WRAP IAS Write · Read · Analyse · Practice
0 Open daily streak — sign in to keep it. App Sign up Login
Mains Prelims

Q2(a) · UPSC Civil Services Mains 2019 · Sociology GS 1 · 20 marks · 2 min read

← Q1(e) Q2(b) →

According to Mead, "We play a key role in our own socialization."

Topic: Sociology. Syllabus: Sociology — The Discipline: Modernity and social changes in Europe and emergence of sociology; Scope of the subject and comparison with other social sciences; Sociology and common sense. Same official PYQ from year-wise 2019 and Sociology.

Download PDF Get your copy evaluated Free · English or Hindi · ~1 min

Revision summary

Mead: the self arises in communication; play and the game build the generalised other. The “I” and the “Me” make socialisation two-sided. Cooley and Goffman support the active looking-glass and performance. Oakley shows gender scripts that are still negotiated. Class, caste, and media limit equal role-taking.

Model answer

Copper italics in this answer — like this — are the key facts. Each one is unpacked in the Facts & figures rail.

Introduction

George Herbert Mead treated the self as a social process, not as a ready soul. Socialisation is not a stamp on clay. The person takes the role of the other, answers, and so helps to make the self that society also makes. That is the key role.

Body

Self as process

  • In Mind, Self and Society, the self arises in communication. Gestures become significant symbols when they mean the same to self and other.
  • The “I” is the spontaneous response. The “Me” is the organised set of attitudes of others that one assumes.
  • Play and the game are stages: first one role, then the organised team. The generalised other is the community’s standpoint.

Why we are not only products

  • Charles Horton Cooley’s looking-glass self already made imagination of others’ view central. Mead made it a theory of action.
  • The child does not merely copy. She tries roles, fails, and adjusts. Agency sits inside the “I”.
  • Erving Goffman later showed performance and saving face. That is still Mead’s active participant, now on a staged encounter.

Socialisation as joint work

  • Family, school, and peer group supply the others. The person selects, resists, and recombines those voices.
  • Ann Oakley showed gender is taught as work and identity. Girls and boys still negotiate the script, which is Mead’s point against a pure mould.
  • Indian illustrations include the bilingual child who switches caste-polite and school-English selves, and NFHS talk on decision-making inside households.

Limits

  • Mead underplayed class, caste, and the state as unequal others. Pierre Bourdieu’s habitus is heavier than an equal conversation.
  • Sigmund Freud’s unconscious is not Mead’s “I”. Structural constraint can drown role-taking.
  • Media and algorithms now supply generalised others that no neighbourhood assembled.

Assessment of the sentence

  • The sentence is right against a one-way filling of the child.
  • It is incomplete if “we” means a free chooser outside institutions.

Flow diagram

flowchart TD
  OTH[Significant others] --> ME[Me]
  I[I spontaneous] --> SELF[Self]
  ME[ME] --> SELF[SELF]
  GAME[Game generalised other] --> ME
  SELF --> SOC[Socialisation as joint]

Conclusion

Mead’s claim is that socialisation is role-taking in which the “I” answers the “Me”. We help to write the self that others also write. Oakley and Goffman extend the activity. Class and caste show that not every player holds the same script.

Quick related

Students also ask

  • Bring out the significance of Ethnography in social research

    Next question on this syllabus topic (2019 · Q2(b)). View answer →

  • Did Mead deny society’s power?

    No. The Me is society inside the person. He denied that the person is only a stamp.

  • Is this the same as free will?

    The I is emergence in the act, not a philosophical soul outside history.

More from this topic

Q8(c) · UPSC Mains 2026 · Sociology GS 1 · 10 marks · Solution

Discuss the significance and limitations of 'intersectionality' in social research

Sociology

Intersectionality, coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw, examines how overlapping identities like race, class, and gender shape systemic oppression. Its significance in social research lies in capturing lived realities beyond single-axis frameworks and preventing reductive generalisations. However, limitations include methodological complexity, risks of infinite regress, and difficulties in operationalising fluid categories. Effective application requires balancing structural macro-analysis with micro-level lived experiences.

View answer → Download PDF

Q6(a) · UPSC Mains 2026 · Sociology GS 1 · 20 marks · Solution

Discuss the intellectual origins of sociology and its evolution as a distinct field of study

Sociology

Sociology arose in 19th-century Western Europe to make sense of massive upheavals caused by the Industrial and French Revolutions. Enlightenment thinkers laid the groundwork by championing reason, empirical observation, and human agency over traditional dogma. Auguste Comte gave the discipline its name, pushing for a positivist "physics of society" based on scientific laws. Émile Durkheim secured its academic legitimacy by defining "social facts" and using empirical methods to study human behavior. Max Weber introduced interpretive sociology, while Karl Marx focused on material conditions and class struggle. In the 20th century, Talcott Parsons advanced structural-functionalism to study systemic equilibrium. Later, conflict theories, the Frankfurt School, and postmodern critiques broadened the field to address power and marginalisation. Today, sociology continues to evolve by analyzing globalisation, digital shifts, and modern identity politics.

View answer → Download PDF
PDF