4 Socialization and Social Roles

What is a self? What does it mean to have a self?

“Self” refers to a person’s distinct sense of identity. It is who we are for ourselves and who we are for others. It has consistency and continuity through time and a coherence that distinguishes us as persons. However, there is something always precarious and incomplete about the self. Selves change through the different stages of life; sometimes they do not measure up to the ideals we hold for ourselves or others, and sometimes they can be wounded by our interactions with others or thrown into crisis. As Zygmunt Bauman (2004) put it, one’s distinct sense of identity is a “postulated self,” a “horizon” towards which we strive but never quite reach.

The self is a social product. It does not develop in the absence of socialization. Socialization is the process through which people are taught to be proficient members of a society. It describes the ways that people come to understand societal norms and expectations, to accept society’s beliefs, and to be aware of societal values. It also describes the way people come to be aware of themselves and to reflect on the suitability of their behaviour in their interactions with others.  Socialization occurs as people engage and disengage in a series of roles throughout life. Each role, like the role of son or daughter, student, and employee, is defined by the behaviour expected of a person who occupies a particular position.

Even when the self is alone for extended periods of time (hermits or prisoners in isolation) an internal conversation goes on that would not be possible if the individual had not been socialized already. The (mostly fictional) examples of feral children, such as Victor of Aveyron or Mogli from The Jungle Book, who have been raised under conditions of extreme social deprivation attest to the difficulties these individuals confront when trying to develop this reflexive quality of humanity. They often cannot use language, form intimate relationships, or play games. Socialization is not therefore simply the process through which people learn the norms and rules of a society, it also is the process by which people become aware of themselves as they interact with others. It is the process through which people become people in the first place.

Charles Cooley

One of the pioneering contributors to sociological perspectives on self-development was the American Charles Horton Cooley (1864–1929). Cooley asserted that people’s self-understanding is constructed, in part, by their perception of how others view them — a process termed “the looking glass self” (Cooley, 1902). According to Cooley, we base our own self-image on what we think other people see. We imagine how we must appear to others, then react to this speculation.

Cooley believed that our sense of self is not based on some internal source of individuality. Rather, we imagine how we look to others, draw conclusions based on their reactions to us, and then develop our personal sense of self. In other words, people’s reactions to us are like a mirror in which we are reflected. We live a mirror image of ourselves.

George Herbert Mead

George Herbert Mead (1863–1931) advanced a more complex sociological approach for understanding self-development. He agreed that the self, as a person’s distinct identity, is only developed through social interaction. He argued that the crucial component of the self is its capacity for self-reflection, its capacity to be “an object to itself” (Mead, 2015 [1934]). On this basis, he broke the self down into two components: the “I” and the “me.”

The “me” represents the part of the self in which one recognizes the “organized sets of attitudes” of others toward the self. It is who we are in other’s eyes: our roles, our “personalities,” our public personas. The “I,” on the other hand, represents the part of the self that acts on its own initiative or responds to the organized attitudes of others. It is the creative, spontaneous, unpredictable part of the self: the part of the self that embodies the possibility of change or undetermined action. The self is always caught up in a social process in which one flips back and forth between two distinguishable phases, the I and the me, as one mediates between one’s own individual actions and individual responses to various social situations and the attitudes of the community.

How do we get from being newborns to being humans with “selves”?  In Mead’s theory of development, a child develops through stages in which the child’s increasing ability to play roles attests to their increasing solidification of a social sense of self. A role is the behaviour expected of a person who occupies particular social status or position in society. In learning to play roles one also learns how to put oneself in the place of another, to see through another’s eyes. When they are very little, a child simply cannot play a game like baseball or cricket; they cannot “get it” because they are not able to insert themselves mentally into the complex role of the player. They cannot see themselves from the point of view of all the other players on the field or figure out their place within a rule bound sequence of activities. At a later point in their life, a child becomes able to learn how to play.

Mead developed a specifically sociological theory of the path of development that all people go through by focusing on the developing capacity to put oneself in the place of another, or role play: the four stages of child socialization.

Four Stages of Child Socialization

During the preparatory stage, children are only capable of imitation: They have no ability to imagine how others see things. They copy the actions of people with whom they regularly interact, such as their mothers and fathers. A child’s baby talk reflects its inability to make an object of themselves. The separation of I and me does not yet exist in an organized manner to enable the child to see themselves through other peoples eyes.

This is followed by the play stage, during which children begin to imitate and take on roles that another person might have. Thus, children might try on a parent’s point of view by acting out “grownup” behaviour, like playing dress up and acting out the parental role or talking on a toy cell phone the way they see adults doing. However, children are still not able to take on roles in a consistent and coherent manner. Role play is very fluid and transitory, and children flip in and out of roles easily. As Mead (2015, p. 115) writes, “The child says something in one character and responds in another character, and then his responding in another character is a stimulus to himself in the first character, and so the conversation goes on.”

During the game stage, children learn to consider several specific roles at the same time and how those roles interact with each other. They learn to understand interactions involving different people with a variety of purposes. They understand that role play in each situation involves following a consistent set of rules and expectations. For example, a child at this stage is likely to be aware of the different responsibilities of people in a restaurant who together make for a smooth dining experience: someone seats you, another takes your order, someone else cooks the food, while yet another person clears away dirty dishes.

Mead uses the example of a baseball game (or “ball-nine” as he called it). At one point in learning to play baseball, children do not get it that when they hit the ball they need to run, or that after their turn someone else gets a turn to bat. For baseball to work, the players not only have to know what the rules of the game are, and what their specific role in the game is (batter, catcher, first base, etc.), but know simultaneously the role of every other player on the field. Role play in games like baseball involves the understanding that one’s own role is tied to the roles of several people simultaneously and that these roles are governed by fixed, or at least mutually recognized, rules and expectations.

Finally, children develop, understand, and learn the idea of the generalized other, the common behavioural expectations of general society. By this stage of development, an individual is able to internalize how he or she is viewed, not simply from the perspective of several specific others, but from the perspective of the generalized other or “organized community.” Being able to guide one’s actions according to the attitudes of the generalized other provides the basis of having a “self” in the sociological sense.

Socialization doesn’t stop with childhood. As we grow into adulthood and beyond, we become socialized into new roles and become new types of people. Many societies have specific rites of passage that mark the transition from childhood to adulthood. Rites of passage are commonly marked by three phases: separation, liminality, and incorporation (Van Gennep, 1977). The word liminality means in-between­–it derives from the Latin word for threshold. When one is in a liminal state one is between states. For example, wedding ceremonies the world over are often marked by a temporary separation, followed by a ceremony, and then a celebration marking the couples new status. During the ceremony itself the couple are in-between states–they aren’t really married, but they are not exactly single. They are between and betwixt states.

Agents of Socialization

Family is the first agent of socialization. Mothers and fathers, siblings and grandparents, plus members of an extended family, all teach a child what he or she needs to know. For example, they show the child how to use objects (such as clothes, computers, eating utensils, books, bikes); how to relate to others (some as “family,” others as “friends,” still others as “strangers” or “teachers” or “neighbors”); and how the world works (what is “real” and what is “imagined”). As you are aware, either from your own experience as a child or from your role in helping to raise one, socialization includes teaching and learning about an unending array of objects and ideas.

Sociologists recognize that race, social class, religion, and other societal factors play an important role in socialization. For example, poor families usually emphasize obedience and conformity when raising their children, while wealthy families emphasize judgment and creativity (National Opinion Research Center 2008). This may occur because working-class parents have less education and more repetitive-task jobs for which it is helpful to be able to follow rules and conform. Wealthy parents tend to have better educations and often work in managerial positions or careers that require creative problem solving, so they teach their children behaviours that are beneficial in these positions. This means children are effectively socialized and raised to take the types of jobs their parents already have, thus reproducing the class system (Kohn 1977). Likewise, children are socialized to abide by gender norms, perceive of race, and class-related behaviours.

In Sweden, for instance, stay-at-home fathers are a regular part of the social landscape. A government policy provides subsidized time off work—480 days for families with newborns—with the option of the paid leave being shared between mothers and fathers. As one stay-at-home dad says, being home to take care of his baby son “is a real fatherly thing to do. I think that’s very masculine” (Associated Press 2011). Close to 90 percent of Swedish fathers use their paternity leave (about 340,000 dads); on average they take seven weeks per birth (The Economist, 2014). How do policies in your country—and your society’s expected gender roles—compare?

Peer Groups

A peer group is made up of people who are similar in age and social status and who share interests. Peer group socialization begins in the earliest years, such as when kids on a playground teach younger children the norms about taking turns, the rules of a game, or how to shoot a basket. As children grow into teenagers, this process continues. Peer groups are important to adolescents in a new way, as they begin to develop an identity separate from their parents and exert independence. Additionally, peer groups provide their own opportunities for socialization since kids usually engage in different types of activities with their peers than they do with their families. Peer groups provide adolescents’ first major socialization experience outside the realm of their families. Interestingly, studies have shown that although friendships rank high in adolescents’ priorities, this is balanced by parental influence.

Institutions

The social institutions of our culture also inform our socialization. Formal institutions—like schools, workplaces, and the government—teach people how to behave in and navigate these systems. Other institutions, like the media, contribute to socialization by inundating us with messages about norms and expectations.

Schools serve as important locations for socialization around the world. Students are not in school only to study math, reading, science, and other subjects—the manifest function of this system. Schools also serve a latent function in society by socializing children into behaviours like practicing teamwork, following a schedule, and using textbooks.

^{The Hidden Curriculum in Russia (Danil Turkov, CC 4.0)}

School and classroom rituals, led by teachers serving as role models and leaders, regularly reinforce what society expects from children. Sociologists describe this aspect of schools as the hidden curriculum, which is the informal teaching done by schools. For example, students in schools in working class neighbourhoods are more likely to be taught to sit quietly, obey instructions, and only speak when spoken to. Students in more elite private schools on the other hand are given assignments that foster leadership skills, public speaking, and experiential learning. The content to be learned may be the same, but the effects are to prepare students for very different occupational roles.

Resocialization

In the process of resocialization, old behaviours that were helpful in a previous role are removed because they are no longer of use. Resocialization is necessary when a person moves to a senior care center, goes to boarding school, or serves a sentence in the prison system. In the new environment, the old rules no longer apply. The process of resocialization is typically more stressful than normal socialization because people have to unlearn behaviours that have become customary to them. While resocialization has a specific meaning, many organizations consider their training or retraining processes to embody elements of resocialization.

The most common way resocialization occurs is in a total institution where people are isolated from society and are forced to follow someone else’s rules. A ship at sea is a total institution, as are religious convents, prisons, or some religious organizations. They are places cut off from a larger society.

Many individuals are resocialized into an institution through a two-part process. First, members entering an institution must leave behind their old identity through what is known as a degradation ceremony. In a degradation ceremony, new members lose the aspects of their old identity and are given new identities. The process is sometimes gentle. To enter a senior care home, an elderly person often must leave a family home and give up many belongings which were part of his or her long-standing identity. Though caretakers guide the elderly compassionately, the process can still be one of loss.

In other situations, the degradation ceremony can be more extreme. Erving Goffman (1961) referred to the process of being stripped of one’s external identity as a “mortification of the self.” As people are placed in jail they lose freedom, rights (including the right to privacy), and personal belongings. When entering the army, soldiers have their hair cut short. Their old clothes are removed and they wear matching uniforms. These individuals must give up any markers of their former identity in order to be resocialized into an identity as a soldier.

After new members of an institution are stripped of their old identity, they build a new one that matches the new society. In the military, soldiers go through basic training together, where they learn new rules and bond with one another. They follow structured schedules set by their leaders. Soldiers must keep their areas clean for inspection, march in correct formations, and salute when in the presence of superior officers.

In his book Asylum (1961), Goffman provides an acute analysis of some of the perverse implications of resocialization within the structure of total institutions. In institutions of resocialization, inmates pass through a standard sequence of changes with respect to how their capacity to act “morally” (i.e., as someone answerable for their actions) is established, recognized, and affirmed by others (and by themselves), which Goffman refers to as their moral career. Goffman observed that the stratagems for securing recognition of viable selfhood or moral capacity from others — mental patients from ward staff, for example — often undermined the stated goals of rehabilitation. As it was the psychiatric authorities who decided who had viable selfhood and who did not, and as tangible benefits of status and privileges were at stake, the setting of the mental institution provided the conditions under which amoral strategies of self became effective. Patients found that “it is not very practicable to sustain solid claims about oneself” because these were easily torn down by staff after glancing at the patients’ records (Goffman, 1961). Instead, it was easier to give up the goal of “moral” rehabilitation and just mimic what the staff wanted to get privileges.

Learning to deal with life after having lived in a total institution requires yet another process of resocialization. In the Canadian military, soldiers learn discipline and a capacity for hard work. They set aside personal goals to achieve a mission, and they take pride in the accomplishments of their units. Many soldiers who leave the military transition these skills into different careers. Others find themselves lost upon leaving, uncertain about the outside world, and what to do next. The process of resocialization to civilian life is not always simple one and in Canada results in a much higher rate of suicide among ex-solidiers than the rest of the population.

Roles and Status

Much of our later socialization involves learning to take on new roles. Roles are patterns of behaviour that we recognize in each other that are representative of a person’s social status. Currently, while reading this text, you are enacting the role of a student. However, you also play other roles in your life, such as “daughter,” “neighbour,” or “employee.” These various roles are each associated with a different status.

Sociologists use the term status to describe the responsibilities and benefits that a person experiences according to their rank and role in society. Some statuses are ascribed; ascribed statuses are those you do not choose, such as son, elderly person, or female. Others, known achieved statuses, are obtained by choice, such as a high school dropout, self-made millionaire, or nurse. As a daughter or son, you occupy a different status than as a neighbour or employee. One person can be associated with a multitude of roles and statuses. Even a single status such as “student” has a complex role-set, or array of roles, attached to it (Merton 1957). It is important to note that status refers to the rank in social hierarchy, while role is the behaviour expected of a person holding a certain status.

If too much is required of a single role, individuals can experience role strain. Consider the duties of a parent: cooking, cleaning, driving, problem-solving, acting as a source of moral guidance—the list goes on. Similarly, a person can experience role conflict when one or more roles are contradictory. A parent who also has a full-time career can experience role conflict daily. When there is a deadline at the office, but a sick child needs to be picked up from school, which comes first? When you are working toward a promotion, but your children want you to come to their school play, which do you choose? Being a college student can conflict with being an employee, being an athlete, or even being a friend. Our roles in life have a great effect on our decisions and who we become.

Role performance is how a person expresses their role. Sociologist Erving Goffman presented the idea that a person is like an actor on a stage. Calling his theory dramaturgy, Goffman believed that we use “impression management” to present ourselves to others as we hope to be perceived. Each situation is a new scene, and individuals perform different roles depending on who is present (Goffman 1959). Think about the way you behave around your coworkers versus the way you behave around your grandparents versus the way you behave with a blind date. Even if you’re not consciously trying to alter your personality, your grandparents, coworkers, and date probably see different sides of you.

As in a play, the setting matters as well. If you have a group of friends over to your house for dinner, you are playing the role of a host. It is agreed upon that you will provide food and seating and probably be stuck with a lot of the cleanup at the end of the night. Similarly, your friends are playing the roles of guests, and they are expected to respect your property and any rules you may set forth (“Don’t leave the door open or the cat will get out”). In any scene, there needs to be a shared reality between players. In this case, if you view yourself as a guest and others view you as a host, there are likely to be problems.

Goffman’s dramaturgy ideas expand on the ideas of Charles Cooley and the looking-glass self. Impression management is a critical component of symbolic interactionism. For example, a judge in a courtroom has many “props” to create an impression of fairness, gravity, and control—like their robe and gavel. People often dress so that they will feel the part. Younger professors often dress up more than their older colleagues, in part because they are trying to establish themselves in the role, not just for others but also in their own eyes. Dressing up can even be part of anticipatory socialization, that is, the preparation for future life roles. Medical students for example are taught early on to wear their white gowns, even before they are practicing in any way. Think about where in your own life your clothes play a part in transforming the roles you play.

Conclusion

In this section our focus was primarily on the micro-level processes that go into constructing social life. While most of these ideas described fall within the symbolic interactionist framework, it is useful to think about how these ideas play out in regard to each of our perspective.

The symbolic interactionist framework is of course the most important here. A symbolic interactionist study might look at the impact that a serious injury might have on professional athletes who are no longer able to play their sport. Many athletes have devoted years of hard work and their sense of self is often tied strongly to the roles they play.

A structural functionalist might pay more attention to the demands that roles place on us and how these roles might conflict with other roles we are asked to play in society. Understanding the stress that mothers faced during the pandemic when they were asked to both take care of children at home while continuing to be productive employees points to a strain in the social structure, which is unfairly asking women to play two social roles at once.

A conflict perspective on socialization is important for understanding how gender stereotypes are internalized, and how we come to embody racism from a very early age. Understanding sexism and racism in this way moves us beyond the “good” vs. “bad” person dichotomy to a space where we can understand these issues as deeply engrained in both our societies and ourselves. They also help us understand how sexism and racism are maintained in societies that profess to treat all people equally.

References

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