Becoming a Member
Culture is the complex of knowledge, beliefs, art, morals, laws, and customs acquired by a person in society.
It divides into two main forms:
- material culture: physical objects and artefacts.
- non-material culture: ideas, beliefs, and rules.
Rules come in grades:
- folkways: ordinary conventions whose breach brings mild disapproval.
- mores: essential rules whose breach brings serious sanction.
A value is a general standard of what is desirable. A norm is a specific rule of conduct. Values explain why we act; norms tell us what to do.
Sociologists distinguish two attitudes towards other cultures:
- Ethnocentrism: judging another culture by the standards of one's own.
- Cultural relativism: understanding a practice within its own context as a method, not a moral claim.
Socialisation and Schooling
Socialisation is the process of acquiring this culture:
- Primary socialisation occurs in early childhood within the family.
- Secondary socialisation continues through schools, peer groups, and the media.
Charles Horton Cooley described the looking-glass self: we imagine how others judge our appearance and react to that judgement.
George Herbert Mead (Mind, Self and Society) traced how the self develops:
- play stage: the child takes one role at a time.
- game stage: the child coordinates several roles at once.
- generalised other: the child internalises the standpoint of the whole community.
Berger and Luckmann argued that society produces humanity just as humans produce society.
Education connects these themes, though theories disagree on what schools do:
| Account | What schools do | Key text |
|---|---|---|
| Functionalist | Select on ability and teach universal standards | Parsons, 1959 |
| Correspondence | Reproduce workplace relations | Bowles and Gintis, 1976 |
| Cultural reproduction | Reward inherited cultural privilege | Bourdieu and Passeron, 1970 |
| Resistance | Provoke refusal that still reproduces class | Willis, 1977 |
Willis's Learning to Labour showed that working-class pupils resisted schooling. Yet their counter-culture led them directly into manual jobs.
Common pitfall: treating socialisation as a stamping machine that creates passive conformists. Dennis Wrong challenged this oversocialised view in 1961. Real people still display deviance and innovation.