Analysing non‐doctrinal socialization: re‐assessing the role of cognition to account for social cohesion in the Religious Society of Friends¹

Abstract

To incorporate newcomers into membership, a group employs socialization strategies to transform the characteristics of the newcomers, so that it can admit them with the confidence that their behaviour will not endanger group unity. Analyses of socialization emphasize that novices' interiorization of an institutional definition of group behaviour is a necessary condition to ensure successful socialization. The contemporary Religious Society of Friends in Britain, however, is a non-doctrinal religious movement that avoids defining the content of its beliefs and practices. To analyse the socializing interaction between members and newcomers in this movement in Britain, and among co-religionists in the USA, this inquiry applies a model of socialization that does not include assumptions about the role played by cognition in socialization (Long and Hadden 1983). My results show that: (a) the diffuseness in Friends' collective explanations of institutional conduct supports novices' identification with institutional practice, and (b) experimental and affective components in socialization motivate novices to imitate institutional behaviour despite the fact that Friends have no authoritative explanations of such behaviour. The data suggest that socialization and social cohesion are not necessarily as strongly cognitive-oriented phenomena as they were previously thought to be. This finding has important implications for thinking about social cohesion in postmodern society.

The Quaker Journey and the Framing of Corporate and Personal Belief

“…When the individual is committed to participating in a belief community, their personal belief model is subjected to power structures that reward or punish particular interpretations of experience. The process of belief described in this issue by Carlisle as he draws from practice theory, supports much of the current writing on Friends (Collins ; Dandelion , , ; Kline ; Pluss , ). By being engaged with the culturally sanctioned categories an agent demonstrates commitment to a community and is rewarded with economic, social, and emotional support.…”

“…Since participants will use their experience within Quakerism as well as models from other faiths to develop their individual beliefs, Quaker corporate belief is fluid (Collins ; Dandelion , , ; Kline ; Pluss , ). The fluidity of their corporate model results from tradition and happenstance.…”

“…The most pertinent form of behavior and communication to learn in this nonauthoritative system is the Quaker understanding of silence (Pluss ). Silence serves as a signal for worship and a tacit symbol for some participants.…”

“…Quakers call this process convincement . It occurs when a participant acquiesces to alter or augment their action to conform to Quaker ideals (Pluss ). Cognitively, convincement is the Quaker conversion process, marking when the personal belief model becomes increasingly aligned with the corporate belief model.…”

Gender representation in school textbooks in Iran: The place of languages

“…It seems that this second hypothesis tends to be more plausible to explain the patterns observed in this analysis, meaning that for older children (adolescents) differences between the roles which men and women have in Islamic societies become more pronounced. Since these educational resources are exclusively provided by the post-revolutionary Islamic state throughout the country, the patterns highlighted in this article present empirical evidence from an ideological context to develop the socialization theory (Berger, 1967;Pluss, 2007;Taylor, 2003;Tylka and Caloger, 2011) which recognizes the educational system as a 'strategy' to maintain the group unity of the dominant culture and more specifically identifies books as a 'microcosm of ideologies, values, and beliefs from the dominant culture' (Taylor, 2003: 301). In sum, the results of this analysis suggest that while language is an important determinant of gender representation through the educational system, the representation is more strongly driven by social and ideological structure.…”