SOCIALIZATION

Socialization

Socialization

Socialization is a term used by sociologists, social psychologists, anthropologists, politicians and educationalists to refer to the process of inheriting norms, customs and ideologies. It may provide the individual with the skills and habits necessary for participating within their own society; a society itself is formed through a plurality of shared norms, customs, values, traditions, social roles, symbols and languages. Socialization is thus 'the means by which social and cultural continuity are attained'.

Section One

Socialization, however, is not a normative term: it describes a process which may or may not affect the reflexive agent, and which may or may not lead to desirable, or 'moral', outcomes. Individual views on certain issues, such as race or economics, may be socialized (and to that extent normalized) within a society. Many socio-political theories postulate that socialization provides only a partial explanation for human beliefs and behaviours; that agents are not 'blank slates' predetermined by their environment. Scientific research provides strong evidence that people are shaped by both social influences and their hard-wired biological makeup. Genetic studies have shown that a person's environment interacts with their genotype to influence behavioural outcomes, whilst the linguistic theory of generative grammar demonstrates how something such as the capacity for learning changes throughout one's lifetime.

To "socialise" may also mean simply to associate or mingle with people socially. In American English, "socialized" has mistakenly come to refer, usually in a pejorative sense, to the ownership structure of socialism or to the expansion of the welfare state. Traditionally, socialists and Marxists both used the term "socialization of industry" to refer to the reorganization of institutions so that the workers are all owners (cooperatives) and to refer to the implementation of workplace democracy.

Clausen claims that theories of socialization are to be found in Plato, Montaigne and Rousseau and he identifies a dictionary entry from 1828 that defines 'socialize' as 'to render social, to make fit for living in society' (1968: 20-1). However it was the response to a translation of a paper by Georg Simmel that the concept was incorporated into various branches of psychology and anthropology (1968: 31-52).

Section Two

In the middle of the 20th century, socialization was a key idea in the dominant American functionalist tradition of sociology. Talcott Parsons (Parsons and Bales 1956) and a group of colleagues in the US developed a comprehensive theory of society that responded to the emergence of modernity in which the concept of socialization was a central component. One of their interests was to try to understand the relationship between the individual and society - a distinctive theme in US sociology since the end of the nineteenth century. Ely Chinoy, in a 1960s standard textbook on sociology, says that socialization serves two major functions:

On the one hand, it prepares the individual for the roles he is to play, providing him with the necessary repertoire of habits, beliefs, and values, the appropriate patterns of emotional response and the modes of perception, the requisite skills and ...