UCSP reviewer chuchuchuchu, Lecture notes of Family and Consumer Science

Download UCSP reviewer chuchuchuchu and more Lecture notes Family and Consumer Science in PDF only on Docsity! Socialization and the Assertion of Agency Primary Socialization Versus Secondary Adjustment - It is clear in the discussion of Mead's analysis of emergence of the self that socialization is not a one-way process in which the potential members of society are indoctrinated to follow the rules and norms of society. Erving Coffman (1922-1982), the father of dramaturgical sociology, in his study of total institutions, or institutions that completely mold its members like convents, prisons, and asylums, put forward the idea that socialization has two kinds. - The first kind of socialization that refers to the molding of the members according to the norms and rules of the group is called primary socialization. Primary socialization for Goffman (1961) refers to a situation, “When an individual cooperatively contributes required activity to an organization and under required conditions... he is transformed into a cooperator; he becomes the ‘normal’, ‘programmed’, or built in member” (180). - When a student learns how to return the books to the library after borrowing them, the student has successfully learned how to follow the rules of borrowing books from the library. This knowledge is transmitted through the orientation for the use of library provided by the school. A new student may also ask the librarian or his/her classmates about the rules and policies regarding the use of the library. - In secondary socialization, an individual uses what he or she has learned from primary socialization and applies it to circumvent the rules of society for his or her own advantage. For Goffman (1961), “secondary adjustment refers to any habitual arrangement by which a member of an organization employs unauthorized means, or obtains unauthorized ends, or both, thus getting around the organization’s assumptions as to what he or she should do and get and hence what he or she should be” (180). - The same student who has learned how to borrow the books from the library may use these same policies and rules to borrow for his/her friends without the librarian knowing it, or he/she may also take books out of the library without the proper permission from the librarian. Other students may write marginal notes on the books they borrow, although, this is a form of vandalism. These are examples of secondary socialization or working the system for one’s advantage. Another example is a situational withdrawal inside the classroom. A student may appear to be listening to a teacher’s lecture but he or she may actually be thinking of something else. - Rules and norms are not merely prohibitive. They also shape individuals by disciplining them to do more productive activities. This is the meaning of agency. Barry Barnes (1999), a social philosopher, defined agency as the capacity “to possess internal powers and capacities, which, though their exercise, make her an active entity constantly intervening in the course of events ongoing around her” (25). Agency implies freedom, which means that a person (i.e., an agent) could have acted otherwise” (Giddens 1976, 75). Socialization and Deviance: Essentialism and Reductionism - When daily resistance of people against a social norm or regulation breaks into a moral panic, it turns into a form of deviance. Moral panics are social currents that mobilize the majority of the people to condemn certain acts and groups that are considered to be threats to social order. Deviant acts are often the root cause of moral panics. Deviance encompasses a variety of - Cesare Lombroso (1835-1909), an Italian physician and criminologist, provided the earliest attempt to explain the nature of criminal behavior. For Lambroso, criminals are distinguished from non-criminals by their atavistic characteristics. Criminals are people who have reverted back to their primary animal instincts. Physically, they could be identified by such items as a sloping forehead, ears of unusual size, asymmetry of the face, excessive length of arms, asymmetry of the cranium, and other “physical stigmata.” In 1876, Lombroso’s The Criminal Man used racial hierarchy theory to explain criminal behavior. - Lombroso cautioned people to look for atavism in their own children by supplying them with stigmata, or signs of atavism. Lombroso’s research compared intraspecies variation to interspecies variation. He then classified them into four categories: 1. Born criminals These are people with physical primitive-like characteristics. They resemble the physical characteristics of early human beings. 2. Insane criminals They are the idiots, imbeciles, paranoiacs, epileptics, and alcoholics. 3. Occasional criminals or criminaloids These are people who have the predispositions to commit crimes. Fourth, criminals of passion are those motivated to commit crime because of emotional motivations. - The significant contribution of Lombroso is that he began to look at deviance from a scientific point of view. This is called positivist criminology. Rather than tracing criminal behavior to demonic possession, positivist criminologists based their theories and explanations on the findings of biology and evolutionary theory. The major flaw of Lombroso's thinking was that it presupposed that those at the "lower end" of the racial hierarchy had a predisposition to criminal behavior. Later, Lombroso influenced the modern eugenics movement or those scientists who advocate the improvement of the condition of the human race through biological means. - Later, William Sheldon (1898-1977) proposed a theory of crime which traces criminality and deviance to certain body types. He associated “temperaments” to body types: (1) endomorphs tended to be soft, fat people; (2) mesomorphs were of muscular and athletic build; and (3) ectomorphs had a skinny, flat, and fragile physique. - Another biological explanation is called phrenology that explains the existence of deviance through the shapes of skulls. This pseudoscience was developed by the German physician Joseph Franz Gall in 1796. According to this view, which is now defunct, criminal behavior can be explained by the size of the brain. It was believed that the mind was made up of specific functions or faculties—lower or active propensities (crime causation), moral sentiments, and intellectual faculties. In this view, crime is caused by overdevelopment of some parts of the brain and underdevelopment of the other parts. In other words, criminal behavior is caused by the overdevelopment of the lower faculties of the brain. - Lastly, the more recent attempts to ground the study of deviance, especially crimes, are based on heredity, hormones, brain structure, blood sugar level, substance abuse, and even diet. Common to these biological models, which give less freedom to the criminal or deviant persons, “is the perception that criminality arises from some physical disorder within the individual offender and it is argued that by following a course of treatment, individuals can be cured of the predisposing condition that causes their criminality” (Hopkins, 87). - So, what can we make of biological theories? Here’s the answer from a recent attempt of Walsh and Beaver (2009) to incorporate biological theories to sociological explanation: - No geneticist claims that there are genes “for” criminal behavior. Genes are for making proteins, some of which facilitate (not cause) our behavior and feelings. Genes produce tendencies to respond to the environment one way rather than another, but the genome is not a blueprint containing deterministic instructions for constructing certain types of brains that then produce certain types of behavior (80). In more recent years, there has been a sustained campaign to rehabilitate biological theories with the recognition that physical and social environment factors are more closely linked. - In addition, experts argue that while biological factors do influence and can predict deviant behaviors, especially crimes; nevertheless, they are not per se explanations. According to Walsh and Beaver (2009), “It is only when social scientists discover the particular mechanisms that underlie these broad holistic categories that they can reasonably claim to understand their link to behavior” (96). One cannot reject biological factors completely, but they must be put in proper context of the interaction between environment and biology. If explaining deviant behavior solely by biological means is reductionist, it is equally reductionist to explain all deviant acts as cultural. The Social Construction of Deviance - Sociological studies of deviance move away from bio-medical explanations. Sociological approach to deviance emphasizes the social construction of deviance, rather than its essential characteristics. Social constructionism is a theory, which states that objects can only be known through some theoretical (1949), he defined it “as a crime committed by a person of respectability and high social status in the course of his occupation” (7). Meanwhile, feminists complain about the relative absence of women in the study of deviance. - Imagine—in your mind’s eye —a criminal. Chances are high that the person you have imagined is male. When criminologists think of criminals, they too usually think of males, and for reasons that are not just imaginary. So far as we know, in all countries throughout the world, crimes of interpersonal violence and theft are committed disproportionately by males. Scholars argue that, “On average, girls are more closely supervised than boys, and are afforded less freedom-reducing their opportunities for participation in delinquency without their parents’ knowledge” (Greenberg 1993, 408). Hence, the relatively less number of female crimes might conceal another form of women’s oppression. - Hate crimes perpetrated against lesbians and gays and transgender individuals tend to correlate with economic crisis. The more the economy slows down, people compete for scarce resources and jobs. Often, the deviant groups are turned into “escape-goats” for the worsening social condition. Lynching of blacks, physical assaults against Latinos and Asians in the United States may be explained partly by the fear of the white population of the invasion of non-whites in the neighborhood. Hence, labeling blacks as gangsters, criminals, and drug dealers are ways that the white population controls the influx of non-whites in their community. - Deviance designations are produced and influenced more by the powerful and applied more to the powerless. When a definition of a deviant act is formulated and applied to a certain individual or class of actions, this process is usually initiated by the powerful institutions within society. Such labeling and moral condemnation draw the lines between what is acceptable and what is not. And this labeling and ascription of name to a certain group or individuals become a ritual to separate the normal from those who are outside the morally acceptable. - Once the label is attached, the groups and individuals excluded are deemed morally “dirty,” “sinful,” or “abnormal,” and that they must be handled and dealt properly. Proper behavior and attitudes are prescribed for the rest of the members of society. When someone is labeled as “gay” or “lesbian,” it demarcates the boundary between normal heterosexual morality—that recognizes only male and female—and those outside such norm. Non-gays and non-lesbians are expected to behave in certain ways toward those labeled as deviants. Elaborate system of punishment and rewards are put in place to maintain the clear demarcation line between what is acceptable and non-acceptable sexual behavior. Is Deviance in the Eyes of the Beholder? The Cultural Relativity of Deviance - Many social scientists today are skeptical about providing a naturalistic or objective definition of deviance. Rather, they suggest that the focus should not be on what offenders are “doing” or have done but on how people and conduct come to be defined or labeled in certain ways. In short, social scientists should study the ways in which societies “manufacture” labels and cures for “maladies of the soul”. This conception should lead them to pay attention to issues that are ignored when the normative definition is the exclusive definition - This leads sociologists to argue that deviance is culturally and socially relative. A deviant behavior in one tribe is not necessarily deviant in another. Homosexuality, for instance, was a normal part of the ancient Greek life. Some societies legalize the use of marijuana like in Netherlands. Other countries consider prostitution and pornography as legal. This does not mean that any form of deviant act in a society can be tolerated. Racist violence perpetrated against a minority is deviant and should be condemned. Violence against women, such as female circumcision and foot-binding may be normal for certain types of societies, but they cannot be viewed as relatively worthy of moral approval. Hence, sociologists of deviance do not only study the process of labeling and constructing of deviant identities and labels, but also focus on how certain power relations enable others to label other groups as “outsiders” (Goode and Ben-Yehuda 2009). - Many contemporary sociologists, influenced by the current postmodern trend in social sciences, tend to dismiss the category of deviance as useless and misleading. These scholars argue that deviance is a product of modern society that attempted to segregate the normal from the abnormal by relying on definitions that are culturally relative. Deviance or Alternative Lifestyle? - In a provocative historical review, Colin Sumner (1994) proclaimed the death of the sociology of deviance. Subtitling his essay An Obituary, he suggested that the sociology of deviance is already archaic because of the criticisms from radical sociologists in the seventies, coupled with a shift toward the discourse analysis of more specific crime and justice topics among mainstream scholars. With the growing proliferation and rise of many forms of subculture around the world, lifestyles and behaviors that have been considered taboo in the past are now openly exhibited by people like tattooing, gender switching, and same-sex relationships, just to name a - The social constructionist psychologist, Kenneth Gergen (19 91) coined the term “saturated self” to describe the identities of people living in the globalized world. For Gergen, the proliferation of identities across geographic places and regions flood the people in the globalized world with multiple images from which they can model themselves. In addition, people can adopt multiple personalities and identities through engagement in social media and other social networks. This leads to the multiple identities that people can assume in different settings and locations. The Virtual Self - Another challenge to the traditional view and definition of self is the rise of “digital self” or “virtual identity.” Agger (2004), defined virtual self as “referring to the person connected to the world and to others through electronic means, such as the Internet, television, and cell phones. Virtuality is the experience of being online and using computers; it is a state of being, referring to a particular way of experiencing and interacting with the world” (1). - The digital self is a product of cyberspace. William Gibson (1984) was the first to use the phrase cyberspace in his futuristic novel, Neuromancer. Since then, there has been much debate over how this medium should be defined and conceptualized. Featherstone and Burrows (1995) define the cyberspace as “a generic term which refers to a cluster of different technologies, some familiar, some only recently available, some being developed and some still fictional, all of which have in common the ability to simulate environments within which humans can interact” (5). - Shanyang Zhao (2003) stated that through the mediation of the Internet, people can interact with one another in telecopresence without being physically copresent. Telecopresence is an electronically mediated social context for human interaction. It is possible through the presence of cyberspace. Unlike corporeal copresence, where individuals are “in one another’s immediate physical presence” (Coffman 1959), telecopresence is a situation in which individuals are electronically linked together while physically separated in different locations. - In telecopresence, we interact with others from a distance in a disembodied environment. Poster (1989) suggests a shift from the classic mode of production analysis to mode of information analysis, that is, society today is dominated more by images and products to be consumed than by the process of producing these commodities. The self now becomes a simulacrum, a hyper-reality without any original source or double (Baudrillard 1989). - With the advent of e-mail, the Internet, virtual reality, and other time-space compressing or space-annihilating technologies, the self as a stable entity with fixed boundaries and identity is more and more difficult to accept (Lyon 1997). - Cyber self is gradually effacing the space of self (Waskul and Douglass 1997). Online chat dissolves the vestiges of the embodied self. Databases digitalize identity (Poster 1996). Surveillance through closed-circuit televisions (CCTVs) and other similar devices is no longer forcibly enforced on obedient subjects. Subjects willingly submit their forms to be encoded in databases, such as Facebook, e-mails, credit cards, and electronic business transactions. - Studies would show that in the anonymous online world, individuals are more likely to engage in a variety of role-play games, assuming different identities by “cycling through” multiple selves (Turkle 1995). The proliferation of self in cyberspace has been explained largely in terms of detachment of the self from the body in telecopresent interaction—as others cannot see who we really are, we are free to claim to be whoever we want to be. - The cyberspace allows a person fairly easily to adopt false identities. In well-structured environments such as Multi-User Domains (MUDS), people can play games and adopt roles as various fantasy figures such as elves, fairies, hobbits, trolls, wizards, and the like. Such identities enable many people to do and fantasize things they could not do offline. Small, powerless people can question giant corporations and bring them to account. An online petition can easily be done. Events that can mobilize people are now easy to do. Racial or gender prejudice can be sidestepped. In effect, if one wants to be, one can be divorced from one’s body online. - Offline, we can assume various identities, but ultimately we are traceable via our physiognomies, gender, and physical location. Online, one can pretend to be anyone: a man can be a woman, a woman can be a man, a white person be a black or a black person be a white. This fluidity of identity is one of the selling points of the Internet, especially for enthusiasts. Deviant identities on the Internet are not policed, except for extreme criminal cases. - Agger (2004) explained this “work on the self” through the Internet: The Internet did not create, but it certainly accelerated, work on the self. The self becomes a cyberself when it is assembled—self-assembled—via the Internet and with other electronic means, such as cell phones and chat lines. Identity is acquired through these electronic pros theses, which allow, indeed require, one to fabricate, alter, experiment with one’s self-presentation to others. In charge” of evolution by transcending their biological limitations. Today, Mercer and Maher (2015) defined transhumanism as: The intellectual and cultural movement that affirms the possibility and desirability of fundamentally improvingthe human condition through applied reason, especially by developing and making widely available technologies to eliminate aging and to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities. - For transhumanists, the rapid development in science and technology—such as in areas of nanotechnology, nanomedicine, biotechnology, genetic engineering, stem cell cloning, transgenesis, artificial intelligence, artificial general intelligence, robotics, and brain-computer integration, which form the domain of bionics, uploading, whole body prosthetics—necessitates the rethinking of humanity and human nature. - Transhumanists believe that these rapid technological developments inspire the hope that human beings will live longer, healthier, and happier because technologies will remove biological imperfections and the social ills they cause. Francis Fukuyama (2004) asks interesting questions about the future of our identities as human beings: “If we start transforming ourselves into something superior, what rights will these enhance creatures claim, and what rights they will possess when compared to those left behind? If some move ahead, can anyone afford not to follow?” (42). Summary - Individuals do not simply internalize the values and culture of their community. They are also capable of asserting and exercising their freedom. Hence, arises the problem of deviance. - Deviance is often the root cause of moral panics. - Many people often react to extraordinary or bizarre behaviors of people and groups by labeling them as deviant or abnormal. - Traditionally, deviant acts were explained in terms of religious language. Today, however, the scientific explanation predominates. Some scholars advocate a cultural interpretation of deviance. - The cultural relativity of deviance is highlighted today by the advent of “life politics” or “identity politics.” Identity politics asserts the resistance and capacity of postmodern individuals to constantly reinvent their selves and identities. - This process produces hybridized and saturated selves. Socialization Process and Self-Making Socialization as a Process of being fully human Human Beings as Necessarily Social - People are capable of transforming society because they have autonomy and freedom. - As Karl Marx famously put it, “Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please in circumstances they choose for themselves; rather they make it in present circumstances, given and inherited.“ - Society provides the pre-given environment and resources by which individuals create and continuously recreate themselves. - To be a full member of a society, an individual has to acquire and learn all the necessary social roles and skills required of a competent member of that society. - The process of learning these skills and social roles is called socialization. Socialization is traditionally seen as a one-way process in which society molds the individual to conform to the established social norms and rules - Social determinism is a doctrine that says individuals have no choice but to follow certain factors or causes that control their behaviors. - This definition, however, forgets how individuals also employ creative means and ways to interpret the prescribed rules and norms. - In some situations, human beings fail to be socialized owing to the absence of parental or surrogate caregivers. These children are called feral children or wild children. - Feral children, like the character of “Tarzan” or “Jungle Boy,” lack the necessary skills and knowledge such as language to be competent members of society. - The usual description of the “modern self” is “self-contained individual” or bounded, masterful self. This is also called the “sovereign self.” - The self in this view is born into this world already equipped with complete personality, dispositions, and consciousness. - The self is seen as existing independent from other selves. Clifford Geertz (1983), summarizing this dominant Western view of the individual self, argued that this is peculiar to Western culture. - The philosophical and religious texts of the West and the East differ fundamentally in their definitions of the person’s place in the world and society. is, develops in the given individual as a result of his or her relations to that process as a whole and to other individuals within that process” (Mead 1934, 135). - On the other hand, the mind emerges from the interactions of highly evolved biophysical human organisms caught up in an inescapable social, interactional web. - The mind is not a mysterious object inside a person, but the ongoing process of solving social problems and adapting to the environment. - The mind develops through the use of symbolic gestures, and later through language. From the use of symbolic gestures, the mind gradually emerges from the awareness of the individual that he/she is a separate entity or object from the world. - The hallmark of the mind, therefore, is the capacity to use language and distinguish the boundary between the self and the outside world. The "I" and the "Me" - Once the self develops, the individual is able to assume the role of others. He/she constantly reflects upon the responses and expectations of others. - A student, who gets patted on the shoulders for doing well in a Math exam, is likely to elicit the same response by doing well in succeeding exams. Mead calls this group of people as the significant others. - They are the individuals to whom a person has intimate relationship such as immediate family members, relatives, peer group, and friends. - The attitude of the generalized other is the attitude of the whole community (Mead 1934, 154). - Thus, the self acts “not only in his own perspective but also in the perspective of others, especially in the common perspective of a group” (Mead 2002, 74). - The “me” of the self, consisting of social and interpersonal perspectives, is simultaneously an instrument of social control and conformity. - The “me” that takes its cue from the attitudes and expectations of the generalized others, however, does not necessarily overwhelm human freedom or the capacity to invent new rules and pursue other options. - The Meadian self has also an agentive (agency or the power to do otherwise) side called the “I,” which responds to an ongoing, moment-to-moment basis to the “me,” as well as to those constantly emergent circumstances within which particular social, interactive conduct unfolds. Social Roles and Identity - Identity is a product of positioning within a discourse. What is relevant in positioning theory that has bearing to narrative identity being developed here is the assertion that, “People present themselves, and others, as actors in a drama” (Harre and Langenhove 1999, 8). - The act of positioning, thus, refers to the assignment of fluid ‘parts’ or ‘roles’ to speakers in the discursive construction of personal stories that make a person’s actions intelligible and relatively determinate as social acts” (17). - Identity could also mean personal identity. Personal identity is the most elementary type of identity. It refers to the social classification of an individual into a category of one (Rosenberg 1979). - It denotes a unique individual with self-descriptions drawn from one’s own biography and singular constellation of experiences. Your name, birth date, current status as a student, or your unique student number or school ID, belong to your personal identity. - Personal identity, of course, does not arise out of nowhere. It is a product of unique social biography of the individual. Hence, personal identity points to the continuity of one’s life story. That is, the person you are right now will be continuous with the person many years from now, no matter how your physical characteristics have changed. - One’s personal identity is primarily derived from one’s position within the social field. Positions are clusters of rights, duties, and obligations to perform specifiable kinds of acts—and thus, in psychological reality, positions exist as expectations, beliefs, and presuppositions. Positioning can be of two kinds: (1) first order, one positions one’s self in a discourse; and (2) second order, one contests one’s position If one narrates one’s position, it is called accountive positioning (Langenhove and Harre 1999, 20-21). - If identities are products of positioning within a narrative or story-plot prescribed by the community, then identity has to be understood as acquisition of roles. In fact, when most of us think about roles, or write about roles in our professional publications, it is the roles of social positions that we have in mind. - Sometimes, a person suffers from role overload, when too much is asked from the person. Sometimes, the role the person is asked to perform is inconsistent with his/her needs or basic values. - There are, of course, male and female, but some babies are born “intersexed,” which means that they share some characteristics of both male and female. - According to Fausto-Sterling, there are three general categories of intersexed persons: True hermaphrodites, people who have one ovary and one testis; (2) male pseudohermaphrodites, people who have testes, no ovaries, but have some elements of female genitalia; and (3) female pseudohermaphrodites, people with ovaries, no testes, but have some elements of male genitalia. In other words, a person’s primary sex characteristics (physical) may not match his or her sex chromosomes (genetic). - Edwin Segal (2003), an American anthropologist, listed four different forms of gender variation among cultures: 1. Some societies construct gender so as to contain distinct categories that are neither masculine nor feminine. 2. Some societies construct gender in ways that are bipolar, but in which the boundaries are markedly different from those common in Western Europe and North America. 3. Some societies construct gender so that, while the basic pattern is bipolar, people with one set of biological characteristics are able, under specific circumstances, to step outside of the society’s ordinary construct and enter the other construct. 4. A residual category—instances that do not quite fit our neatly created typology. This category is necessary to highlight the purely heuristic nature of the other three and to avoid sterile typological debates and arguments. - Sex and gender, therefore, are accomplished or achieved categories. - Gender and sex are done and performed. Being male or female is what one does. - Doing gender means creating differences between girls and boys and women and men, differences that are not natural, essential, or biological. - Once the differences have been constructed, they are used to reinforce the essentialness of “gender.” This entails, “reconceptualizing gender not as a simple property individuals but as an integral dynamic of social orders” (147). - The functioning of sex-differentiated organs is involved, but there is nothing in this functioning that biologically recommends segregation; that arrangement is a totally cultural matter. Toilet segregation is presented as a natural consequence or the difference between the sex classes when in fact it is a means of honoring, if not producing, this difference (116). The Self, Gender, and Body - The feminist social scientists have contributed a lot to the discussion on the study of the formation of self and identity. They made many social scientists admit and recognize that self and identity are inevitable from the concept of the material body. - Our sense of ourselves as particular individuals is based in part on our sense of the continuous spatio-temporal trajectories of our bodies through which we are located in the material world. - But our social identities, the kind of persons we take ourselves and others to be from time to time, are also closely bound up with the kinds of body we believe we have (14). - In turn, bodies cannot be divorced from their lived experiences. - Selves and identities are always embodied—ways of inhabiting the world. - Embodiment means selves and identities are located in a specific social and cultural position, and this position is always defined in terms of power, hierarchy, and social status. - Embodiment—the physical and mental experience of existence—is the condition of possibility for our relating to other people and to the world. - Fully able or seriously disabled, it is through our physical bodies that we function as social beings, whether in face-to-face communications, through hand-written letters, or by tapping electronic keyboards to connect with people across the globe. - Embodied social relations serve both as the starting point for any social interactions while also being the outcome of social relations themselves. - If the self is always embodied, then, the body is simultaneously both a natural, physical entity, and is produced through cultural, symbolic practices. - The clothes that individuals wear and the accessories they use provide extension of the meanings attached to the body. - These meanings are based on gender stereotypes, age, and ethnic affiliations. - The self as embodied always bears the imprint of different social and cultural power relations within society - The differing traits of men’s and women’s bodies are brought about, in part, through cultural practices in which boys and men are encouraged, more than girls and women, to be physically strong and confident. - Therefore, sociologists argue that rather than natural biology determining men’s and women’s bodies as different, masculine and feminine bodies are largely made as such through cultural practices.