Other Socialising Agencies

Beyond family, peer groups, schools and mass media, people also spend large stretches of their lives within other social settings that shape them just as surely, even if less obviously labelled as 'socialising agencies' -- the workplace being a prime example. Work has always been a socially significant setting in every culture, but it is really only in industrial societies that large numbers of people regularly 'go out to work' -- that is, travel each day to a place of work physically separate from the home. In more traditional communities, by contrast, people typically worked the land close to where they lived, or ran workshops attached to their own dwellings, so that the sharp separ …