Socialization: Shaping Individuals and Society
Definition: Socialization is a set of social experiences that occur over a human’s life, allowing individuals to develop their human potential and learn the cultural norms of their society.
The social experience is the foundation upon which we build personality.
Cultural assimilation is not the same as training personality.
We build our personality by internalizing the social environment around us, participating in the society we live in, and assimilating its culture. By doing so, we shape our way of thinking and evaluating things. Without social contact, however, it is absolutely impossible to develop a personality.
Social experience (and its socializing effect) is vital for individuals, but also for the reproduction of society. Socialization is vital for the reproduction of society. Society continues over time because there is an exposure of individuals to their culture, ensuring transmission from one generation to another of the basic skills they need for survival.
Socialization is a continuous process in the life of individuals and permanent in the business of society for transmission and cultural reproduction.
Socialization Agents
Family
The family is the most important agent, both in complex modern societies and in less technologically advanced societies. It is important because the early years of a person’s life revolve around the family.
Socialization is continuous and diffuse. Socialization does not follow a pre-established pattern.
What children see and watch at home becomes their picture of themselves and the world. Children absorb everything they see in the home environment, and there they begin to form their own personality.
The importance lies not only in how to educate but also in the attention paid to intellectual and emotional development.
Transmission of social status includes economic and cultural capital. The world does not come from children in general, but from children of a particular race, religion, or social class, which is the race, religion, and class of the family.
Peer Group
Upon entering school, children discover the interest group, a social group composed of individuals who have more or less the same age and social status and common interests.
In peer groups, young people gain a measure of personal independence that will be key to learning to establish their own relationships and to form an image of themselves other than that which they receive from their parents or teachers.
Peers are people with similar age and status.
Circumventing adult control: the peer group is the first instrument to avoid adult control.
Exploring the world and sharing concerns and interests that are not relevant or are repressed in the family. Parents are interested in knowing and controlling friendships.
Possible rival authority to the family (“generation gap”) when there is a strong need to forge a new identity (adult). Here begins the transition between childhood and adulthood.
Two other relevant actors, but not universal in all societies:
Education System: Deliberate, planned, and professionalized socialization. Characteristic of modern societies. It tries to compensate for the errors that may be committed in the family.
Mass Media: Appeared in the middle of the twentieth century (television). The mass media impersonally and simultaneously reaches a large number of individuals.
Demographic Transition
The demographic transition is a theory used in demography that helps to understand two phenomena:
First, it explains why the growth of the world’s population has soared in the last 200 years, from 1 billion people in 1800 to 6.5 billion today.
Secondly, it describes the period of transformation from a preindustrial society, characterized by high birth and mortality rates, to an industrial or even a post-industrial society, characterized by low rates.
A process in four phases:
1) Preindustrial: High mortality rate and high birth rate, resulting in low population growth (essentially agrarian and rural).
- Birth rate: Offspring have economic value, absence of family planning, high risk that children will not reach adulthood.
- Mortality rate: Recurrent pests and infectious diseases, poor living conditions for most of the population.
2) Early Industrial: Mortality rate is low, but the birth rate is high, resulting in very high population growth (Malthus).
- Mortality rate: More food available due to technology and medical development.
- Birth rate: Not yet adjusted to new conditions of mortality.
3) Advanced Industrial: Birth rate drops to almost match the mortality rate, resulting in slowing population growth.
- Most children survive and become adults.
- Lifestyles make raising children expensive.
- Increased access to the workforce for women.
- Improved family planning methods.
4) Postindustrial: Still falling and stabilizing mortality and birth rates, resulting in a static or declining population and significant aging.
- The birth rate falls because many couples have both partners working and have a personal project of life.
- The cost of upbringing continues to increase.
Critical Evaluation
The demographic transition theory argues that technology is the key to demographic changes. Instead of predicting unstoppable population growth as Malthus did, this approach provides that technology will dominate the increase in the number of inhabitants. The demographic transition theory is a derivation of the theory of modernization. The current economic structure perpetuates poverty unless there is a redistribution.
Social Stratification
Social stratification is the stable distribution of individuals into social categories (strata, classes) depending on their life chances.
It is an inequality that is consolidated, stable, and firm, giving rise to different social strata that are distinguished in that they have different opportunities in life.
These opportunities can be configured in two ways:
a) They exist in fact.
b) They correspond to “right” (natural).
Social prestige and lifestyle are associated with both.
Layers can be configured as social groups with group consciousness.
Principles: It is a characteristic of society, not of its individual members. It is perpetuated from generation to generation through family, although it may support more or less universal evolutionary social mobility, but it varies in direction and degree. Any system of stratification is legitimated by beliefs that justify and facilitate taking the position occupied.
Life chances depend on income and wealth, prestige, and political power.
Open and Closed Social Systems
Closed system: Social mobility is difficult and unregulated (slavery, castes, estates). Status changes are difficult. Ascription (by birth, natural law) and lifestyle determine opportunities in life. There is high consistency in the various dimensions of life chances.
Open system: Greater social mobility, socially frowned upon, as well as poorly regulated (modern social class). Income (mostly) and heritage determine opportunities in life, which in turn determine prestige and lifestyle. There is less consistency in the different dimensions of life opportunities.
Capitalist Society
Capitalist society is based on an economic system that:
- Converts a minority of capitalist society into drivers of wealth, using a rational profit logic.
- Converts a majority into workers who, to survive, must sell their ability to work to the capitalists for wages.
This results in structural conflicts of interest between capital and labor, the key to the order and dynamics of society today.
All productive activity in capitalist society is dominated by the characterization of capitalist society:
- The logic of rationalized profit leads to an impressive and unknown development of productive forces and instrumental mastery of nature.
- The superstructure of social and cultural institutions attends to the reproduction of this mode of production and the social power resulting from it.
- Loss of control by man over his own life: this is what Marx called alienation.
Dimensions or aspects of alienation:
- Work: Participating in a process over which the protagonists have no control, as it is regulated and supervised impersonally.
- Products of work: Belong not to those who produce them, but to the owner of the means of production (employer or capitalist), who buys their workforce to use it according to his calculation of interest.
- Other workers: Production is inherently cooperative and supportive, but capitalism makes it individualistic, competitive, and unsupportive. Other staff are competitors.
- Oneself: The worst of all, one becomes estranged from their own human nature because the work does not serve to affirm oneself.
What is the fate of a capitalist society according to Marx?
- Reducing wages to a minimum, using the reserve army as a lever.
- Imperialist expansion: always wanting more markets, more products.
- Capitalists are unable to cooperate with the political powers.
- Capitalist development of productive forces.
According to him, socialism is an inevitable consequence of how society is evolving.
Anomie
Society imposes few restrictions on the individual. Life now has personal freedom as a fundamental value. Relationships between individuals have tolerance and respect for this freedom as their basic principle.
Modern society, functional and urban, imposes few moral restrictions on the individual. Life now has personal freedom as a fundamental value. Relations between individuals now have tolerance and respect for this freedom as their fundamental principle.
Lack of models and benchmarks to anchor the behaviors and lifestyles of individuals.
Individuals who are faced with a lack of restrictions could lead to self-destruction.
Functionalist Paradigm
Its starting point is the opposite of the action paradigm:
Society is more than the sum of the individuals who compose it and their behavior. It is a reality sui generis (which has its own components and is not something to be studied from the behavior of individuals).
This reality has a life and existence of its own. Society is a kind of organism or group that has its own existence. Before we were born it existed, and after our death, society will continue to exist.
The aim of sociology is “social facts”: ways of behaving, thinking, and feeling external to men, imposed on us with unsurpassed coercive force on our consciences, and defined as such under structures and social functions.
Social structure produces social events and social function.
Functional components of the study:
1) Identify social facts, something that certain individuals do on a regular basis.
2) Find out which social structure produces this fact.
3) Find out what is the social function that is being satisfied.
Social Group
A social group is a set of two or more individuals, each with a recognizable identity for the rest, who have some type of link or connection between them. Human beings are constantly in groups: couples, families, circles of friends, etc. Social groups are composed of people who have common experiences or interests, or of persons bound together by bonds of trust, loyalty, or dependence. Members of a social group, although aware of their own individuality, are recognized as members of that group.
Differences between primary and secondary groups:
- In primary groups, members define each other as who they are, in terms of kinship or in relation to personal and unique characteristics of each.
- In secondary groups, members define each other more in terms of what they do or make, in order to achieve a certain objective. Thus, in secondary groups, each member knows very well what they have to offer the rest of the group and what the rewards are.
This accounting of debits and credits is presented more clearly in secondary groups.
Conduct is more formal and less personal.
George Herbert Mead’s Socialization Theory
Mead’s theory has a concept, the self, from which all its construction is concentrated.
SELF: The subject’s image of himself, which cannot exist outside of society, as it is formed from social experience.
Components:
- The I: The self is the subject (active agent guided by symbols that it creates, knows, and evaluates). It is the active part of the self. It reflects the active nature of the subject.
- The ME: The self is the object (provides guidance to other subjects). At the same time, I am the subject of guidance for others.
Social interaction is an ongoing dialogue between the self and the me of each actor.
Thus, we act in a non-random or spontaneous way, but anticipating what we can expect others to expect of us.
One thus becomes targetable for oneself: being objective in one’s own consciousness, forming an image of oneself, who one is, and who one represents.