soci 2

SOCI201-012

Tuesday, September 17, 2019

Socialization and Interaction

Culture

· Important questions about culture

· Who decides what is and is not included in our material culture?

· Who decides the values, norms, and sanctions included in a society’s culture?

· Who decides when culture changes?

Key and Peele- “Substitute Teacher”

Nature vs. Nurture

Socialization

· The process of learning a society or social group’s culture, including how to “properly” interact

· Begins in childhood but persists throughout the life course

· Occurs between generations

· E.g., gender socialization

Agents of Socialization

· Individuals or groups that provide socialization into culture

· People: Family, Peers

· Institutions: school, government, religion, workplaces, mass media

· Total institutions

· Resocialization

George Herbert Mead (1863-1931)

· American sociologist/psychologist

· Children learn how to “take the role of the other” through:

· Imitation

· Play

· Team games

· The “generalized other”

Charles Horton Cooley (1864-1929)

· American sociologist

· The “Looking-Glass Self”

· We imagine how we appear to other people

· We interpret others’ reactions to us

· We develop a self-concept based on that interpretation

· Zhao (2005) “The Digital Self: Through the Looking Glass of Telecopresent Others”

· How do we develop our self-concept online if others are disembodied?

· “Analyses of the online experience of teenagers have shown that telecopresent others in the online world do constitute a unique looking glass which generates a digital self that is different from the self constructed offline. The digital self has been found to be oriented inward, narrative in nature, retractable, and multiplied” (p. 400)

Symbolic Interactionism

· Society is composed of symbols that people use to establish meaning, develop their views of the world, and communicate with others

· Herbert Blumer (1900-1987)

· American sociologist

· coined the term “symbolic interactionism” but was heavily influenced by Mead and Cooley

Harold Garfinkel (1917-2011)

· American sociologist

· Ethnomethodology: an analytical method in the social sciences that examines how meaning is created in everyday interaction/communication

· Social breaching experiment: disrupting taken-for-granted knowledge in order to understand the nuances of social life

Berger and Luckmann

· “The Social Construction of Reality” (1966)

· Social constructionism: meaning-making is a social event- things only have meaning because we assign them meaning

Erving Goffman (1922-1982)

· American sociologist

· The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life

· Dramaturgical perspective of social interaction

· The (idealized) performance

· Regions- front and back

· The team

· Setting

· Impression management

· Things we “give” vs “give off”

· Role Performance: we all inhabit different statuses, and each of these statuses comes with different roles; these roles become part of what is expected of us during interaction

· Role conflict: when two of your roles directly conflict with one another

· Role strain: when you feel strain within one role

· “On Face-Work: An Analysis of Ritual Elements in Social Interaction”

· Line

· Face and the role of the face in interaction

· Face-work

· Ritual