Theories of Socialisation

9 Key excerpts on "Theories of Socialisation"

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  Social Psychology

  • Jeffrey H Goldstein(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Academic Press

    (Publisher)

  3 SUGGESTED READINGS SOCIALIZATION: THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIAL BEHAVIOR THE AGENTS OF SOCIALIZATION RECIPROCITY AND SOCIALIZATION/ AGE-DEPENDENT DEVELOPMENT/ THE NATURE-NURTURE DEBATE THEORIES AND PROCESSES OF SOCIALIZATION PSYCHOANALYTIC THEORY/LEARNING: CLASSICAL AND OPERANT CONDITIONING/LEARNING: IMITATION AND MODELING/SOME COMMENTS ON PSYCHOANALYTIC AND LEARNING THEORIES/EXPLORATORY BEHAVIOR, CURIOSITY, AND THE CONCEPT OF COMPETENCE/SYMBOLIC INTERACTIONIST THEORIES OF SOCIALIZATION SEX ROLES AND SYMBOLIC INTERACTIONISM DIFFERENTIATION, GENERALIZATION, AND ATTITUDES CHARITY BEGINS AT HOME: THE DEVELOPMENT OF PROSOCIAL BEHAVIOR IS ALTRUISM AN INSTINCT? LEARNING TO BE AGGRESSIVE THE ORIGINS OF SOCIABILITY SUMMARY An infant enters the world without knowledge of rules, roles, or relationships among people. Between infancy and adolescence, so-ciety's basic expectations and limitations are imparted to the child in a complex series of processes generally referred to as socialization. Think of the enormous number of social principles that young children must learn in order to become effective, cooperative mem-bers of society. They must learn about relationships in families; about proper and expected behavior toward peers, relatives, teach-ers, and strangers; and about playing and working cooperatively. Children also must learn something of the social, moral, and legal sanctions associated with various behaviors. And they must acquire a general knowledge of the economic and political systems so that these institutions will be perpetuated from one generation to the next. All this is learned in addition to acquiring basic motor and intellectual skills. While socialization is a process that continues throughout life, we assimilate most of these social skills in an impressively brief span of time. Socialization means the acquisition of skills and traits that enable you to function effectively with other members of your society.

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  Turkey's 'Self' and 'Other' Definitions in the Course of the EU Accession Process

  • Melek Saral(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Amsterdam University Press

    (Publisher)

  2 The Concept of Socialization and Identity Change 2.1 The Concept of Socialization Socialization is a complex and ambiguous concept. The connection of socialization with a wide range of themes like national identity formation, change in interests, compliance with international norms, and the ef fects of international institutions put socialization and identity at the center of IR studies. There is a small but rapidly growing body of literature within the f ield of IR and in EU studies on socialization (Finnemore and Sikkink 1998; Risse et al. 1999b; Wendt 1999; Alderson 2001; Johnston 2001; Flockhart 2006; Schimmelfennig et al. 2006; Checkel 2005). Socialization is generally referred to as a process by which the newcomer becomes incorporated into organized patterns of interaction (Johnston 2001: 494). It is ‘the process of inducting actors into the norms and rules of a given community’ (Zürn and Checkel 2005: 1046). The process starts with an introduction to the new rules/norms/identities and proceeds through learning or ‘internalization’ (Schimmelfennig 2003; Johnston 2001; Risse 2000; Checkel 2005; Flockhart 2006). Throughout this process, institu-tional conditions and informal/formal rules structure social life while mechanisms such as instrumental bargaining, role playing, or persuasion shape which behavioral practices, norms of appropriateness, and outcome preferences are internalized by the political actors. The internalization of these practices, norms, and preferences are mostly regarded and analyzed on the individual level, as it is argued that they are internalized only by individual actors. However, the impact of these practices, norms, and prefer-ences are far-reaching. Socialization refers to both individuals and groups. The interactions among individuals also shape the group’s features.

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  A Sociology of Educating

  • Roland Meighan, Clive Harber(Authors)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • Continuum

    (Publisher)

  Socialization involves the way in which: the main structure of personality is built up through the process of social interaction. It (personality) develops through the internalization of social objects and of the normative patterns governing the child's interaction in social situations. Parsons, 1964 Parsons argues that, in order for social integration to be achieved, society has, through a process of gradual evolution, thrown up a number of institutions which function as agencies of socialization - the church, the family and, importantly, the education system. As part of their everyday lives in society, social actors, like actors in the theatre, take on specific roles, depending upon the part of the social system, the institution, in which they are interacting -roles such as priests, fathers, mothers, teachers and pupils. The behaviour appropriate to these roles is defined by society. Society has what Parsons calls 'patterned expectations of the behaviour of individuals who occupy particular statuses in the social system'. In other words, for any given social role, society has, on the basis of past experience, evolved a system of'rules and regulations' governing what is generally considered to constitute proper behaviour for those playing the roles, and these 'rules' gradually become crystallized into a set of 'expec-tations'. These expectations are shaped by the need society has to preserve itself; that is, its 'functional requirements'. For Parsons, all societies had four main functional requirements. These are: 1. Pattern maintenance, i.e. the preservation and passing on of social norms, values, rights and prohibitions. 2. Internal integration, i.e. the provision of the means by which one part of social life is linked to another or by which one sector of the social system (e.g. family life) is related to another (e.g. the economic system). 3. Goal attainment, i.e. the provision of the means whereby both individual and collective aims and needs can be realized.

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  Role Theory

  Expectations, Identities, and Behaviors

  • Bruce J. Biddle(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Academic Press

    (Publisher)

  281 282 Role Theory SOCIALIZATION AND OTHER EXPLANATIONS To summarize: The function of socialization is to transform the human raw material of society info good working members. . . . Role acquisition is probably the most important aspect of adult -Orville Brim A good place to begin is with a question. How are roles generated? How do we explain similar behaviors that appear in persons who share membership in a social position or who enter similar contexts? Moreover, why do exceptions to roles occur? Why do some persons fail to conform? How do we account for deviancy and creativity in role performance? Socialization Most role theorists use the concept of socialization to explain the appearance of roles. Roles, they argue, appear because persons are taught appropriate ways to behave by others. Moreover, the major way in which roles are taught is through the medium of role expectations. Thus, persons are exposed to experiences that would lead them to form similar expectations for their own and others' roles, and these in turn lead them to exhibit or encourage appropriate role behavior. Some confusion has appeared among the related concepts of learning, socialization, and education. The broadest of these concepts is learning, which refers to any nonfacilitated change in the behavior or conceptual state of the person that can be shown to have followed from an environmental condition. Many things can be learned: things that are relevant or irrelevant, good habits and bad habits, behaviors that lead to the death of the person and the disruption of others, or behaviors that lead to harmony, discovery, and a better life for all. In contrast, socialization refers to those learning processes that lead to greater ability of the person to participate within a social system—either through understanding it or by conforming to it inadvertently.

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  The Social Structure of Modern Britain

  Pergamon International Library of Science, Technology, Engineering and Social Studies

  • E. A. Johns(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Pergamon

    (Publisher)

  T h u s the authors of Social Scientists at Work 25 conclude: W e have shown that possession of a social science degree entailed average earnings higher t h a n those for graduates as a whole d u r i n g the 1960s a n d we have suggested that this m a y h a v e accounted at least in p a r t for the rapid growth in the n u m b e r of social science students d u r i n g that d e c a d e . A r m e d with such assumptions, the study predicts that the proportion of sociologists will fall d u r i n g the next few years, followed to a certain extent by the n u m b e r of psychologists ; business studies courses will r e m a i n p o p u l a r ; the expansion of economics will continue ; a n d the decline in geography is perennial. 25 Williams, G., Westoby, A. and Webster, D., Social Scientists at Work, Society for Research into Higher Education, 1976. The Socialization Process : Education 167 Education and Society Socialization is a process of cultural transmission w h e r e b y people learn the rules, practices a n d n o r m s of the social groups to which they belong. F o r m a l education is only one of the m a n y a g e n c i e s 26 through which the socialization process is enacted, b u t it is particularly crucial in a d v a n c e d industrial societies because of the a m o u n t of time it occu-pies d u r i n g the individual's formative years. As education proceeds, a n d prolongs itself by the development of extensions to the system beyond the m i n i m u m leaving age, it produces recruits for the specialized roles required b y industrialization. Equally, education communicates in-formal values which are eventually internalized by the recipient, on aspects of behaviour concerned with occupational a d v a n c e m e n t , honesty, individual competitiveness a n d others.

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  Connecting Sociology to Our Lives

  An Introduction to Sociology

  • Tim Delaney(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  As was clear in the case of Ivan, a dog cannot teach a young child how to speak any language. A parent can teach a child every language. Cases of feral children remind us of how important the socialization process is. The socialization process reveals how we become human. Without human interaction and socialization, infants will not develop properly; they will not become “human.”

  THEORIES OF SOCIALIZATION AND HUMAN DEVELOPMENT

  The discussion of neglected and feral children highlights the nature-versus-nurture debate regarding how human development occurs. Biology (nature) certainly dictates a number of physical attributes (e.g., skin color, hair color, eye color, ancestry) and plays a role as to whether an individual is physiologically capable of learning, but does it dictate behavior? According to sociologists, socialization, past experiences, modeling, and motives—in short, the environment (nurture)—most significantly influence human behavior. It might help to think of social forces and natural innate traits, in terms of their significance for human behavior, as two ends of a “nature-nurture continuum.” Both forces play a role in human development, but in sociology, the pendulum swings toward nurture.

  A number of significant theories have been put forth in an attempt to explain how human development occurs. Some of these theories favor the nature approach while others rely more heavily on the nurture approach. Considering that sociology leans heavily on the importance of learning, most sociologists embrace human-development theories that emphasize the importance of nurturing factors. To illustrate both the nurture and nature approaches to human development, two classical psychological theories are discussed here. We begin with Sigmund Freud and his theory of psychoanalysis.

  Sigmund Freud and Psychoanalysis

  Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) was a medical doctor specializing in neurology during an era when most causes of human behavior were deemed biological in origin. Freud developed his theory of psychoanalysis through years of treating patients for mental or emotional problems. For years during and after Freud’s lifetime, psychoanalysis was a dominant theory, but in recent decades it has largely been replaced by other approaches to treating mental disorders.

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  Lifespan Development, 5th Australasian Edition, P-eBK

  • Michele Hoffnung, Robert J. Hoffnung, Kelvin L. Seifert, Abi Brooker, Sonja Ellis, Damien Riggs, Wayne Warburton, Elyse Warner(Authors)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Wiley

    (Publisher)

  The com- munication between these viewpoints becomes a part of people’s thinking and problem solving. Children and adults alike internalise features of these dialogues, using language to guide their own thoughts and actions. Both Vygotsky and Hofstede see social interaction, cultural transmission and intercultural co-operation as important for survival, as Hofstede et al. (2010) states: Pdf_Folio:63 CHAPTER 2 Theories of development 63 … every person carries within him or herself pat- terns of thinking, feeling, and potential acting that were learned throughout the person’s lifetime. Much of it was acquired in early childhood, because at that time a person is most susceptible to learn- ing and assimilating. As soon as certain patterns of thinking, feeling, and acting have established themselves within a person’s mind, he or she must unlearn these patterns before being able to learn something different … The sources of one’s mental programs lie within the social environments in which one grew up and collected one’s life experiences. The programming starts within the family. It contin- ues within the neighbourhood, at school, in youth groups, at the workplace, and in the living commu- nity … Culture is always a collective phenomenon, because it is at least partly shared with people who live or lived within the same social environment, which is where it was learned (pp. 4–6). Richard Lerner’s contextual approach emphasises the dynamic interactive relationships between an individual’s development and changes in the contexts in which their development occurs (Lerner, 1996, 2005, 2013; Lerner et al., 2005). Developmental changes during adolescence are a good example. Adolescents, their families and the communities and societies in which they live experience systematic and successive developmental changes over time.

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  Contemporary Perspectives on Socialization and Social Development in Early Childhood Education

  • Olivia Saracho, Bernard Spodek(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Information Age Publishing

    (Publisher)

  1 Contemporary Perspectives on Socialization and Social Development . . . , pages 1–17 Copyright © 2007 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved. THEORIES OF SOCIALIZATION AND SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT Olivia N. Saracho and Bernard Spodek Right from their moment of birth, children are unique in their rate of growth and development, as well as in their social awareness and ability to interact socially. Characteristics for each age group have been identified, but these are only norms that indicate expected developmental sequences. However, there is a range of individual differences among children. Newborn infants are aware of their needs and use their activity level to make these needs known. As they mature, they develop other ways to make their needs known. They also become aware of both their physical and social environment. Interactions between mothers and children are impor-tant for social development as adequate mothering satisfies children’s social and emotional needs. SOCIALIZATION FORCES Children’s socialization is influenced by several important social forces such as those found in the family, the peer group, and among significant others. Each is discussed separately here. CHAPTER 1 2 O.N. SARACHO and B. SPODEK The Family Context Children are first influenced by their early exposure at home with their family. Each family reflects an ethnic background, a series of relationships, educational attitude, and a social status. Each family also establishes defi-nite rituals, habits, and attitudes. The family is the child’s first and most important socializing agency. An emotional attachment to family is essen-tial in the development of all relationships in life. Within the family envi-ronment, children begin to understand and build relationships and interactions among all the family members. Children’s experiences within the family ultimately give them a feeling that the primary group accepts or rejects them.

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  Explaining Social Life

  A Guide to Using Social Theory

  • John Parker, Hilary Stanworth(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Red Globe Press

    (Publisher)

  In addition, the glossary offers definitions and further elaboration of some key terms (these are indicated in bold in the text). To facilitate the understanding of readers who are curious about the rela-tion between our fundamental schema and the wide variety of social theo-retical possibilities, we can also expand on Figure 0.4. This showed how each concept can be used to identify a theoretical bias, and that together the five basic concepts can be mobilised to provide a classification of six broad varie-ties of social theory, each characterised by its understanding of the relative importance of the five fundamental kinds of causal powers we suggest are together responsible for social phenomena. Figure 0.5 tentatively assigns a range of named theorists and social theoretical stances to positions within the broad sixfold classification (individualism, natu-ralism, actionalism, culturalism, structuralism and our own multi-causalism). Figure 0.5 A crude, but useful, classification of common social theory labels, writers and schools Individualism utilitarianism, rational choice theory, Collins’ ‘interaction ritual chains’, subjectivism, psychologism Naturalism positivism, Comte, social evolutionism, Spencer, biological determinism, environmental determinism, varieties of feminism, Levi-Strauss Actionism symbolic interactionism, Goffman, ethnomethodology, social constructionism, Giddens’ structuration theory Culturalism idealism, cultural Marxism, Foucault, varieties of feminism, Douglas and cultural theory Structuralism Parsons’ later systems functionalism, Bourdieu, Althusser, economistic Marxism, Marxist feminism, actor network theory Pluralist Multi-causalism Marx, Weber, Durkheim, pragmatism, Habermas, early Parsons, Elias, contemporary historical sociology, Mann’s theory of social power, Archer’s morphogenetic critical realism, DeLanda’s assemblage theory Explaining social life 16 This kind of assigning is suggestive rather than definitive.

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