The evolving vocabulary of the social sciences: The case of “socialization”.

Abstract

While the term "socialization" stands as a common and clearly understood term regularly used in social science and lay conversations alike, its history is complex. In the 19th century, socialization was introduced to refer to societal activities or projects, and only in the early 20th century did it gain usage as a term describing psychological processes transpiring within the individual. The architecture of the newer meaning harbored ambitions and problems of modern social science, including ideals of interdisciplinary theory and theoretic resolution of the individual/society dualism. Nevertheless, socialization became a central object of social scientific inquiry after World War II. This significant social scientific object was repeatedly altered: initially representing a vision of conforming citizens who were free from certain troubling characteristics depicted in psychoanalysis and well-suited to democracy, it later was engaged to create a vision of autonomous, resilient, and cognitively active actors able to negotiate a complex social world.

Professional socialization: an analytical definition

“…Professional socialization is essential for a successful academic graduation experience, and its inappropriate formation may lead to dissatisfaction and dropping out of school (6). Until the 1940s, this concept was relatively uncommon, but after World War II, it attracted the interest of many researchers and scholars of various disciplines and interdisciplinary studies and entered dictionaries and scientific works such as the Talcott Parsons theory (7). Since then, this concept has repeatedly been used in scientific literature with different terminology such as acculturation (8,9); adaptation (10 -13); assimilation (14); social assimilation (15); organizational socialization (16,17); and a variety of definitions.…”

Mark A. May

“…34 Such research, especially as focused on issues pertinent to culture and personality and to socialization, had important implications for the practices and ‘biopolitics’ of child rearing; its influence was reflected in such phenomena as the mass consumption of literature on child rearing during the postwar era (Grant, 1998). Concomitantly, work on personality and culture and on socialization came to exert a major intellectual influence, as Meyerowitz (2010), Morawski and St. Martin (2011), Bryson (2009) and others have suggested, on the North American educated public and social sciences during the mid-20 th century.…”

“…An important book to emerge from the elaboration of the learning-theory approach to socialization was R. R. Sears, E. E. Maccoby and H. Levin's (1957), which examined child rearing practices in the United States. For an overview of the evolution of the concept of socialization during the 20 th century, see Morawski and J. St. Martin (2011). 34.…”

“…The hypothesis was elaborated as part of an overall project to explore Freudian principles within the framework of Hull's theory of adaptive behavior, and it came to inform one of the most significant of the institute's publications, Frustration and Aggression (1939), co-authored by Dollard,Doob,Miller,Mowrer and Sears. 29 Significantly, contrary to the bland concept of socialization that came to prevail in US social science during the post-Second World War era -which tended to depict socialization as the relatively smooth process of the individual's internalization of social norms, a process that was supposed to result in the individual's conformity with regard to these norms (Wrong, 1961;Morawski and St. Martin, 2011) -socialization, as it came to be formulated by IHR researchers, involved frustration and consequent aggression. According to May, the frustration aggression hypothesis assumed .…”

Livelihoods of theory: The case of Goffman’s early theory of the self

“…Some scholars spoke of a vulnerable human kind: their tonal fear and pessimism figured in the writings of Arendt and Milgram. Some expressed hope and even optimism, promoting humanist ideas of malleable or protean personhood along with nascent cognitive psychologists’ tropes of creative, rational, and flexible beings (Cohen-Cole, 2005; Morawski & St. Martin, 2011). According to one of the actors, scholars were challenged to understand the modern person whose “inner self is no longer fixed and immutable,” and to investigate how “psychic mobility liberated man from his native self” (Lerner, 1959, p. 22).…”