SOC101: Introduction to Sociology

Figure 5.1 Emergency workers are prepared to treat patients with a wide array of illnesses and injuries. Beyond their medical training, they build skills in decision-making, teamwork, communication, and stress management. These abilities can be extremely valuable throughout the workers' lives and careers, even if they move into other areas of employment. However, fast and efficient decision-making does not always translate to less intense environments.

When Noel was 15, they saw a flyer about joining the volunteer ambulance corps. Noel was intrigued: They had an interest in pursuing medicine and liked volunteering, but ambulance work seemed like something for older people with professional training. At the information session, Noel learned that junior members of the ambulance corps could help with supplies and communications, and were allowed to ride on ambulance calls to assist the Emergency Medical Technicians (EMTs). Noel was thrilled and signed up right away.

Noel was amazed by how confidently the EMTs – some just a few years older than Noel – made consequential decisions. The EMTs relied heavily on their training and guidelines, but they did so quickly. Upon arriving at the hospital with a patient, Noel was similarly impacted by the efficiency of the nurses, doctors, and other staff. Noel developed a deep respect for that level of decisiveness and the required expertise.

Over their college years, Noel found themselves drawn toward the more strategic aspects of medicine and pursued a degree in healthcare administration. Meanwhile, they did get an EMT certification and joined the college emergency services team; later on, while in grad school, Noel was a part-time professional EMT in a small city. With good grades and varied experience, Noel was recruited into a great job several states away.

After interning in an urban hospital and spending years as an EMT, Noel had come to expect a degree of urgency in medicine. Hospital administration was certainly not an ambulance facility, but the slow pace of Noel's job was agonizing. Every inventory list, bill of lading, email reply, and even meeting schedule went through several people for approval. Noel enjoyed the job but was used to working more quickly.

One day, Noel was looking over an equipment bill and noticed a serious error that no one else had caught. Nearly $250,000 in overpayment was about to be paid to a supplier. Noel immediately called the accounting department. No answer. Then, they sent a group Slack message and emailed their boss and a few other people involved with the billing and payment process. Noel was about to head across the building to address the issue in person, but a message popped up: "Good eye, Noel. We will hold this payment until we clear things up."

Toward the end of the day, Noel received a message from their manager, Tracy, asking them to stop by. Tracy's office was crowded with three other people, including the director of accounting. Expecting to be congratulated, Noel was shocked when Tracy began outlining all the things Noel had done wrong.

Who was correct in this situation? Noel saved the hospital hundreds of thousands of dollars or at least the hours of managing the refund process. Tracy, with broader responsibilities, was considering the long-term impacts of Noel's style, and how Noel, as a talented member of the team, will function within the team.

Tracy was concerned about the organization's culture. Culture, as discussed in the chapter on the topic, is a group's shared beliefs, values, and practices. Countries, societies, religions, and sports teams all have cultures, and companies do, too. When you interview for a job, it will likely come up. Researchers who study organizations find that when workers aren't properly incorporated into the corporate culture, they begin a cycle of mutual disappointment, where workers are likely to reject company values and ultimately leave or be fired.

Why didn't Noel enjoy the job, and why did Noel's approach put people off? For the most part, Noel was not prepared for the pacing and style; their previous experience opposed the hospital's culture. Company culture is easier to learn if someone is predisposed to it, while others might need time to unlearn past behaviors. Experts indicate that the responsibility for such adaptation is shared between the new employee and the company.

How could Noel have learned, and what could Tracy have done to help? Company culture is learned the same way that other types of culture are learned: through observing and adapting to the norms and values, understanding and applying beliefs, and, in general, seeking to be productive as a member of the group. Just like a child learns how to behave during a play date or school day, people learn to be productive partners through an ongoing process called socialization.

Socialization is the process through which people are taught to be proficient members of a society. It describes the ways that people come to understand societal norms and expectations, accept society's beliefs, and be aware of societal values. Socialization is not the same as socializing (interacting with others, like family and friends); to be precise, it is a sociological process that occurs through socializing.

While Noel's story is about a relatively advanced stage of life, socialization is crucial for early childhood. Even the most basic of human activities are learned. Learning to crawl and then walk are major milestones. Still, as any parent, guardian, or family member of a toddler knows, other minor accomplishments can be life-altering for the child: climbing stairs, safely getting out of bed, sitting in a regular chair, and drinking from a regular cup. Likewise, family behaviors and values must be learned, sometimes through observation and sometimes through active instruction.

In the following sections, we will examine the importance of the complex process of socialization and how it takes place through interaction with many individuals, groups, and social institutions. We will explore how socialization is critical to children as they develop and a lifelong process through which we become prepared for new social environments and expectations in every stage of our lives. But first, we will turn to scholarship about self-development, the process of recognizing a sense of self, a "self" that can then be socialized.

Theories of Self-Development

When we are born, we have a genetic makeup and biological traits. However, who we are as human beings develop through social interaction. Many scholars, both in the fields of psychology and sociology, have described the process of self-development as a precursor to understanding how that "self" becomes socialized.

Psychological Perspectives on Self-Development

Psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) was one of the most influential modern scientists to put forth a theory about how people develop a sense of self. He divided the maturation process into stages and posited that people's self-development is closely linked to their early stages of development.

According to Freud, failure to properly engage in or disengage from a specific stage results in emotional and psychological consequences throughout adulthood.

Psychologist Erik Erikson (1902–1994) created a theory of personality development based, in part, on the work of Freud. However, Erikson believed the personality continued to change over time and was never truly finished. His theory includes eight stages of development, beginning with birth and ending with death. According to Erikson, people move through these stages throughout their lives. In contrast to Freud's focus on psychosexual stages and basic human urges, Erikson's view of self-development gave credit to more social aspects, like the way we negotiate between our own base desires and what is socially accepted.

Jean Piaget (1896–1980) was a psychologist who focused on the role of social interactions in child development. He recognized that the development of self-evolved through a negotiation between the world as it exists in one's mind and the world that exists as it is experienced socially (Piaget 1954). All three of these thinkers have contributed to our modern understanding of self-development.

Psychologist Harry Harlow (1905–1981) is known for studying the role of social relationships in human development by observing the impact of isolation and maternal deprivation on the development of young rhesus monkeys. Harlow found that the monkeys, when subjected to isolation, exhibited disturbed behaviors, including self-harm, and had a difficult time integrating when reconnected with other monkeys. Harlow also introduced isolated monkeys to simulated surrogate mothers, some covered in cloth while others constructed out of wire. Based on observed behaviors, the young monkeys appeared to develop an attachment with the cloth mothers and lean on them for emotional support. More than seven decades later, this experiment continues to inform the research of psychologists, sociologists, and those interested in human development.

Sociological Theories of Self-Development

Charles Cooley (1864–1929) was a pioneering contributor to sociological perspectives. He asserted that people's self-understanding is constructed, in part, by their perception of how others view them – a process termed "the looking-glass self."

Later, George Herbert Mead (1863–1931) studied the self, a person's distinct identity developed through social interaction. In order to engage in this process of "self," an individual has to be able to view him or herself through the eyes of others. That's not an ability that we are born with (Mead 1934). Through socialization, we learn to put ourselves in someone else's shoes and look at the world through their perspective. This assists us in becoming self-aware as we look at ourselves from the perspective of the "other."

How do we go from being newborns to being humans with "selves?" Mead believed that there is a specific path of development that all people go through. During the preparatory stage, children are only capable of imitation: they have no ability to imagine how others see things. They copy the actions of people they regularly interact with, such as their caregivers. This is followed by the play stage, during which children begin to take on the role that one other person might have. Thus, children might try on a parent's point of view by acting out "grownup" behavior, like playing dress-up and acting out the "mom" role, or talking on a toy telephone the way they see adults do.

During the game stage, children learn to consider several roles at the same time and how those roles interact with each other. They learn to understand interactions involving different people with a variety of purposes. For example, a child at this stage is likely to be aware of the different responsibilities of people in a restaurant who together make for a smooth dining experience (someone seats you, another takes your order, someone else cooks the food, while yet another clears away dirty dishes).

Finally, children develop, understand, and learn the idea of the generalized other, the common behavioral expectations of general society. By this stage of development, an individual is able to imagine how one or many others view him or her – and thus, from a sociological perspective, to have a "self."

Kohlberg's Theory of Moral Development

Moral development is an important part of the socialization process. The term refers to how people learn what society considers to be "good" and "bad," which is important for a smoothly functioning society. Moral development prevents people from acting on unchecked urges, instead considering what is right for society and good for others. Lawrence Kohlberg (1927–1987) was interested in how people learn to decide right and wrong. To understand this topic, he developed a theory of moral development that includes three levels: pre-conventional, conventional, and post-conventional.

In the pre-conventional stage, young children who lack a higher level of cognitive ability experience the world around them only through their senses. It is not until the teen years that the conventional theory develops when youngsters become increasingly aware of others' feelings and take those into consideration when determining what's "good" and "bad." The final stage, called post-conventional, is when people begin to think of morality in abstract terms, such as Americans believing that everyone has the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. At this stage, people also recognize that legality and morality do not always match up evenly. When hundreds of thousands of Egyptians turned out in 2011 to protest government corruption, they were using post-conventional morality. They understood that although their government was legal, it was not morally correct.

Gilligan's Theory of Moral Development and Gender

Another sociologist, Carol Gilligan (1936–), recognized that Kohlberg's theory might show gender bias since his research was only conducted on male subjects. Would female study subjects have responded differently? Would a female social scientist notice different patterns when analyzing the research? To answer the first question, she set out to study the differences between how boys and girls developed morality. Gilligan's research suggested that boys and girls do have different understandings of morality. Boys appeared to have a justice perspective, by placing emphasis on rules and laws. Girls, on the other hand, seem to have a care and responsibility perspective; they consider people's reasons behind behavior that seems morally wrong.

While Gilligan is correct that Kohlberg's research should have included both male and female subjects, her study has been scientifically discredited due to its small sample size. The results Gilligan noted in this study also have not been replicated by subsequent researchers. The differences Gilligan observed were not an issue of the development of morality but an issue of socialization. Differences in behavior between males and females are the result of gender socialization that teaches boys and girls societal norms and behaviors expected of them based on their sex (see "What a Pretty Little Lady").

Gilligan also recognized that Kohlberg's theory rested on the assumption that the justice perspective was the right, or better, perspective. Gilligan, in contrast, theorized that neither perspective was "better": the two norms of justice served different purposes. Ultimately, she explained that boys are socialized in a work environment where rules make operations run smoothly. In contrast, girls are socialized in a home environment where flexibility allows for harmony in caretaking and nurturing.

Source: Tonja R. Conerly, Kathleen Holmes, Asha Lal Tamang; OpenStax, https://openstax.org/books/introduction-sociology-3e/pages/5-1-theories-of-self-development
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