Institutional Lives

Abstract

Within traditional accounts of socialisation, as I have discussed in Chapter 2, society was considered to have the upper hand in shaping children’s experiences and engagement with the social world, succeeding — or failing — to ensure their conformity to the rules of a range of social institutions. However, as Musgrave (1987) has observed, while societal theorists such as Parsons (1951) argued forcibly that it was the generational replication of social roles and their associated values and norms that ensured the integration of society, he nonetheless managed to neatly side-step the issue of exactly how that process takes place at the level of the individual. He did not, Musgrave points out, ‘explain the ways in which individuals chose to act towards others’, preferring instead to talk more generally about the function of institutions, such as the family, in transmitting culture to the young or wielding sanctions to instil conformity (1987: 13). Looking at socialisation through the lens of children’s personal lives, however, opens up a window for exploring the kinds of choices and decisions that children themselves make and how they come to understand aspects of the social world. As I have already begun to show in previous chapters, it offers a way to see children as people who interact with others in their everyday lives and also with those institutions that, collectively, they help constitute. This is a key part of the process through which children’s learning about the social world — their socialisation — takes place and the aim of this chapter is, therefore, to explore in more detail the fourth assumption upon which my account of child-centred socialisation rests: that the structures and institutions that comprise the human world (Jenkins 2002a) are experienced by children through the interactions that they have with them, experiences which are both diverse and multifaceted.