Observing Society: Meaning, Communication, and Social Systems By ...

themselves through the independent observation of society to associate certain objects and behaviors with certain meanings. Thus, as we suggest in this book, it is society that produces meaning and understanding for its participants.

Sociologists typically explain understanding between people by pointing to a nebulous process known as “socialization.” Supposedly, society enters into the minds of its participants, culturing the raw state of their human consciousness. In the natural state, people are mentally disassociated; but the socialization process organizes and unifies their thoughts. In one leading introductory textbook to sociology, for instance, we learn: “Socialization is the process whereby the helpless infant gradually becomes a self-aware, knowledgeable person, skilled in the ways of the culture into which he or she was born” (Giddens, Duneier and Appelbaum 2007:92). Humans are born into a culture, as it were, and this common experience slowly transforms them into members of society. Thus, the miracle of societal members understanding each other can be explained by their being born into the same culture. This traditional account of socialization leaves many important questions unanswered. For example, does the infant find itself inside a culture from the moment of its birth, all at once? Can a person leave one culture and be “reborn” into another one? Are people born into two different cultures inherently unable to understand one another? And why is it that people born into the same culture sometimes misunderstand each other?

The concept of socialization implies that people understand one another because the same society is literally “inside” them, or that the people are inside of the same society. The “process of socialization” might initially appear to explain how people learn to understand each other, but only if we accept two rather dissatisfying conditions. First, we must substitute the problem of how society gets “inside” its members for a different problem: how people are born into the same culture. Second, we must overlook the problem that mainstream sociology has not effectively defined society or determined its boundaries. How can people be in or out of a space that has not yet been delineated? Anthony Giddens and