is especially open to or absorbent of specific forms of learn-
ing in certain periods, is often understood as being biologically based. However,
such phases may also be rooted in the interplay between social and biological fac-
tors, and in the societal structuring of the life course of children.
Genes cannot be understood as factors dominating the behaviour of small chil-
dren and gradually being replaced by culture; biological parameters influence the
life course throughout life, and the genetic components may become more appar-
ent over time. When we follow cohorts of children to mature age, the importance
of the genetic profile does not diminish over the life course; the reverse seems
often to be the case: studies indicate that cognitive skills in childhood correlate
more strongly with occupational position in midlife than with the first professional
positions (Deary et al. 2005). This indicates complex interactions between culture,
class, and educational achievements; the influence of different factors on sociali-
zation is likely to vary with historical periods and social contexts. A study of the
1950 cohort of men in Aberdeen in Scotland suggests that genetic factors (for
this cohort during these historical conditions) had a greater effect on position in
midlife than social background, and that both factors were mediated through edu-
cation (von Stumm et al. 2010). The paradox—at first glance—is that the influence
of genes appears to increase over time.
Children’s behaviour cannot be understood only through biological-social
interaction at the micro level, but must be viewed in relation to societal forma-
tions and historical conditions. “Attention deficit disorder” (ADD) is a biologi-
cally based diagnosis, but it is also a syndrome embedded in the forms of attention
required and formulated by the knowledge society and educational institutions.
Attention deficit has biological roots, but must also be understood as based in the
need for self-discipline and the capacity for educational effort and concentration
required by a specific societal formation. That matters in early childhood can pre-
dict unemployment in adulthood (Caspi et al. 1998) may likewise be related to
2See: http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fnins.2014.00276/full.
the knowledge society; vulnerability in the transition to adult roles intensifies the
demands for positive developmental spirals and basic skills in the preschool age.
That some people are “reward dominated” and more sensitive than others to both
negative and positive factors (Dodge 2008) illustrates the complexity of the inter-
action between biological and social factors. Aggressive behaviour may have both
biological and social roots, but some children have stronger biological potentials
for aggression than others. Hyper-aggressive actions are socially embedded, but
individuals with genetic aggressive tendencies are particularly sensitive to specific
social contexts. The genetically aggressive child can interpret signals that others
would not have noticed as threatening or abusive and as requiring an aggressive
response (for a discussion, see, e.g., Dodge 2008). Recent studies indicate that
anti-sociality is rooted in complex underlying temperament patterns (Rothbart
et al. 2000; Bjørnebekk 2007). Specific environments may influence genetic pat-
terns; Wired’s classic article on the over-representation of Asperger’s syndrome
and autism among children in Silicon Valley postulates that people with specific
genetic profiles are drawn there, where they then meet and produce children with
an over-representation of specific genetic profiles (Silberman 2001). That genetic
predispositions for certain behavioural problems are triggered by some family
profiles (Caspi et al. 2002) illustrates the complexity of the interaction between
genetic and social factors, but also the need for cooperation between the social sci-
ences and neuroscience (Caspi and Moffit 2006).
From the perspective of socialization it is important to distinguish between evo-
lutionary psychology, which focuses on the evolutionarily-rooted biological pat-
terns influencing human behaviour, and behavioural genetics, which is concerned
with the dynamics of differentiation through the interaction between genetic and
social patterns. Specific behavioural patterns are understood as based in the inter-
action between the individual, contexts and the structural patterns rooted in evo-
lution. Belsky et al. (2010) argue that through the evolution children who grew
up under certain unsafe conditions more often than other children gave birth at
a young age, implying that this kind of social background, early maturation, and
early pregnancy were interwoven during evolution. To day the troubled girl with
a difficult background may not only develop behavioural problems as a conse-
quence of the environment as such, but also because such stress and unsafe con-
ditions may trigger early puberty, which entails increased risk for various social
and developmental problems. The child’s development will not only be influenced
by the specific social situation as such, the situation may also trigger complex
reactions rooted in evolution. The point is not whether this model is completely
empirically correct or not, but that it illustrates possible complex interactions we
still know little about. The basic assumption is that the child’s early life history
influences the future life course not only through interaction between social fac-
tors and genetic profiles, but possibly also through complex developmental pat-
terns anchored in evolution.
6.3 Social Background as a Process 85
6.3 Social Background as a Process
A challenge for the theorizing of socialization is how the mechanisms of interac-

tion and development can be identified. Studies based on sociological concepts,
such as “social background” or “amount and forms of capital,” indicate statistical
relationships between groups of variables and life course development, but do not
reveal the mechanisms of learning and development; as far as sociological under-
standing is concerned Cinderella and her sisters had the same social background.
But as parents know, their children are different and are experiencing different
contexts within the same family. Differentiation among siblings was originally
highlighted as a significant discovery; Plomin said that he wanted to “draw atten-
tion to the far-reaching implications of the finding that psychologically relevant
environmental influences make children in a family different from, not similar to,
one another” (Plomin and Daniels 1987, p. 1; see also Hetherington et al. 1994;
Turkheimer and Waldron 2000). The shared family environment did not seem
to explain much of children’s further personality development, but the influence
of non-shared environments seemed to be extensive. The concept of non-shared
environments is complex, since identical social environments never are identical
from the perspective of socialization; the same school environment can be experi-
enced as hell by some children and as heaven by others. Children interact differ-
ently with “similar” social environments. It is this process that constitutes a child’s
social background; social background is thus not an amount of various capitals or
a set of factors, but a process.
As regards childhood and socialization, social inequality has to be understood
not as a state but as a process; inequalities generate self-reinforcing processes that
produce further inequality. The actors influence the constitution of the contexts
that influence them; a dyslexic child may seek to avoid books and reading, and
develops environments adverse to its own development. A socially incompetent
child will easily be dismissed in challenging social situations, and be drawn to
simpler situations, often towards other children with low social competence.
Children (and adults) will thus often seek environments that reinforce their indi-
vidual characteristics and the trends in their development. Studies of the effect of
increased resources in the classroom show that “children select, modify and create
their own education in part on the basis of their genetic propensities”—“genotype
environment correlation illustrates how children add value to their own environ-
ments”3 (Haworth et al. 2011). Environments have to be understood as processes,
not only as structures; environments refer to the interplay between subjects and the
cultural and material contexts, and children add value to their environments. The
child and the environment can only be analytically separated.
3http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0016006.
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Chapter 7
Understanding Socialization
Abstract This chapter seeks to synthesize the perspectives and studies within the
various disciplines. Returning to the first chapter and the dimensions of socialisa-
tion, emancipation is underlined as a basic purpose of modern socialisation. The
driving force of socialisation is understood as the desire for recognition in all its
forms, ranging from success in career and heroism to love and friendship, which
the social subject seeks to realise within his or her symbolic order.
Keywords Social differentiation · Emancipation · Desire for recognition · Will

to meaning
7.1 Culturalization, Differentiation and Emancipation
A sociological understanding of socialization must include how factors ranging

from genes to social and economic structures interact and produce the dynamics
driving the processes. The challenge for the theorizing of socialization is to grasp
the process of socialization as a whole, while retaining the knowledge and per-
spectives of various disciplines and theories. Socialization rests on two different
processes that are interwoven. Generalization—the perspectives of the significant
others generalized to form a worldview; and differentiation—the identification not
only of divergent social positions and individuals, but also of the possible different
perspectives and worldviews of individual subjects. Individualization implies that
individual development and life course are influenced by the subject’s competence
and selective behaviour—the capacity to add value to the environment—as well as
by the subjective constitution of meaning. The subjective minds and the reflexive
subjectivity are constituted socially.

90 7 Understanding Socialization
As long as socialization was defined as the acquisition of existing cultural

patterns, as the internalisation of culture, reflections on the purpose or goal of
socialization were not relevant. But when children are understood as subjects and
socialization as the development of competencies, emancipation and the individual
capacity to identify the perspectives of the other; the qualities, purpose and mean-
ing of the processes of socialization become an issue. When the child is understood
as a subject, the socialization process is not only about culturalization but also
about the development of the subject’s potentials for action, reflection and eman-
cipation. The child is constituted as a subject in socialization theories not because
the active child is the ideal of the modern family and educational institutions, or
because modern labour markets require innovative and autonomous workers, but
because it is an essential analytical starting point for a theory of socialization.
Understanding competence and achievements as well as vulnerability and margin-
alisation requires an analytical framework in which the child is seen as a subject
who actively relates to its surroundings, and not as an object moulded by culture.
The child as a subject is both the vulnerable child and the competent child.
The relationship between the present and the future is one of meaning; the ideas
of the future shape the purpose of the present; that parents and children may have
different values and aspirations concerning the future (Casas et al. 2012), illus-
trates the complexity of socialization as well as of upbringing. Studies also indi-
cate that values may change over relatively short periods, influencing the ideas
of the future and the meaning of the actions in the present (Casas et al. 2007).
Socialization implies a gradual widening of the horizon, new horizons may pro-
duce new desires, for things, knowledge and experiences; and new psychologi-
cal “needs”, such as the desire for self-actualisation. Maslow (1943) underlines
that needs are not states but growth processes. The desire for self-actualisation
and knowledge may produce a lower level of subjective well-being; a quest for
wisdom does not necessarily correlate with increased happiness. The purpose
of socialization can therefore be not subjective well-being or happiness, but the
increase in knowledge and reflexive capacities. Socialization is also a normative
and societal issue; civilization is based on the development of empathic capaci-
ties that can bridge social and cultural differences. Empathy represents a complex
social-cognitive operation that presupposes the capacity to take the perspective
of the other; to decenter may imply to disconnect from the naturalised taken for
granted perspectives of the culture. In the perspective of socialization decentering
implies not only decentering the taken for granted, but also the capacity to concep-
tualize multiple perspectives and to take the perspective of the other. Grasping the
perspectives of the other is essential to the capacity for self-understanding as well
as for the construction of social and cultural meaning; the capacity for decentering
is a essential to the development of civilisation.
Reflexive societies, as depicted in modern sociology (e.g., Beck and Beck-
Gernsheim 2002; Giddens 1991), represent a challenge for socialization by requir-
ing increased capacities for decentering, social competence and reflexivity. These
capacities are prerequisites for adherence to the fundamentals that make com-
plex changing societies culturally and organizationally viable. The perspective of
7.1 Culturalization, Differentiation and Emancipation 91
socialization emphasizes the development of emancipatory reason, communicative

competence and the deliberative dimensions of democracy, wherein democratic
practice and the role as citizens represent both factual democratic processes and
arenas of socialization
7.2 Desire, Language and the Symbolic Order
In classical psychoanalytic thinking the child’s integration into the culture rep-
resents a kind of discomfort (Das Unbehagen in der Kultur, Freud 1994), as the
inborn desires and drives collide with the cultural and real-world frameworks. As
regards socialization, the problem with this perspective is that man’s “eternal long-
ing”—the longing for the “real” in Lacanian terms—seems to be a longing for an
imagined natural harmony that is destroyed by culture. But the desire for the “real”,
for wholeness, can be understood as not rooted in the meeting with the “discom-
fort” of culture and civilization, but as a desire rooted in the child’s gradual integra-
tion into the symbolic world. The experience of unfulfilled desires may not derive
from a tension between nature and culture, but from the child’s integration into lan-
guage and its myriad of narratives and metaphors. Biological needs are elaborated
as social/cultural desires, as when sexual needs are transformed into erotic desires:
the narratives, allegories, metonyms and metaphors of the symbolic framework not
only provide meaning, language produces quests for meaning as well. And human
desires do not always follow prescribed norms: the desire for transgression, espe-
cially found in the phases of youth, illustrates the complex interaction of individ-
ual and social factors (see Jenks 2003). From the perspective of socialization, it is
important that the will to transcend be understood as anchored in the transcendent
potential of language itself, in its mysterious ability to point beyond what exists
(Taylor 2010). That an increase in wealth does not seem to increase the level of
happiness (Easterlin 1974) is because the horizons of desire change with new levels
of wealth and new social praxes. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs implies that when
needs are met new needs develop; the ultimate craving is for self-realization. It is
no coincidence that self-realisation is a dominant modern master signifier.
Saussure (2011) distinguishes between signifier and signified, between the
actual written or spoken word (signifier), and its content (signified). What the
word refers to is termed the referent; in the sentence, “this is a dog” the dog is the
referent. In the relationship between the referent, the signifier, and the signified
it is easy to imagine the signified, the content, as a generalization based on the
referent: the idea of a dog is based on the factual dog(s). But human values and
desires like love, happiness, success, and joy have no direct physical referents; you
cannot see hate or love the way you can see a dog, horse or a mountain; the sign
points to new signs, narratives, images, ideas, actions, and metaphors, but not to
simple tangible referents. Love is not only a feeling, it is a master signifier, and
an overarching notion that draws associated signifiers into its realm. Tristan and
Isolde or Romeo and Juliet are specific stories, but they also represent narratives
and horizons that transcend the stories as such and leave the message that real
love is larger than life. In the great cultural narratives the declaration of love rep-
resents a transition from choice to destiny. These stories are “cold” in McLuhan’s
(1964) sense; the readers can read into the story their own desires, interpretations
and dreams. The major clichés grab both the most general and the most private
content; the first meeting in a love story is a cliché that also invokes all the private
experiences of such a meeting. The great clichés refer both to public expressions
and to private emotional experiences. The master signifiers get their power from
being at the same time public, private and emotional; it is these properties that
distinguish language from simple signals. The metaphorical and narrative richness
of language contains motivation, connotations and the seeds of transcendence; the
sign carries not only content, but also desire. The child’s encounters with language
and the symbolic order produce the regulation of desires through the internaliza-
tion of the symbolic order, but possibly also a desire to transcend this order. The
desire for transcendence is interwoven with the process of integration; socializa-
tion implies the capacity to transcend as well as to adapt.
7.3 The Driving Forces of Socialization
In sociology the concepts of agency and actor are often used to refer to an ana-
lytical perspective that differs from the structurally oriented perspective: actor-ori-
ented versus structure-oriented theories. In the perspective of socialization agency
does not primarily refer to an analytical perspective contrasting structurally ori-
ented perspectives, but to the development of the capacity to act in a competent
and reflexive way. The development of agency is understood as a gradual develop-
ment of self-determination.
The starting point of a theory of socialization is the child as subject, which
makes it possible to study socialization processes as both culturalization and as the
differentiation and development of individuals and groups. Individual and societal
developments are interwoven through relatively autonomous levels connecting the
micro and macro levels (Bronfenbrenner 1979). Biological drives are part of the
forces driving the processes of socialization; but the specific biological design of
humans is their capacity for social participation, developed through evolution, as
expressed by Dennet’s design stance (see page 53 in this book). That the newborn
baby is driven by its biological design for the development of social capacities, is
highly visible in a baby’s interaction with his or her environment (Bråten 2007).
The further development of the mind involves the elaboration of motivation and
the increasingly self-determinant subject; the vocabulary of motivation gradually
evolves with the child’s integration into language and culture. Integration into the
symbolic patterns of language can be understood as a growing conformity to cul-
tural patterns, but also as the opposite, the development of a capacity to transcend.
Lacan’s concept of the real illustrates that meaning is not just provided through
the socialization into language and culture, socialization gradually develops a
7.3 The Driving Forces of Socialization 93
desire for meaning; the quest for meaning thus becomes a driving force of sociali-
zation. The desire for meaning and transcendence unfolds in the search for rela-
tions and love, in the development of art and science, in the search for freedom,
spirituality or utopia, in monasteries as well as in marriages. “The real” escapes
simple definition but is constantly represented in language and the symbolic order;
language illustrates that the most important things often cannot be formulated
clearly, which strengthens the yearning to seek them.1 The real is not a fantasy that
actors may use to escape the world of everyday reality; actors may as well drown
themselves in everyday reality to escape the demands of the real as the visions and
dreams of what may be. The real- as the dream, images and purposes of the indi-
vidual—establishes the subjective as a possible force of transcendence. While
practical as well as discursive consciousness relate to language as a communica-
tive tool, encompassing tacit knowledge as well as discursive expressions, the
search for meaning also relates to the ability of language to point beyond itself, to
the language’s mysterious character (Taylor 2010). The limits of language are also
its strength; language indicates other ways of communication and expressions than
through words. The seeking of “the real” is an essential part of the driving force of
socialization in the period of youth.
In Maslow’s theory, self-actualisation, at the top of the hierarchy of needs, is
understood as fulfilment through activities and relations; self-actualisation rep-
resents a demand for an elaboration of meaning. The fundamental questions of
meaning can only be met by a reflexive engagement with life; to seek the good
and the “real” requires a socialization that develops the ability to reflect on what
the good and the real may be. For the philosopher Kierkegaard the desire for
the “real” would point to the religious experience, illustrating that the real can-
not be codified. Others may choose to seek the real in the kind of relationship
Kierkegaard rejected when he broke off with his fiancé. Possibly the real may be
experienced in fulfilling activities or relationships, or in art, through a language
that seeks to transcend the limits of language. The relationship between the real
and language as words can be illustrated by Isadora Duncan’s answer to the ques-
tion about what she was expressing through her dance: “If I could say it, I would
not have to dance it.”
7.4 The Desire for Recognition
Theories of socialization that treat children as objects escape the challenge of the
motivation of the subject; the forces of socialization are simply presumed to be
embedded in the social and cultural structure. When the child is positioned as the
subject, however, the process of socialization becomes active self-socialization
1Wittgenstein’s early statement “Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen”
(Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent), is contrary to the position of language in
socialization.
within a provided social framework. The question of motivation is then at the core
of the theory: what is driving the child to become socialised? One of the basic
motivational forces is the child’s urge for recognition, expressed in myriad ways
and evolving with the developing individual, as the urge for friendship, status and
mastering. The narrative of real love is perhaps the narrative of the optimal recog-
nition; someone recognises you in the most intense way just for what you are. The
idea of soul mates is not an idea of similarity, but of mutual recognition.
The struggle for recognition is rooted in intersubjectivity and social rela-
tions; objectification can then be understood as a disturbance of the possibility of
mutual recognition between autonomous subjects. Forms of objectifications may
be rooted in the construction of relations as such, or related to market forces and
the transformation of social relations into relations between exchange values. But
objectification is always about inauthenticity in relations, that is, lack of the capac-
ity or motivation to seek the other as a unique self. Discrimination and class struc-
tures illustrate the structuring of recognition and objectification; the invisibility of
servants that can be observed in codes of communications as well as in the physi-
cal arrangement of manors, showed inequality not only as differences in wealth
and positions, but also as lack of recognition of the other person as a subject. The
struggle of the lower classes represents not only a struggle for better conditions,
but also a struggle for recognition. What is labelled identity politics is often about
the recognition of groups that were not recognised as subjects before (or as exist-
ing at all).
Self-consciousness is based on recognition from autonomous subjects; the
acknowledgment of the slave is of little importance to the master. In an episode
of the TV series “Sopranos”, the mob boss discovers that since everyone laughs
heartily at all of his jokes, he will never know if his stories are really funny or not.
Their laughter indicates that at the structural level he is the absolute boss, but at
the level of interaction the opinions of his men may be worthless. Subjects seek-
ing to satisfy their desire for recognition and mutual affirmation between subjects,
will constitute the other as an independent subject. The recognition that grants the
other the position as subject provides a space of reason based on mutual recogni-
tion. For children, peers represent such a space, underscoring the special position
of peers (Frønes 1995). To be recognised for what one does and produces, as well
as for what one is as a person, is understood as a fundamental driving force in
the modern socialization process; that the lack of recognition by peers may influ-
ence the further life course is no surprise (French and Conrad 2001; Frostad et al.
2015). The desire for love and friendship illustrates the desire for mutual recogni-
tion—the desire for the desire of the other. Desire presupposes a distance between
subjects, as when love is understood as the desire for the other and for the desire
of the other. But love also involves the idea that this mutual desire will transcend
the existence of two subjects; that the couple will become one implies that they
are two.
The struggle for recognition is a driving force at the core of the agency of
the individual. A society that opens for recognition along many dimensions will
produce new desires; the possibility of choosing friends and peers underscores
7.4 The Desire for Recognition 95
popularity as a desire, the great narratives of love produce intense desires for hap-
piness, the possibilities of wealth produce the desires for wealth. The culture of a
democratic society not only provides the population with the right to vote, but with
the position of a subject and the desire of mutual recognition.
7.5 The Will to Meaning
The little child is thrown into the world; at the core of socialization is the acknowl-
edgement of this and its fundamental challenge: the constitution of meaning. The
seeking of meaning, as a driving force in socialization, refers to a desire for mean-
ingfulness, for the real, not a quest for the truth as such. In making a distinction
between “having” and “being”, Fromm (1976) emphasized that “being” not only
refers to a subjective experience of happiness, but to a productive, creative basic
attitude that ties individual self-realization to social development. While concepts
like social needs refer to needs produced by the social system—like a need for a
TV and information, for cars to get around in or for items defined by the various
“standard packages” or “style of living” (Townsend 1979),2 desire refers to the
development of motivation as well as intention. Desire represents a will not only
to act, but a will to meaning. The quest for meaning is influenced by social forms,
and structures, but is not determined by them.
The capacity for transcendence is likely to be strengthened by advanced moder-
nity, because of the demands for reflexive capacities to navigate in complex social
and cultural landscapes. The sociological concept of anomie is often described as
a lack of balance between available means and cultural goals (Merton 1938). In
Durkheim’s original theories anomie could be rooted in rapidly growing wealth
as well as in economic recessions and lack of opportunities; wealth and oppor-
tunities may dissolve the cultural norms that represent the boundaries of desire.
The resolution of frameworks of norms and values represents freedom from cul-
tural restraints, but also a possible constitution of the boundlessness of desire. The
modern challenge of anomie and cultural release is what is depicted as “reflex-
ive modernity” (Giddens 1991); individuals must themselves develop their own
frameworks that define happiness, identity and the essential purposes of life.
Aristotle distinguished between well-being as a hedonistic optimization of hap-
piness and pleasure, as opposed to well-being as doing what is worth doing; the
big question following from that is what is worth doing and who should decide
that. Happiness as subjective experience also brings up the question of my hap-
piness versus the happiness of all, and the issue of private versus general inter-
ests. Happiness also raises the question of a “fool’s paradise,” happiness based on
illusions that will not last. In Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Juliet’s old servant
realizes that Juliet can be lead into fool’s paradise. In Ibsen’s A Doll House, Nora
2The concept of “standard packages” refers to norms indicating a proper level of consumption
and an acceptable life style.

leaves when she realises that her happiness is based on her singing in a cage in
which she is not recognized as a subject. The concept of a fool’s paradise illus-
trates the intricate relationship between self-realization, happiness and context.
In A Doll House, Nora’s new desire is a desire for recognition, and she closes
the door on what once made her happy. Her ideas of what is worth doing have
changed, she herself has changed it. The self is relational, for Nora to turn back
“the most wonderful thing of all would have to happen”; the constituting a new
relationship between subjects.
The self is not a substance, but a reflexive relationship with others as well as
with the inner dialogues encompassing relations, values and meaning. As
expressed in a famous quote of the philosopher Kierkegaard: “The self is a
Relation which relates itself to its own self, or it is in the Relation that the Relation
relates itself to its own self; the Self is not the Relation but that the Relation relates
itself to its own self”.3 The fundamental challenge for the modern Self is to relate
to itself as a set of relations, as desires and self-reflexivity. The Self is a reflexive
relationship; the Self is of culture but is not controlled by culture. The develop-
ment of the Self is both a process, a purpose and a desire; the Self is a product of
socialization as culturalization and of socialization as emancipation.
The interplay of factors at the microlevel is framed by societal formations. The
last part of the book will seek to illustrate parts of this interplay through an analy-
sis of socialization in the societal formation that is termed the knowledge-based
economies.
References
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its social and political consequences. London: Sage.
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design. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
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mirror neurons to empathy. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Casas, F., Figuer, C., Gonzalez, M., & Malo, S. (2007). The values adolescents aspire to, their
well-being and the values parents aspire to for their children. Social Indicators Research,
84(3), 271–290.
Casas, F., Coenders, G., Gonáles, M., Malo, S., Bertran, I., & Figuer, C. (2012). Testing the rela-
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holder sig til sig selv; Selvet er ikke Forholdet, men at Forholdet forholder sig til sig selv”)
(Kierkegaard 1849, For more details see Kierkegaard S (1983)).
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Cambridge: Polity.
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Part II
The Knowledge Societies
and the Structuring of Socialization
and the Life Course
Chapter 8
The Knowledge Society
Abstract This section of the book addresses socialization in the knowledge-based

societies, focussing on how this societal formation structures the life phases of
childhood. In the educational knowledge society the processes of socialization are
increasingly understood as the accumulation of social and cultural capital, related
to the functions of educational development.
Keywords Knowledge based economy · Transformative learning · Industrial

society · Forms of capital
8.1 The Coming of the Knowledge Society
The movement from the industrial to a knowledge-based economy is more than

just a change in the means of production; it is a change in basic discourses, con-
cepts and beliefs, and a change in both the structure and content of childhood. The
transition to the knowledge-based economy has changed childhood and socializa-
tion not only with new technologies, globalization and new media, but by calling
attention to the child as an active resource that must be developed and qualified
through the socialization process. Childhood has been transformed from a period
dominated by basic schooling and play, and a youth period in which the majority
were “waiting” to become adults, into a period of intense educational qualification.
The terms industrial society and knowledge society are used as metaphors to
illustrate societal changes in the last decades that have altered both the content and
the structure of the periods of childhood and youth. If we use Wikipedia for a pop-
ular definition, the industrial society refers to the culture, social structures and
dominant way of life in “a society driven by the use of technology to enable mass
production, supporting a large population with a high capacity for division of

102 8 The Knowledge Society
labour”.1 Industrial societies evolved in the wake of the industrial revolution; the
basic means of production were the big factories and the assembly lines, which
symbolized the standardization of work and its reduction to simple labour, and
unskilled and semiskilled workers dominated the workforce. In this book, the term
“industrial society” refers to the post-war societies of the 1950s, not to the poverty
and child labour of early industrialization. The children of the industrial society of
the 1950s were (in general) in school and not working, but in most countries edu-
cation was limited to elementary school for the majority of the children. Children
in the industrial societies were no longer required for the tasks demanded of chil-
dren in the agrarian communities, and the educational marathon of the knowledge
societies was yet come. This provided children with a high degree of freedom and
little pressure from work, education or parenting. This was a playful childhood,
one that within a short period of time established itself as the very image of
childhood.2
After the childhood period came the turmoil of adolescence, followed by estab-
lishing a family. This was the statistically dominant life course, and the dominant
cultural narrative of growing up. The tranquillity of childhood was interrupted by a
troubled adolescence that ended in the adult role, a life course division that
appeared to be “natural” and was mirrored in psychology and sociology. The term
“teenage” was constituted in parallel with the expansion of the consumer society.
Teenagers were visible through a distinctive symbolic consumption and style,
which also underscored the detachment of youth from the family and the tradi-
tional community organizations, and the problem of youth was primarily lack of
social control. In most western countries (part of the United States is the possible
exception) there was in general little space for young people at home, physically
as well as culturally; the life of children and teens took place outside at various
gathering places. In some areas the car was a meeting place, a way to escape the
control of older generations, and a symbol of the youth culture. The teenage
period was described as a “period of waiting” for an adult position, as a US news-
paper expressed it in 1938: “We have made of youth a period of waiting. Too old
for childhood’s play, too young for adult activities; unwanted in any job, youth is
condemned to kill time.”3 Most young people did not wait long and established
families early. When young men walked through the industrial gates they also
entered adult roles, as did young women when they became housewives and moth-
ers. These transitions represented a tremendous integrative force, and most youth
entered into expected adult family roles in their early twenties. The same integra-
tive forces excluded many, especially women, from education and the realising of
their potentials.
Increasing prosperity was provided by a mass production that also produced
standardization. The modern crowd was seen as governed by standardised norms
1http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_society.
2Epitomized by Mark Twain and Astrid Lingren.
3Ames Daily Tribune (Iowa), October 10, 1938, page 4.
8.1 The Coming of the Knowledge Society 103
and the opinions of others (Riesman 1961), and by simple status seeking (Packard
1959). Books such as Growing Up Absurd (Goodman 1960) described socializa-
tion in the industrial society as partly meaningless and alienating. Teenagers in the
1950s epitomized psychological turmoil, in the 1960s they were gradually trans-
formed into political and cultural rebels. The expansion of the educational system
and the growing number of students represented a general postponement of fam-
ily life, and provided fertile ground for cultural change. The cultural and sexual
revolutions were facilitated by the birth control pill as well as by the sheer number
of baby boomers, and the high number of young people contributed to their cul-
tural positions as well as to their visibility. The conflicts between generations in
the 1960s and 1970s can partly be understood as an adaptation to the coming of
the post-industrial society, an adaptation in which the young were in the forefront
of a general cultural change (Frank 1998).
The coming of the knowledge society is not rooted in cultural changes as such
but in the fundamental change in the means of production, from the large facto-
ries and assembly lines to the focus on human capital. Wikipedia illustrates the
popular understanding of what is meant by the “knowledge society”: “any soci-
ety where knowledge is the primary production resource instead of capital and
labour”. The term “knowledge-based economy”, derives from Peter Drucker and
his book The Age of Discontinuity: Guidelines to Our Changing Society (1969).
Human capital, i.e., competence and brainpower, as the key factor of production
has an enormous influence on the structuring of childhood, since the future of the
nation, as well as of individuals, is based on the (future) skills of the children.
As regards socialization, the knowledge society can be understood as a distinc-
tive societal formation, built on a distinctive mode of production with human capi-
tal as the fundamental means of production (Bell 1974; Nickell and Bell 1995).
The knowledge society, or “the knowledge-based economy,” refers to both the
increased production of services, information and administration and to the fact
that physical products are increasingly produced through a knowledge-industrial
base. In the knowledge-based economies childhood becomes the period for the
development and elaboration of the means of production, illustrated by the expan-
sion of educational institutions. This expansion, partly driven by the self-interests
of these institutions, may contribute to educational inflation, which in itself may
contribute to increasing educational pressure and possible marginalisation.
The PISA surveys of children’s competence are seen as indicators of how well
suited the different countries are to meeting the demands of the knowledge-based
economy (Esping-Andersen 2002), as illustrated by the ranking of nations; the
PISA study is itself a child of the knowledge-based economy. Educational institu-
tions are structuring childhood by organizing children’s everyday life as well as
their life course (see, for instance, OECD 2011, 2012). The educational culture is
not limited to educational institutions; it permeates organizations, leisure activi-
ties, the family and the culture in general. The industrial society provided young
people with increasing leisure time filled with consumption and peer relations,
constituting youth culture as an important part of socialization. The knowledge-
based economies are gradually making obsolete the traditional descriptions of
teens hanging out on the street corner; as most vividly illustrated in countries like
China, Korea and Japan, educational activities are penetrating leisure time.
8.2 Socialization in the Knowledge-Based Economies
Educational institutions shape modern childhood by organizing children’s days as

well as their life course, and dropping out is regarded as the basic factor of social
exclusion (Barton 2005; Berlin et al. 2011; OECD 2012). The emphasis on qualifi-
cations and the position of educational capital in socialization processes have
turned attention to possible stimulating and preventive strategies: research indi-
cates that knowledge societies emphasize the importance of the early years. A
large longitudinal study suggests that programs like the U.S. Head Start may influ-
ence child development (Oden et al. 2000); and a Norwegian study shows that pre-
schools have major positive effects on children’s educational attainment and
subsequent integration in the labour market (Havnes and Mogstad 2009).
Preschool seems in general to have effects related to possible social exclusion
(see, e.g., Sammons et al. 2004); and especially numeracy seems to have en effect
on future earnings (Dougherty 2003). Although research on the influence of early
day care is methodologically complex, seeking to sort out the interplay between
the effects of parents, genetic profiles, and time spent in nurseries/preschool; stud-
ies indicate, not surprisingly, that the quality of day-care programs is of impor-
tance for development measured in terms of success/problems at school. Programs
for children and parents target different social groups, age groups and contexts; in
2014 the database for the organization Child Trends4 contained descriptions of
more than 600 different programs that have been evaluated. The expansion of edu-
cational programs is of course related to the knowledge society, both as prevention
of educational marginalisation and as educational training.
The industrial societies’ research on youth focused on peers largely as pos-
sible sources of negative capital, and the discussion about the influence of peers
and subcultures is still concerned with risk; but the knowledge societies’ demands
for educational development also point to peers as possible positive capital. The
importance of peers for cognitive and social development is well documented, and
the interaction with peers is especially important in contexts that require master-
ing a variety of complex language games. The effect of peers in the classroom
has increasingly been the object of research (Lavy and Schlosser 2011; Whitmore
2005), illustrating the position of peers in the accumulation of capitals.
Effects of neighbourhood can be identified as the roots of norms and values
(Melton 2010), as social capital (Coleman 1988), and as physical and social ecol-
ogy (Ungar 2011). Disadvantaged communities seem especially to influence
achievement outcomes of students of lower socioeconomic status (Sykes and
4http://www.childtrends.org.
8.2 Socialization in the Knowledge-Based Economies 105
Kuyper 2009). That teenagers are more likely to drop out if they live in neigh-
bourhoods with a high percentage of dropouts, and that the negative effects of
bad peers seem to be stronger than the effects of good peers (Lavy et al. 2009),
illustrate how risks for low school achievement accumulate in some social
environments.
The ideologies of the knowledge society are reflected in the expanding array
of educational toys that promise to encourage development and learning. Baby
Einstein and stimulating software are part of modern “edutainment,” a mix of fun
and learning that is supposed to provide a good start in life. Educational toys rep-
resent a billion dollar industry, and are directed largely towards the very young-
est children, since parents have more control over them, and the first phase in
life is regarded as the sensitive starting point. The self-help trend is also reach-
ing out to ambitious parents; books on how to stimulate and support one’s chil-
dren have found a market in the knowledge society. Children from parts of Asia
are the best school achievers, and the market even provides books from which all
parents can learn how to create an Asian-style “educational family” and ensure
that their children will be best in class (Abboud and Kim 2011). Some mothers
leave occupational careers to support their children’s achievements and capital
accumulation, illustrating the possible pressure on upbringing in the educational
society (Badinter 2012). There has also been an increase in children’s participa-
tion in organized activities outside of educational institutions. In some Asian
countries, such as China, Japan and Korea, this involves largely educational activi-
ties; whereas in the U.S. and Europe, these are often dominated by cultural activi-
ties and sports. Cultural activities are understood as having a positive impact on
the development of cultural and social capital, and recent decades have seen an
increase in organised activities in the knowledge-based economies, especially
among young and pre-school children.
The importance of being part of the right social and cultural circles is of course
nothing new; bourgeois children have always been protected by cultural, economic
and institutional walls. Added to the hereditary hierarchies of distinctions and
resources, knowledge societies put increasing emphasis on individual and parental
strategies for the accumulation of resources. The knowledge-based economy also
requires expertise for social navigation; the life course underlines the need for
“planfulness” or “competence for planning” (Clausen 1991). But the economic,
cultural and psychological resources facilitating the cultivation of achievements,
the competence for planning, and the accumulation of capitals are unevenly dis-
tributed. That school achievements are strongly related to risk development when
the other general suspects in sociology are accounted for, (see e.g. Frønes and
Strømme 2014; Socialstyrelsen, Social Rapport5 2010) indicate the complexity of
the processes of skills formation (Cunha and Heckman 2007). Swedish studies
showed low educational achievements among former child welfare clients
(Vinnerljung et al. 2005), illustrating processes of marginalisation, as well as a
5Swedish ministry of social welfare.

tendency to underestimate the cognitive capacities of certain groups of children at

risk (Tideman et al. 2011). Some environments experience steady decline in social
and economic capitals, such as the poverty-stricken French suburbs characterised
by processes in which groups with resources continuously leave the areas, while
groups with few resources remain (Wacquant 1997).
Social integration and a successful life course are based on the accumulation
of capitals; risk is based on the lack of such accumulation, or the accumulation of
negative capital. The axis of socialization theory moves from the internalisation of
norms and values, where unsuccessful socialization was termed deviance, to the
development of capacities and capitals, where unsuccessful socialization is under-
stood as marginalisation.
8.3 Capability and Transformative Learning
A basic mechanism in the socialization process is naturalisation: the dominant

cultural patterns are perceived as natural and obvious, influencing the horizon of
the subjects. Related to gender, the naturalisation of certain positions is illustrated
by a critique of Kohlberg’s understanding of development and moral categories;
Gilligan (1982) argued that women and men were relating to different categories,
and that Kohlberg’s categorisation represented a naturalisation of the moral cat-
egories of (middle class) men. The same logic can of course be applied to differ-
ent contexts; in the relationship between social class and school, the working class
is “the other” in institutions where middle-class styles and codes are understood
as natural. Cultures vary; educational achievements, for instance, are interpreted
as unfeminine in some groups and as lack of masculinity in others (McWhorter
2003). Different environments provide different cultural opportunities and barri-
ers, as when the naturalized positions of various classes and subgroups influence
the cultural horizons of the life course navigation.
The knowledge society may generate social regimentation by the strong empha-
sis on planning life careers and educational achievements, but it also opens for
transformative learning. Transformational/transformative learning (Mezirow
1997) involves the development of the capacity for critical autonomous think-
ing that penetrates the veils of naturalisation. The knowledge society provides for
such development through its cultural, social and technological complexity; this
complex and changing society can integrate the learning and development on
which it depends. The knowledge society creates the need for discipline through
the requirements of skills and competence, and provides a fertile basis for trans-
formative learning through its emphasis on innovation and education, and not
least, through its complexity and changeability. In the context of socialization,
transformative learning refers to a development of reflexivity that is instigated
by the competent subjects’ direct confrontation with complexity. Transformative
learning illustrates the possible generating of new horizons and possible tran-
scendence through social praxis and experience; complexity acts as proximal
8.3 Capability and Transformative Learning 107
zones producing learning and new frames of reference. Transformative learning

may provides for new development, as illustrated by the growth of innovation
and new industries. On the level of individuals and groups modern complexity is
likely to produce new forms understanding as well as new forms of inequality and
marginalisation.
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Chapter 9
The Knowledge Society and Life Phase
Dynamics
Abstract The process of socialization is structured by the life course of childhood;

the knowledge society transforms the life phases of childhood as well as their inter-
play. This chapter analyses the changes in the phases of childhood, from toddler to
the young adult, as well as changes in the family and peer group. The emphasis on
the first years of life is related to the need for a good start in the educational society.
Keywords The structuring of life phases · The function of life phases ·

Toddlerhood · Middle childhood · Tweens · Adolescence
9.1 Life Course and Life Phases
Societal formations influence the content of the life phases and the structure of
the life course, as illustrated by the transformation of childhood from the hunt-
ing and gathering societies to the agrarian societies, and from the agrarian to the
industrial. In the knowledge societies educational institutions structure the experi-
ence of children and youth related to both everyday life and the life course. As the
educational institutions expand in years as well as in daily hours, they formulate
the informal criteria for successful socialization; they also issue the certificates for
a variety of occupational positions. The knowledge society shapes the processes
of socialization by altering the life phases of childhood in both structure and con-
tent. The structuring of children’s lives through educational institutions represents
a homogenization of their lives, but the emphasis on capabilities also produces a
differentiation of individuals and social groups as well as an increased risk of the
marginalization rooted in educational failure.
The changing of the transition to adult roles, from the early establishment of
a family in the industrial society to the knowledge society’s creation of a long

110 9 The Knowledge Society and Life Phase Dynamics
transitional period, put new emphasis on the interplay between phases, and on
the early years and the preschool period. The political metaphors legitimating the
investment in the first years, such as a “Sure Start” (UK), “No child left behind”
(US), and “A fair go” (AUS), all point to the importance of the baby and toddler
periods as the foundation of further life course dynamics.
9.2 Babyhood and Toddlerhood: The Foundation

of Development
The pre-school period has been transformed into a critical phase for the develop-
ment of basic skills. The Internet informs parents that: “For many kids, the most
important years of schooling come before they can even read”.1 This can be re-
written as “before they can even talk”. The quality of early relationships with par-
ents appears to influence both social and cognitive development. Studies of the
harmful effects of social deprivation, underlining the baby’s need for social rela-
tions, also influence general attitudes related to the importance of the infancy
period. Numerous studies emphasizing the baby as a subject provide a new per-
spective on baby’s development and on the influence of the first years on the future
life course. The OECD emphasizes toddler and pre-school education as being of
fundamental importance in the knowledge-based economy.2 Heckman (2000)
underlines the importance of the early years and also the development of non-cog-
nitive skills. Social and communicative competence have increased in importance
both in themselves and because social skills contribute to the development of other
skills. Basic trust3 is a prerequisite for cognitive and social development by pro-
viding the child with a sense of security that allows it to seek challenges and enter
into the positive developmental spirals in which skills beget skills.
The US Department of Education states: “Studies prove that children who have
rich early learning experiences are better prepared to thrive in kindergarten and
beyond” and “the goal is to provide high-quality early learning opportunities to all
children in America so that they enter kindergarten ready to succeed in school and
in life.”4 The basic functions of preschools can be linked to the development of
linguistic, social and communicative skills, preparation for the educational culture,
and the prevention of possible risk development. Infant and toddler phases must
create a scaffold for further development, a scaffold that is especially important
because of the dynamics of achievement and risk that characterise the knowledge
society.
1(http://www.wired.com/2012/03/does-preschool-matter/).
2http://www.oecd.org/edu/school/startingstrongiii-aqualitytoolboxforearlychildhoodeducationand
care.htm.
3Basic trust (versus mistrust) is related to infancy, the first stage of Erikson’s eight stages. See
e.g.: http://www.simplypsychology.org/Erik-Erikson.html.
4http://www.ed.gov/early-learning.
9.3 Middle Childhood: From Latency to Learning 111
9.3 Middle Childhood: From Latency to Learning
The life phase often referred to as “middle childhood”, from the age of six to
eleven-twelwe, is the period most often associated with childhood. In an agrar-
ian society most children in this phase were working, while in the late period of
the industrial society this phase achieved the position of the “classic” childhood
of schooling and play. The knowledge society rewrites middle childhood into a
period of extensive learning. As in the agrarian society, children are working, but
now their work is their educational preparation for the future, the elaboration of
the new means of production. Erikson saw this age phase as a period in which the
focus is on the development of competence, and a basic task is the development of
an identity related to abilities and mastering. The knowledge society accentuates
the importance of mastery; Erikson’s description of this phase is industry versus
inferiority, which can be described as being able to cope versus the increased risk
of marginalization.
Positive development in middle childhood probably also has a stabilizing
effect on possible turbulence in puberty; a stable social identity related to coping
implies that the child more easily may combine an orientation towards the future
with the orientation towards the excitement of the moment that is often associated
with puberty. The importance of the phase has increased in the knowledge society,
both in terms of skills development, related to social skills and the ability of social
elaboration, and in relation to risk development in the later phases. The variety of
intervention programs developed in the knowledge-based economies illustrates the
need for intervention directed towards children/pupils at risk (Sørlie and Ogden
2007). While the middle childhood in many ways was invisible in the industrial
society, the knowledge base society and the educational institutions locate middel
childhood at the centre of attention.
9.4 Tweens and Puberty: From Confusion to Navigation
The tweens and early teen phase is here termed social puberty; it represents a
transition to the phase of youth, and is embedded in the long youth period of the
educational society. The transition to puberty is a period of reconstruction and
reorientation; some identities have to be left behind while a panorama of possible
social identities and identity strategies opens up. The phase is understood as one
of intense social and cultural learning, in which development takes place through
social play, in ambiguous playful language games in which signs and symbols
are tried out in settings where statements and actions are both serious and part of
playful interaction (Frønes 1995); the symbolic framework opens for trying out
statements and actions without severe social consequences (See p. 13). Statements
are serious and non-serious at different levels; teen love is deadly serious, but the
end of the relationship is not divorce. When the author of this book—as a social
worker in a youth club—pointed out to two tween girls that being in love with
the same boy of eighteen who never looked their way was a strange project, their
answer was that they were finding out how it felt to be hopelessly in love. Their
crush was a rehearsal in which the chosen boy had a necessary but peripheral role.
The need in social puberty for play and social learning by doing, underscores the
need for a safe sociocultural framework. This playful “testing” can be risky busi-
ness if the social frameworks are unsafe, if someone transforms the play into real-
ity. Avoiding the risk of participating in the social play, in turn, has implications
for the development of social skills.
The American Psychological Association (2007) underlines that there is a
pressure for the sexualisation of girls in the tween phase, a pressure illustrated
by clothes and styles. The risk of such early maturation will not only involve the
potential for adverse events, it may influence social and cognitive development.
Compared with the adolescence described by Erikson, modern social puberty rep-
resents a “compressed” adolescence; role diffusion and the trying out of new posi-
tions, behaviours and styles are squeezed into an intense phase. The development
of the tweens phase is probably reinforced by mass media and social media that
both reflect this phase and shape it. If we use Erikson’s dichotomies of identity
versus identity confusion, the core issue in social puberty is not to find a stable
identity, but to develop the ability to navigate into youth, and to keep a balance
between the orientation towards the present and the future. The competence for
navigation is developed gradually through childhood, but capacities for navigation,
or the lack of such capacities, emerge especially during social puberty, when the
challenge is to stay on course during a turbulent transition.
9.5 Adolescence: From Liminality to Qualification
Adolescence in the industrial society was a turbulent period of waiting, at the end
of which the young men and women were assigned the role of adults. As a period
of transition between two prescribed positions, the adolescence/youth period had
clear traits of liminality, in the sense of a chaotic period of waiting for adulthood.
In the knowledge society, the expected early establishment of an adult role and
family is dissolved, and the period of liminality is replaced by the educational
institutions’ demand for discipline and navigation and the corresponding threat of
marginalisation. Adolescence is transformed from a period of waiting and possible
transgressive behaviour, into a period of intense qualification. Modern mainstream
youth have left the street corner for the home or organised activities, a develop-
ment related to the structuring of adolescence by the educational institutions, as
well as modern by social media. In the knowledge society hanging out on street
corners is an indication of marginalization; a defined period of liminality is trans-
formed into a process of integration versus marginalisation by the pressure and
culture of the educational systems. Aspects of liminality are still there, but the
9.5 Adolescence: From Liminality to Qualification 113
groups of adolescents that drop out of the systems of qualification will find that
there is no adult position waiting for them.
In the industrial society the teen period was a kind of liminal waiting, in which
finding a partner and ending the phase gradually became the focus. As a phase,
modern adolescence is structurally geared towards the development of competence
and navigating towards the complex future, requiring long-term perspectives and
capacities for planning. No longer a liminal period with a prescribed end, but still
with liminal traits, investment in the future versus enjoying the moment is the fun-
damental tension of adolescence. In a knowledge society, the basic challenges of
the youth phase are not identity versus identity confusion while waiting for the
prescribed establishment of adulthood, but integration versus risk of social exclu-
sion, in a long and gradual transition to adulthood.
9.6 Singles, Friends and Navigation: From Instant Family

to Emerging Adulthood
In the industrial society most young people established families in their early
twenties, not long after the turmoil of the teenage years; a new historical condition
which in many ways was seen as the normal life course of those in the industrial
affluent modernity. During the 1980s–1990s a new life phase emerged, as illus-
trated by the TV series “Friends”: a period in which relations with friends and
navigating towards complex adult roles are at the centre of life. Recent decades
have in general made 17-year olds more mature and 25-year olds younger—in the
sense that the latter group has yet to establish a family and that most people at
the age of 17 are socially and sexually more mature than was the same age group
some decades ago. This life phase is termed emerging adulthood (Arnett 2004),
underlining the long and gradual transition into adult positions. For many it is an
educational period, and for the young people outside the educational systems it
is when they form a stable attachment with the labour market. Research from the
U.S. suggests that for groups with low education this has become more difficult
than it was in the 1970s (Corcoran and Matsudaira 2005).
The term emerging adults captures the sense of the gradual development of
adult roles, which is achieved along many dimensions and at different stages in
the life course (Settersten et al. 2005). In the knowledge society the transition to
adulthood takes the form of a long period of qualification from early childhood
until well into the period of young adult. This transition constitutes a phase of
socialization that is new in historical terms, even if late establishment of a fam-
ily, often varying with gender, is not uncommon historically; that Goethe’s mother
was closer in age to her son than to her husband is not a mere coincidence, but
related to historical conditions. For the more affluent social classes, the period of
youth could be bohemian in character (bohemian refers to groups associated with
unconventional ways of life). The classic understanding of youth, with its romantic
and unconventional Sturm und Drang, is still with us, but is now combined with
the image of youth as a period of intense qualification.
Both Margaret Mead and Erikson emphasized youth as a “psychosocial mora-
torium,” a phase of reflexivity, possible identity crisis and social innovation. The
phase of emerging adulthood underlines the importance of the moratorium; in the
modern youth period the challenge is to establish a direction for the future life
course and life projects in the complex landscape of education, work and rela-
tionships. The emerging adulthood is not an extension of the industrial society’s
period of youth; it is a completely different structuring of the life course of this
age group. In young adulthood the fundamental challenge of the modern process
of socialization, integration versus marginalization, becomes a tangible reality.
9.7 Family and Peers in the Knowledge Society
Sociologists often argued that the family lost some functions in the transition to
modern societies: it was no longer engaged in economic production as a unit and
functions for education and care were taken over by specialized public institutions.
The transition to the knowledge-based economies places parents as active agents
in the socialization process of their children, as educational and developmental
support, as illustrated by the academic success of children from the family culture
of parts of Asia. The reasons for this success are in general related to the fact that
they are pushed harder at home, a pushing that may also generate conflicts (Qin
et al. 2012). The metaphor of “tiger moms” illustrates the changing role of the
family and mothers; the family is still a haven in the world, but it is an instrumen-
tal haven. The family is particularistic in the sense that it is fighting for its own
children, and the purpose of the family is to support the children in achieving posi-
tions in the educational meritocracy. The pressure for educational achievements
and competence as well as the discourses on marginalization show the importance
of positive development and parental support (Flouri 2006). The long gradual
transition to adult roles produces a life course that expands the period of need for
parental economic support. The knowledge-based economies expand the parents’
functions for social, cognitive and economic support. This may imply increasing
inequalities, related to parents’ capacities to supply the various forms of support.
The functions of peers are transformed in the same way as those of parents;
peers are increasingly understood as positive or negative social capital, and
related to further life course development (Woodward and Fergusson 2000). The
increased emphasis on the functions of pre-schooling (Hall et al. 2009) illustrates
the importance of developing social and cognitive competence at an early age, and
the development of social competence is especially related to contact with peers
(Ladd 1999). The educational knowledge society accentuates both the positive
status of pro-social behaviour and social competence, and the problems resulting
from antisocial behaviour (Ogden 2013).
9.8 The Restructuring of Girls’ Social World … 115
9.8 The Restructuring of Girls’ Social World: From Family

and Traditions to Peers
The gender revolution associated with the educational societies is global, in spite
of the fact that a high percentage of girls in parts of the world are still being mar-
ried off early. Changing gender roles are related to political struggles, but also to
social developments that helped to dispel traditional beliefs. The opening for girls
in the expanding educational systems dissolved cultural ideas about women’s and
men’s educational potential; in a short time young women dominated among col-
lege students. The majority of teenage girls in the industrial society looked for-
ward to the role of housewife, and most girls navigated toward finding a good
husband. The long educational period of the knowledge society has now placed
friends of the same gender at the centre of young girls’ lives. This restructured the
horizon of young girls and the dynamics of anticipatory socialization; now, when
girls in their teens imagine the future, they see themselves in university dorms and
study halls and at cafe tables with their friends. Friends are supposed to be at the
centre of life in the near future; spouses and children are not yet on the horizon.
That TV family series were gradually replaced with series about young adults, and
largely about groups of young women, illustrates the same trend. Contrary to com-
mon beliefs about girls as being two and two together and boys being in larger
groups, studies in Norway in the 1980s indicated that teenage girls more often
than boys belonged to larger peer networks.5
Girls in the industrial society had their friends, but they navigated by the expec-
tations of getting married and having a family in their early twenties, and forming
new groups of friends with young mothers in the suburbs.6 The social horizon of
young girls was socially restructured by the knowledge society; while young
women’s social world in general had been confined to the family, female peers
were now gradually becoming the social and cultural fulcrum for most girls,7 a
position of the peer group that throughout Western history had been reserved for
men. The cultural revolution of the educational society made the peer group the
reference group and social centre of young girls’ life, moving young women out of
the traditions of the family and into new horizons continually developed by the
peer groups (Frønes 2001).
5http://www.hioa.no/asset/6560/1/6560_1.pdf).
6Interested readers are referred to Marilyn French’s novel, The Women’s Room (New York: Jove
Publications, 1977).
7The position of the peer group varies with ethnic and social groups.
References
American Psychological Association. (2007). Task force on the sexualization of girls.

http://www.apa.org/pi/women/programs/girls/report-summary.pdf. Accessed July 5, 2015.
Corcoran, M., & Matsudaira, J. (2005). Is it getting harder to get ahead? Economic attainment in
early adulthood for two cohorts. In R. A. Settersten Jr, F. F. Furstenberg Jr, & R. G. Rumbaut
(Eds.), On the frontier of adulthood: Theory research, and public policy (pp. 256–396).
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Flouri, E. (2006). Parental interest in children’s education, children’s self-esteem and locus of
control, and later educational attainment: Twenty-six year follow-up of the 1970 British Birth
Cohort. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 76(1), 41–55.
Frønes, I. (2001). Revolution without rebels: Gender, generation, and social change an essay on
gender, socialization and change. In A. Furlong & I. Guidikova (Eds.), Transitions of youth
citizenship in Europe: Culture, subculture and identity. Strasbourg: Council of Europe
Publishing.
Hall, J., Sylva, K., Melhuish, E., Sammons, P., Siraj-Blatchford, I., & Taggart, B. (2009). The
role of pre-school quality in promoting resilience in the cognitive development of young chil-
dren. Oxford Review of Education, 35(3), 331–352.
Heckman, J. J. (2000). The real question is how to use the available funds wisely. The best
evidence supports the policy prescription: Invest in the very young. Chicago: Ounce of
Prevention Fund.
Ladd, G. W. (1999). Peer relationships and social competence during early and middle child-
hood. Annual Review of Psychology, 50, 333–359. http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/full/
10.1146/annurev.psych.50.1.333?url_ver=Z39.88-2003&rfr_id=ori:rid:crossref.org&rfr_dat=
cr_pub%3dpubmed. Accessed July 3, 2015.
Ogden, T. (2013). The complex roots and branches of antisocial behavior. In A. Ben-Arieh, I.
Frønes, F. Casas, & J. E. Korbin (Eds.), Handbook of child well-being (Vol. 5, pp. 1–15).
Frankfurt: Springer.
Qin, D. B., Chang, T., Han, E., & Chee, G. (2012). Conflicts and communication between
high-achieving Chinese American adolescents and their parents. New Directions for Child
and Adolescent Development Special Issue: Family conflict among Chinese- and Mexican-
origin adolescents and their parents in the U.S. 135, 35–57. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/
doi/10.1002/cd.20003/epdf. Accessed July 2, 2015.
Settersten, R. A. Jr, Furstenberg, F. F. Jr, & Rumbaut, R. G. (Eds.). (2005). On the frontier of
adulthood: Theory, research, and public policy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Sørlie, M.-A., & Ogden, T. (2007). Immediate outcomes of PALS: A school-wide multi-level
program targeting behavior problems in elementary schools. Scandinavian Journal of
Educational Research, 51(5), 471–492.
Woodward L. J., Fergusson D. M. (2000). Childhood peer relationship problems and later risks
of educational under-achievement and unemployment. Journal of Child Psychology and
Psychiatry and Allied Disciplines 41(2), 191–201.
Chapter 10
Understanding Socialization: Some
Concluding Reflections
Abstract Life is lived forward and understood backwards. Socialization shall not
only help children to understand their life and society, but also provide them with
the courage to move into the unknown.
10.1 The Autonomous Child: The Meaning of Agency
In a traditional anthropological perspective, culture is understood as the totality of

knowledge, beliefs, customs, laws, skills and habits that humans acquire as mem-
bers of society (see, e.g., Tylor 1920). As culturalization, socialization is depicted
as a “collective programming of people’s minds” (Hofstede 1990). From the per-
spective of socialization theory, the existence of many different cultural enclaves
and the possible tension between primary socialization and later secondary and
tertiary socialization makes problematic the idea of culturalization as the inter-
nalisation of common norms and values. More important is that socialization as
the shaping of the individual by social forces, do not conceptualize socialization
as the interaction between structures, contexts and the agency of the subject. The
processes of socialization has a strong aspect of self socialization, influencing the
shaping of the subjects as well as social and cultural patterns, constituting sociali-
zation as a force of change as well as of culturalization.
At the core of the theorizing of socialization is agency, both as the fundamen-
tal proposition or starting point and as the development of self-determination and
autonomy. Socialization as culturalization can no longer be understood as just the
internalisation of common cultural patterns, but as the development of capacities
for interpreting and coping with a variety of cultural and social cues and demands.
Socialization as individualization involves the shaping of individual personali-
ties and “styles”, as well as the development of the capacities for self-reflexivity.

118 10 Understanding Socialization …
Socialization as qualification ranges from the development of basic skills, cultural

skills and various forms of practical consciousness, to capacities for self-actual-
ization and discursive consciousness. Socialization as emancipation refers to
the capacities for critical reflexivity and transcendence, pointing to the quest for
meaning as well as to the formation of meaning.
A theory of socialization must necessarily draw on many different sources,
seeking to provide an understanding of individual lives, life course develop-
ment, and the relationship between socialization and wider historical frameworks.
Socialization is multidimensional, and a core aspect of socialization theory is to
analyse how its various aspects interact: socialization is both about being woven
into symbolic patterns and about being able to transcend them.
The development of agency, of skills, reflexivity and emancipation as funda-
mental dimensions of socialization, provides a different perspective than sociali-
zation as cultural programming. History presents itself as a contingent landscape
in which the past is continuously rewritten and the future is uncertain. Increased
knowledge about human evolution does not provide us with biological essences
that determine human lives, but with human children designed for communication,
social relations and self-determination.
The level of self-determination is related both to opportunity structures and to
the subject’s capacities generate self-determined outcomes. The realization of the
statement in the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the “development of the
child’s personality, talents and mental and physical abilities to their fullest poten-
tial” (Article 29), refers to the development of factual capabilities and agency, not
to abstract rights as such but to their realisation. The right to the development of
agency also includes the rights of babies and small children (Melton 2011); you
have rights even if you cannot articulate them.
10.2 Existence Precedes Essence
Socialization involves both cultural transmission and the development of the

capacity for emancipation; the end of history is not a new harmony, but the recog-
nition that human beings are left to their own decisions, reflexivity and constitu-
tions of meaning. Khaldūn (1958), most likely the world’s first sociologist, living
in a period of change and instability, underscored that the quest for meaning and
truth requires fortitude. More than 600 years later the Convention on the Rights
of the Child underlines children’s right to develop their potentials, which requires
not only capacities and opportunities, but also the courage and the self-determina-
tion to move into the future. That existence takes precedence over essence implies
acknowledging that life is lived forward and understood backwards; moving into
the unknown life is a quest for meaning. Children will always have to move into
the unknown, and their quest for meaning is based on their capacity to understand
as well as on their fortitude to transcend.
References 119
References
Hofstede, G. J. (1990). Cultures and organizations: Software of the mind. London: McGraw-Hill.
Khaldūn, I. (1958). The Muqaddimah: An introduction to history. Translated from the Arabic by
Franz Rosenthal. New York: Princeton.
Melton, G. B. (2011). Young children’s rights. In R. Tremblay, M. Boivin, & R. Peters (Eds.),
Encyclopedia on early childhood development. Montreal, Quebec: University of Montreal,
Centre of Excellence for Early Childhood Development. http://www.researchgate.net/profile/
James_Heckman3/publication/255601449_Invest_in_the_Very_Young/links/546bd3110cf20de
dafd53922.pdf. Accessed July 2, 2015.
Tylor, E. (1920 [1871]). Primitive culture. New York: J. P. Putnam’s Sons.

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SPRINGER BRIEFS IN WELLBEING AND

QUALIT Y OF LIFE RESEARCH

The Autonomous Child

ISSN 2211-7644 ISSN 2211-7652 (electronic)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015953642

Springer Cham Heidelberg New York Dordrecht London

Printed on acid-free paper

Springer International Publishing AG Switzerland is part of Springer Science+Business Media

Part I Socialization in the Social Sciences

3.4 Language Games; Socialization into the Unions

Part II The Knowledge Societies and the Structuring

9 The Knowledge Society and Life Phase Dynamics. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109

Abstract Socialization is a fundamental concept in the social sciences, but the

Keywords The child as a subject · Dimensions of socialization

1.1 The Organisation of the Book

© The Author(s) 2016 1

The definition given in Wikipedia can be understood to represent a mainstream under-

externalization. Externalization, based on the capacities of the acting and reflect-

1.3 The Child as an Object or a Subject; Socialization

There is a tension in the theorizing of socialization between children viewed either

capacity to transcend it.

a harmonious process of social and cultural integration. The transmission of cul-

1.4 Basic Dimensions of Socialization

Bauman, Z. (1976). Towards a critical sociology: An essay on commonsense and emancipation.

Jenks, C. (1982). Sociology of childhood: Essential readings. London: Batsford.

Keywords Sociology · Play · Primary socialization · Secondary socialisation ·

2.1 Socialization, Social Structure and Cultural Patterns

© The Author(s) 2016 11

in the children as unconscious norms, beliefs and imaginations. The non-conscious

2.2 Primary Versus Secondary Socialization4

Wikipedia informs us that “primary socialization occurs during childhood and is

6The term was coined by Jackson (1968).

childhood. Some sociologists reinforced this understanding with a concept of

2.3 Socialization Through Role Models and Roles

as a movement through a set of changing stages or positions and related roles.

The axis in the modern version of anticipatory socialization is preparing for

2.4 Play, Role Play and the Perspective of the Other

2.5 Cultural Discourses and Socialization; the Cultural

The sociological perspectives focussing on institutions, roles and positions involve

individuals and groups may take on market characteristics, transforming possi-

2.6 The Cultural Landscape of Media and Consumption

2.7 Socialization and the Images of Children

The images and narratives of children and childhood influence socialization—

2.8 Disciplination and Cultural Release

The classical sociological perspective emphasizes socialization through institu-

cultural forces, the post-modern and post-structuralist understanding underscores

2.9 Individuation and Individualization

Recent political and ideological developments in modern Western societies have

of the 1950s–1970s, the construction of identity was understood as a challenge

2.10 Socialization and Class Culture

and doctoral thesis.

2.11 Socialization and Well-Being

2.12 The Constitution of Meaning and Reflexivity

transcendence. Maslow’s (1943) theory of a hierarchy of needs approaches the

narrative continuously constituted by the subject. My self and my biography are

2.13 The Social Roots of Motivation

Corsaro, W. (1992). Interpretive reproduction in children’s peer cultures. Social Psychology

Mesle, R. (2008). Process-relational philosophy: An introduction to Alfred North Whitehead.

Part II The Knowledge Societies and the Structuring

1.1 The Organisation of the Book

1.3 The Child as an Object or a Subject; Socialization

1.4 Basic Dimensions of Socialization

2.1 Socialization, Social Structure and Cultural Patterns

2.2 Primary Versus Secondary Socialization4

2.3 Socialization Through Role Models and Roles

2.4 Play, Role Play and the Perspective of the Other

2.5 Cultural Discourses and Socialization; the Cultural

2.6 The Cultural Landscape of Media and Consumption

2.7 Socialization and the Images of Children

2.8 Disciplination and Cultural Release

2.9 Individuation and Individualization

2.10 Socialization and Class Culture

2.11 Socialization and Well-Being

2.12 The Constitution of Meaning and Reflexivity

2.13 The Social Roots of Motivation

3.1 Socialization and Cultural Variation

3.2 Culture and Personality

3.4 Language Games; Socialization into the Unions

3.5 Transitions, Liminality and Twilight Zones

4.1 Socialization in Psychoanalytic Understanding

4.2 Cognitive Developmental Psychology

4.3 Social Decentering; Taking the Perspective

4.5 Phases in Childhood and Adolescence in Psychological

4.6 Socialization and the Family

4.7 Socialization and Peers

5.1 Demographics, Life Course Analyses and Socialization

5.2 Life Course, Life Phases and Historical Change

5.3 Life Course and Identity Construction

5.4 Generations and Generation Gaps

5.5 Life Course and Generational Exchange

5.6 Socialization, Life Course and Well-Being

6.1 The Evolutionary Frameworks of Socialization

6.2 Vulnerability and Development

6.3 Social Background as a Process

7.1 Culturalization, Differentiation and Emancipation