Culture and Identity.

HookA girl raised by dogs could not stand up straight

ModelConceptions of culture — from high art to global pop

'Culture' is the whole way of life of a group: its norms, values, beliefs, language and customs, transmitted between generations. But sociologists slice it into competing conceptions. High culture is the prized creative work — opera, classical music, fine art — associated by Bourdieu with the elite and their cultural capital; it confers status. Low or popular culture is the mass-produced entertainment of the majority — soaps, pop music, blockbusters. The Frankfurt School (Adorno) attacked this as a manipulative mass culture: churned out by a profit-driven culture industry to keep a passive audience docile. Folk culture is culture created by ordinary people themselves — traditional songs, crafts, festivals rooted in a community — the authentic opposite of the commercial.

A subculture is a group within society whose norms and values differ from the mainstream — youth subcultures, deviant subcultures — while global culture describes the way globalisation is spreading shared products, brands and media worldwide, producing what some call cultural homogenisation or 'Americanisation'. Postmodernists such as Strinati reject these tidy hierarchies: in a media-saturated world the line between high and low culture dissolves — Shakespeare is quoted in adverts and graffiti hangs in galleries — and consumer culture lets people pick and mix. The evaluative tension examiners want is between the Marxist view of popular culture as imposed manipulation and the postmodern view of it as free, playful choice.

MechanismSocialisation — how culture gets inside us

If Oxana Malaya shows culture must be learned, socialisation is the process that teaches it. Primary socialisation happens in early childhood, overwhelmingly within the family: Parsons called the family a 'personality factory' where children first absorb the basic norms, values, language and roles of their society. Secondary socialisation takes over as the child's world widens, run by a series of agencies. Education transmits shared values and, through its hidden curriculum, trains punctuality and obedience. Peer groups exert powerful pressure to conform, especially in adolescence. The media increasingly shape norms, role models and aspirations. Religion transmits moral codes and rituals, and the workplace resocialises adults into occupational norms.

The machinery of socialisation runs on four linked concepts you must define precisely: norms (specific rules of expected behaviour), values (the general principles a society holds dear), roles (the behaviour attached to a social position, like 'teacher' or 'mother'), and sanctions (rewards and punishments — positive and negative, formal and informal — that enforce conformity). Functionalists see socialisation as producing a beneficial value consensus; Marxists and feminists see the same process reproducing class inequality and patriarchy, socialising the working class into obedience and girls into subordinate gender roles. Same mechanism, opposite verdicts on who it serves.

CaseThe self — built in the mirror of other people

How does a private, individual 'self' arise from all this social contact? Interactionists argue the self is not innate but socially constructed through interaction. Charles Cooley coined the looking-glass self: we come to see ourselves as we imagine others see us, so our self-concept is literally a reflection bounced back off the people around us — their reactions are the mirror. George Herbert Mead deepened this: through language and 'taking the role of the other', the child learns to see itself as an object, developing a self split between the spontaneous 'I' and the socialised 'Me' that has internalised society's expectations.

Erving Goffman pushed the idea furthest with his dramaturgical model in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life: social life is theatre. We are actors performing roles for audiences, managing the impression we give through 'front-stage' performance and dropping the act 'back-stage'. Identity, on this view, is not a fixed core but an ongoing, negotiated performance. The key evaluative contrast is with structural approaches — functionalism and Marxism — which see identity as shaped from above by the demands of society or the economy, rather than built from below through interaction. That structure-versus-action debate is the synoptic spine that connects this topic to the rest of the A-level.

ModelSources of identity — the eight dimensions the spec names

Identity is drawn from many overlapping sources, all of them socially shaped. Class was long seen as the master identity — Marxists tied it to relation to production, and Skeggs's study of working-class women showed how 'respectability' becomes a defensive class identity — though postmodernists argue class identity is fragmenting. Gender identity is constructed through socialisation; Connell's hegemonic masculinity describes the dominant, idealised form of manhood against which others are measured. Ethnicity increasingly produces hybrid identities: Gilroy and studies of British Asian youth show young people blending heritages, and Johal described a 'white mask' code-switched in different settings. Nationality is, in Anderson's phrase, an imagined community — we feel kinship with millions we will never meet — reinforced by what Billig called 'banal nationalism', the daily flag on the building we barely notice.

Sexuality is socially constructed too: McIntosh argued the 'homosexual role' is a social label, and Plummer traced how sexual identities are learned and narrated. Age is not merely biological — childhood, youth and old age are given very different meanings across societies and eras. Disability identity turns on the contrast between the medical model (disability as individual deficit) and the social model (disability created by a society that fails to accommodate impairment); Shakespeare and Goffman's concept of stigma and 'spoiled identity' show how others' reactions impose the identity. The examiner's reward goes to answers showing these dimensions intersect — no one has just a gender or just a class.

DataIdentity now — from what you make to what you buy

The final leaf asks how identity is changing under production, consumption and globalisation. In the modern industrial era, identity was anchored in production: who you were flowed from your job, your class and your community — the miner, the factory worker, the housewife. Postmodernists argue that in late modernity this has flipped. Identity is now built through consumption: we construct and signal who we are through what we buy, wear and display. Bauman's liquid modernity captures the restlessness of it — identities are no longer fixed for life but endlessly remade, like shopping. Polhemus called it a 'supermarket of style' where people pick and mix a self from a rack of options, and Baudrillard argued we increasingly consume signs and images rather than useful objects.

Globalisation supercharges this. Global media and brands offer identity resources from everywhere at once, producing cultural hybridity — new blended identities — and what Robertson called glocalisation, where global products are adapted to local tastes. Optimists see liberation: more freedom than ever to author your own identity. Critics push back hard: consumer identity requires money, so it excludes the poor; globalisation can erode local cultures into a homogenised, Americanised sameness; and Marxists argue 'free' consumer choice is manufactured by advertising, a new mask over old class inequalities. Weighing that postmodern optimism against the Marxist and inequality critiques is the evaluative heart of any 20-mark essay on this leaf.

VocabularyKey terms the mark scheme pays for

TrapsMisconceptions that cost marks

ExamWhat examiners want