Function, Conflict, Symbolic Interaction, and Gender: How Agents of Socialization Work
does socialization help to maintain social order or does it give rise to conflict that
has the potential to change society? Second, if society socializes people, how much
freedom do individuals have to choose, modify, or even reject those influences? Functionalists,
conflict theorists, symbolic interactionists, and feminists answer these key
questions differently:
Functionalists emphasize how socialization helps to maintain orderly social
relations.
They also play down the freedom of choice individuals enjoy in the
socialization
process.
Conflict and feminist theorists typically stress the discord based on class, gender,
and other divisions that is inherent in socialization and that sometimes causes
social
change.
Symbolic interactionists highlight the creativity of individuals in attaching meaning
to their social surroundings. They focus on the many ways in which we often step
outside of, and modify, the values and roles that authorities try to teach us.
Whether it maintains order or engenders conflict, shapes us or allows us to shape
it, the socialization process operates through a variety of social institutions, including
families, schools, peer groups, and, in modern times, the mass media. We now consider
how these various “agents of socialization” work. As we do so, please take careful note of
the functionalist, conflict, symbolic-interactionist, and feminist interpretations embedded
in our discussion.
Families
Few sociologists would disagree with the functionalist claim that the family is the most
important agent of primary socialization, the process of mastering the basic skills required
to function in society during childhood. After all, the family is well suited to providing
the kind of careful, intimate attention required for primary socialization. It is a
small group. Its members are in frequent face-to-face contact. Most parents love their
children and are therefore highly motivated to care for them. These characteristics make
most families ideal for teaching small children everything from language to their place
in the world.
Note, however, that the socialization function of the family was more pronounced a
century ago, partly because adult family members were more readily available for child
care than they are today. As industry grew across the United States, families left farming
for city work in factories and offices. Especially after the 1950s, many women had
to work outside the home for a wage to maintain an adequate standard of living for
their families. Fathers partly compensated by spending somewhat more time caring for
their children. However, because divorce rates have increased and many fathers have less
contact with their children after divorce, children probably see less of their fathers on
average now than they did a century ago. In some countries, such as Sweden and France,
the creation of state-funded child care facilities compensated for these developments by
helping to teach, supervise, and discipline children (see Chapter 10, “Families”; Clawson
and Gerstel, 2002). In the United States, however, lack of state-funded child care became
a social problem, contributing in some cases to child neglect, abuse, and juvenile delinquency.
Families are still the most important agent of primary socialization, but they are
less important than they once were, and they sometimes function poorly.
Schools: Functions and Conflicts
For children over the age of 5, the child care problem was resolved partly by the growth of
the public school system, which was increasingly responsible for secondary socialization,
or socialization outside the family after childhood. In addition, American industry needed
better-trained and better-educated employees. Therefore, by 1918, every state required
children to attend school until the age of 16 or the completion of eighth grade. By the
beginning of the 21st century, more than four-fifths of Americans older than 25 had graduated
from high school and about one-fourth had graduated from college. By these standards,
Americans are among the most highly educated people in the world.
Instructing students in academic and vocational subjects is the school’s manifest function.
One of its latent functions is to train them in the hidden curriculum. The hidden
curriculum teaches students what will be expected of them in the larger society once they
graduate—it teaches them how to be conventionally “good citizens.” Most parents approve.
According to a survey conducted in the United States and several other highly industrialized
countries, the capacity of schools to socialize students is more important to the public
than the teaching of all academic subjects except math (Galper, 1998).
What is the content of the hidden curriculum? In the family, children tend to be evaluated
on the basis of personal and emotional criteria. As students, they are led to believe
that they are evaluated solely on the basis of their performance on impersonal, standardized
tests. They are told that similar criteria will be used to evaluate them in the world of
work. The lesson is only partly true. As you will see in later chapters on social stratification
(Chapter 6), race and ethnicity (Chapter 8), sexuality and gender (Chapter 9), and religion
and education (Chapter 11), not just performance but also class, gender, and racial criteria
help to determine success in school and in the work world. However, the hidden curriculum
convinces most students that they are judged on the basis of performance alone.
A successful hidden curriculum also teaches students punctuality, respect for authority,
the importance of competition in leading to excellent performance, and other conformist
behaviors and beliefs that are expected of good citizens, conventionally defined.
The idea of the hidden curriculum was first proposed by conflict theorists, who, you
will recall, see an ongoing struggle between privileged and disadvantaged groups whenever
they probe beneath the surface of social life (Willis, 1984 [1977]). Their research
on socialization in schools highlights the way many students—especially those from
working-
class and racial-minority families—struggle against the hidden curriculum.
Conflict theorists acknowledge that schools teach many working-class and racialminority
students to act like conventional good citizens. However, they also note that a
disproportionately large number of such students reject the hidden curriculum because
their experience and that of their friends, peers, and family members make them skeptical
about the ability of school to open good job opportunities for them. As a result, they
rebel against the authority of the school. Expected to be polite and studious, they openly
violate rules and neglect their work. They then do poorly in school and eventually enter
the work world near the bottom of the socioeconomic hierarchy. Paradoxically, the rebellion
of working-class and racial-minority students against the hidden curriculum typically
helps to sustain the overall structure of society, with all its privileges and disadvantages
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