30.03.02 · sociology / socialization

Agents of socialization: family, peers, schools, media; resocialization

stub3 tiersLean: nonepending prereqs

Anchor (Master): Mead, G. H. — Mind, Self, and Society (1934)

Intuition Beginner

Socialization is the lifelong process by which people learn the culture and skills needed to function in society. It begins in the family. By age five, children have already absorbed language, gender roles, emotional expression, and basic values — all without formal teaching. No one hands a toddler a syllabus. The learning happens through everyday interaction, imitation, and correction.

Parents are the first and most powerful agent. But social class shapes how parents do the job. Annette Lareau found that middle-class parents tend toward "concerted cultivation" — they enroll children in organized activities and train them to question adults and advocate for themselves. Working-class parents more often emphasize obedience and respect for authority, what Lareau calls the "accomplishment of natural growth."

Peers become crucial in adolescence. Unlike parents, peers are roughly equal in power, and the relationships are voluntary. Peer groups teach independence from the family, gendered behavior, and how to navigate social hierarchies. They are also where conformity and peer pressure do their sharpest work.

Schools teach more than academics. Buried inside the daily schedule is a "hidden curriculum": punctuality, obedience to authority, competition for grades, and acceptance of hierarchical evaluation. These lessons, not the textbook content, are what prepare students for the workplace.

The mass media are a powerful agent. In many societies, children spend more time with screens than in school. Television, film, advertising, games, and social media teach gender roles, body ideals, racial categories, and consumer habits — often more consistently than any single parent or teacher.

Resocialization happens when old patterns must be unlearned and new ones built. "Total institutions" like prisons, the military, monasteries, and psychiatric hospitals deliberately resocialize people by stripping away their old identity — uniforms, numbers instead of names, rigid schedules — and replacing it with a new one.

Visual Beginner

The table below maps the four major agents of socialization and the special case of resocialization. Each agent teaches a distinct cluster of lessons through a distinct mechanism.

Agent	What it teaches	Mechanism
Family	Language, values, gender roles, emotional norms	Daily interaction, imitation, discipline
Peers	Independence, conformity, gendered behavior	Voluntary association, approval and rejection
School	Punctuality, obedience, competition, hierarchy	Hidden curriculum, grading, tracking
Media	Gender, race, body image, consumption	Repeated representation, modeling
Total institutions	A wholly new identity	Stripping the old self, scheduled control

Key term	Plain-language meaning
Concerted cultivation	Middle-class parenting via organized activities and self-advocacy
Hidden curriculum	The unwritten lessons schools teach alongside academics
Anticipatory socialization	Rehearsing a future role before entering it
Total institution	A closed setting that controls all of life to rebuild identity
Resocialization	Unlearning old behaviors and learning new ones

Worked example Beginner

Example 1: Two childhoods, two skill sets

Lareau followed families across class lines. A middle-class child she called Alexander Garrett spent weekends shuttling between soccer, piano, and baseball, learning to look adults in the eye and ask questions at the doctor's office. A working-class child, Billy Yanelli, spent long unstructured afternoons playing with cousins in the street and watching television with extended family.

Neither childhood was "better." But the middle-class pattern produced a child fluent in the language of institutions — comfortable challenging authority, scheduling time, and making a case for himself. The working-class pattern produced strong family ties and self-direction but left the child less prepared to navigate institutions that were not built around him. The skills schools and workplaces reward are not natural; they are class-produced.

Example 2: Boot camp as resocialization

A new Marine recruit arrives at training with a civilian name, civilian clothes, and a civilian identity. Within hours, the institution strips these away. Hair is shaved. Clothing becomes a uniform. The recruit is addressed by a title, not a name. Every minute of the day — when to eat, sleep, speak, move — is scheduled and commanded.

The goal is mortification of self: breaking the old identity so a new one can be built. Over thirteen weeks, the recruit is rebuilt as a Marine who follows orders reflexively and identifies with the unit. Erving Goffman called prisons, boot camps, and monasteries "total institutions" because they control the whole person in order to resocialize them.

Check your understanding Beginner

Exercise (easy, multiple choice).

What is the "hidden curriculum" that schools teach?

A. The official subjects schools are legally required to teach.

B. The unwritten lessons about obedience, punctuality, and hierarchy that schools transmit alongside academics.

C. A secret set of advanced classes reserved for gifted students.

D. The values parents teach children before they start school.

Hint

Think about what students learn from the structure of the school day — bells, lines, grades, waiting to speak — rather than from any textbook.

Answer

Option B. The hidden curriculum is the set of unwritten lessons — punctuality, obedience to authority, competition for grades, acceptance of hierarchy — that schooling transmits through its routines rather than its stated content. Philip Jackson named the concept in 1968. These lessons, not the academic syllabus, are what most directly prepare students for the discipline of the workplace.

Exercise (easy, multiple choice).

Lareau's term "concerted cultivation" describes which pattern?

A. Working-class parenting that stresses obedience and respect for authority.

B. Middle-class parenting that organizes children's activities and trains them to advocate for themselves.

C. A farming technique applied metaphorically to rural education.

D. A method schools use to sort students into ability groups.

Hint

The phrase names an active, deliberate effort to cultivate a child through organized schedules and institutional navigation.

Answer

Option B. "Concerted cultivation" is Lareau's label for the middle-class pattern: parents enroll children in organized activities and teach them to question adults and institutions. Its counterpart, the "accomplishment of natural growth," describes the working-class pattern of unstructured time and directive language. Neither is a tracking method; both are family socialization styles.

Formal definition Intermediate+

The agents of socialization are the individuals, groups, and institutions that transmit social knowledge, norms, and dispositions to the developing person. Four agents dominate the literature — family, peers, schools, and mass media — and a fifth category, resocialization, describes the special case in which an existing identity is deliberately dismantled and replaced.

Primary socialization is the intense, early-childhood induction into a society's basic reality: language, fundamental norms, initial gender and racial categories, and the first sense of self. It occurs chiefly within the family and is emotionally charged and difficult to undo because it happens before the child can evaluate what is being taught ^{[source pending]}.

Secondary socialization extends and modifies primary socialization as the person encounters school, peers, workplaces, religious communities, and political organizations. It is more specialized and, in principle, more reversible.

Anticipatory socialization is the rehearsal of a future role before entering it — a high school student imagining college life, a trainee practicing a profession. It eases transitions by letting the person internalize the target group's norms in advance.

Resocialization is the dismantling of an existing identity and its replacement with a new one. When the process is institutionally controlled, it occurs inside a total institution. Goffman defined total institutions by five characteristics: all activity occurs in the same place under a single authority; activities are carried out in the immediate company of others; activities are tightly scheduled; the schedule is imposed from above by a system of explicit rules; and all activities form a single rational plan ^{[source pending]}.

Institutional analysis: family, peers, schools, media, and resocialization Intermediate+

Family: parenting styles and the class divide

Diana Baumrind's research identified four parenting styles that travel across the literature: authoritative (high warmth, high control), authoritarian (low warmth, high control), permissive (high warmth, low control), and neglectful (low warmth, low control). Authoritative parenting is most consistently associated with favorable outcomes, though the finding is concentrated on White, middle-class, US samples and does not travel without modification.

Lareau's Unequal Childhoods (2003) showed that the more consequential fault line is social class. Concerted cultivation — organized activities, language used as intervention, and active institutional navigation — equips middle-class children to manage and challenge the bureaucracies they will meet. The accomplishment of natural growth — unstructured time, directive language, and reliance on kin — produces strong family bonds but leaves children to face institutions alone ^{[source pending]}. The family does not merely pass on culture; it reproduces class advantage and disadvantage.

Peers: children as active agents

William Corsaro's ethnographic work reframed children not as passive recipients of adult culture but as active agents who create their own peer cultures — shared routines, jokes, games, and exclusion rules that children produce and enforce among themselves. Peer pressure is real but bidirectional: adolescents select into peer groups that match their existing orientations, and the group then amplifies those orientations. Adolescent crowds and cliques sort identities (jock, nerd, rebel), and deviance training — the reinforcement of rule-breaking talk within friendships — is a documented pathway into delinquency.

Schools: the hidden curriculum and tracking

Philip Jackson (1968) named the hidden curriculum: the routines of schooling — waiting for permission to speak, standing in lines, accepting evaluation, competing for grades — teach obedience, punctuality, competition, and deference to hierarchical authority. Jeannie Oakes's Keeping Track (1985) showed that tracking (ability grouping) reproduces inequality: lower-track students receive less challenging content and more behavioral control, and the placements correlate with race and class. The school-to-prison pipeline extends the logic: harsh discipline, school-based policing, and racial disparities in suspension push students, disproportionately Black, out of school and into the carceral system.

Media: cultivation, gender, and the digital self

George Gerbner's cultivation theory holds that heavy television viewing cultivates a worldview matching televised reality, most famously the "mean world syndrome." Media research documents systematic patterns in gender socialization: women are underrepresented in children's media and overrepresented in domestic or romantic roles, while men dominate action and authority roles. Advertising connects consumption to gender identity, and media exposure is linked to body image dissatisfaction, especially among adolescent girls.

The digital transformation has intensified and complicated these effects. Social media and identity formation are now tightly linked: platforms expose young people to constant social comparison, identity experimentation, and algorithmic norm-setting. Whether media effects are top-down (Gerbner) or negotiated by active audiences (Stuart Hall's encoding/decoding) remains contested; the current consensus treats both as partly right.

Resocialization: total institutions, brainwashing, and conversion

Goffman's analysis of total institutions describes a two-stage process. First, mortification of self: the institution strips the existing identity through uniforms, numbers replacing names, confiscation of personal possessions, and loss of control over daily routine — what Harold Garfinkel called a degradation ceremony. Second, the institution builds a new identity around a binary split between staff and inmates.

Outside the total institution, resocialization takes other forms. Edgar Schein's study of Korean War prisoners of war described coercive persuasion ("brainwashing") as a sequence of physical pressure, confession, and ideological re-education. Religious conversion, including entry into and exit from new religious movements ("cults"), is a less coercive but structurally similar resocialization; Eileen Barker's work and the deprogramming controversies of the 1970s and 1980s framed the debate.

Exercises Intermediate+

Exercise 1 (medium, short answer).

Distinguish Lareau's "concerted cultivation" from the "accomplishment of natural growth" along three dimensions: time use, language style, and relationship to institutions. Then explain why the difference is a mechanism of class reproduction rather than a matter of individual parenting preference.

Hint

The third dimension is the key. Consider which style produces a child who can make institutions respond to them, and which produces a child who must adapt to institutions alone.

Answer

Time use. Concerted cultivation fills the child's schedule with organized activities; the natural-growth pattern leaves large blocks of unstructured time for kin and play.

Language style. Concerted cultivation uses language as intervention — parents reason with children and teach them to argue with adults; the natural-growth pattern uses directives — parents issue clear instructions and expect compliance.

Relationship to institutions. Middle-class parents treat schools and doctors as responsive to pressure and teach children to make demands of them; working-class parents experience institutions as unresponsive and leave children to navigate them alone.

This is class reproduction because the skills schools and workplaces reward — scheduling, self-advocacy, challenging authority comfortably — are not natural but are systematically cultivated in one class and not the other. The advantage compounds across the life course, converting parenting style into unequal adult outcomes.

Exercise 2 (medium, multiple choice).

Which of the following is NOT one of Goffman's characteristics of a total institution?

A. All activity occurs in the same place under a single authority.

B. Activities are tightly scheduled and imposed from above.

C. Members are free to leave and return at will.

D. All activities are part of a single rational plan.

Hint

Consider what makes the institution "total." Freedom of exit is incompatible with one of the defining features.

Answer

Option C. Total institutions are defined by the containment and control of their members; free exit is precisely what they foreclose. Goffman's five characteristics are: same place and single authority; activity in the company of others; tight scheduling; schedule imposed from above by explicit rules; and a single rational plan unifying all activities. A setting one can leave at will fails the first and most basic criterion.

Exercise 3 (hard, short answer).

Oakes argues that tracking reproduces inequality, while media-effects research (Gerbner) and active-audience research (Hall) disagree about whether media socialization is top-down or negotiated. Construct a unified account: how might tracking, cultivation, and negotiated decoding combine to produce different socialization outcomes for students in different tracks? Identify one prediction such an account would generate.

Hint

Each student sits at the intersection of institutional placement (track) and media consumption. Think about what a lower-track student who is also a heavy television viewer would internalize, and whether negotiated decoding offers any escape.

Answer

A unified account treats the school track and media exposure as two reinforcing socialization channels. A student in a lower track receives the hidden curriculum in its harshest form — more behavioral control, less challenging content, weaker signals of academic belonging — while heavy television viewing cultivates a worldview in which their social position appears natural and the world appears dangerous and hierarchical. The two channels converge: the institution constrains aspiration, and the media legitimates the constraint.

Hall's encoding/decoding model leaves room for resistance: a student can decode media oppositionally and reject the school's low expectations. But negotiated and oppositional readings require cultural resources — alternative vocabularies, counter-examples, supportive adults — that are themselves unevenly distributed by class and track. The combined account predicts that lower-track students with heavy media exposure and few countervailing resources will show the strongest acceptance of their assigned position, while those with a rich counter-socialization (a mentor, a peer culture of resistance, a media diet that decodes against the grain) are more likely to resist.

Advanced results: theories of the self, habitus, and resocialization in depth Master

Classical theories of the self

The agents of socialization matter because they build the self. Four classical accounts frame the field. Mead's I and Me splits the self into the spontaneous, acting I and the internalized social attitudes of the Me; the self emerges as the person learns to take the role of others, advancing from the play stage (specific others), to the game stage (multiple organized others), to the generalized other (the internalized community) ^{[source pending]}. Cooley's looking-glass self holds that we build self-feeling from our imagination of how others judge us.

Developmental psychology constrains what can be internalized at each stage. Piaget mapped the cognitive stages that bound a child's capacity for perspective-taking; Vygotsky emphasized that learning happens through cultural tools (language above all) mediated by more capable others in the zone of proximal development. Freud located socialization in the superego, the internalized parental and social prohibitions; Erikson reframed the life course as a sequence of psychosocial stages (trust, autonomy, identity, intimacy, generativity) each defined by a social crisis. None of these replaces the others — they describe different layers of the same process.

Bourdieu: habitus and social reproduction

Pierre Bourdieu's concept of habitus names the durable, transposable dispositions that socialization deposits in the body — tastes, manners, bodily carriage, sense of the "proper" way to speak, eat, and judge. Habitus is class-specific: it is generated by the conditions of a class position and orients action and perception without conscious deliberation. Through the education system, habitus is converted into cultural capital and back into class position, producing social reproduction: schools reward the dispositions of the dominant class as if they were neutral merit.

Bourdieu's framework subsumes Lareau's findings — concerted cultivation is one way of producing the habitus that schools reward — and supplies the mechanism by which family socialization becomes structured inequality. Lareau's longitudinal follow-up confirmed the prediction: the middle-class children's institutional fluency translated into adult advantage, while the working-class children's strong kin ties did not shield them from institutions that penalized their dispositions.

Lareau: Unequal Childhoods in longitudinal depth

Lareau's follow-up, a decade and more after the original fieldwork, traced the children into young adulthood. The middle-class subjects navigated college, job markets, and graduate school with the institutional fluency they had practiced since childhood; their parents continued to intervene on their behalf well into their twenties. The working-class and poor subjects faced arrested educational trajectories, encounters with the criminal justice system, and chronic illness, with far less institutional support.

The longitudinal findings sharpen the original claim: parenting style is not a private preference but a mechanism that converts class position into individual biography over the long run. They also complicate it — the strongest family ties among the working-class subjects were a genuine good, even as they did not translate into institutional mobility. The inequality is real, but it does not map onto a simple ranking of "better" childhoods.

Resocialization in depth: Goffman, Schein, conversion

Goffman's total-institution analysis goes beyond mortification to the staff-inmate binary: the institution organizes the world into two populations with sharply different privileges, perspectives, and moral worth, and the inmate's new identity is built around subordination to staff. Degradation ceremonies (Garfinkel) are the ritual moments in which the old identity is publicly revoked. The same logic structures prisons, the military, monasteries, and some therapeutic communities, though the moral valence differs: a Marine's resocialization is publicly honored, a prisoner's is publicly stigmatized.

Schein's study of Korean War POWs modeled coercive persuasion as a sequence — isolation, physical deprivation, forced confession, and ideological re-education — that could produce genuine (if often temporary) belief change. Religious conversion and entry into new religious movements raise the same questions without the same coercion: Barker's work on the Moonies documented a process of gradual identity realignment, while the deprogramming movement of the 1970s and 1980s responded with its own coercive counter-resocialization, raising civil-liberties questions that remain unresolved.

Workplace and adult socialization

John Van Maanen's ethnographies of police recruits showed how occupational training is a resocialization that builds an occupational identity — the recruit learns not just skills but a worldview (us versus them, suspicion, control) that reorganizes perception. Nurses, soldiers, and corporate managers undergo parallel transformations into occupational cultures.

Adult socialization continues across the life course: entering marriage, parenthood, retirement, immigration, or a new profession each requires learning new norms and shedding old ones. Anticipatory socialization eases these transitions; where the new role conflicts sharply with prior socialization, the transition becomes a resocialization. West and Zimmerman's "doing gender" reframes gender itself as an ongoing adult accomplishment rather than a one-time childhood lesson — a continuous socialization that never completes.

Media and socialization: effects, audiences, and algorithms

Three traditions structure the debate. Albert Bandura's social learning theory (the BoBo doll experiments) demonstrated that children learn aggressive behavior by modeling what they observe; this is the strongest evidence for direct media effects. Stuart Hall's encoding/decoding model counters that audiences are active meaning-makers who can read media as dominant, negotiated, or oppositional. George Gerbner's cultivation theory operates on a longer timescale: years of heavy viewing cultivate a worldview rather than a single behavior.

The digital age has added algorithmic socialization. Eli Pariser's filter bubble hypothesis holds that personalized recommendation narrows the information environment and shapes worldview by hiding disconfirming content. Sherry Turkle (Alone Together) and danah boyd (It's Complicated) study how social media reorganizes identity: Turkle foregrounds the anxious curation of the online self and the displacement of conversation by connection, while boyd documents how networked publics let teens negotiate identity, privacy, and context collapse among overlapping audiences. Gaming culture contributes its own socialization around competition, gender, and belonging, with a parallel literature on toxicity and identity.

Sociology of childhood

Allison James, Alan Prout, and Chris Jenks reframed childhood as a social construction rather than a biological universal: childhood varies across history and culture, and children are social actors who participate in producing their own social worlds, not incomplete adults waiting to become real. This reframing matters for agents of socialization: it treats children not as vessels into which culture is poured but as co-producers of peer cultures, family dynamics, and media meaning — a stance that reorients the whole question of how socialization works.

Connections Master

Socialization and identity formation 30.03.01. The prerequisite unit introduced socialization, the self, primary and secondary socialization, and the major agents in broad strokes. This unit deepens the agents — Baumrind and Lareau on family, Jackson and Oakes on schools, Gerbner and Hall on media — and adds the dedicated treatment of resocialization. The two are designed to be read in sequence.
Socialization, self, and the life course 30.03.03 pending. The successor unit treats identity and the self across the lifespan, building directly on the agents and resocialization dynamics mapped here. The hook is the bridge: agents shape the self that the next unit analyzes.
Media and culture industry 30.02.03 pending. Cultivation theory, encoding/decoding, and the culture industry thesis were introduced there as media-sociology concepts. Here they return as mechanisms of socialization — how media becomes an agent that builds gender, race, and body-image dispositions in the developing person.
Social institutions 30.05.01. Schools and media are treated here as agents of socialization; that unit treats them as core institutions alongside family, religion, and the state. The hidden curriculum and tracking are the socialization-side counterpart to the institutions unit's analysis of education as both mobility and reproduction.
Social stratification 30.04.01. Lareau and Bourdieu supply the mechanism by which family socialization converts class position into individual biography. The class reproduction documented here is the micro-foundational layer of the stratification analysis in that unit.
Deviance and social control 30.06.01. The school-to-prison pipeline and the mortification rituals of total institutions bridge to the sociology of deviance: tracking and discipline produce deviant categories, and resocialization is a mechanism of social control.
Psychology [29]. Piaget, Vygotsky, Erikson, and Bandura are psychologists whose developmental and learning theories constrain and explain how socialization agents operate. The line between sociological and psychological accounts of socialization runs through this unit.
Philosophy [20]. The question of whether the self is discovered or constructed — central to Mead, Cooley, and Goffman — is continuous with philosophical treatments of personhood, agency, and identity across Western and non-Western traditions.

Historical and philosophical context Master

Mead, Cooley, and the symbolic interactionist origins

The study of socialization agents was built by the early Chicago school. George Herbert Mead, lecturing in the 1910s and 1920s, argued that the self is not given but emerges through social interaction — specifically through the capacity to take the role of the other. His lectures were compiled posthumously as Mind, Self, and Society (1934) by his students, a fitting origin for a theory that the self is socially constructed. Charles Horton Cooley's looking-glass self (1902) had already supplied the companion claim: we see ourselves through our imagination of others' reactions. Together they grounded socialization not in biology but in symbolic interaction, making the agents — family, peers, school, community — the constitutive source of the person.

Structural functionalism and its critics

Talcott Parsons treated socialization as the mechanism by which society reproduces its role structure: families and schools internalize the norms required to fill society's roles, producing conformity and stability. The framework was powerful but conservative — it treated the existing arrangement as functional and understudied conflict, inequality, and resistance. The symbolic interactionists (Mead's heirs), the conflict theorists (drawing on Marx), and later feminist and critical race scholars pushed back, showing that socialization reproduces inequality as much as cohesion and that those socialized are active agents, not passive moldings.

Goffman and the total institution

Goffman's Asylums (1961) grew out of fieldwork at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C. By studying a psychiatric hospital as a total institution, he produced the enduring analysis of how identity is deliberately dismantled and rebuilt — mortification, the staff-inmate binary, the degradation ceremony. Written at the height of the postwar expansion of mass institutions (prisons, the military, asylums, the bureaucracy), the analysis has traveled outward: boot camp, monastic formation, cult recruitment, and online communities have all been read through the total-institution lens, even where the fit is loose.

Bourdieu, Lareau, and the class turn

Bourdieu's Outline of a Theory of Practice (1972) and Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture (1970, with Passeron) made socialization the central mechanism of class reproduction: habitus, formed in the family and refined in the school, converts class position into the dispositions that institutions then reward as merit. Lareau's Unequal Childhoods (2003) operationalized the claim in close ethnography of US families, showing how parenting styles vary by class and translate into unequal institutional fluency. The longitudinal follow-up confirmed that the mechanism compounds across the life course, cementing socialization's place at the center of stratification theory.

The digital turn

The arrival of networked media reopened settled questions about which agents matter and how. Where mid-century sociology studied family, school, and broadcast media, contemporary work must reckon with platforms, algorithms, and persistent networked publics. Pariser's filter bubble, Turkle's work on the displaced self, and boyd's networked-teens research extend the socialization framework into a setting where the agents are partly non-human (recommendation systems) and the audience is collapsed and persistent. The digital turn has not displaced the older agents; it has layered new ones on top of them and complicated the question of who, exactly, is doing the socializing.

Bibliography Master

Mead, G. H., Mind, Self, and Society (University of Chicago Press, 1934). The foundational text of symbolic interactionism: the I and the Me, the play and game stages, and the generalized other as the mechanism by which the self emerges through social interaction.
Cooley, C. H., Human Nature and the Social Order (Scribner's, 1902). Introduces the looking-glass self — the self built from our imagination of how others perceive and judge us.
Goffman, E., Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (Doubleday, 1961). The defining analysis of total institutions: mortification of self, the staff-inmate binary, degradation ceremonies, and institutional resocialization.
Jackson, P. W., Life in Classrooms (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968). Names and analyzes the hidden curriculum — the unwritten lessons of obedience, punctuality, and hierarchy that schooling transmits alongside its academic content.
Oakes, J., Keeping Track: How Schools Structure Inequality (Yale University Press, 1985). The study of tracking and ability grouping as a mechanism that reproduces race and class inequality.
Bourdieu, P., Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge University Press, 1977). Develops habitus — the durable, class-specific dispositions that socialization deposits in the body — and the theory of social reproduction.
Bourdieu, P. and Passeron, J.-C., Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture (Sage, 1970). The systematic account of how education converts habitus into cultural capital and back into class position.
Lareau, A., Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life (University of California Press, 2003; 2nd ed. 2011 with longitudinal follow-up). Concerted cultivation versus the accomplishment of natural growth, and the class-reproductive consequences of parenting style.
Corsaro, W. A., The Sociology of Childhood (Sage, 1997; 3rd ed. 2017). Children as active agents who co-produce their own peer cultures rather than passively receiving adult culture.
Bandura, A., Ross, D., and Ross, S. A., "Transmission of Aggression through Imitation of Aggressive Models," Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 63.3 (1961), 575-582. The BoBo doll experiments establishing social learning through modeling.
Gerbner, G., Gross, L., Morgan, M., and Signorielli, N., "Living with Television: The Dynamics of the Cultivation Process," in Bryant and Zillmann (eds.), Perspectives on Media Effects (Lawrence Erlbaum, 1986), 17-40. Cultivation theory and the mean world syndrome.
Hall, S., "Encoding/Decoding," in Hall et al. (eds.), Culture, Media, Language (Hutchinson, 1980), 128-138. The active-audience model: media messages are decoded as dominant, negotiated, or oppositional.
Baumrind, D., "Current Patterns of Parental Authority," Developmental Psychology Monograph 4.1, Pt. 2 (1971), 1-103. The authoritative, authoritarian, permissive, and neglectful parenting typology.
Erikson, E. H., Childhood and Society (Norton, 1950; 2nd ed. 1963). The eight psychosocial stages of the life course, each organized around a developmental crisis.
Vygotsky, L. S., Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes (Harvard University Press, 1978). Cultural tools, the zone of proximal development, and learning as social mediation.
Piaget, J., The Psychology of the Child (Basic Books, 1969, with B. Inhelder). The stages of cognitive development that constrain what a child can internalize at each age.
Schein, E. H., Coercive Persuasion: A Socio-Psychological Analysis of the "Brainwashing" of American Civilian Prisoners by the Chinese Communists (Norton, 1961). The model of coercive persuasion developed from Korean War POW research.
Garfinkel, H., "Conditions of Successful Degradation Ceremonies," American Journal of Sociology 61.5 (1956), 420-424. The ritual revocation of an existing identity — the formal mechanism behind mortification of self.
West, C. and Zimmerman, D. H., "Doing Gender," Gender and Society 1.2 (1987), 125-151. Gender reconceived as an ongoing accomplishment rather than a fixed attribute — adult socialization that never completes.
Van Maanen, J., The Making of a Police Officer: The Socialization of Police Recruits (MIT Press, 1973). Occupational socialization and the formation of an occupational identity and worldview.
Barker, E., The Making of a Moonie: Choice or Brainwashing? (Basil Blackwell, 1984). Conversion into a new religious movement studied as socialization rather than coercion.
Pariser, E., The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You (Penguin Press, 2011). Personalization algorithms as a new socialization agent that narrows the information environment.
Turkle, S., Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (Basic Books, 2011). The curation of the online self and the displacement of conversation by connection.
boyd, d., It's Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens (Yale University Press, 2014). Networked publics, context collapse, and how teens negotiate identity, privacy, and audience online.
James, A., Jenks, C., and Prout, A., Theorizing Childhood (Polity, 1998). Childhood as a social construction and children as social actors who co-produce their worlds.
Giddens, A. and Sutton, P. W., Sociology, 8th ed. (Polity, 2017). Introductory text; Ch. 4 (Socialization and the life cycle).
Macionis, J. J., Sociology, 17th ed. (Pearson, 2019). Introductory text; Ch. 4-5 (Socialization, Social interaction).