SOCIALIZATION AND THE

ASSERTION OF AGENCY
Session 7 – 1st Grading
Understanding Culture, Society and Politics
OUTLINE
• Primary Socialization vs. Secondary
Adjustment
• Socialization and Deviance
• Biological and Social Model of Deviance
• Cultural Relativity of Deviance
• The Self in Cyberspace and Social Media
PRIMARY SOCIALIZATION VERSUS SECONDARY
ADJUSTMENT
Two Kinds of Socialization (Erving Goffman)
Primary socialization – the process of molding individuals to
conform to social norms and rules.
Secondary Socialization – the individual uses what he/she has
learned from primary socialization and uses it to find a way around
the rules of society for his/her own advantage.
• Use of authorized means to achieve unauthorized ends.
Resistance (Michel Foucault) – characterize the rebellious attitudes
of people towards norms and rules; “Whenever there is a power,
there is resistance”
But despite all of these, people still has AGENCY or freedom, which
means that a person could have acted otherwise.
SOCIALIZATION AND DEVIANCE
Moral Panics – social currents that mobilize the majority
of the people to condemn certain acts that are
considered as threats to social order.
Deviance – violation of society’s rules and norms that
calls forth condemnation or punishment for the violator.
• Rape, murder, crime, sexual abuse, drug abuse,
abortion, and other behaviors that people do not
consider as part of a healthy society.
THERE ARE TWO EXPLANATIONS TO DEVIANCE:

•BIOLOGICAL MODEL
•SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION
BIOLOGICAL MODEL OF DEVIANCE
Essentialism – deviance is an inherent property of an
individual.
Reductionism – one explains a phenomenon purely on a
single cause or in a single perspective to the exclusion of
other explanations.
SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF DEVIANCE
Howard Becker
• Society creates deviance by making
rules, whose violation constitutes
deviance.
• Deviance is not a quality of the act that
a person commits, but rather a
consequence of the application of rules
and sanctions to an “offender”.
• Sociologists are not interested in the
biological basis of deviance but on
how it is constructed and applied.
• Rules are made by people with power
and enforced on people without power.
DEVIANCE AND SOCIAL CONTROL
• Social Control (Edward Ross) – refer to the
processes that the society develop to regulate
itself.
• Institutions (state and church) have the authority
to define certain behaviours as right or wrong.
• White-collar Crime – a crime committed by a
person of high social status in the course of his
occupation.
• Hate Crimes – directed towards those who are
traditionally marginalized (LGBT community,
Asians, Latinos, Blacks).
CULTURAL RELATIVITY OF DEVIANCE
• Deviance is culturally and socially
relative.
• A deviant behaviour in one society
may not be necessarily deviant in
another.
• Homosexuality is normal in Ancient
Greece.
• Use of Marijuana is legal in the
Netherlands.
• However, not all forms of deviance
should be tolerated (e.g. racist violence)
THE SELF IN THE AGE OF WEB 2.0 TECHNOLOGY

• Globalization – enable people to acknowledge

the presence of others and other cultures from
different parts of the world.
• Glocalization – a product or service that is
developed and distributed globally, but is also
fashioned to accommodate the user or
consumer in a local market.
THE SELF IN THE AGE OF WEB 2.0
TECHNOLOGY
• Identity politics – political positions based on the interests and
perspectives of social groups with which people identify
• However, because of globalization, people are exposed to other ways of life from various
cultures.
• Ability to combine different forms of cultural styles.
• Saturated Self (Kenneth Gergen) – the proliferation of identities
around the world flood people with multiple images from which they
can model themselves.
• People can adopt multiple personalities and identities in social
networks.
THE CYBER/VIRTUAL SELF
• The cyber self is gradually erasing the space of the self.
• Anonymity - as others cannot see who we are online,
we are free to claim whoever we want to be.
• The internet allows a person to easily adopt false
identities..
• The anonymity of the internet can also empower
criminals to tap into one’s computer and “hack” the
victim’s bank accounts, credit cards, and internet history.