A Reconception of Socialization

Abstract

of society and for the well-being of the individual (p. 133). Nevertheless, we found the concept inadequately conceived to guide our empirical research on how medical training affected students' medical specialty choices. Following our sociological common sense, we formulated that issue in general theoretical terms as a problem of socialization, specifically the relation between socialization processes and one type of career outcome. Identifying, operationalizing and measuring key socializing features of medical training proved to be a most frustrating task. While the empirical literature identified a multitude of training relevant to specialty choice, nowhere did we find a definition of the distinctive characteristics of socializing activity that would permit the sorting and organizing of these factors theoretically. Many scholars talked about the socialization process, but no one specified exactly what it was conceptually. The literature on medical socialization proved not to be an aberration; the same difficulties appear in the general theoretical literature on socialization. Substantively, definitions of the term do not identify what specific activities constitute socialization and, technically, they fail to distinguish it precisely from other phenomena. That haziness of definition offers certain advantages to post hoc interpretation of events and research findings, but it renders the concept of