Socialisation During the Life Course

Klaus Hurrelmann, Ullrich Bauer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138502178
• eBook ISBN: 9781351384568
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This comprehensive text highlights new developments in sociological, educational and psychological aspects of socialisation, examining how human beings as 'subjects' – experiencing, thinking and acting individuals – confront the material, social and cultural 'objects' of their environment and sustain their position. The authors provide an overview of the most important theories of socialisation, then integrate these using the Productive Processing of Reality (PPR) model. This novel approach is applied to a life course analysis, examining developmental tasks and the challenges of productive processing of the internal and external reality at various stages of development. The book also considers contexts, addressing the inequalities between different socio-economic and ethnic groups and genders, to consider how humans – with their genetic dispositions and their individual instincts and needs – solve the task of coping with the requirements of society, culture and economy while at the same time safeguarding their status as unique individuals.

It is core reading for advanced students on socialisation modules in developmental or social psychology and educational sciences and is additionally of value for the professional training of sociologists, teachers and social workers. It is also relevant for all those interested in elementary questions of how the interaction between the society and the individual works; how human beings deal not only with themselves but also with their social and physical environment, and how they shape it in their own way.

CHAPTER
1The understanding of socialisation

The concept of socialisation is used in many academic disciplines to describe the personality development of human beings in permanent interaction with their physical and psychological disposition on the one hand and the social and ecological living conditions on the other. The term first appeared in sociology and psychology, was then adopted by educational science, and later on by social work and social pedagogy. During the past 20 years, it has also become popular in health sciences and public health, in some areas of paediatrics, adolescent and social medicine, as well as in nursing science and related disciplines.

In this book, we apply this approach to the analysis of the human life course in modern societies. As socialisation is characterised by the permanent confrontation with internal and external requirements, this life-course perspective is self-evident. The fundamental question is how it is possible for human beings to plan their lives consistently during times of economic turbulence and political crises. Consequently, this approach implies a meta-theoretical perspective. This means, first, that we tend to provide a bird’s eye perspective rather than a compartmentalised argumentation of different theoretical features of socialisation research. Although socialisation is seen as a sociological key concept tackling basic problems of ensuring social order (Bühler-Niederberger, 2016) the general framework refers to a more individual perspective of dispositions, competencies and personality development (Grusec and Hastings, 2016). This implies, second, a constant mediating process between structure and agency (Archer, 2012). And, third, although most approaches highlight a childhood perspective (Denzin, 2010; Mcnamee, 2016; Qvortrup, Corsaro and Honig, 2009) a broader socialisation perspective only starts with a focus on childhood (Lancy, Bock and Gaskins, 2010) and widens towards a life-course perspective that encompasses lifelong person-environment-interactions from an individual’s perspective. This is what we will call ’productive processing of reality’ in the following argumentation. It serves as an overarching hook of theorising socialisation during the life course.

In this chapter, we start with a discussion of everyday and the scientific understanding of socialisation. In Chapter 2, we turn to our own approach of a comprehensive theory of socialisation according to the ‘Model of Productive Processing of Reality (PPR)’, which integrates different individual theories. This approach is then transferred to life-course analysis. In a first step, we analyse the developmental tasks to be solved in different life stages (Chapter 3). In a second step, we discuss the productive processing of the internal and external reality during the life course in general (Chapter 4) and during the four stages childhood, adolescence, adulthood and old age in specific (Chapter 5). Thereafter we discuss the framework conditions and contexts needed by human beings to manage a productive processing of internal and external reality (Chapter 6) and address the enormous inequality between different groups of society – according to socioeconomic status, gender and ethnic background – which results from the qualitative differences in productive processing (Chapter 7). The book ends with an outlook on future challenges of socialisation research in Chapter 8.

Everyday understanding of socialisation

The term socialisation is one of the scholarly terms that are not only used in a great variety of academic disciplines but also in everyday life. Expressions such as ’This child is well socialised’ or ’This shows your socialisation as a diplomat’ point to the substance of this term: the integration of social values and norms, the adaptation to the social environment, the endeavour to become-what-society-expects-me-to-be, or even the concept of the conditioning of individuals by the social context, that is the process of becoming social. However, everyday language also knows that a child can ’leave socialisation behind’ and a diplomat can ’step out of the shadows of socialisation’, expressing that the development of an independent personality is possible and that an individual evades environmental influences to a certain extent and even actively influences the development of his or her environment.

Socialisation as reciprocal person–environment relationship

This double perspective is fully adopted in everyday understanding. It is consistent with the experiences made by human beings. Each person intuitively knows the ‘effects’ of a specific external influence, such as unemployment due to economic trends following the global economic crisis from 2007 to 2008, for example. This is dependent not only upon the intensity and duration but also upon the personal characteristics and initial condition of the individual affected by such influences. Many people feel helpless and depressed when affected by unemployment; others react with resistance and activate their survival skills.

The influence of environmental events is by no means a one-way street. Even if the influences of the social environment, of the respective social, economical and cultural setting in which a person lives, are important, have enduring effects and leave lasting marks on his or her attitude and action patterns – this alone is not sufficient to determine the personality development of this person to the full extent. Therefore, homogamy, the equivalence of biographically experienced and current action structures is by no means the rule. Rather, the social environments encountered during the life course are subject to permanent historical change. New influences appear, and others disappear. Thus, the action competences once acquired are by no means applicable to all subsequent situations and great efforts are constantly required to adapt to new or altered challenges.

Determinants of socialisation

This is also true at the level of direct personal contacts. The relations between a person and his or her environment are reciprocal and interactive. The question of how a specific external influence ‘takes effect’ can only be answered with a view to the initial conditions of this individual.

Here is an everyday life example:

At 10.30 p.m., a 17-year-old adolescent waits for his connecting train at the underground station in the centre of a large city. Someone taps him on the shoulder from behind. How does he react? His reaction will depend on his biographical experience and his perception of the situation. Situational: He can be in a bad mood (after a long workday and a failed exam in the morning) or in a good mood (after a shopping trip with friends) and therefore be open or not open for the question signalised by the tap on the shoulder. Biographical: He may come from an environment in which he experiences a great amount of aggression, disposing him to react immediately to a movement from behind which is directly addressing his body, and whip round prepared to defend himself, or attack. But he might also have bad experiences with such a reaction and decide to refrain from using force. Maybe he expects an aggressive action in return and took the decision to resist this dynamic. We can also imagine the 17-year-old young man as a violinist who is just returning from a rehearsal with his ensemble and has no manifest idea of violence or counter violence and reacts completely defensive; or a religious person who rejects violence completely due to his intensive religious conviction.

With the situational and biographical background information of this example, we have narrowed down two of the influences belonging to the conditions, which determine the possible reactions of a person in a specific situation. Gender and religion are other factors that point to common attitudes in different ways. The example shows that the reaction of the 17-year-old person to the tap from behind depends on these factors. They are decisive for the following action and can be more or less conscious or reflected and thus part of reaction patterns that are a result of socialisation.

Another important aspect decisive for the reaction of the 17-year-old adolescent refers to the socio-spatial conditions. In our subway example, these are connected with contextual and compositional influences. Contextual factors concern the features of a place, for example the location of the station in the city district, and the amount of people present in the situation. Compositional factors describe the composition of the people waiting in the underground station together with the 17-year-old. The adolescent’s reaction will decisively be determined by the conditions, that is whether he waits for the underground together with a group of close friends who could back him up in case of a conflict, or whether he is alone and the person tapping on his shoulder belongs to a large group of unknown young people; or whether the finger tapping on his shoulder is by an elderly lady who got lost, has been wandering around for hours and does not know how to find her way home.

The example shows that biographical, group-related and socio-spatial factors come together in a situation that only lasts for a few seconds. It is an interaction of the individual’s personal determinants with those of the space or location and those of the person tapping on his shoulder. The 17-year-old adolescent assimilates the reality within seconds, processes it and reacts.

But the same is true for the person tapping on his shoulder. Both interact with each other and answer to the reactions of the other. Both call up a stock of knowledge and actions they are familiar with from their previous life experiences. Maybe the 17-year-old makes an angry face and talks loudly when he is confronted with an aggressive unknown person but puts on a friendly smile and reacts in a caring way when he sees the elderly lady.

All this is part of socialisation. It does not only take place in the individual and not only depends upon the conditions in which we act or by which we have been shaped. Our knowhow is updated in the interaction, we draw on the language and experiences in dealing with elderly persons and the care they deserve, and we thereby confirm the applicability of specific behavioural patterns (Duranti, Ochs and Schieffelin, 2014). At the same time, we learn lessons from every new situation and prepare ourselves to react more favourably should we be faced with a similar situation.

Of course we are not fully aware of all these aspects when we speak about socialisation in everyday life, but the fundamental experience of the reciprocal person-environment relation exists. We are aware of the fact that every day we act in situations in which we use our knowledge and experiences to understand the circumstances and that our personal know-how and action repertoires are at the same time confirmed, revised or expanded. We also know that our personality develops constantly and on the one hand, is influenced by the material and social structures surrounding us but on the other hand also influences them.

The scientific understanding of socialisation

At the core of socialisation theory is the question of how a human being with his or her genetic disposition of instinctual drives and needs, with his or her innate temperament and acquired personality traits, as well as in interaction with the surrounding environmental factors, becomes a subject with the ability of self-reflection and manages to cope with the requirement of integration into a social fabric. To answer this question, psychological as well as sociological approaches are required.

Psychological approaches primarily address the individual’s ‘internal reality’. They analyse in which stages and phases human personality development takes place, how the capacities of perception, thinking and acting evolve and how they change in the phases of transition from one stage of life to the next as well as in situations of crisis and tension. During the past years, they have been increasingly supplemented by neurobiological approaches.

Sociological approaches, however, focus on ‘external reality’. They analyse the structures of the human personality, which occur in confrontation with the requirements of society, such as the ability to adopt the prevailing values, norms and patterns of behaviour and to join social groups and organisations.

Early approaches

The question of how the personality of a human being develops and how this process is influenced by the environment is as old as the entire history of human and social sciences. Socialisation theory focuses on the tension between the individual and society. Two related questions are at issue here:

• How does a society manage to shape the human beings living in this society into social beings who integrate themselves in the social structures?

• How do human beings manage to open up opportunities for their own personal development and lifestyle and become autonomous individuals in a society?

Thus, it is about understanding how human beings as ‘subjects’ – as experiencing, thinking and acting individuals – confront the material, social and cultural ‘objects’ of their environment and assert themselves, how they solve the task of coping with the requirements of society, culture and economy with their specific genetic dispositions, their instincts and needs, their inherent temperament and personality traits, and at the same time safeguard their status as unique individuals.

Sociological theories of socialisation

The earliest socialisation theorists were two sociologists. The German social philosopher Georg Simmel and the French sociologist Emile Durkheim are regarded as the scientific founders of the concept of ‘socialisation’. At the beginning of the twentieth century, both were mainly concerned with the question of how social cohesion could be ensured in times of fast and intensive industrialisation, which was leading to increasingly complex societies.

To answer this question, Georg Simmel took account of the phenomenon of the formation of societies. According to his explanation, societies can emerge because human beings constantly influence each other. As a result, a network of rules and dependencies is created which forms the society. In this sense, each member of the society is a ‘socialised individual’. Simmel refers to this process as ‘socialisation’ (Simmel, 1890). By this, he essentially means the process of incorporating the social entirety into the individual personality. According to his assessment, every society needs a homogenous social awareness of its members, even if they belong to different social classes and are highly different individuals, because otherwise the society as a community will collapse.

In his analysis of the transition from simple societies to societies based on the division of labour, Emile Durkheim raised the question of how integration can be achieved in complex social structures. His answer: The society shapes the personality of human beings according to its needs by systematically influencing their feelings and attitudes. He called this influence ‘socialisation méthodique’ meaning the systematic and planned manipulation of the attitudes of all members of the society, with the obje...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• About the authors
• Chapter 1 The understanding of socialisation
• Chapter 2 Socialisation as productive processing of reality
• Chapter 3 Coping with developmental tasks
• Chapter 4 Productive processing of reality during the life course
• Chapter 5 Socialisation in the individual life stages
• Chapter 6 Contexts of socialisation in the life course
• Chapter 7 Inequality of socialisation during the life course
• Chapter 8 Conclusion and outlook
• Bibliography
• Index