SOC271 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Jargon
8 Jun 2018
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Socialization
Definition of Socialization
1. A process by which persons acquire skills, knowledge and disposition that enables them to
participate as more or less effective members of groups and societies.
2. Societal perspective - the means by which culture is transmitted from one generation to the
next.
3. Humanization of infants is problematic in that provision must be made for their acquisition of
those aspects of culture essential for competent social participation.
Children must:
a. learn what is and is not appropriate - NORMS
b. acquire standards telling them what is and is not desirable, worthwhile, beautiful, and good -
VALUES
c. secure conceptions of the world about them, how it operates, and their place in it - BELIEFS
d. gain mastery of the means for communicating with others - SYMBOLS
4. Generally, the family is the chief culture transmitting agency and is intermediate between
the larger society and the individual.
Learning takes place in certain kinds of intimate group situations - the ideal is the primary
group which emphasizes relations between its members.
Three essential conditions give rise to the social characteristics found in primary groups -
conditions most favourable for effective socialization.
i. Physical proximity.
ii. Smallness in size of the group.
iii. Duration of the membership.
Social characteristics of the primary group relationship:
1. Identification of ends.
2. Intrinsic valuation of the relation and of the other person.
3. Inclusive knowledge of the other person.
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4. Feeling of spontaneity and freedom.
5. Operation of informal control.
Socialization is an on-going process - a process that we all experience, in varying degrees and
intensity, throughout our life course.
Resocialization - describes the type of socialization that occurs in a rapid, sometimes dramatic
fashion, often when a person must lay down one role and take up another, quite divergent one.
The ease and effectiveness of resocialization depends upon:
1. amount of control over the individual.
2. ability to suppress previous statuses and status relations.
3. denial of the worth of the old self.
4. degree of group pressure vs. pressures from significant others.
5. degree of individual participation in the resocialization process.
AGENTS OF SOCIALIZATION
1. socializes the child into its own patterns and its own values.
2. Each agency helps to socialize the child into the larger world.
3. Each agency become surrogates of wider social and cultural orders.
4. Their impact extends beyond their own organizational limits.
The FAMILY - most important socialization agency.
Approximates the ideal primary group, in which close, intense, and enduring emotional
attachments are fostered.
continuous contact - first context in which socialization patterns develop for the child.
1. Family in the community.
Transmits only segments of the wider culture - The family interprets this wider community to
the child.
2. Family as an complex interaction structure.
3. Mechanisms of Socialization. . . a system of rewards and punishments.
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