“According to Mead, “We play a key role in our own socialisation.” Explain.” (2019)
Functionalist accounts often picture socialisation as society imprinting its norms on a passive child. George Herbert Mead (Mind, Self and Society, 1934) saw it differently. The self emerges only when the individual takes the attitudes of others, interprets them and responds to them. Socialisation therefore happens through the individual’s own reflexive activity. People are its co-authors, not merely its products.
Why the individual is an active agent in Mead
1. Reflexivity. The self can be an object to itself: a person praises, blames and revises their own conduct. The social is internalised through this capacity, not stamped on a blank slate.
2. Role-taking is imaginative work. In play, the child chooses roles (teacher, doctor, shopkeeper) and tries them out. In the game, it must actively organise the expectations of all players into a system.
3. The “I” and the “me”.
- The “me” is the organised set of others’ attitudes the person has taken in.
- The “I” is the spontaneous, creative response to that “me”. It cannot be predicted in advance and is known only after the act.
- Each response of the “I” becomes part of a revised “me”. The individual therefore keeps rebuilding the social self they received.
4. Internal conversation. Mind is an inner dialogue between “I” and “me”. Before acting, a person weighs how others will respond and may still decide otherwise. Mead called such conduct conditioned but not determined.
5. The individual changes the community. The relation is reciprocal: every adjustment of the self alters, however slightly, the social environment. Innovators, reformers and people of genius reshape the generalised other itself.
Later developments
- Herbert Blumer (Symbolic Interactionism, 1969): people handle meanings through an interpretive process rather than simply absorbing them.
- Ralph H. Turner (1962): role-making is as important as role-taking, since people improvise and redefine roles.
- Erving Goffman (Asylums, 1961): even inmates of total institutions practise “secondary adjustments” and role distance, resisting an imposed self.
Contrast with the oversocialised model
| Criterion | Talcott Parsons (The Social System, 1951) | Mead |
|---|---|---|
| Actor | Internalises shared values | Interprets and answers them |
| Mechanism | Internalisation of norms | Role-taking, “I”–”me” dialogue |
| Outcome | Conformity, equilibrium | Negotiated, changing self |
| Change | Deviance or strain | Normal output of the “I” |
Dennis H. Wrong (“The Oversocialized Conception of Man in Modern Sociology”, 1961) criticised sociology for portraying people as mere conformists. Mead’s model had anticipated that correction.
Indian illustration
Women’s higher education shows active self-making within constraints. By AISHE 2021-22, the female gross enrolment ratio (28.5) had been above the male ratio for five consecutive years, and women’s enrolment reached 2.07 crore. Many first-generation women students grow up with a “me” of early marriage and domestic duty. They reinterpret it, negotiate with families and form new reference groups on campus. The same socialisation yields different selves because individuals respond to it differently.
Limits
- Primary socialisation is not chosen. Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann (The Social Construction of Reality, 1966) note that the child cannot choose its significant others. Their world is taken in as the world before reflexivity develops.
- Structure and power. Mead underplays inequality. Caste, class and gender decide which generalised others are available and how much the “I” can deviate without sanction. A Dalit child’s room to redefine the self is far narrower.
- The “I” is vague and hard to verify empirically.
Conclusion
Mead’s claim holds in a qualified sense. We cannot socialise ourselves out of nothing, but the self is always our own response to what society offers. Socialisation is thus a dialogue in which the individual both receives and remakes the social world. It needs an account of the structures that limit that dialogue.