Socialisation and social groups

1. Meaning of socialisation

Socialisation is the process by which a human infant learns the culture of his society and becomes a functioning member of it. A child is born a biological organism; socialisation makes him a social being with a self.

• Ogburn and Nimkoff: socialisation is the process by which the individual learns to conform to the norms of the group.
• Harry M. Johnson: socialisation is learning that enables the learner to perform social roles.
• Kingsley Davis cited cases of isolated children such as Anna (USA), found at about six years old unable to speak or walk, to show that without socialisation human nature does not develop.

2. Stages of socialisation

Johnson, following Freud, gives four stages in the development of the child. Indian textbooks use this scheme.

1. Oral stage (birth to about 1–1½ years). The infant’s needs centre on feeding. He learns to signal hunger and discomfort and forms his first dependence, on the mother. Infant and mother form a single sub-system.
2. Anal stage (to about 3 years). Toilet training begins; the child learns to care for himself to some extent and to receive and return love. He internalises two roles: his own, and the mother’s.
3. Oedipal stage (about 4 to puberty, 12–13). The child becomes a member of the whole family; he identifies with the parent of the same sex and learns sex roles. Freud called the boy’s attachment to the mother the Oedipus complex and the girl’s to the father the Electra complex.
4. Adolescence (puberty onwards). The young person seeks independence from parental control, faces conflicting demands of peer group and family, and prepares for adult roles in work and marriage.

Socialisation continues through life: adult socialisation into a job or marriage, anticipatory socialisation (learning the norms of a group one hopes to join, as a law student learns courtroom manners) and re-socialisation (unlearning old ways in a prison, army or after migration).

3. Agencies of socialisation

1. Family. The first and most important agency; language, habits, values, gender roles and religion are learned at home. Cooley called it a primary group.
2. Peer group. Friends of the same age teach co-operation among equals, and fashions, slang and attitudes the family may not approve.
3. School and educational institutions. Formal knowledge, discipline, punctuality, competition and civic values.
4. Religion. Moral values, ideas of right and wrong, rituals and a sense of community.
5. Mass media. Television, cinema, newspapers and social media spread values and lifestyles, often faster than family or school.
6. The State and law. Laws and their enforcement teach what is permitted.
7. Occupation and workplace. Work norms, hierarchy and professional ethics.
8. Neighbourhood, caste and community. In India, caste and kin networks teach rules of food, marriage and ritual purity.

4. Theories of the development of self

• C.H. Cooley — the looking-glass self (Human Nature and the Social Order, 1902). The self develops in three steps: we imagine how we appear to others; we imagine their judgment of us; we feel pride or shame accordingly.
• G.H. Mead — the I and the me (Mind, Self and Society, 1934). The self arises through communication. In the play stage the child takes the role of one other person (playing “mother”); in the game stage he takes the roles of many at once and learns the rules; finally he internalises the generalised other, the attitudes of society as a whole.
• Sigmund Freud — id, ego and superego. The id is the store of instinctual drives; the superego is the internalised conscience of society; the ego mediates between them and reality. Socialisation builds the superego.
• Jean Piaget traced stages of cognitive development (sensorimotor, pre-operational, concrete operational, formal operational).

5. Social groups: meaning and characteristics

A social group is two or more persons in interaction, with a sense of belonging and shared norms. A crowd at a bus stop is an aggregate, not a group, because its members do not interact or share a sense of unity.

MacIver and Page: by group we mean “any collection of human beings who are brought into human relationships with one another”.

Characteristics: collection of individuals; interaction; we-feeling; common interests; shared norms; unity and solidarity; group control over members; relatively stable structure of statuses and roles.

6. Types of social groups

Primary and secondary groups

C.H. Cooley (Social Organization, 1909) defined primary groups as those “characterised by intimate face-to-face association and co-operation”: family, play group, neighbourhood. They are “the nursery of human nature”. The term secondary group was added by later writers to describe large, impersonal, goal-oriented groups.

Other classifications

• In-group and out-group (W.G. Sumner, Folkways, 1906): the group with which one identifies (“we”) and others (“they”). In-group loyalty often goes with hostility to out-groups.
• Reference group (Herbert Hyman coined the term in 1942; developed by Merton): a group whose standards a person uses to judge himself, whether or not he belongs to it.
• Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft (Tönnies).
• Voluntary and involuntary groups; organised and unorganised; formal and informal.

How this is examined

The 16-mark socialisation question takes definitions, the four stages, the agencies and a paragraph on Cooley and Mead. A short note on primary groups or on types of groups needs Cooley’s definition, characteristics and the primary-secondary table.