Organizational or occupational recruits must learn new ways of seeing themselves. Becker and Carper have described the way beginning students in physiology are at first unexcited but later come to see themselves as budding scientists. On the other hand, engineers in their sample see engineering as primarily a way to enter industry and move up the organizational ladder. In this process there may be age contingencies. Persons may see themselves as destined for a high position but later in their careers will settle for a lower one.
Westby studied 70 members of a major U.S. symphony orchestra. He found a large difference in self-conceptions according to the age of the musician. The young tended to be enthusiastic and hopeful of becoming soloists someday; they often played in chamber music groups. The older members (often in their 40s) were more likely to settle down and to decide that such ambitions were not so rewarding in any case. These different values led to splits between the two groups in the orchestra. Clark has described the way the junior college may function to shift the ambition pattern of persons who discover they do not have the motivation or perhaps the ability to succeed in a university.
Shifts in age bring up the whole question of demotion, about which there has grown a considerable body of literature. Organizations must emphasize upward mobility opportunities in order to encourage motivation on the part of their employees, but not everyone has the ability. Nor will there necessarily be a place for everyone. Inevitably some will have to settle for lesser positions or, at some point, will have to be demoted because of changes in organizational demand or need. Such processes may require changes in self-attitudes that can be destructive; more has noted that some persons may then become alienated. Further, demoting persons reflects on their sponsors and such demotions are not encouraging to younger persons, who speculate that the same sort of thing could happen to them in twenty or thirty years. Consequently, organizations adopt many devices such as creating the position of "assistant to" or making ambiguous moves to avoid the appearance of demotion.
The new person begins to associate with new persons. University freshmen find themselves surrounded by persons just as capable as they, and, since many freshmen were among the top performers in their high schools, that experience is likely to be upsetting. Further, the university may become increasingly competitive (partly because of dropouts) as one moves through the system. Caplow pointed out that socialization involves not simply the development of new relationships but the abandonment of old ones:
For the recruit, the convert, the newly elected, adopted, or graduated, there is always the awareness that becoming what one is now means forgetting what one was before. The bride is no longer a maiden; the new chief is expelled from the peer group. The extent and importance of the old relationships that are to be abandoned usually determine what kind of socialization process is necessary. In those cases in which socialization takes a drastic form, the severity of the new experience is explained not so much by the difficulty of learning a new part as by the difficulty of forgetting the old.
Perhaps the outstanding description of the problem of forgetting or eliminating prior statuses is provided by Goffman in his vivid description of the process of mortification in mental hospitals. In occupations and organizations this is often accompanied by sequestration. Such sequestration may be ecological, in which persons are sent off to retreats, or may be temporal, in which the whole of the day and the night or longer periods may be given over to training. In some cases one lives in separate communities, as Lipset, Trow and Coleman have described for the case of printers.
New Values
One is expected to accept the values of some organizations wholeheartedly. Such may be the case in ideological parties, those committed to the election of certain persons, or convents. In other organizations one is not necessarily expected to absorb the organization's values but one is expected at least to be indifferent to them. For example, private businesses do not necessarily insist that the recruit become identified with the organization's goals but they assume that at least he or she will not resist them. This is likely to become less true as one moves up in the organization and, indeed, the top executives may be whole heartedly identified with the organization and with what it stands for. Finally, in some organizations one must assume that persons reject the values of the organization, as in prisons or other organizations in which persons experience involuntary servitude. But even there inmates may find they have to accept the norms of the organization just to get out, or at least to minimize the pains of imprisonment. In turn, they may accept fellow-inmate values.
The acceptance of values is especially important where socialization takes the form of an apprenticeship and, where the learning takes place on the job, in association with the experienced members of the organization or the occupation. Examples include graduate schools, artist schools, and executive suites. Here it is assumed that you must do more than simply learn; you must take a special view of the world.
A number of researchers have reported a shift among nurse trainees from a lay conception of the job to a more technical conception. The matter is described vividly by Simpson:
Without exception our student nurses said that their main reason for choosing nursing as a career had been the wish to be of service to suffering people. When their freshman year began, they were disappointed upon finding that the entire first semester was devoted to academic classroom work: they had expected to learn things that were immediately useful in helping the sick. When basic nursing training began in the hospital during the second freshman semester, the students mainly wanted to develop nurturant relationships with patients. They found, however, that sometimes the faculty's training requirements thwarted this wish.
The purpose of the hospital experience, as this was defined by the nursing faculty, was not so much to serve individual patients as it was to impart certain specialized skills as well as proficiency in following routines and procedures. This technical orientation was evident in the teaching of simple basic nursing tasks, which were defined as standardized procedures to be performed in precise sequences of steps. Making a bed, for instance, called for 21 consecutive steps. In both teaching and grading the faculty emphasized the accuracy with which these routines were mastered, not the welfare of the patients on whom the students practiced their nursing skills. . . .
During the two semesters of basic nursing, the gradual shift of interest from a humanistic concern with patients as individuals to a concern with mastery of technical repertoires was evident in off-duty conversations among student nurses. At first they talked mainly about patients as persons: what a sad life Mrs. Jones had led, or how much better Mr. Brown felt this morning. Later, however, technical considerations were found to predominate in conversations. Mrs. Jones was now a "challenging patient," and Mr. Brown was taking his medicine more willingly. Instead of discussing the suffering of a patient, they were more likely to talk about the severity of his illness or the rarity of his disease. Thus a definite transformation was visible during the first year and a half of nursing school. The entering freshman wanted to serve others, and she wanted to be a nurse as a means to this end. A year and a half later she wanted above all to be a nurse; and she had learned that to be regarded as a nurse by others, she had to know the specific skills which are the mark of the nurse. Service values were transformed, not displaced, by technical interests... Throughout the training experiences of basic nursing the primary concern of the student shifted from helping a patient to playing the role of a nurse. During this shift, the service value started to be generalized to the nurse role; its expression was no longer dependent on developing a nurturant relationship with a patient.
Westley has called attention to the fact that the police operate in a world often hostile to the police function itself. As a result, the police have been pushed into isolation and secrecy in their work. This leads to a pervasive secretiveness and to a willingness to condone violence. One result of this is that the police often see themselves as being concerned with defending each other from society as much as defending society from criminals.
Generally speaking it seems clear that teaching or learning such values is difficult and probably can be learned only on the job, where persons associate with already committed workers or their models. This has led to an emphasis in research on what has been called "anticipatory socialization". In addition, it is usually necessary that such values be communicated subtly. For example, Olesen and Whittaker show how laughter and silences are used by nursing instructors as teaching devices.
