For Parsons, socialisation is the mechanism through which society’s core values are transmitted to each new generation, ensuring the system continues to function smoothly. He saw the family as the primary socialising institution, with two critical functions: the stabilisation of adult personalities and the primary socialisation of children.

Parsons argued that successful socialisation produces individuals who have internalised (made their own) the shared values of society — so thoroughly that they want to conform, not because they are forced to, but because it feels natural. This is the key to social order in a functionalist framework.

Criticism: Parsons ignores conflict, inequality, and resistance. He assumes one dominant value system exists and ignores that different groups are socialised into very different norms depending on class, race, and gender.

Louis Althusser argued that socialisation is fundamentally a tool of class domination. Institutions like education, religion, and the media function as Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs) — they socialise working-class children into accepting their own exploitation as natural and inevitable.

Unlike the police or army (Repressive State Apparatuses that rule by force), ISAs rule by consent — they make people want to accept the system. The school, for Althusser, is the most powerful ISA in capitalist society — it reproduces the relations of production by training workers for their future roles while naturalising capitalist ideology.

Evaluation: Althusser is criticised for being overly deterministic — he leaves no room for human agency, resistance, or the possibility of change. Paul Willis’s study of working-class boys (Learning to Labour, 1977) showed they actively resisted school socialisation.

George Herbert Mead rejected the idea that the self is biologically given. Instead, the self emerges through social interaction — specifically through learning to see yourself through the eyes of others. Mead called this “taking the role of the other.”

He identified two components of the self: the I (the spontaneous, creative, individual self — the subject) and the Me (the socialised self — the internalised attitudes and expectations of others). Socialisation builds the “Me.” The “I” reacts to it. Social identity is the ongoing conversation between them.

Mead also outlined stages of play: the play stage (imitating specific others — playing mummy), the game stage (internalising multiple roles simultaneously), and the internalisation of the Generalised Other (the norms of society as a whole).

Goffman saw social life as a theatrical performance. Through socialisation, individuals learn the scripts, props, and stage directions required for different social situations. This is his concept of impression management. We present different versions of ourselves on the “front stage” (in public) and behave differently “backstage” (in private).

Goffman’s concept of stigma also relates to socialisation: society socialises us to perceive certain attributes (disability, mental illness, deviance) as shameful or discrediting — showing that socialisation can produce exclusion, not just integration.

Bourdieu’s concept of habitus is one of the most sophisticated accounts of socialisation in sociology. Habitus refers to the set of durable, transposable dispositions — ways of thinking, feeling, and acting — that are acquired through socialisation within a particular social class and field.

Crucially, habitus operates below conscious awareness. It is not a set of rules we consciously follow; it is a “feel for the game” that shapes our choices, tastes, and behaviours as if naturally. Middle-class habitus makes university feel natural and appropriate; working-class habitus can make it feel alien — a phenomenon Bourdieu called misrecognition.

Linked to habitus is cultural capital — the knowledge, skills, behaviours, and credentials valued by dominant culture, which are transmitted through socialisation and translate into social advantage.

Ann Oakley argued that gender differences between men and women are not natural — they are the product of gender socialisation. From birth, children are socialised into gender roles through four mechanisms: manipulation (encouraging gender-appropriate behaviour), canalisation (directing children towards gender-appropriate toys and activities), verbal appellation (gendered language), and different activities for boys and girls.

Feminist theory more broadly argues that socialisation is a key mechanism of patriarchy — it produces docile, nurturing femininity and dominant, assertive masculinity, naturalising a hierarchy that serves male interests. Girls are socialised into their own subordination.