Socialization
John Locke (1632-1704), an enlightenment philosopher, advanced the idea that we are born with a tabula rasa or blank slate onto which our experiences are etched. As we grow, we develop knowledge of the self, others, and the world in which we live. This knowledge shapes our perceptions and actions. His propositions were a departure from the idea that we are born and ordained with moral structures that guide our actions. Instead, Locke sought to understand the human experience through an epistemological position, a position that seeks to understand the acquisition of knowledge. As Locke and other philosophers advanced these ideas, more recognition was given to how the context in which we live shapes our existence.
Today we recognize the influence of our environment on our values, beliefs, attitudes, and perceptions. A person growing up in rural America will develop different views of the self, others, and the world than someone who has always lived in the city. While recognition is given to environmental influences, a great debate exists regarding the extent of environmental influences. This debate centers on not whether the environment influences us, but rather, how, in what ways, and to what extent.
Rather than explaining the self as a product of the environment (social determinism), some explain the self through essentialist (biological determinism) ideas of the self. The essentialist position is that nature determines the self. According to this view, for example, people who are poor are poor because of certain biological dispositions that lead to low intelligence and the inability to delay gratification or make proper moral decisions. These two perspectives, social and biological determinism, provide different explanations for human behavior and are often pitted against one another. Rather than viewing these two as in opposition to one another, a more viable perspective is one that attempts to unravel the interdependency between the two. With this approach, the cause of alcohol dependency would be a combination of biological predispositions as well as environmental conditions.
Initially this view that we can explain human behavior as a combination of these two conditions appears to resolve the debate. It resolves it in that human behavior is best explained as an interaction between biology (nature) and environment (nurture). But by itself, this view fails to pull apart these interactive effects. And it cannot answer the following questions. To what extent do environmental conditions influence the development of the self? Under what conditions are environmental pressures influential? How do we know that any particular behavior is the result of nature or nurture? In relationship to gender affects, how is it that some girls who grow up in similar environmental conditions become anorexic and bulimic and others do not? For those who claim boys are "just more aggressive" and girls are "just more nurturing," what evidence exists that these are essential behavioral differences and not the influence of social pressures and historical conditions?
Of the two positions, sociology places more attention on the environment and calls into question scientists, politicians, and others who lay claim that behavior is best explained as biologically driven. As a sociologist, I do not deny biological influences but rather view such explanations of rather poor predictors of patterns of behavior. The sociological position, or to use C.W. Mills' term "the sociological imagination," is interested in the social and societal dimensions of human behavior. Whereas a biological explanation would seek to understand factors inherent within the individual, an environmental explanation seeks to understand such factors as the influence of societal and individual reactions to those identified as addicted, the relationship between social class and race and the likelihood of being labeled, treated, or incarcerated, and cultural and social conditions that influence addition rates of different segments of the population.
Bigger, Stronger, Faster Video Clip
The sociological perspective often runs counter to commonly held beliefs in society. This is particularly true in the United States with its almost sacred level of worshipping rugged individualism. This individual level of analysis supported in U.S. culture provides a partial explanation for the interest in pop-psychology books on gender differences. In John Gray's 1993 Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, Gray provides research and entertaining anecdotal stories claiming that men and women are different beings from different planets. When I first read this book, my own personal experiences and observations fit with much of what Gray was stating. I would guess that other middle-class, educated men raised in the post World War II economy in the United States would find similar consistencies. Even though there may be consistency, this does not mean however that his claims are valid without identifying significant limitations, including historical time period, social class, race, and region of the country.
Quotes from Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus
A man's sense of self is defined through his ability to achieve results.
A woman's sense of self is defined through her feelings and the quality of her relationships.
Just as a man is fulfilled through working out the intricate details of solving a problem, a woman is fulfilled through talking about the details of her problems.
Really? Are women "fulfilled through talking about the details of [their] problems"? Is this an essential condition of being a woman? If this is a pattern for women, is it true of all women, in all cultures, in all time periods? If not, what historical, social, and cultural conditions create this pattern? In many ways Gray's book speaks to a particular social class demographic (educated, middle-class) and race (white), a target audience interested in Gray's type of self-analysis and development. A quick glance at the cover of the newest book edition provides some support for this. Gray's website provides more.
Sociological Analysis of Gender Socialization
In Chapter 2 general characteristics of different types of societies (hunting and gathering, horticulture and pastoralism, agricultural, industrial, and post-industrial) were provided. A sociological perspective on gender can be quickly, albeit roughly, explained in a brief discussion of how gender was structured by the demands of an agricultural versus industrial society.
In agricultural societies, the family is the unit of production. With family being the productive unit, all members of the family must work together to ensure the family's survival. While certain tasks may have been divided between men and women, such as men primarily plowing and women canning food, other labor often overlapped. This would have been especially true during certain times of the year, such as planting and harvest where all able hands were needed to work the fields in a particular and limited time. As America, and this is true of other societies as well, transitioned to an industrial-based economy, gender roles changed. Men left the home to work in factories and became wage earnings. Women became the caretakers of children and the home. During the 1800s in the United States, women, particularly middle-class women, were viewed as more morally pure than men. With fears about the ill effects of improper socialization of children and youth in a harsh industrial economy, women were granted custody of children in times of desertion, separation, or divorce. The court's Tender Years Doctrine highlights how a change in the economic structure of society altered gender roles, family structure, and institutions such as the courts. Fast forward to a post-industrial society. In this type of economy, fewer areas of employment are as clearly gender segregated. With service-oriented and high tech jobs, men and women more equally compete for jobs. As a result, ideas of masculinity and femininity change for men and women. In contemporary society, the term metrosexual is used to refer to men, usually younger and more educated, who live in US cities and follow the latest fashion trends. This term is linked to particular historical, social, and economic conditions and highlights how gender is shaped by context.
This short article from a University of Florida professor adds to this discussion of a sociological analysis of gender. As you read the article, pay particular attention to how economic forces shape gender roles and the particular beliefs this conservative religious group, the Promise Keepers, hold regarding gender ideals.
From University of Florida, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
In Their Own Words: CLAS Professors Interpret the Promise Keepers
This article was originally published in the November 1997 issue of CLASnotes.
Promise Keepers Should Promise Equality for Women
American feminists have been outspoken in their criticism of the PK and their agenda. The National Organization for Women (NOW) recently passed a resolution declaring the PK a great danger to women's rights because they believe the PK emphasis on male leadership and female subordination is a throwback to the days of women's servitude and oppression.
There is considerable evidence to support the Promise Keeper's (PK) premise that men need to rethink their commitments to their female partners and their children. Statistics on divorce, out-of-wedlock births, deadbeat dads, male uninvolvement in family life, and domestic violence suggest that some men are failing to act in a responsible way in regard to their families.
Is a revival of the "traditional" nuclear family of post-WWII America (with its breadwinner husband and homemaker wife) the solution to the social problems plaguing our nation? Feminists think not.
First, the financial survival of the average American household and of the US economy as a whole depends on the labor force participation of wives and mothers. The married woman who is employed full-time, year round contributes over 40% of her household's total income, on average. Furthermore, over 45% of the US labor force is female and a large proportion of the new jobs that will be added to the economy over the next decade will be filled by women. Thus, a full-scale return to the one-earner household is not economically feasible.
Second, public opinion will not support male dominance in family decision making in households in which adult women are major economic contributors. Women who've responded to various magazine polls in recent years have indicated that their preferred type of relationship is one where spouses are equal partners. Other ideals of the past-such as the husband as senior partner and wife as junior partner-have been resoundingly rejected among many younger, well-educated segments of the female population.
Patricia Ireland, president of NOW, says: "Two adults standing as equals and peers taking responsibilty for their family is a much different image than a man being the head and master, and women being back in an old role that historically was very detrimental." NOW sponsored a counter-rally in Washington at the same time as the PK's "Stand in the Gap" rally. Ireland has said of the absence of women at PK events: "The PK come to their rally and check their wives and daughters at the door like coats. We're here with a promise we want the PK to keep: 'I promise to support equality for women.'" The PK themselves justify their single-sex gatherings by saying that women impede men's ability to "soul search."
Criticism from feminist groups has actually succeeded in forcing the PK to retract some of its original extremist statements about male dominance. NOW has attempted to debunk prevalent myths about the PK and to counteract some of the positive statements about the benefits of the PK for women-made primarily by wives of PK members-with quotations from PK leaders. For instance, NOW acknowledges that feminists have long urged men to take more responsibility in the home. But to NOW, taking responsibility does not mean taking control. PK openly calls for wives to submit to their husbands. Tony Evans, a senior pastor of a PK fellowship in Dallas and prominent PK spokesman, encourages PK members to "Sit down with your wife and say...'Honey, I've made a terrible mistake. I've given you my role. I gave up leading this family, and I forced you to take my place. Now, I must reclaim that role'...I'm not suggesting you ask for your role back, I'm urging you to take it back...there can be no compromise here."
In a Time magazine interview, PK founder Bill McCartney said: "The man has responsibility before God. You know what a woman is told [in the bible]? Respect your husband. OK? The way she would do that is she would come alongside him and let him take the lead, and he in turn would lay down his life. He would serve her, affectionately and tenderly serve her."
Conservative women from mainline Protestant, Orthodox, and Roman Catholic churches have denounced NOW for its attack on the PK. Mary Ellen Bork, wife of the unsuccessful Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork, and a lecturer on Catholic life says NOW has missed the point of the PK and is out of touch with what American women want. "Power is not (our) goal in life." Wives of PK members have started a number of Christian women's ministries. Cheri Bright, the founder of one such group, Suitable Helpers, says she prayed that "women wouldn't be a discouragement, that women wouldn't become a hindrance to the work God wanted to do in their lives, but that women would step back and take their hands off the situation." (quoted in Time, Oct. 6)
The PK believe in innate spiritual and emotional differences between women and men. And they attribute most, if not all, of our national crises to a blurring of gender lines. McCartney says: "You do know, don't you, that we're raising our children at a time when it's an effeminate society. It's not the proper climate. We need young boys that are launched to be men and that has to be imitated for them by a godly man."
The PK also offer an interesting perspective on feminists, as might be expected. Tony Evans is quoted as saying, "I believe that feminists of the more aggressive persuasion are frustrated women unable to find the proper male leadership. If a woman were receiving the right kind of love and attention and leadership she would not want to be liberated from that."
For more information about NOW's response to the PK, visit their web site at .http://www.now.org
Feral Children: Illustrating the Impact of Interaction on Development of the Self
Feral Children Video Clip
Harlow and Harlow Studies: Application of the Experimental Design
· Hypothesis
· Approaches to Research: Positivist, Interpretive, Critical
· Independent Variables and Dependent Variables
· 3 Conditions and Findings
Article Link: Application of Harlow Study Finding to Supermax Prisons (this link doesn't work at this point)
Socialization and the Self: The Interactionist Perspective
1. Nothing has inherent meaning.
2. We give the world meaning through our interaction with others.
3. We act towards the world based on the meaning we give our interactions.
4. We negotiate our meanings through interactions and adjust our actions accordingly.
5. It is only through interactions that we develop meaning.
Perspectives on Socialization
Evolutionary Perspective: Darwin
• 1800s
• Evolutionary Perspective
• Social Darwinism
• Biology determines outcome
• Natural Selection and Survival of the Fittest
• Mental and Genetic Degeneracy = Cause of Various Social Ills
• Social Darwinism and Eugenics
• Relate Eugenics to 3 Approaches to Science: Positivist, Interpretive, and Critical
• Reliability and Validity: Application to Family Studies
• Eugenics: Applications to Interactionist Perspective and Conflict Theory (ideology to justify colonization, exploitation, and stratification)
Galton (1883) Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development
"That is, with questions bearing on what is termed in Greek, eugenes namely, good in stock, hereditarily endowed with noble qualities. This, and the allied words, eugeneia, etc., are equally applicable to men, brutes, and plants. We greatly want a brief word to express the science of improving stock, which is by no means confined to questions of judicious mating, but which, especially in the case of man, takes cognisance of all influences that tend in however remote a degree to give to the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable than they otherwise would have had. The word eugenics would sufficiently express the idea; it is at least a neater word and a more generalised one than viriculture which I once ventured to use."
"Some day we will realize that the prime duty, the inescapable duty, of the good citizen of the right type is to leave his or her blood behind him in the world." (Theodore Roosevelt, 1910)
"Society has no business to permit degenerates to reproduce their kind.... Any group of farmers who permitted their best stock not to breed, and let all the increase come from the worst stock, would be treated as fit inmates for an asylum.... Some day we will realize that the prime duty, the inescapable duty of the good citizens of the right type is to leave his or her blood behind him in the world; and that we have no business to permit the perpetuation of citizens of the wrong type. The great problem of civilization is to secure a relative increase of the valuable as compared with the less valuable or noxious elements in the population... The problem cannot be met unless we give full consideration to the immense influence of heredity..." (Theodore Roosevelt to Charles B. Davenport, January 3, 1913, Charles B. Davenport Papers, Department of Genetics, Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y.)
Middle and upper class women ("good stock") who went to college and remained more independent from domestic roles were identified by Roosevelt as "race criminals."
Eugenics in Contemporary US
Click to the Right for Audio Clip
CALLER: I noticed the national media, you know, they talk a lot about the loss of revenue, or the inability of the government to fund Social Security, and I was curious, and I've read articles in recent months here, that the abortions that have happened since Roe v. Wade, the lost revenue from the people who have been aborted in the last 30-something years, could fund Social Security as we know it today. And the media just doesn't -- never touches this at all.
BENNETT: Assuming they're all productive citizens?
CALLER: Assuming that they are. Even if only a portion of them were, it would be an enormous amount of revenue.
BENNETT: Maybe, maybe, but we don't know what the costs would be, too. I think as -- abortion disproportionately occur among single women? No.
CALLER: I don't know the exact statistics, but quite a bit are, yeah.
BENNETT: All right, well, I mean, I just don't know. I would not argue for the pro-life position based on this, because you don't know. I mean, it cuts both -- you know, one of the arguments in this book Freakonomics that they make is that the declining crime rate, you know, they deal with this hypothesis, that one of the reasons crime is down is that abortion is up. Well --
CALLER: Well, I don't think that statistic is accurate.
BENNETT: Well, I don't think it is either, I don't think it is either, because first of all, there is just too much that you don't know. But I do know that it's true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could -- if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down. That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down. So these far-out, these far-reaching, extensive extrapolations are, I think, tricky.
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)
The Personality/Psychoanalytic View
Freudian Perspective of the Self
· Biological Needs or Drives
· 2 Basic Drives: Eros and Thanatos
· Basic drives: unconscious self
· 3 parts of the personality (id, ego, superego)
· Sublimation
Theory of the Social Self: George Herbert Mead
l Compare Views of Self: Freud and Mead
l Mead = Social Behaviorist
l Symoblic Interactionism
l Self = Developed with social experience
l Actions occur after thinking
l Thinking = inner conversation with "audience."
l Respond to perceived intentions of others. To accomplish this we "take the role of the other"
l The "I" = response of the individual (subject)
l The "me" = imagine how other see us (object)
l Stages of Development
l Imitation
l Play Stage: Significant others
l Game Stage
l Generalized other
Charles Cooley: The Looking-Glass Self
l "Self and society are twin-born."
l Society and Self = inseparable.
l No sense of "I" without a "you."
Applications of Freud, Mead, and Cooley
Kenneth Clark Doll Experiment: Video Clip 1
Kenneth Clark Doll Experiment: Video Clip 2
Rosenthal and Jacobson Study: Influence of Labels
· Interactionist Perspective
· Influence on Teachers
· Influence on Self
· Relate to TAG Identified Students
Resocialization
l Total Institution
l Close Supervision
l Standardized environment
l Regimented rules for daily activities
l 2 Step Process
l Break down individual identity
l Decrease individual markers and force conformity
l Mortification of the self
l Rebuild the Self
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest: Video Clip
http://www.bcps.k12.md.us/student_performance/PDF/PE_Baraka_Comp_Report_Aug2002.pdf
Additional Readings
Messner, M.A. (2000). Barbie Girls versus Sea Monsters: Children Constructing Gender. Gender and Society, 14, 6, 765-784.
NOTES TO PRINT OFF
· John Locke
· Epistemology
· Social Determinism
· Biological Determinism
· Reliability
· Validity
· Gender role different in agriculture versus industrial economy
· Tender Years Doctrine
· Feral Children
· Martin Kallikak
Harlow and Harlow Studies: Application of the Experimental Design
· Hypothesis
· Approaches to Research: Positivist, Interpretive, Critical
· Independent Variables and Dependent Variables
· 3 Conditions and Findings
Socialization and the Self: The Interactionist Perspective
1. Nothing has inherent meaning.
2. We give the world meaning through our interaction with others.
3. We act towards the world based on the meaning we give our interactions.
4. We negotiate our meanings through interactions and adjust our actions accordingly.
5. It is only through interactions that we develop meaning.
Darwin and the Self
• 1800s
• Evolutionary Perspective
• Social Darwinism
• Biology determines outcome
• Natural Selection and Survival of the Fittest
• Mental and Genetic Degeneracy = Cause of Various Social Ills
• Social Darwinism and Eugenics
• Relate Eugenics to 3 Approaches to Science: Positivist, Interpretive, and Critical
• Reliability and Validity: Application to Family Studies
• Eugenics: Applications to Interactionist Perspective and Conflict Theory (ideology to justify colonization, exploitation, and stratification)
Galton (1883) Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development
"That is, with questions bearing on what is termed in Greek, eugenes namely, good in stock, hereditarily endowed with noble qualities. This, and the allied words, eugeneia, etc., are equally applicable to men, brutes, and plants. We greatly want a brief word to express the science of improving stock, which is by no means confined to questions of judicious mating, but which, especially in the case of man, takes cognisance of all influences that tend in however remote a degree to give to the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable than they otherwise would have had. The word eugenics would sufficiently express the idea; it is at least a neater word and a more generalised one than viriculture which I once ventured to use."
Freudian Perspective of the Self
· Biological Needs or Drives
· 2 Basic Drives: Eros and Thanatos
Basic drives: unconscious self
· 3 parts of the personality (id, ego, superego)
· Sublimation
George Herbert Mead and the Self
l Compare Views of Self: Freud and Mead
l Mead = Social Behaviorist
l Symoblic Interactionism
l Self = Developed with social experience
l Actions occur after thinking
l Thinking = inner conversation with "audience."
l Respond to perceived intentions of others. To accomplish this we "take the role of the other"
l The "I" = response of the individual (subject)
l The "me" = imagine how other see us (object)
l Stages of Development
l Imitation
l Play Stage: Significant others
l Game Stage
l Generalized other
Charles Cooley: The Looking-Glass Self
l "Self and society are twin-born."
l Society and Self = inseparable.
l No sense of "I" without a "you."
Rosenthal and Jacobson Study: Influence of Labels
· Interactionist Perspective
· Influence on Teachers
· Influence on Self
· Relate to TAG Identified Students
Resocialization
l Total Institution
l Close Supervision
l Standardized environment
l Regimented rules for daily activities
l 2 Step Process
l Break down individual identity
l Decrease individual markers and force conformity
l Mortification of the self
l Rebuild the Self