Notes on Socialization

SOCIALIZATION AND SOCIAL ROLES
A. Introduction
1. socialization
Process of social learning. Watch an infant and how that infant relates to her / his mother. The infant is learning to be a human being, experimenting with the things that will enable her / him to communicate with others. This social learning continues throughout our life time, we constantly learn and relearn things.
a. Are we human?
With minimal human contact -- are we human? Look to the cases of feral children that Stark discusses, keep in mind that some see the "socio-pathic" personality as one that developed from "dysfunctional" family relationships, that is the "socio-path" learned to behave in this fashion by the extent and kind of contact that s/he has had with others.
b. structured contact with others shapes our:
· attitudes
· beliefs
· values
· patterns of behavior
B. The process:
1. agents of socialization
a. informal:
the process takes place in an unconscious fashion, there is no deliberate effort to move the individual in a particular direction to become a particular kind of human being. For example, little boys generally will be treated a bit rougher than girls, this is not necessarily a deliberate action, it is rather part of the broad expectation that boys are active and will be part of the rough and tumble. If a boy starts to play with dolls he will not be encouraged, if he picks up a golf club both mother and daddy may make a big fuss over this, particularly if he uses it on a golf ball rather than his sister or the cat.
b. formal:
Here the process is often very deliberate, the agents involved in the socialization process have a relatively clear idea of what kind of product they want to turn out. In the class room, we want you to begin to think like a sociologist so we stress the importance of the group and of the society, often to the exclusion of everything else. We will reward you if you begin to think and act like a sociologist, not as a psychologist. Formal rewards are given for conformity, punishments for failure to conform or learn the new rules. The work place will have specific rules that you must learn and adhere to if you expect to be successful. The church and Sunday school will put you through formal classes to learn what it is that we believe and why.
c. Total institutions and stripping.
Erving Goffman in his book Asylums presented us with a detailed description of re-socialization that takes place in total institutions. The process consists of removing any vestige of former identity (stripping), making the person dependent on the authority, then replacing the former sense of self or identity with a new one. Mental hospitals, prisons and the military are examples of total institutions. I will use the Army as an example. When I entered the Army, I was awakened at 3:30 on the first morning, sent out to breakfast, from there to the quartermaster where my clothing was removed, I was given a haircut (nearly a shave!), and issued new clothing. The key thing about the new clothing is that it is indistinguishable from any one else except for the name plate on the left chest. The Army then proceeded to humiliate me (and my fellow trainees), to make us dependent upon one another and the first sergeant for virtually everything we did. We were also isolated from other servicemen and women and from our families. We were taught how to blindly obey orders, how to move in unison and how to kill. All things that as Americans we did not do well or easily before. When we left basic training we were trained in the rudiments of combat and would go on for additional training. (I did not, I went to work in medical research).
This process is the one described by Goffman -- an original identity is stripped away and a new one put in its place. You have heard this referred to as brainwashing, you may also have read about people being drawn into a cult and undergoing similar experiences. It is all the same thing, and virtually every organization does something of this type to some degree or another. The difference between the total institutions and a fraternity or IBM is the latter are entered voluntarily and do not have complete and absolute control over the individual for any period of time.
2. particular agents
a. family
(1) earliest human contact occurs within the family, much research suggests that this early contact is important in the formation of the self and in developing human identity. Pay particular attention to what Stark presents relating to the Harlow monkeys, feral children. I would also call your attention to the work that Channel 4 did several years ago concerning the children in Romanian "orphanages." (A recent follow up was done during sweeps-week in the fall of 1995.) Compare this to what Stark says about children raised in the relative isolation of the orphanage or other institution. Some of my consulting work has been with the Colorado Division of Developmental Disability (homes for the mentally retarded) and the process of normalization -- moving these young people from the institution to group homes where they have more interaction with one another and where they must take on greater responsibilities for each other. The consequence of such moves is that these individuals become much less dependent, childlike and much more "human" and individualistic adults.
(2) differences by SES: read the discussion in Stark where he summarizes the work of Kohn and others
b. peer group:
As the name suggests these are friends and associates with whom we interact on a regular basis. Socialization and conformity is informal, that is, there is no deliberate agenda for what is learned or taught. The rules are often made up as we go along.
c. schooling and education:
The former is the formal training that you experience (are experiencing) in the educational system. Education is what you actually learn, some of it in school but probably most of it informally and outside the school system. We will say more about this distinction when we examine education and occupation later in the semester.
3. The social self:
the work of Cooley and G. H. Mead
a. Charles Horton Cooley:
the looking glass self
(1) we see ourselves reflected in others, through this reflection we come to know who and what we are
(2) Human Nature and the social self
b. George Herbert Mead:
Mead's major contribution is to be found in his Mind, Self and Society, published by his students from their notes taken over the years of his lectures at the University of Chicago. The thing that intrigues me a great deal about Mead's work is his idea of the 'I' and 'me' and how we come to know who we are.
The I and me of interaction. Notice that the development of the self according Cooley is relatively passive. You learn about who you are from how others reflect your projected image. For Mead the process is much more proactive, the individual is seen as a very active participant, shaping the interaction and attempting to convince others of the correctness of his / her view of self.
(1) project an I, this is the subjective self, who we believe we are
(2) are reflected the me, the objective self, who others think we are
(3) comparison of and adjustment of these two in the process of interaction develops the self as we know it. We can experience only the objective me of the interaction, it is through this that we come to know who and what we are.
(4) note the import of this in the development of self esteem.
C. Roles and Impression management
1. Roles -- expectations
a. reciprocal roles, expectation occur in context of structures
Roles always occur at least in pairs, that is if we speak of the student role, it is nearly always defined in relation to other students, teachers, administrators and so. A role does not occur in isolation, someone or some group establishes the expectations for the role and for how it relates to the others or the group.
2. behavior settings
Where behavior takes place. The class room is a behavioral setting as is the hallway on the campus. Note that the expected behaviors in these settings are somewhat different. Some sociologists have examined organizations and places where people interact for the number and variety of behavior settings. What they have tended to find is that as the organization gets larger, the number of different behavior settings does not increase proportionately with the result that there are more people per setting (consider the classroom in a large university contrasted to one in a small liberal arts college). When this occurs, more and more people become "passive" and less involved with the setting and with others in that setting. These studies have also found many other interesting things about satisfaction with performance and the expertise of performance associated with such large institutions. (Consider football played at Grinnell College in Iowa and football played at the University of Iowa.)
a. definition of situation:
each situation or setting in which we find ourselves has defined "expectations" for an individuals behavior. We also take to each situation or setting our own expectations, definitions. These are definitions of the situation. Consider the possibility of being stopped by a traffic policemen and accusing the policeman of "picking" on a law abiding (but in a hurry) citizen and challenging the policeman by telling him he should be off chasing robbers and such. Then do the same thing again, but this time acknowledge the skill with the policeman is doing her / his job. These are what we mean by definitions of the situation. (Note: the first behavior may fit with how the cop will define the situation, the second could very well confound him or her.)
b. size and complexity, number of settings:
Students of organizations have noted that as the size and complexity of an organization increases, the number of behavioral settings does not increase proportionately. The net effect is that we have more and more actors with less chance to participate. We can see these differences in the classroom. When a class is small (say less than 20-25), each student in the class can and is expected to participate. As the class increases in size, the numbers who are able to participate decreases till we often reach a point where no one can actively participate in the class.
The example of the class is one kind of situation, we can carry this over to the size of the organization and to the number of settings in which people can participate. In a small high school (say one in Eads, Colorado) there may be more opportunities for activities (behavioral settings) than there are students to participate. In this case we will encourage everyone to participate. In fact, there were so few girls in one these high schools that every girl in the school was encouraged to play on the varsity basketball team. One of these girls had only one arm, yet was a starter. At Cherry Creek high school the numbers of students is quite large, but the numbers of activities is not that much greater than it is at Eads. The net result is that we have more students per setting and a generally lower level of participation among the students. Another consequence is that at Cherry Creek High School it takes a higher level of performance to participate in the settings that are there, that is a greater degree of expertise.
3. management of social interaction
We are not passive participants in this interactive play, we often take charge. It is often useful to think about the action as a play in which we manage the roles and interaction. This is in fact what Erving Goffman does in his book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. He suggests (with Shakespeare!!) that all the world's a stage and all the men and women merely players with their exits and entrances. This notion provides some powerful tools for examining and attempting to understand interaction.
I have been perusing the Web for additional information on Goffman. One page I came across is by a computer type who likes to read and write. He presents a brief overview of Presentation of Self. Another page I found present excerpts from Presentation, mostly about Fronts, the author is on the faculty of the University of California, Riverside.
a. maintenance of self-esteem, self worth (boundary maintenance, privacy)
self-boundary as separate from others (privacy): each of us requires some degree of privacy to maintain our balance and sense of self. It is in the privacy of our home (or our mind) that we keep things about ourselves that we do not want to share with others. Often these things that we keep hidden away would 'spoil' our public performance. Until recently acknowledging ones homosexuality is such a thing, as is drinking or some kinds of drug use. I do not mean to imply or to say that these are the same things, only that these are bits of information about our self that if made public could damage our performance and success. Politicians are vary aware of these kinds of issues. Thomas Eagleton discovered the hard way how intolerant people are of any hint of mental illness -- Mr. Eagleton was a Senator from Missouri who joined the democratic ticket as the candidate for Vice President. Early in the campaign it was disclosed that he had been treated at an institution for a mental break down (depression, mental fatigue). This was enough discrediting that he was forced to drop off the ticket, although the problem would have in no way affected his performance as Vice President of United States. We draw boundaries around our selves and use these boundaries to shield our selves from the interference or prying of others. Such boundaries are seen to be necessary to our performance in a role.
Culture in definitions: Although the boundaries are important it must be noted that they are culturally defined. The degree and kind of privacy varies significantly from society to society. For example, Americans tend to require isolation in terms of sound and sight in order to feel private. The English on the other hand can create a 'private' space by just mentally blocking out others. Americans who room with English tend to find them 'standoffish' and cold as a result (they are capable of ignoring others in the same room with them if they want to be by themselves). In Japan, hotel rooms are often divided by rice paper screens, something that Americans find a bit disconcerting. For the Japanese the key to privacy is visual blocking out.
What is considered to be private and to constitute privacy varies markedly from culture to culture and from behavioral setting to setting (hospitals are places where our personal space and privacy is regularly violated by strangers, but we accept it as appropriate for the setting).
b. presentation of self as drama
Erving Goffman and others see our day to day activities as performance in a drama for which we write the script as we go along (some parts of the script are established by the society in terms associated with our statuses -- male, female, age, race etc.)
(1) performance : what we do in the role. In the class room I am clearly a performer, playing a role for which I have spent quite some time preparing. It is a performance that I repeat with some minor variation over and over each semester in any given class. As a husband, I also perform -- doing the things that are expected of me in our family drama -- help with dishes, cooking, earning money and so forth. The performances are the things that we do. Furthermore each performance takes place on a stage and has individual components
(2) front components: these are our on-stage performances. The components of this consist of the physical setting in which the performance takes place and over which we have varying degrees of control. Each performance also includes personal characteristics such as dress and action.
(A) setting: This is the stage on which the performance takes place. The movie Auntie Mame has a delightful series of changes in setting as Auntie Mame changes her apartment to suit how she sees herself at that time in life. Most of us do not have control over the setting to this degree, but we are still able to modify most 'stages' to some degree to suit our need. For example, I move furniture around in the classroom to accomplish what I want with that particular class (placement of the lectern, screens, etc.)
(B) personal characteristics: These are qualities about ourselves over which we often have a greater degree of control. We are very aware of this when we go on a job interview or on that first important date with our one true love (do people still do those kinds of things??? ; ^) ). We can break these into two parts: appearance and manner.
1. appearance : how do we look? What kind of clothing are we wearing? How do we stand -- perhaps this gets over into manner. I have often gone into class dressed in a fly fishing vest and hat, clothing that I typically wear when I am on the stream. I have often considered wearing academic regalia into the classroom (gown, cap and hood). This is appearance, quite simply, what do we look like?
2. manner: this is much more behavioral. Do we act in a confident manner, one that seems appropriate for the role that we are playing? In those instances when I go to class dressed in an odd manner, I get very little response or questioning of what I am doing. At first students seem a bit put off or laugh at the appearance. But after a few minutes when I conduct the class just as if I were not dressed in this fashion, the appearance is ignored. Generally we look for a match between appearance and manner to validate a performance. If they do not then we suspect that something is wrong and act accordingly toward the person. Successful con men are able to make the appearance and manner match to carry off the con.
(3) region of stage and region behavior: as mentioned above behavior takes place in regions -- front stage, back stage or off stage.
(A) front stage: this is the performance. It is what I do regularly in front of the class. You will be front stage when you complete quiz and exam, you are now 'on stage' and performing in this drama.
(B) back stage: typically is an area of preparation, where we prepare for our performance. At present I am in my office typing up these notes, this is preparation, off-stage performance. When this is completed and placed on the computer it will be 'front-stage.' Back stage is where we often keep our little secrets, the things that might spoil our performance, or where we work to hide them and to overcome. Good preparation will hide potential deficiencies.
1. privacy: is related to these regions of stage. Back stage and off stage are where our private lives and things are kept.
2. preparation: backstage is where we prepare for the performance.
Summary
Social roles and socialization are important concepts in the sociological lexicon. We use them to help us to understand the behavior of humans and the context in which that behavior takes place. The roles are the rules that govern our performance, socialization is the process by which we learn these roles and rules. The learning can be formal or informal, in fact, much of it is informal. Some of our most important performances require formal and lengthy training -- education and on the job.