Types of Socialisation - Primary, Secondary, Anticipatory, Resocialisation

Socialisation is not one process. Learning to speak at three, learning to be a surgeon at twenty-six, and being systematically remade after entering a prison are different operations with different mechanisms, different depths and different reversibility.

This lesson sorts them.

Four scenes from one life.

At four, Meenakshi learns that you do not point with your left hand, that guests are given the good cup, that certain words are not said in front of her grandmother, and that when a particular tone enters her mother's voice the conversation is over. She does not experience any of this as learning. She experiences it as how things are.

At twenty-four, she joins a hospital as a junior doctor. Within three weeks she has learned an argot she could not have parsed a month earlier, a hierarchy she can read in a corridor, how to be looked at while examining a body, how to write a note that protects her, and — hardest — how to arrange her face when telling a family something terrible. She knows she is learning. She is aware of being watched. She practises.

At thirty-one, she is preparing to become a consultant. Nobody has appointed her yet. But she has begun to dress differently, to speak to juniors in a way she did not before, and to notice that she now finds certain kinds of questions from house officers irritating in a way that surprises her. She is becoming what she has not yet been asked to be.

At forty, she is convicted of an offence and imprisoned for two years. On the first day her clothing, her possessions, her name and her form of address are taken. Everything that made her Dr Meenakshi is removed in ninety minutes, deliberately, by a procedure that has been performed on thousands of people before her.

Four processes, all called socialisation, and any account that treats them as the same thing has missed almost everything.

The idea, in plain words

Primary and secondary: the real difference

Berger and Luckmann (1.3.3) draw the distinction sharply, and their formulation is worth having because it explains why the two differ in depth rather than merely noting that they do.

Primary socialisation involves no choice of significant others. A child does not select her parents, and therefore does not experience their world as one world. She experiences it as the world. There is no alternative available for comparison — Bourdieu's doxa (2.1.2), acquired.

And it is emotionally charged in a way nothing later can match. The child identifies with the people teaching her, because she depends on them totally. Content absorbed under those conditions is not stored as information; it becomes constitutive.

Secondary socialisation, by contrast, is always partial. It installs "sub-worlds" — the world of medicine, of a workplace, of a religious order — onto an already-formed self, and the person retains awareness that these are roles occupied rather than reality itself. Which is why role distance (2.2.3) is possible in secondary settings and nearly impossible in primary ones: the junior doctor can joke about being a doctor; almost nobody can maintain ironic distance from their native language or their disgusts.

Two consequences follow.

Secondary socialisation must work harder to stick. Hence uniforms, ceremonies, initiations, oaths, titles, long training, and deliberate emotional intensity — organisations that want deep commitment have to manufacture something resembling primary conditions. Note how much of professional training consists of shared ordeal.

And primary socialisation sets the terms on which later socialisation is received. The child of 2.1.13's first household arrives at medical school already comfortable questioning authority. The competences transmitted at four determine what can be acquired at twenty-four — which is the mechanism of cultural capital, stated developmentally.

Anticipatory socialisation

You met this in 2.2.5, via reference groups. Restated here in its own right, because it does more work than its brief treatment suggested.

Anticipatory socialisation is rehearsal: adopting the values, manners, speech, dress and outlook of a group before entering it. The student who begins to speak like the profession she intends to join. The migrant learning the destination's codes before departure. The junior manager who starts thinking like a senior one.

Merton's finding was that in open systems, anticipatory socialisation predicts advancement — it prepares people and signals suitability. In closed systems it isolates: you have distanced yourself from your own group and are not admitted to the other. That is 2.1.9's cleft habitus, produced by an entirely rational strategy that did not pay off.

Note also its darker application. Anticipatory socialisation is how people prepare for positions of authority they have not yet held, and it is one reason organisations reproduce themselves so faithfully: by the time someone is promoted, they have been practising the outlook for years.

Resocialisation

Two forms, and the difference matters enormously.

Voluntary resocialisation. Religious conversion. Joining a monastery or an ashram. Recovery programmes. Migration. Therapy. Retirement. Becoming a parent. The person seeks the transformation and retains, in principle, the option to leave.

Involuntary resocialisation. Prison. Conscription. Compulsory institutionalisation. Some boarding schools. Re-education. The person did not choose it and cannot leave.

The mechanisms overlap more than the moral difference suggests, which is precisely what makes the topic uncomfortable and worth studying carefully.

Harold Garfinkel (5.4) analysed what he called status degradation ceremonies — communicative work whose purpose is to transform a person's total identity into something lower in the group's scheme of social types.

His analysis identified what such a ceremony requires. The denounced act must be presented not as an incident but as revealing what the person really is all along. The denouncer must speak in the name of the group's shared values rather than personally. And the audience must be made witnesses, so that the new identity is publicly and jointly ratified.

The classic instance is a criminal trial, which does something no punishment alone accomplishes: it converts a person who did a thing into a criminal. But the form recurs far beyond courts — in a public dressing-down at work, an excommunication, a caste boycott (2.1.4), a family disowning, a viral online denunciation.

Notice that the ceremony is not merely expressive. It is productive: it creates a new social identity that others will thereafter respond to. This is 2.2.1's master status being conferred, in public, by procedure — and 10.2's labelling theory is built directly on it.

Goffman described the parallel process inside institutions as mortification of the self (2.3.7): the systematic stripping of the identity kit a person arrives with — clothing, possessions, name, hair, privacy, the ability to control who sees them. His point is that these are not incidental indignities. They are the method: an identity is supported by props and audiences, and removing them removes the identity.

Both concepts describe the same finding from different angles: a self is a social achievement, and what society builds it can take apart. Which is the strongest possible confirmation of everything in 2.3.2 and 2.3.3 — and the most disturbing.

Go deeper

Adult socialisation is not a footnote

The popular picture has socialisation as something that happens to children and then stops. It does not, and treating adulthood as a plateau makes a great deal of ordinary life unintelligible.

Occupational socialisation is thorough and often transformative. Studies of medical training describe students learning not merely knowledge but a stance towards bodies, death, uncertainty and error — and the classic finding of Howard Becker's Boys in White is that much of what students learn is how to manage the institution rather than the material.

Marriage, parenthood, migration, illness, unemployment and retirement each require the acquisition of a role and the shedding of another (2.2.3's role exit).

And ageing itself is socialised: what one may wear, want, say and be at sixty is a social fact that varies across societies and has changed sharply within living memory (2.3.8).

The distinctive feature of adult socialisation, as against childhood's, is that it is more explicit, more voluntary, more superficial and more reversible — added to a self rather than constituting one.

The limits of resocialisation

An important corrective to the vividness of the degradation material, because the drama can mislead.

Resocialisation is far less reliable than institutions hope. The evidence from prisons is the clearest case: whatever a prison intends, high reoffending rates in most jurisdictions indicate that the resocialisation is not achieving what is claimed. What such institutions frequently produce instead is institutional competence — an inmate who is good at prison — plus a spoiled identity that makes reintegration harder (2.2.1's stigma).

And the popular concept of brainwashing deserves specific scepticism. The term entered English from Korean War reporting; subsequent research on returning prisoners found very few lasting conversions, and the sociological literature on new religious movements has largely rejected coercive-persuasion models in favour of accounts emphasising social ties, gradual commitment and the ability to leave. What actually predicts durable resocialisation, across settings, is not intensity of pressure but the replacement of a person's social network — which is Berger's plausibility structure (2.1.6) doing the work.

That finding is worth carrying: selves are held in place by the people around them, and they change when the people change. It explains conversion, recovery, radicalisation and migration better than any account of persuasion.

Desocialisation, and the person who does not fit

Two further terms occasionally useful.

Desocialisation is the stripping-away phase — the removal of prior identity that must precede resocialisation. Goffman's mortification is its systematic form.

Undersocialisation and oversocialisation are terms to be used with caution, because both smuggle in a judgement. Dennis Wrong's famous essay, "The Oversocialized Conception of Man in Modern Sociology" (1961), is the more useful of the two: he argued that mid-century sociology, especially Parsons, had produced a picture of human beings so thoroughly moulded by internalised norms that conflict, deviance and the sheer recalcitrance of desire became inexplicable. Wrong's warning belongs beside 1.5.3's: a theory in which socialisation always succeeds cannot explain any of the things that actually make societies interesting.

"Socialisation ends with childhood." Occupational, marital, parental, migratory and ageing socialisation continue throughout life.

"Secondary socialisation is just more of the same." It is added to an existing self, is known to be happening, permits role distance, and is far more reversible.

"Resocialisation means brainwashing." The coercive-persuasion model has been largely rejected. What predicts durable change is the replacement of a person's social network, not the intensity of pressure.

"Total institutions successfully remake people." They reliably strip identity; they are much less reliable at building the intended replacement. Reoffending rates are the standing evidence.

"Anticipatory socialisation always pays." In open systems it predicts advancement; in closed ones it isolates you from your own group without admitting you to another.

"Degradation ceremonies are about punishment." They are about identity transformation — producing a new social type that others will respond to. That is why they must be public.

Why it matters

It tells you what can and cannot be changed, and how. Deep primary learning is not shifted by information or incentives; it shifts, if at all, through prolonged immersion in a different setting with real relationships in it. Secondary role learning responds to training. Knowing which you face is the difference between a workable intervention and a wasted one (1.5.1, 2.1.14).

It explains institutional practices that otherwise look gratuitous. Uniforms, haircuts, initiation, numbers instead of names, the removal of possessions: these are not cruelty for its own sake but a technology for dismantling a self, and knowing that lets you recognise it wherever it appears — including in organisations that would be shocked to be described this way.

It gives you the mechanism of durable change. Not persuasion — network replacement. That single finding is among the most practically useful in this Part, and it applies to conversion, recovery, radicalisation, migration and starting a new job.

And it delivers you to the extreme case. Everything in this lesson about resocialisation has been pointing at one setting, where all of it is done systematically, at scale, by design.

Primary socialisation — childhood acquisition of language, norms, emotions and a self; no choice of significant others, no alternative available for comparison, emotionally total, and therefore constitutive rather than additive.

Secondary socialisation — later acquisition of sector-specific roles and competences; known to be happening, permits role distance, partial and reversible. It works harder to stick, hence uniforms, oaths, initiations and shared ordeal.

Primary socialisation sets the terms on which later socialisation can be received — cultural capital, stated developmentally.

Anticipatory socialisation — rehearsing a group's ways before joining. Predicts advancement in open systems; isolates in closed ones (cleft habitus).

Resocialisation — unlearning and relearning; voluntary (conversion, migration, recovery) or involuntary (prison, conscription).

Garfinkel's degradation ceremonies transform a person's total identity publicly and productively; Goffman's mortification of the self does it institutionally by stripping the identity kit. Both confirm that a self is a social achievement.

Adult socialisation is continuous and substantial. Resocialisation is less reliable than institutions claim, brainwashing models have been largely rejected, and durable change is predicted by network replacement rather than pressure.

Wrong's warning against an oversocialised conception: a theory in which socialisation always succeeds explains nothing interesting.

Primary socialisation — the foundational childhood process of acquiring language, norms, emotional responses and a self.

Secondary socialisation — later acquisition of the roles and competences of particular institutional sectors.

Anticipatory socialisation — adopting the ways of a group before joining it.

Resocialisation — discarding prior patterns and acquiring new ones.

Desocialisation — the stripping away of prior identity that precedes resocialisation.

Degradation ceremony — public communicative work transforming a person's total identity into a lower social type (Garfinkel).

Mortification of the self — the systematic institutional removal of the props supporting a prior identity (Goffman).

Identity kit — the possessions, clothing, name and appearance through which a self is presented and sustained.

Plausibility structure — the social base that sustains a belief or identity (Berger, 2.1.6).

Occupational socialisation — acquisition of the competences, stance and identity of a trade or profession.

Oversocialised conception — Wrong's criticism of theories in which internalised norms explain all behaviour.

One — sort your own. List five things you learned before age six and five you learned after twenty. For each, ask how reversible it is. The pattern will be striking.

Two — spot anticipatory socialisation. Identify something you do now in preparation for a position you do not yet hold. Then ask, honestly, whether the system you are preparing for is open.

Three — find a degradation ceremony. Locate one in your own experience or observation — a public reprimand, an expulsion, a denunciation. Check it against Garfinkel's requirements: was the act presented as revealing what the person is, did the denouncer speak for the group, and was there an audience?

Four — the network test. Think of someone who changed substantially — beliefs, habits, way of life. Ask what happened to the people around them at the same time. The answer is usually the explanation.