Socialisation is the process by which a biological organism becomes a social person: the learning of language, norms, values, skills and roles through which an individual acquires a self and a place in a group. It is the mechanism by which culture is transmitted across generations and by which society, having no existence apart from the individuals who compose it, secures its own continuity. Every society must convert newcomers into participants, and socialisation is the name for whatever it does to accomplish that.
Two features of the concept are easily lost. First, it is lifelong, not confined to childhood — the new recruit, the bride entering her husband's household, the migrant, the retiree and the prisoner are all being socialised. Second, it is two-sided: from society's point of view it is the transmission of culture and the maintenance of order, while from the individual's point of view it is the development of personality and identity. The individual is not merely stamped by the process. Socialisation supplies the very equipment — language, concepts, a capacity for reflection — with which a person can later question what he has been taught.
Types of socialisation
Primary socialisation occurs in early childhood, chiefly within the family. It is the most consequential stage because it establishes language, elementary moral categories and emotional attachment; the child has no alternative world with which to compare it, and what is learned then is internalised as reality itself rather than as one option among many. Secondary socialisation takes place later, through school, peer group, workplace and media, and involves the acquisition of specialised roles and segmental identities; it can be resisted and relativised because the person now has a standpoint from which to evaluate it.
Anticipatory socialisation is the rehearsal of a role not yet occupied — the law student adopting the manner of counsel, the aspirant reading the newspaper like an officer — and Merton showed that it operates through the reference group whose standards the individual adopts before belonging to it. Re-socialisation is the deliberate replacement of one set of dispositions by another, as in military training, religious conversion or rehabilitation. De-socialisation, the stripping away of a former identity, generally precedes it.
Agencies of socialisation
The family is the primary agency: it supplies language, elementary discipline, the first experience of authority and reciprocity, and, in a stratified society, the child's initial location within it. The school adds what the family cannot — treatment by universal rather than particular standards, achievement judged by impersonal criteria, and cooperation with strangers. The peer group is distinctive in being a relationship among equals, where norms are negotiated rather than handed down, and it is the main site of adolescent identity formation. The media now function as an agency of considerable reach, supplying models of consumption, aspiration and gender that often contradict those of family and school. Religion transmits moral cosmology and ritual competence, and the workplace and professions socialise adults into occupational cultures with their own ethics, jargon and hierarchies. That these agencies frequently pull in opposite directions is not a malfunction; the resulting inconsistency is one source of both individual autonomy and social change.
Theoretical accounts
Durkheim treated education as the methodical socialisation of the young and, in Moral Education, identified three elements the child must acquire — the spirit of discipline, attachment to social groups, and autonomy, the rational understanding of why the rules bind. Society is thus installed within the individual; the moral authority the child feels is society's authority internalised.
Talcott Parsons made socialisation the answer to the problem of order: the social system is stable to the extent that actors have internalised the value-orientations of their roles, so that they want to do what they must do. Motivation and expectation are brought into alignment, and deviance becomes a strain in the system rather than a natural condition. In The School Class as a Social System he argued that the school effects the crucial transition from the particularistic, ascriptive affection of the family to the universalistic, achievement-based standards of adult occupational life, and simultaneously performs the differentiation of pupils into future positions.
George Herbert Mead and Charles Horton Cooley supply the interactionist account, which is about the emergence of the self rather than the transmission of norms. Cooley's looking-glass self holds that we come to know ourselves through our imagination of how others see us. Mead distinguished the spontaneous, impulsive I from the me, the organised attitudes of others as taken over by the individual, and traced development through play, in which the child takes the role of one significant other at a time, to the game, in which he must hold in mind the roles of all participants simultaneously and thereby arrives at the generalised other — the attitude of the community as a whole. Language, and the significant symbol, is the mechanism throughout.
Freud added the insight that socialisation is not painless. The instinctual demands of the id are curbed by an ego oriented to reality and a superego that internalises parental prohibition, and the price of civilisation is a permanent residue of repression and guilt. Bourdieu's habitus offers the most sociological version of the same point: early experience deposits durable, largely unconscious dispositions — bodily bearing, taste, a practical sense of what is possible for someone like oneself — which reproduce class position without anyone intending it.
The over-socialised conception and the place of agency
Dennis Wrong's celebrated objection to the Parsonian account is that it presents an over-socialised conception of man: an actor so thoroughly moulded by norms that his conformity is automatic and his resistance inexplicable. Against this, interactionists insist that norms are interpreted and negotiated in every situation rather than simply obeyed, and that Mead's I is precisely the element of spontaneity that no socialisation can eliminate. Paul Willis's counter-school culture, and every generation's rejection of its parents' certainties, demonstrate that the process is contested. Socialisation is better understood as supplying a repertoire than as installing a program — and because agencies conflict and messages are ambiguous, its outcomes are never fully determined.
Socialisation in India: caste and gender
Indian socialisation has historically been organised by caste and gender in a way that makes the sociological point visible. Caste transmitted occupation, ritual entitlement, dietary rule, marriage circle and the everyday etiquette of distance and deference; a child learned not only who he was but who he might touch, eat with and marry, and this learning occurred through the ordinary business of kitchen, well and street rather than through explicit instruction. Leela Dube's work on the construction of gender showed how girls in patrilineal Hindu households are socialised through the body and through daily practice — regulation of movement and dress, seclusion at puberty, the food served last, the fast kept for a brother, the repeated reminder that this house is not finally her own. The message that a daughter is paraya dhan, belonging elsewhere, is conveyed by arrangement rather than argument, and is therefore harder to contest. Sanskritisation may be read as adult re-socialisation undertaken collectively by a caste group seeking to raise its position.
Total institutions and re-socialisation
Erving Goffman's Asylums (1961) provides the limiting case. In a total institution — asylum, prison, monastery, barracks, boarding school — the barriers ordinarily separating work, sleep and play are removed, all activity occurs in one place under a single authority, and inmates are handled in batches. Entry involves a mortification of the self: the person is stripped of name, clothes, possessions and privacy, subjected to admission procedures and degradation ceremonies, and rebuilt around an institutional identity. Goffman also documented the inmate's secondary adjustments and underlife, the small techniques by which a self is preserved against the institution's claim on it. The case demonstrates both how thoroughly identity can be remade by social arrangements and how stubbornly the person resists.
For the UPSC answer
Define socialisation as lifelong and two-sided — cultural transmission for society, personality formation for the individual — since candidates who treat it as childhood learning lose the concept's analytical reach. Set the functionalist account (Durkheim on moral education, Parsons on internalisation and the school class) against the interactionist one (Cooley's looking-glass self, Mead's I, me and generalised other), as most questions turn on this contrast. Answer the over-socialised objection explicitly by invoking agency, conflicting agencies and resistance. Use Leela Dube on the making of gender and caste-based learning as your Indian illustration, and Goffman's total institution for re-socialisation.
References & further reading
- Durkheim, É. (1925/1961). Moral Education. Free Press.
- Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind, Self and Society. University of Chicago Press.
- Cooley, C. H. (1902). Human Nature and the Social Order. Scribner.
- Parsons, T. (1959). The School Class as a Social System. Harvard Educational Review, 29(4), 297–318.
- Goffman, E. (1961). Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates. Anchor Books.
- Dube, L. (1988). On the Construction of Gender: Hindu Girls in Patrilineal India. Economic and Political Weekly, 23(18), WS11–WS19.