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SOC101 Lecture Slides Week 5

The document discusses socialization and its role in perpetuating social norms and structures over time. Socialization occurs through various agents throughout life and involves learning social roles and identities. Interactions help transmit a culture's values and behavior patterns between generations.

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24 views14 pages

SOC101 Lecture Slides Week 5

The document discusses socialization and its role in perpetuating social norms and structures over time. Socialization occurs through various agents throughout life and involves learning social roles and identities. Interactions help transmit a culture's values and behavior patterns between generations.

Uploaded by

maisha.ayman.75
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PPTX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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SOC101: Introduction to Sociology

Week 6

Selim Reza, PhD


Associate Professor of Sociology
Department of Political Science and Sociology
School of Humanities and Social Sciences
Social interactions, groups, and networks
• What values do you hope to instill in your children?
• Would you like them to be successful? Creative? Well-mannered? Kind?
Obedient? Religious?
• Why?
• 1920s (obedience) vs. 1970s (independence and creative thinking)
• Socialization is the process whereby an infant gradually becomes a
self-aware, knowledgeable person, skilled in the ways of his or her
culture.

• It also describes the processes whereby preschool-age children learn


to be students, students learn to be workers, and childless persons
learn to become parents.

• The vast majority of social roles we hold in life seem “natural” but
actually involve intense socialization, or learning how to successfully
navigate one’s roles and relationships throughout the life course.
Social reproduction
• Socialization is a key mechanism contributing to social reproduction— the process
whereby societies have structural continuity over time.

• During socialization, especially in the early years, children learn the ways of their elders,
thereby perpetuating their values, norms, and social practices across the generations.

• All societies have characteristics that endure over time, even though their members
change as individuals are born and die.

• North American society, for example, has many distinctive social and cultural
characteristics that have persisted for generations—such as the fact that English is the
main language spoken.

• Socialization connects different generations to one another (Turnbull, 1983).


Agents of Socialization
• Agents of socialization—groups or social contexts in which significant processes
of socialization occur.

• Primary socialization which occurs in infancy and childhood, is the most intense
period of cultural learning. It is the time when children learn language and basic
behavioral patterns that form the foundation for later learning. The family is the
main agent of socialization during this phase.

• Secondary socialization occurs later in childhood and in maturity. In this phase,


other agents of socialization, such as schools, peer groups, organizations, the
media, the workplace, and even religious organizations, become socializing forces.
• Social interactions help people learn the values, norms, and beliefs of their
culture.

• Socialization is a lifelong process and does not end in childhood.

• Socialization can be a process of learning, relearning, and unlearning.

• Resocialization refers to the process whereby people learn new rules and
norms when entering a new social world. (Bangladesh vs Japan/military,
prison).

• Anticipatory socialization: the process whereby we learn about what a


particular role might entail before we enter it (parenting classes/Summer
camps)
Family: A socializing agent

Annette Lareau (2011):


1. Working-class parents: accomplishment of natural growth: children enjoy long periods of
unstructured free time, often spent with friends and extended family members.

2. Upper-middle-class: concerted cultivation, fostering kids’ talents by enrolling them in a


range of structured educational and extracurricular activities and closely monitoring their
development.
Other agents of socialisation
• Schools
• Peer relationships: Peer group
• Mass media: newspapers, magazines, radio, television, social
media/reality show
• Work: managing emotions and feelings/success in the workplace
Social roles
• Socially defined expectations for a person in a given social position.

• Doctor?

• Through socialization, individuals internalize social roles and learn how to


carry them out (instructed and programmed)
Identity
• Identity relates to people’s understandings about who they are and what is meaningful to
them.

• These understandings are formed in relation to certain attributes that take priority over
other sources of meaning.

• Some of the main sources of identity are gender, sexual orientation, nationality, ethnicity,
and social class.

• Social identity: student, mother, lawyer, Muslim, homeless, Asian, dyslexic, and married.
Master statuses (Erving Goffman).

• Self-identity
Socialisation through the life course

• Childhood
• Teenager
• Young adulthood
• Midlife
• Later life
Social interactions
• Human beings are self-aware

• Erving Goffman: social interaction/sociological subfield called “microsociology”

• Apparently insignificant forms of social interaction is of major importance in sociology and, far
from being uninteresting, is one of the most absorbing of all areas of sociological investigation.

A) Our day-to-day routines, with their almost constant interactions with others, give structure and
form to what we do; we can learn a great deal about ourselves as social beings, and about social
life itself, from studying them.

B) The study of everyday life reveals to us how humans can act creatively to shape reality.

C) All large-scale social systems, in fact, depend on the patterns of social interaction we engage in
daily life/Civil inattention
Any questions?

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