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Sociology: Culture&Identity

Topic 3
1. Socialisation
  1. Socialisation is carried out by a number of agencies of primary and secondary socialisation.
2. Resocialisation
  1. Key term: resocialisation is the learning of appropriate new norms and values to enable people to operate in a changed social environment when they enter a new and different society or when their life circumstances otherwise change.
3. Primary socialisation
  1. Key term: Primary socialisation is socialisation during the early years of childhood, and is carried out by the family or close community.
4. Secondary socialisation
  1. Key term: Secondary socialisation is socialisation which takes place beyond the family and close community, such through the education system, the peer group, the workplace, the mass media and religious institutions.
  2. Key term: The peer group is a group of people of similar age and status, with whom a person often mixes socially.
  3. The education system - it is at school that most children lean a great deal of knowledge abou the society in which they live, as well as the values and norms to which they willbe expected to conform as adults.
  4. The peer group - the desire for approval and acceptance by peers os powerful socilising influence, and peer group pressure o conform, and the fear of rejection and ridicule by peers, may exert an enormous influences on an individual's self identity and behaviour. Such pressure may promote conformity to the wider norms of society, such as acceptance of taditional gender roles.
    1. Key term: The peer group is a group of people of similar age and status, with whom a person often mixes socially.
  5. The workplace - the very fact of finding and keeping a job, and getting along with workmates, involves learning about and conforming to the social rules governing work. The workplace has traditionally been seen as an important sources of the individual and social identities of adults, as what people do for a living affects people's view of themselves, how others define them and the kind of lives they are able to lead outside of work.
  6. The mass media are major sources of information, ideas, norms and values, as well as spreading images of, e.g. fashion & music.
  7. Religious institutions spread beliefs which influences people's ideas about right and wrong behaviour, important values and norms, and morality, and these may in turn affect the behavoiur of individuals.
5. Structural approaches
  1. Individuals are seen like puppets or programmed robots, who are socialised and manipulated by social instituations like the agencies of socilzation. Wider forces, form and limit the identities that are adopted, and individuals have little choice or control over their indentity formation. Their identity is passed down to them by the socialisation process.
  2. Study: Functionalists Durkheim and Parsons see learning culture through socialisation as a benevolvent process - the means by which individuals are integrated or stitched into the societies to which they belong. Socialisation acts as a social glue, with shared values and norms - a value consensus - bonding people togther and enabling them to live in relative harmony.
  3. Study: Marxists argue that there is not a value consensus, but, rather, that people are socialised into the beliefs and values of the dominant social class in society. The socialisation process is seen as a form of social control.
    1. Criticisms of structural approaches
      1. Criticisms of these approaches are that individuals are seen simply as puppets, what Garinkel (1984) called 'cultural dopes', passively consuming and acceptinf normas and values handed down through socialisation, with little input from the individuals. Structural approaches don't recognise that individuals have free will, and can take initiatives, make choices, challenge and disobey social rules, and have a role in carving out their own identities in interaction with others.
  4. Study: Feminists would emphasise how socialisation can often reinforce and reproduce patriarchy - the dominance of men over women. However, all recongise that it is culture and socialisation that form the integrating link between the individual and society.
6. A third way: structuration
  1. The reflexive self
    1. Key term: The reflexive self refers to the idea that an individual's identity is formed and develops through a process of relecting on, or thinking about, her or his identity in interaction with other individualsand the agencies of socilaisation.
    2. Study: Giddens (1991) sees identity like an evolving narrative or biographical story that individuals are continuosuly reflecting on, working on and re-working as they go through life.
  2. Study: Giddens (2006) argues that there is a middle way between these structure and the actions approaches, which he calls 'structuration'. He accepts that social structures limits how people may act and the identities they may adopt, but also sees that they make it possible for people to act and form identities in the first place. The culture and structureof society provide people with the means of establising their identities and the tools necessary to make sense of soceity, and provide some degreee of predictability in social life through and understanding of and agreement of basic social norms and values and a common language. Without these, it would be very difficult for individuals to establish their identities. While people can make choices and have opportunities to form and change their identities, they can only make choices within the cultural framework of the society in which they live. Social structure and social action are therefore interdependent.
7. Socialisation and the social construction of self and identity
  1. Key term: A socail construction means that the important characteristics of something- such as statistics, health, childhood, old age or what is regarded as deviance - are created and influenced by the attitudes, actions and interpretations of members of society. They only exist because people define them as such.
  2. It is something created by socialisation process, and the individual and social interpretations and actions of people. it is not something that is givenby biology or nature. For example, being black or white, male or female, only have significance in society because people attach some importance to these characteristics, and define people in terms of these categories.It is the socialisation process that transmits both culture and identities from one generation to the next, though the precise forms of this socialisation process will vary between, for example, ethnic groups, sexes, age groups and nationalities.
  3. Study: Jenkins (1996) argues that identities are formed in the socialisation process. Through learning their culture, and though their involvement with other individuals, social groups and suvcultures, people come to develop ideas about what makes them similar to, or different from, others, and their identities are formed.
Topic 3
1. Nature versus nurture
  1. Socialisation gives people enough in common with others to relate to them and know what is expected of them as they share a broadly similar way of life. The importance of nurutre rather than nature in making people fully social members of society. The significance of socialisation in binding humans into society is also shown in some cases of feral children. These children have missed out on the normal processes of human socialisation and so fail to developwhat we might regard as normal human behaviour.
2. Social action approaches
  1. The 'looking-glass self'
    1. Study: Mead (1863 - 1931) argues that, as children grow up, they learn to develop a sense of themselves - their self-concept' - and the qualities they have that make them different from others. As they have that make them different from others. As they relate to other people, they begin to develop ideas about how others see them and, by seein how people respond to them, they may modify their self-concept and sense of identity and begin to see themselves as others see them. This means the self-concepts and identities of individuals are changing and developing all the time as they go through daily life in society.
    2. Study: Cooley (1998), wrting in 1902, developed the concept of the 'looking-glass self' to explain this. The 'looking-glass self' is the idea that our image of ourselves is reflected in the reactions of toher people to us, we may modify and change our view of ourselves and our behaviour. Our self-concept or our individual identity is therefore a social construction, and not a purely individual one.
  2. Goffman: the presentation of self and impression management
    1. Key term: Impression management is the way individuals try tp convince other of the identity they wosh to assert by giving particular impressions of themselves to other people.
    2. Study: Goffman (1990) sees society like a satge, with people acting out performances like actors do in plays. Good actors are able to persuade performances audiences or viewers that they really are the characters they are playing. Similarly, in society people try to project particular impressions of themselves - what Goffman calls 'the presentation of self' - by putting on dramatic performances or a 'show' to try to influence or manipulate how others see them. By managing the impression they give to other people - goffman calls this impression management - individuals try to convince others of the identities they wish to assert. This is often achieved by the use of symbols of various kinds to demonstrate the kind of person they want to be seen as.
      1. Symbols include things like: choice in consumer goods, chocies in media and technology, body adorment (body piercings, tattoos and hairstyles), the way people speake.
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    3. Goffman says everyone is engaged in this process of mainpulating others and being manipulated by them to give the best possible impression ofthemselves. Through adopting social roles and by responsing the reactions of others, individuals therefore develop there individual and social identities.
  3. Criticisms of social action approaches
    1. critics of the soial action approach suggest that individuals are seen as having too much control over their identity formation, and not enough emphasis is given to the importance of power inequalitites in society and the role os social institutions in limiting and controlling the identities that individuals can adopt.

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Sociology: Culture&Identity

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