Culture, norms, values, roles and status

Culture is the whole way of life of a society — its language, beliefs, knowledge, customs, art and material objects — learned and shared by its members. The key sociological claim is that culture is transmitted, not inherited.

• Values are the general, abstract beliefs about what is desirable — for example the belief that human life is sacred, or that hard work deserves reward. Émile Durkheim called the shared values that bind a society together the collective conscience: without it, he argued in The Division of Labour in Society (1893), society would fall into anomie (normlessness).
• Norms are the specific, everyday rules that put values into practice: queueing, not shouting in a library, covering your mouth when you cough. Norms are situational — the norms of a nightclub are not the norms of a funeral.
• Status is a social position. Ralph Linton distinguished ascribed status (given at birth and hard to change — sex, aristocratic title, caste) from achieved status (earned — surgeon, graduate, captain).
• Roles are the patterns of behaviour expected of a status. Every status carries a role: 'student' carries expectations about attendance, deference and deadlines.

Cultural relativity — OCR asks for this explicitly. Norms and values are relative: they vary between societies and change over time. What counts as respectful, modest or edible in one culture is an outrage in another. Use cross-cultural material: the Nacirema (Horace Miner, 1956) satirically described ordinary American bathroom habits as exotic 'body ritual' precisely to show how strange the familiar looks when you refuse to take it for granted.

Types of culture

OCR names six ideas you must be able to define, illustrate and criticise:

• High culture — the cultural products treated as having lasting artistic worth: opera, ballet, classical music, 'serious' literature. Pierre Bourdieu (Distinction, 1984) argued that taste is not innocent: high culture functions as cultural capital, a resource the dominant class uses to mark itself off and to reproduce its advantage.
• Popular (mass) culture — the culture of the majority: chart music, soaps, football, streaming. Dominic Strinati argues that the boundary between high and popular culture is collapsing, and postmodernists celebrate this; Marxists of the Frankfurt School saw mass culture instead as a manufactured distraction.
• Subculture — a group within a society with norms, values and style of its own. Punks, goths, gamers, a religious minority. A subculture may be oppositional or simply distinctive.
• Global culture — cultural products, brands and images circulating worldwide. Marshall McLuhan's global village captures how electronic media shrink distance.
• Consumer culture — a culture in which identity is built through what we buy. Zygmunt Bauman argued in Consuming Life (2007) that in a 'society of consumers' people are pressed to become commodities themselves — marketable, always upgradeable.
• Cultural diversity and cultural hybridity — societies contain many cultures, and cultures mix. Les Back's research in South London (New Ethnicities and Urban Culture, 1996) found young people building genuinely new, shared cultural forms out of Black, white and Asian elements.

Evaluation you can use: the high/popular distinction is a value judgement, not a fact — as Bourdieu shows, calling something 'high' culture is itself an exercise of power.

Whose taste counts?

Which type of culture?

Tap a card, then tap the type of culture it best illustrates.

The nature/nurture debate

If culture is learned, how much of human behaviour is biological (nature) and how much is socialised (nurture)? Sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists stress instinct and genes. Sociologists, almost without exception, stress nurture — and they have powerful evidence.

• Cross-cultural variation. If behaviour were purely biological it would look the same everywhere. It does not: the anthropologist Margaret Mead's Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935) reported strikingly different gender temperaments across three New Guinea peoples — evidence, she argued, that gender is culturally shaped. (Note the evaluation: Derek Freeman later attacked the reliability of Mead's Samoan fieldwork, so treat her as contested, not settled.)
• Gender socialisation. Ann Oakley (Sex, Gender and Society, 1972) separated biological sex from socially learned gender, and identified four processes by which parents produce gendered children: manipulation (encouraging 'appropriate' behaviour), canalisation (channelling children towards gendered toys and activities), verbal appellation ('good girl', 'little soldier') and differential activity exposure.
• Feral and isolated children. The strongest natural experiments we have.

Real cases — never invent these. Genie (studied by Susan Curtiss, 1977) was discovered in Los Angeles in 1970 aged 13 after extreme isolation and restraint; she had almost no language, and although she acquired vocabulary she never achieved normal grammar. The Czech twins studied by Jarmila Koluchová (1972, follow-up 1976) were isolated and abused until age seven, arrived without speech — and, after being fostered into a loving family, recovered remarkably. Together the two cases suggest socialisation is essential, and that recovery depends heavily on age at rescue and the quality of care afterwards.

What do the isolated-child cases show?

Primary socialisation

Primary socialisation is the first and most intense phase, taking place in the family during early childhood. It is where the child acquires language, basic norms, emotional attachment and a first sense of self.

• Talcott Parsons (with Robert Bales, Family, Socialization and Interaction Process, 1955) called the family a 'factory' producing human personalities. It performs two 'basic and irreducible' functions: the primary socialisation of children into society's shared value consensus, and the stabilisation of adult personalities.
• Émile Durkheim saw socialisation as the mechanism by which the collective conscience is passed on, producing social solidarity.

Evaluate Parsons hard. (1) He describes a 1950s American nuclear ideal and treats it as universal. (2) Feminists reply that what is really transmitted is patriarchy — Oakley's four processes show the 'personality factory' turns out gendered products. (3) Marxists (Althusser) reply that it transmits ruling-class ideology. (4) The 'dark side of the family' — abuse, neglect, coercive control — is entirely absent from his account.

Secondary socialisation and its agencies

Secondary socialisation continues throughout life, in the wider institutions beyond the family. OCR names six agencies:

• Family — primary, but it keeps socialising us as adults too.
• Education — for Durkheim, school teaches 'society in miniature' and creates solidarity; for Parsons, it is the bridge from the family's particularistic standards to society's universalistic ones, and it acts as a meritocratic sifting device. For Louis Althusser, education is the key Ideological State Apparatus, reproducing labour power and the ideology that legitimates inequality. Bowles and Gintis (Schooling in Capitalist America, 1976) argue a hidden curriculum teaches obedience and acceptance of hierarchy — the correspondence principle.
• Peer group — powerful in adolescence. Paul Willis (Learning to Labour, 1977) found 'the lads' formed a counter-school culture that, ironically, prepared them for the manual work they mocked. Sue Lees (Losing Out, 1986) showed how girls' behaviour was policed by sexual reputation and name-calling.
• Media — increasingly a primary as much as secondary agency for the young. Antonio Gramsci's hegemony helps here: the powerful rule not mainly by force but by winning consent for their worldview through culture.
• Religion — transmits moral codes; for Durkheim it is the ritual celebration of society itself.
• Workplace — occupational socialisation: canteen culture, jargon, dress, the informal rules of 'how we do things here'. This is where resocialisation is most visible.

Socialisation is lifelong — OCR says so explicitly. Do not write as if it stops at 18.

Primary or secondary?

Match the sociologist to the idea

Tap a sociologist on the left, then the idea they are known for on the right.

Formal and informal social control

Socialisation makes conformity feel natural. Social control is what happens when it does not.

• Formal agencies apply written rules with official sanctions: the police, the law and legal system, the courts, government and the military. Sanctions are explicit — fines, imprisonment, dismissal.
• Informal agencies apply unwritten rules with unofficial sanctions: the family, the peer group and subcultures, the media, religion, education and the workplace. Sanctions are subtle — a raised eyebrow, gossip, exclusion, a viral pile-on, being 'left on read'.

OCR wants the overlap. The same institution often does both. A school exercises formal control (exclusions, detentions written in policy) and informal control (a teacher's sigh, the pupils' own mockery). A workplace has disciplinary procedures and canteen culture. Religion may hold formal courts and the far more powerful informal weapon of shame. Show that overlap and you are writing at A-level standard.

Theoretical spin: for functionalists social control maintains value consensus and is basically benign. For Marxists (Althusser) the Repressive State Apparatus — police, army, courts — backs up the ideological one, and both serve capital. For interactionists (Becker) control is not a neutral response to deviance: applying a rule is itself an act that creates the deviant.

Which kind of control?

The self: how identity is built in interaction

Structural theories tell you what socialisation does for society. Interactionism tells you how the self is actually assembled — and this is the theory OCR expects at the top band.

• George Herbert Mead (Mind, Self and Society, 1934) argued the self emerges through symbolic interaction. Through play and games children learn to take the role of the other, and eventually to see themselves from the standpoint of the generalised other (society's expectations). Mead split the self into the spontaneous 'I' and the socialised 'me'.
• Charles Horton Cooley (1902) gave us the looking-glass self: I imagine how I appear to you, I imagine your judgement of that appearance, and I develop a feeling about myself accordingly. My self-image is your reflection.
• Erving Goffman (The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, 1959) offered a dramaturgical account: we are performers, managing impressions on a front stage while relaxing backstage. Identity is not a possession but an ongoing performance requiring an audience.

Why this matters for the exam: interactionism explains why identity can change, why it varies by situation, and why labels stick. Its weakness is that it can lose sight of structure — Goffman's actor seems free to choose a costume, but a working-class Black disabled woman does not choose her audience's reading of her from an infinite wardrobe. The best answers combine structure and agency.

Class and gender identities

OCR names seven aspects of identity: ethnicity, nationality, gender, social class, sexuality, age and disability. Take the first two here.

• Social class. Marx defined class by relationship to the means of production; Weber added status and party alongside class. Culturally, Bourdieu shows class identity is carried in habitus — the taste, accent, bodily style and confidence that mark someone as belonging. Mike Savage and colleagues' Great British Class Survey (published in Sociology, 2013) proposed a seven-class model built from economic, social and cultural capital, including an 'elite' and a 'precariat' — a reminder that class identity today is about far more than job title.
• Gender. Oakley's sex/gender distinction is the foundation. R. W. Connell (Masculinities, 1995) developed hegemonic masculinity — one dominant, idealised form of manhood against which other masculinities are subordinated or marginalised. Máirtín Mac an Ghaill (The Making of Men, 1994) found schools acting as 'masculinity-making devices', producing rival male identities such as the 'macho lads' and the 'academic achievers'. Feminists add that femininity is disciplined too — Sue Lees showed girls' reputations policed through sexual labelling.

Intersectionality — OCR asks you to consider how aspects of identity intersect. Class, gender, ethnicity and age are not separate boxes; they are experienced together and simultaneously.

Ethnicity, nationality, age, disability, sexuality — and hybridity

• Ethnicity. A shared culture, history and sense of belonging (not 'race', which is a discredited biological category). Tariq Modood's Fourth National Survey of Ethnic Minorities (1997) showed ethnic identity is strongly held but changing across generations — younger British-born people often assert an ethnic identity that is more chosen and more political than their parents'.
• Nationality. Benedict Anderson (Imagined Communities, 1983) argued a nation is 'an imagined political community': you will never meet most of your fellow nationals, yet you feel kinship with them — a feeling built by print media, education, flags, anthems and sport.
• Age. Age is socially constructed: what 'youth', 'middle age' or 'old age' means varies hugely across societies and history. Philippe Ariès (Centuries of Childhood, 1960) famously argued that childhood as we know it did not exist in medieval Europe — a claim later historians have contested, so use it as an argument, not a fact.
• Disability. The social model distinguishes impairment (a bodily difference) from disability (the exclusion produced by how society is organised). Tom Shakespeare argues that disabled people's identities are heavily shaped by how others read them — the impairment becomes a master status that swamps everything else about the person.
• Sexuality. Mary McIntosh's 'The Homosexual Role' (1968) argued that 'the homosexual' is a social role a society creates, not a fixed natural type — a founding argument for the social construction of sexual identity. Ken Plummer extended this with the idea of the homosexual career: identity is built through stages of labelling and self-labelling.
• Hybrid identity. Les Back (1996) documented young Londoners producing new, mixed cultural identities; researchers on British Asian youth describe similarly hybrid 'code-switching' identities. OCR explicitly wants hybrid identities and cultural hybridity.

Reading an identity claim

Are identities becoming more fluid?

OCR asks you to 'consider changing identities'. This is where the big theories fight.

• Late modernists. Anthony Giddens (Modernity and Self-Identity, 1991) argues the self has become a reflexive project: with tradition weakened, we must continuously choose, narrate and revise who we are. Ulrich Beck (Risk Society, 1992) adds individualisation — we are compelled to write our own biographies, and to bear the risk of getting it wrong.
• Postmodernists. Jean-François Lyotard (1979) proclaimed 'incredulity towards metanarratives' — the big stories (class, progress, religion) that once fixed identity have lost authority. Jean Baudrillard argues we live in hyperreality, where media simulations precede and replace the real. Zygmunt Bauman's liquid modernity pictures identity as something we assemble and discard, like a shopping trolley of consumer choices.
• The structural reply. Marxists and feminists answer bluntly: identity feels like a free choice only if you can afford choices. Class, patriarchy and racism have not evaporated. Being a 'reflexive project' is a lot easier from a position of security — Beck's own concept of risk shows the poor absorb most of it.

Top-band move: do not simply declare 'identity is now fluid'. Argue that choice has increased for some, in some domains, while structural constraints persist — and support both halves with named evidence.

Evaluating postmodern identity

Turning this into marks

Component 01 is 1 hour 30 minutes, 90 marks, 30% of the A Level. Section A is compulsory; Section B is your one chosen option from Families and relationships, Youth subcultures or Media.

• Define with precision. 'Norms are the specific rules that put values into practice' beats 'norms are things you do'.
• Always name and use. Not 'Parsons said the family socialises children', but 'Parsons argues the family is a factory producing personalities — however, feminists such as Oakley show the product is a gendered personality, which Parsons treats as natural.'
• Use cross-cultural and historical material to demonstrate cultural relativity. OCR asks for it by name.
• Structure evaluation as a debate: functionalism → Marxism → feminism → interactionism → postmodernism, with your own reasoned judgement at the end.
• Intersect. Whenever you discuss one aspect of identity, show how it cuts across another.

Component 01 Section A — the big ideas

Press Finish to see your score.