Socialization

Week Two: 27th & 28th Jan, 2020

CONTENTS

1. Socialization
2. Seeing the Social World in A New Light: Personal & Larger Social
3. How Sociologist View Society
4. Sociological Imagination
5. Social Structure & Sociological Imagination
6. Sociological Institutions
SOCIALIZATION

 In very general terms, we are all born into societies where there are already
established patterns of organized behavior that we referred to earlier as
social institutions, such as speaking a particular language or organizing
ourselves into small groups called families.
 Sociologists use the term institutionalization to describe the processes
whereby these social practices become accepted ways of doing things in a
society or social group.
 These social practices, and the values and beliefs surrounding them, make up
the culture of a society, or sub-culture of a social group and these cultural
practices and values place expectations on how people should behave.
SOCIALIZATION

 Sociologists use the term socialization to describe the various processes through
which people learn about, and generally conform to, the norms and values of
the social groups in which they live.
 Socialization processes can be divided into three stages.
 Primary socialization involves the socialization of the young child by the family.
 Secondary socialization is socialization by the school. Schools obviously teach
us academic skills but, as sociologists have shown, they are teaching us a lot
more. It is from school that we learn, for example punctuality, cooperation,
team games, discipline and that good work will be rewarded, bad work
penalized. This is sometimes known as the ‘hidden curriculum’. So, in number
of ways, schools are trying to socialize us for adulthood. However, socialization
doesn’t end when we leave school.
SOCIALIZATION

 Tertiary, or adult, socialization continues through our lives. People are

socialized into ethnic, gender and work identities.
 Another example is socialization into old age. People do not just get old.
They also learn what is expected of them when they are becoming old.
 In some societies growing old gracefully means retreating into the
background. Medical sociologists have even shown that terminally ill people
are socialized by medical and nursing staff into dying in the ‘right way’.
 So socialization is a continuous process: it begins when we are born and only
ends when we die.
Seeing the Social World in A New
Light: Personal & Larger Social

 The average person lives too narrow a life to get a clear and concise understanding
of today’s complex social world. Our daily lives are spent among friends and family;
at work and at play, and watching TV and surfing the Internet. No way can one
person grasp the big picture from their relatively isolated lives. There’s just not
enough time or capacity to be exposed to the large crowd complexities of a society
of 305 million people.
 There are thousands of communities, millions of interpersonal interaction, billions of
Internet information sources, and countless trends that transpire without many of us
even knowing they exist. What can we do to make sense of it all?
 Social Facts are social processes rooted in society rather than in the individual.
Seeing the Social World in A New
Light: Personal & Larger Social
 Psychology gave us the understanding of self-esteem; economics gave us the
understanding of supply and demand, political science gave us the understanding
of polling; and physics gave us the Einstein theory of E=MC2.
 C. Wright Mills (1916-1962) was a contemporary sociologist who brought tremendous
insight into the daily lives of society’s members. Mills stated that “neither the life of
an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without
understanding both."
 Mills identified “Troubles” (personal challenges) and "Issues" (Larger social
challenges) that are key principles for providing us with a framework for really
wrapping our minds around many of the hidden social processes that transpire in an
almost invisible manner in today’s societies. Before we discuss personal troubles and
larger social issues let’s define a social fact.
Seeing the Social World in A New
Light: Personal & Larger Social
 Social facts are typically outside of the control of average people. They occur in
the complexities of modern society and impact us, but we rarely find a way to
significantly impact them back. This is because, as Mills taught, we live much of
our lives on the personal level and much of society happens at the larger social
level.
 Without a knowledge of the larger social and personal levels of social experience,
we live in what Mills called a False Social Conscious is an ignorance of social facts and
the larger social picture.
Seeing the Social World in A New
Light: Personal & Larger Social
 Personal Troubles are private problems experienced within the character of the
individual and the range of their immediate relation to others.
 Mills identified the fact that we function in our personal lives as actors and
actresses who make choices about our friends, family, groups, work, school, and
other issues within our control. We have a degree of influence in the outcome of
matters within the personal level.
 Larger Social Issues are those that lie beyond one's personal control and the range of
one's inner life. These pertain to society's organization and processes. These are
rooted in society rather than in the individual. Nationwide, students come to college
as freshmen ill-prepared to understand the rigors of college life.
Seeing the Social World in A New
Light: Personal & Larger Social
 They haven’t often been challenged enough in high school to make the
necessary adjustments required to succeed as college students.
 Nationwide, the average teenager text messages, surfs the Net, plays video or
online games, hangs out at the mall, watches TV and movies, spends hours each
day with friends, and works at least part-time.
 Where and when would he or she get experience focusing attention on college
studies and the rigors of self-discipline required to transition into college
credits, a quarter or a semester, study, papers, projects, field trips, group
work, or test taking.
How Sociologists View Society
 All sociologists are interested in the experiences of individuals and how
those experiences are shaped by interactions with social groups and
society as a whole.
 To a sociologist, the personal decisions an individual makes do not exist in
a vacuum.
 Cultural patterns and social forces put pressure on people to select one
choice over another.
 Sociologists try to identify these general patterns by examining the
behavior of large groups of people living in the same society and
experiencing the same societal pressures.
 Sociologists will look beyond individual foreclosures at national trends.
They will see that in recent years unemployment has been at record highs.
They may look into whether unemployment and lending practices were
different for members of different social classes, races, or genders.
 By analyzing the impact of these external conditions on individuals’
choices, sociologists can better explain why people make the decisions
they do.
How Sociologists View Society
 Sociologists identify and study patterns related to all kinds of contemporary social issues.
 The “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, the emergence of the Tea Party as a political faction, how
Twitter has influenced everyday communication—these are all examples of topics that sociologists
might explore. A key basis of the sociological perspective is the concept that the individual and
society are inseparable. It is impossible to study one without the other.
 German sociologist Norbert Elias called the process of simultaneously analyzing the behavior of
individuals and the society that shapes that behavior figuration. He described it through a
metaphor of dancing. There can be no dance without the dancers, but there can be no dancers
without the dance. Without the dancers, a dance is just an idea about motions in a
choreographer’s head. Without a dance, there is just a group of people moving around a floor.
 Similarly, there is no society without the individuals that make it up, and there are also no
individuals who are not affected by the society in which they live.
 An application that makes this concept understandable is the practice of religion. While people
experience their religion in a distinctly individual manner, religion exists in a larger social context.
 For instance, an individual’s religious practice may be influenced by what government dictates,
holidays, teachers, places of worship, rituals, and so on. These influences underscore the
important relationship between individual practices of religion and social pressures that influence
that religious experience.
The Sociological Imagination
 Although these studies and the methods of carrying them out are different, the
sociologists involved in them all have something in common.
 Each of them looks at society using what pioneer sociologist C. Wright Mills called
the sociological imagination, sometimes also referred to as the sociological lens or
sociological perspective.
 Mills defined sociological imagination as how individuals understand their own and
others’ pasts in relation to history and social structure.
 By looking at individuals and societies and how they interact through this lens,
sociologists are able to examine what influences behavior, attitudes, and culture.
By applying systematic and scientific methods to this process, they try to do so
without letting their own biases and pre-conceived ideas influence their conclusions.
Social Structure & Sociological
Imagination
 One way sociology achieves a more complete understanding of social reality is through its focus
on the importance of the social forces affecting our behavior, attitudes, and life chances. This
focus involves an emphasis on social structure, the social patterns through which a society is
organized. Social structure can be both horizontal or vertical.
 Horizontal social structure refers to the social relationships and the social and physical
characteristics of communities to which individuals belong. Some people belong to many
networks of social relationships, including groups like Boy or Girl Scouts, while other people
have fewer such networks.
 Some people grew up on streets where the houses were crowded together, while other people
grew up in areas where the homes were much farther apart. These are examples of the sorts of
factors constituting the horizontal social structure that forms such an important part of our
social environment and backgrounds.
Social Structure & Sociological
Imagination
 The other dimension of social structure is vertical. Vertical social structure , more commonly
called social inequality, refers to ways in which a society or group ranks people in a hierarchy,
with some more “equal” than others.
 In the United States and most other industrial societies, such things as wealth, power, race
and ethnicity, and gender help determine one’s social ranking, or position, in the vertical
social structure. Some people are at the top of society, while many more are in the middle or
at the bottom. People’s positions in society’s hierarchy in turn often have profound
consequences for their attitudes, behaviors, and life chances, both for themselves and for
their children.
 In recognizing the importance of social structure, sociology stresses that individual problems
are often rooted in problems stemming from the horizontal and vertical social structures of
society. This key insight informed C. Wright Mills’s ‘The sociological imagination’ is a classic
distinction between personal troubles and public issues .
Social Structure & Sociological
Imagination
 Personal troubles refer to a problem affecting individuals that the affected
individual, as well as other members of society, typically blame on the
individual’s own failings. Examples include such different problems as eating
disorders, divorce, and unemployment.
 Public issues, whose source lies in the social structure and culture of a
society, refer to a social problem affecting many individuals.
 Thus problems in society help account for problems that individuals
experience. Mills, feeling that many problems ordinarily considered private
troubles are best understood as public issues, coined the term sociological
imagination to refer to the ability to appreciate the structural basis for
individual problems.
Social Structure & Sociological
Imagination
 To illustrate Mills’s viewpoint, let’s use our sociological imaginations to understand some
important contemporary social problems.
 We will start with unemployment, which Mills himself discussed. If only a few people were
unemployed, Mills wrote, we could reasonably explain their unemployment by saying they
were lazy, lacked good work habits, and so forth. If so, their unemployment would be their
own personal trouble.
 But when millions of people are out of work, unemployment is best understood as a public
issue because, as Mills put it, “the very structure of opportunities has collapsed. Both the
correct statement of the problem and the range of possible solutions require us to
consider the economic and political institutions of the society, and not merely the
personal situation and character of a scatter of individuals.”
Social Structure & Sociological
Imagination
 The growing unemployment rate stemming from the severe economic downturn that
began in 2008 provides a telling example of the point Mills was making. Millions of
people lost their jobs through no fault of their own.
 While some individuals are undoubtedly unemployed because they are lazy or lack good
work habits, a more structural explanation focusing on lack of opportunity is needed to
explain why so many people were out of work as this book went to press. If so,
unemployment is best understood as a public issue rather than a personal trouble.
 Social relationships are rarely random. Normally they are organized in various ways.
Sociologists refer to these patterns of behavior as social institutions.
 Types of family life, education and religious practice are examples of social
institutions, where behavior tends to be regular or patterned.
Sociological Institutions

 What we loosely refer to as a ‘society’ is actually a complex of many social institutions. In

contemporary industrial societies we find, for example, political, family, economic,
educational, legal and religious institutions. Although these institutions seem to be separate and
distinct they are also related to each other in various ways.
 To give a simple example: productive institutions are dependent on educational institutions for
a skilled workforce, educational institutions are dependent on the government for their funding,
and government institutions, in turn, rely on productive institutions to create the wealth to
finance government spending. Sociologists call this institutional interdependence.
 As a result of this institutional interdependence, many sociologists adopt a structural, or
macro, perspective that means looking at societies as systems, and trying to work out how
different institutions ‘function’ to produce particular outcomes.
Institutional Interdependence