Agents of Socialisation

We have four accounts of how a self forms (2.3.2–2.3.4). The obvious remaining question is: who does the forming?

The answer is not "parents." It is a set of institutions and groups, each teaching different things by different methods, with different power — and, crucially, not agreeing with each other. That last fact turns out to be where a person's capacity for independent thought comes from.

Trace one small competence backwards: standing in a queue.

Who taught you?

Not your parents, exactly. They took you to places where queues existed and pulled you back when you ran ahead. They may have said "wait." They almost certainly never sat you down and explained queueing.

Your school taught it, hard. Lines for assembly, lines for lunch, lines to leave the room. Not because queueing is on any syllabus, but because a school cannot function without it — and, less obviously, because a school is a machine for producing people who can wait their turn among strangers under supervision.

Your peers enforced it more effectively than any adult. The scorn directed at someone who pushed in taught more than any instruction.

Media supplied the moral framing. Somewhere in a story, a film or an advertisement, someone jumped a queue and was marked as the kind of person who does that.

Religion may have supplied a general principle about fairness that the queue instantiates.

Your workplace refined it into a subtler competence: which queues can be bypassed, by whom, with what apology, and whose time is treated as more valuable than yours.

And the state built the physical world in which queueing is the only option: counters, tokens, ration lines, a railway reservation system, a ballot box, a signboard reading "form a line here."

Seven teachers. One trivial competence. None of them coordinated with the others, and every one of them was necessary.

Now notice the thing the story is really about.

You have never in your life received an instruction to queue, and yet you would feel a specific physical discomfort if you pushed in front of someone — which is 1.1.3's internalisation and 2.1.4's internal sanction, arriving through seven channels at once.

And notice the second thing, which is more interesting. Those seven teachers do not agree. Your family may hold that queues do not apply to people who know somebody. Your school taught universal rules. Your peers may have honoured the person who beat the system. The state's counter has an unwritten policy about who is called first.

That disagreement is not noise. It is, as this lesson will argue, the single most important fact about socialisation — because a person raised by a chorus that agreed perfectly would have nothing to think with.

The idea, in plain words

The agents, one at a time

Family

What it teaches: language, and with it a whole set of social categories (2.1.5); the first emotional repertoire; disgust and shame (1.1.3); gender expectations, usually before the age of three; caste, class and religious identity; food, cleanliness and bodily discipline; and — least visibly and most consequentially — a disposition towards institutions (2.1.13's doctor's room).

How it teaches: by immersion, correction, modelling and love. Almost nothing is stated as a rule.

Its distinctive power: it is first, it is a primary group (2.2.4) with the strongest sanctions available, and it operates during the period when the greatest amount is absorbed.

Its limits: it is one household, and it is increasingly outmatched in hours by school and screen.

School

What it teaches openly: literacy, numeracy, the curriculum.

What it teaches without saying so — the hidden curriculum, a term from Philip Jackson (9.2): punctuality by the clock (1.1.3); sitting still; raising a hand and waiting to be recognised; working alongside people you did not choose; being evaluated by a stranger against a public standard; competition; queueing; obedience to impersonal authority; and the acceptance that your worth in this room is a number.

Parsons made a sharp point here (5.1): the school is where a child first meets universalistic standards. At home you are judged as you, particularly and unconditionally. At school you are judged by the same criterion as thirty others. That transition — from particularistic to universalistic evaluation — is one of the most consequential things schooling does, and it is a rehearsal for every bureaucracy the child will meet (2.2.9).

Bowles and Gintis (9.2) gave the conflict reading: the correspondence principle — the social relations of schooling mirror those of the workplace (hierarchy, extrinsic motivation, fragmented tasks, alienation from what one produces), so that schooling prepares people for the positions they will occupy.

Both readings are useful. Ask the two questions from 2.2.8: what does it do, and how does it distribute?

Peer group

What it teaches: how to deal with equals — negotiation, alliance, reciprocity, exclusion; how to be liked; how to break rules; the argot and style of a subculture (2.1.7).

Its distinctive power: it is horizontal (2.2.5), it is the first group a person substantially chooses, and its sanctions — ridicule, exclusion — are among the most effective in existence at the age when identity is being assembled.

And Piaget's point from 2.3.4: the morality that arises among equals is different in kind from the morality that arises under authority. This is not merely another influence; it is the only setting that produces that particular capacity.

Media and digital platforms

What it teaches: what different kinds of people are like, and what is normal, desirable, funny, shameful and possible. It supplies models for lives a person has never encountered, which is genuinely emancipatory and genuinely distorting.

Its distinctive features: it reaches across household and locality, so it is the main agent that can contradict the family; it is consumed in enormous volume; and — the change of the last two decades — it is algorithmically selected, participatory and permanent, so the audience is also a performer (2.3.2's digital mirror).

Two cautions. The evidence on media effects is more contested and more modest than either alarmists or dismissers claim (9.7 handles it properly). And representation matters in a specific, documented way: what a person sees people like themselves doing shapes what they take to be available — which is the looking-glass self at population scale.

Religion

What it teaches: a cosmology (2.1.6), a moral vocabulary, ritual competence, a calendar, a community, and answers to suffering and death (Weber's theodicy).

Its distinctive power: it operates through ritual and repetition rather than argument, it is bound to primary groups and life transitions, and it supplies sacred rather than merely conventional authority — which is why its norms sit closer to the taboo end of 2.1.3.

Workplace

What it teaches: occupational competence, an argot, a professional identity, and the norms of the trade — including the informal ones the Hawthorne workers enforced (2.2.4).

Occupational socialisation is a serious field in its own right: how medical students learn to touch strangers' bodies and to manage death; how police recruits learn what the job actually is as distinct from what training says; how professionals acquire a licensed distance. This is adult socialisation, and it is thorough.

The state

What it teaches — and this is the agent most often left off the list, though Foucault would put it first (5.9): who you officially are. It issues you a name, a number, a category, a birthdate, a nationality, a caste or ethnicity on a form. It compels attendance at school, licenses your marriage, records your death, and defines which of your relationships count.

Recall 2.1.12's form and 1.3.3's census: the categories a state uses do not merely record identities, they produce them. And through schooling, conscription, public health and law, the state is a socialising agent of the first rank — one whose reach is precisely what distinguishes modern societies from earlier ones.

A young woman in a small town is taught by her family that her marriage is a family decision, by her school that individuals should follow their own aptitudes, by her friends that romantic love is the point of life, by a national curriculum that citizens are equal individuals, by films that both accounts are true at different moments, and by a workplace that she is an employee with a salary of her own.

The obvious reading is that she is confused, or caught between tradition and modernity.

The sociological reading is better. She has been handed several generalised others (2.3.3), and they do not agree — which means she has to adjudicate. And the capacity to adjudicate is exactly what a person raised by a single, unanimous agent would never develop.

Three consequences follow, and they matter for the rest of this course.

Contradiction is the source of reflexivity. You cannot see a rule as a rule while it is the only one available (Bourdieu's doxa, 2.1.2). The moment two authorities conflict, the taken-for-granted becomes visible as a position — which is 1.1.2's habit, arriving by accident.

Therefore socialisation is never total. 1.1.3 promised this and here is the mechanism. No society is a perfectly consistent transmitter, because its agents occupy different positions with different interests. A perfectly socialised person is a theoretical fiction.

And this is where social change gets its foothold. Every generation is socialised by agents that have themselves changed, in combinations their parents did not face. Mead's "I" (2.3.3) responds to the contradictions; those responses accumulate; and the arrangement moves (1.2.3).

Which yields the sentence worth carrying out of this lesson: the incoherence of a society's socialising agents is not a defect in the system. It is the reason the system can change, and the reason the people inside it can think.

Go deeper

Socialisation is not a conveyor belt

Three corrections to the picture of a passive child being filled.

Children resist, interpret and negotiate. They test rules, exploit inconsistencies between agents, and construct meanings the agents did not intend. Willis's lads (1.5.2) were being socialised and were doing something with it.

Socialisation runs both ways. Children socialise parents — into new technologies, new vocabulary, changed attitudes. The term is reverse socialisation, and it is unusually visible in periods of rapid change and in migrant families, where children frequently mediate between the household and the host society's institutions.

And the relative weight of agents is genuinely contested. Judith Rich Harris argued in The Nurture Assumption that the shared family environment explains far less of adult personality variation than assumed, and that peer groups do more of the work. The argument provoked a large literature; it is not settled, and it was overstated in places. But it is a useful corrective to the assumption that parents are the main authors of a person — an assumption that carries a heavy load of blame and credit, and which the evidence supports less strongly than most people expect.

The distribution question

The two questions from 2.2.8 apply here too, and the second is the sociological one.

Agents are not equally available to everyone. Whose family transmits the language of the school? Whose school has teachers present? Whose peers are aiming at university? Whose media is in their first language? Whose workplace socialises them into a profession rather than into a job?

Socialisation is therefore one of the principal mechanisms by which inequality is reproduced — not because some children are socialised and others are not, but because different agents transmit competences that institutions reward differently (2.1.13). This is the thread that runs from here to Part 8, and it is why Topic 2.3 is not a soft interlude between the hard concepts.

Two-agent conflict as a research site

A practical note for anyone who wants to do sociology rather than read it.

Points where two agents transmit conflicting expectations are unusually productive research sites, because they force people to articulate what is normally tacit. Migrant families where school and home disagree. First-generation students. Women entering male-dominated professions. Converts. People whose workplace ethics conflict with their religious ones.

In each case the person must reason explicitly about something most people never have to state, which makes them exactly the informant a researcher needs — and it is the reason Schutz's stranger (2.1.9) is such a valuable figure.

"Family is the most important agent." It is the first and most intensive, and its exclusive primacy is contested (Harris). School, peers and media do enormous work, and the relative weights differ by society and by outcome.

"Socialisation is what happens to children." It is lifelong: occupational socialisation, marriage, migration, parenthood, illness and ageing all resocialise (2.3.6).

"Agents transmit a coherent culture." They contradict each other, which is where reflexivity, agency and change come from.

"The hidden curriculum is a conspiracy." It is a latent function (1.5.2): unrecognised, unintended by most participants, and consequential anyway.

"Media socialises passively." Audiences decode actively (Hall, 2.1.11) — and the effects literature is far more contested than confident claims in either direction suggest.

"The state is not a socialising agent." It compels schooling, issues categories, licenses relationships and records existence. Foucault would put it first.

Why it matters

It replaces "upbringing" with a map. Instead of a vague sense that people are shaped by their background, you have seven identifiable agents, each with a characteristic content, method, power and limit — and you can ask, of any competence or disposition, which agent supplied it.

It locates inequality inside socialisation. Different children are socialised by differently resourced agents into differently rewarded competences. That is not a side-effect; it is one of the main engines of reproduction (Part 8).

It explains where independent thought comes from, without appealing to anything mysterious. Not from a person's innate individuality, but from occupying a position where several authorities disagree — which is a testable, sociological account of a capacity people usually treat as personal.

And it means socialisation is not destiny. Because the agents contradict each other, because people resist and interpret, and because socialisation continues for life, the process is far more open than "you are made by your upbringing" implies. Which is the honest version of what 1.3.1 argued.

An agent of socialisation transmits culture, competences and expectations. The principal agents are family, school, peer group, media, religion, workplace and the state.

Family: first and most intensive; transmits language, emotion, gender, caste and class, and a disposition towards institutions. School: the hidden curriculum, and the first encounter with universalistic evaluation (Parsons) — read alongside Bowles and Gintis's correspondence principle. Peers: horizontal, chosen, and the only source of a morality of equals (Piaget). Media: reaches across the household, supplies models and representation, algorithmically selected. Religion: cosmology and sacred authority, transmitted by ritual. Workplace: occupational socialisation, thorough and adult. The state: categories, documents, compulsory schooling — the agent Foucault would place first.

The agents contradict each other, and that is the crucial fact: contradiction is the source of reflexivity, the reason socialisation is never total, and the foothold for social change.

Socialisation is not a conveyor belt: people resist and interpret, reverse socialisation runs upward, and the relative weight of agents is contested (Harris).

Agents are unequally distributed, which makes socialisation a principal mechanism of social reproduction.

Agent of socialisation — a person, group or institution transmitting culture and competences to members of a society.

Hidden curriculum — the unstated norms, values and dispositions schools transmit alongside their formal syllabus.

Universalistic / particularistic standards — evaluation by criteria applied to all, versus evaluation as a particular person (Parsons).

Correspondence principle — Bowles and Gintis's claim that the social relations of schooling mirror those of work.

Occupational socialisation — the process by which people acquire the competences, identity and norms of a trade or profession.

Reverse socialisation — the transmission of culture and competences from younger to older generations.

Representation — the depiction of social groups in media, shaping what audiences take to be normal and possible.

Reflexivity — the capacity to regard one's own assumptions as assumptions, arising largely from conflict between socialising agents.

Doxa — assumptions so deep no alternative is available for comparison (Bourdieu, 2.1.2).

Social reproduction — the transmission of social positions and advantages across generations.