2 | The Process of Socialisation

Chapter 2 builds on the “culture material” in the first chapter by exploring how culture is created in one of two ways:

1. Through the influence of instincts, a largely non-sociological (‘nature’) approach to understanding culture.

2. Through the influence of our social environment, a conventional sociological approach that outlines different types and agencies of socialisation.

More-specifically the chapter covers the process of socialisation in terms of:

• Feral children
• Types of socialisation (primary, secondary, etc.)
• Formal and Informal social control
• Agencies of socialisation (primary and secondary)
• Structure and Action approaches
• Consensus perspectives (Functionalism)
• Conflict perspectives (Marxism, Feminism)
• Action perspectives
• Postmodern perspectives

For those of you who worry about such things the book was originally written for the OCR Specification but since it’s really just a general introduction to culture and socialisation it will cause no harm if students following other Specifications are exposed to the material it contains. Whether it will do you or them any good is, of course, not something on which I wish to speculate.

As with the previous chapter some printer’s marks are visible and a few illustrations that appear in the final version have not been included for the deceptively simple reason that I wasn’t involved in their selection and I can’t be bothered to look in the book to see what they were. That’s probably two reasons, I grant you, but you probably get the drift.