CHAPTER 9
Occupational Socialization
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
After reading this chapter, the students will have achieved the following objectives:
• Understand occupational socialization.
• Understand the basic precepts of organizational culture.
• Understand the socialization process as it applies to criminal justice agencies.
KEY TERMS
codified mores
corruption
countercultures
culture
escalation episodes
folkways
norms
occupational socialization
organizational culture
pluralistic ignorance
role behavior
role conflict
LECTURE OUTLINE
I. Occupational Socialization
A. In the criminal justice system, practitioners have a great deal of autonomy and a great
deal of power.
B. One problem for executives is to ensure that practitioners work within the scope of
their legitimate authority, abiding by ethical boundaries.
C. Occupational socialization is defined as the process by which a person acquires the
values, attitudes, and behaviors of an ongoing occupational social system.
D. A continuous process that includes:
1. intentional influences (i.e., training)
2. unintentional influences (i.e., the locker-room or work-group culture)
E. Attitudes, values, and behaviors acquired through occupational socialization can be
F. Behaviors within organizations persist as long as members’ attitudes, beliefs,
perceptions, habits, and expectations remain constant.
2. The practices of police officers and prison staff often seem unchanging and even
resistant to change efforts.
3. Courts seem more efficient at bringing about procedural change than substantive
change.
G. Katz and Kahn give the social-psychological concept of role a central place in their
theory of organizations, positing that:
2. these roles link the individual to the organization and assure its continuity.
II. Organizational Culture
A. Defined as a set of assumptions, values, and beliefs shared by members of an
organization.
1. These elements plus language, symbols, and folklore ultimately direct members’
behaviors, especially regarding work-related problems.
2. Common meanings of organizational culture include:
a. observed behavioral regularities that evolve in working groups
3. The process of socialization serves to impose the organization’s patterns of basic
assumptions upon its new members.
B. Culture
2. includes knowledge, belief, art, laws, morals, customs, and other capabilities and
routines acquired by the members
C. Societies develop language to solve the problem of communicating; thus, it becomes
the framework for its culture.
1. Groups also have desirable goals which are expressed as values.
3. Also developed are:
4. A society or group attempts to perpetuate the culture it develops.
5. Social control is the process of perpetuating conformity to the established culture.
a. Sanctions—rewards and punishments—are provided for individual conformity
6. Subcultures have their own beliefs and norms, but share values of dominant
7. Countercultures are groups whose shared values differ substantially from those of
the dominant culture.
D. Multi-department organizations have multiple internal cultures that require
integration into the organizational culture.
E. The major role of top-level administrators is to:
2. identify the problem or problems the agency has been mandated to solve
F. Role behavior is:
2. the recurring actions that are appropriately related to the repetitive activities of
others so as to yield a predictable outcome (Katz and Kahn)
3. a function of social setting, rather than the individual personalities of people in
organizations
G. Researchers have argued that the personality traits of individual police officers differ
from those of the general public prior to their entering the police fields.
2. Researchers continue to utilize the socialization model, which focuses on the
nature of police work itself and the process by which novices are recruited from
the general public and become experienced officers.
III. The Socialization Process
A. Stages of Socialization
1. Socialization is a process.
2. The process can generally be divided into three stages:
4. During formal socialization, generally a period of formalized training, new
5. Informal socialization is an ongoing process that molds individuals to the
organization culture.
B. The models of influences
1. Katz and Kahn’s social-psychological model relies on four key concepts:
a. Role expectations are the standards by which the behavior of an
2. Behavior results from expectations communicated by significant others and
filtered through the organizational members’ own psychological processes.
3. The role taking process is shaped by organizational, interpersonal, and individual
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4. Roles are also influenced by differences in individual approaches to the job.
5. Duffee and O’Leary have illustrated that some managerial orientations are a result
of position rather than individual character.
6. Frontline officers view their activity as centering on order maintenance and
restraint.
IV. Problems in the Socialization Process
A. Role conflict
2. Conflicting expectations may come from one or more role senders.
3. Lipsky calls competing goals a defining characteristic of all street-level
bureaucracies, particularly in criminal justice where, for example:
4. Research shows role conflict results in low job satisfaction and poor performance.
B. Role ambiguity
1. Defined as uncertainty about what the occupant of a particular office is supposed
to do—that is, the sent message is unclear.
3. In Sykes’ classic work The Society of Captives, he points out that the goals of
punishment and rehabilitation provide little direction for correctional workers.
C. Official deviance
1. Defined by Lee and Visano as “actions taken by officials that violate the law
2. Does not benefit the individual, as corruption may, but is aimed at furthering the
perceived goals of the organization.
4. Official deviance does not benefit the individual as corruption may but is aimed at
furthering the perceived goals of the organization.
D. Corruption
1. Corruption goes well beyond official deviance.
2. No aspect of criminal justice is immune to corruption.
a. Investigations of Cook County (Illinois) courts between 1986 and 1988
resulted in nearly sixty federal indictments for case fixing and payoffs.
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3. Rookie police officers’ work groups exercise considerable influence. The
5. Wilson points out that police justify some types of corruption by pointing to
declining moral standards in the general community.
7. Thus officers may differentiate between clean graft (acceptable) and dirty graft
(unacceptable).
V. Socialization and the Police
1. Police work is depersonalizing.
3. The ambiguous nature of police work
D. During the informal stage of socialization, new officers learn through peer contact
1. These norms included secrecy in terms of zero disclosure of police business to
outsiders.
2. Officers supported the use of violence in the form of roughing up suspects.
VI. Socialization in Corrections
A. Anticipatory socialization for corrections officers is marked by incomplete and
inaccurate information regarding the nature of the job.
2. Rookie corrections officers thus experience a significant reality shock on first
contact with inmates.
B. Corrections officers often attend the training academy only after weeks or even
months of on-the-job training at an institution.
1. Anticipatory socialization dissolves under the weight of real experience.
2. Informal socialization is often marked by mistrust and often hostility from their
experienced peers
C. Rookie corrections officers grapple with conflicting role expectations.
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1. Veterans and supervisors emphasize the guard’s formal role.
2. At least some inmates send expectations of reasonableness, dependence, and
friendship.
4. Acculturation thus results from the significant differences between formal
socialization messages received in academy training and informal socialization
messages received among the rookie’s peers.
D. Most reject the concept of a subculture within corrections, opting instead to use the
concept of pluralistic ignorance to describe corrections’ organizational culture.
E. Klofas and Toch found that corrections officers reported themselves as being less
punitive and less custodially oriented than their peers.
F. King argued that a perception of potential violence in high security prisons may
become a self fulfilling prophecy.
VII. Socialization and Community Expectations
A. Public expectations strongly influence the socialization of people in the criminal
justice system.
1. Close to 90 percent of respondents in one national opinion poll have a great deal,
quite a lot, or some confidence in the police.
3. Similarly favorable opinions are found with respect to the public’s perception of
the Supreme Court.
4. Public confidence may be questionable is in the area of corrections, specifically in
5. The only profession related to the criminal justice system where public attitudes
are fairly low is that of lawyers, particularly on the dimensions of honesty and
ethical standards
B. Notwithstanding these findings, criminal justice professionals perceive that they are
viewed negatively by the public.
VIII. Strategies for Socialization: Implications for Administrators
A. By deliberate design or by their failure to design, managers continuously influence
the socialization process.
B. A direct influence on socialization occurs during recruitment and selection. The
socialization process is impacted by such nuances as:
2. establishment of job qualifications
3. “weeding out” criteria used in the selection process itself
C. In the formal stage of socialization, the training process and its content directly
influence role taking.
1. Collective socialization strategies involve the training of new members as a
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2. Individual socialization strategies involve an apprenticeship approach to
4. Serial socialization strategies rely on experienced veterans to groom newcomers
in organizations.
D. Socialization is more prevalent during the early than the later stages of a career; thus,
recruits are more susceptible than experienced workers.
8. Personnel practices such as shift assignments or bidding procedures for job
assignments may influence socialization.
9. Klofas and Toch found that anti-inmate attitudes among young corrections
officers received support when the rookies were clustered on the 3 to 11 shift
because the officers lacked the seniority to bid on assignments that would have
integrated them with their experienced peers on desirable shifts.
E. Technological changes may also influence socialization.
IX. Ethical Considerations in the Socialization Process
A. Close and Meier note that “ethics concerns the study of right and wrong, duty,
responsibility, and personal character.
B. The formal socialization process is a mechanism to for the organization to impose its
dominant belief system, and rules upon its members.
C. Since there is a great deal of latitude for discretion, autonomous decision making by
practitioners, most training programs also dedicate several hours of lecture and study
to applied ethics.
D. From a socialization perspective the view the author give us is one in which the
group’s values come from a tradition of police as tribal warriors.
2. Right and wrong, ethics, for police will determined by the needs of the tribe and
3. In effect, police command staff that pass on values of toughness and masculinity
1. Corrupt officers obtain money from inmates and their families and are prone to
use violence to control inmates.
3. What is needed, he argues, is a form of civil management under which staff
members are somewhat free to discuss corruption.
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CHAPTER SUMMARY
This chapter provided an overview of organizational culture and its complexity to provide
organizations. Each step transmits not only technical knowledge but also the ethos of the
organization. The product, however, is not an organizational automaton.
The roles sent to workers are complex, varied, and often conflicting. Such demands may
foster a range of undesirable outcomes, from cynicism to stress, official deviance, or corruption.
Understanding occupational socialization is thus fundamental to management in criminal
REVIEW QUESTIONS
1. Describe the content of the role of a probation officer. What are the norms and values
associated with this work? Include those that can be regarded as legitimate, as well as
those regarded as illegitimate. What are the sources of these norms and values? How do
education, training, and the work experience influence them?
2. How can you distinguish between corruption and official deviance in policing? What
socialization processes support each of these? Design an in-service training program
3. Describe how a culture of violence in high security prisons is perpetuated by the process
of informal socialization. What steps could be taken by administrative personnel to
address this issue? Could a training program be implemented? Would inmates be
included in the process?
4. Your job is to develop a program for training corrections officers for a special internal
affairs unit. They will investigate problems of contraband and violence in prison while
DISCUSSION TOPICS/STUDENT ACTIVITIES
1. Form the students into three groups. Give the groups 20 minutes to analyze the case study
2. Have the students discuss the reasons they decided on the career that each is working
toward by taking this college class.
4. Have the students discuss how police departments attempt to overcome the negative
influences of informal groups of police officers.
INTERNET CONNECTIONS
1. Access Russ Pratt’s article “Role Behavior in Highly-Effective Teams,” available
through the ezinearticles website at http://ezinearticles.com/?Role-Behavior-in-Highly-
2. Access the Canadian Journal of Behavioural Science article “Occupational Role Stress in
the Canadian Forces: Its Association with Individual and Organizational Well–Being,” by
3. Access Rick Brenner’s essay on role conflict entitled “Who’s Doing Your Job?,”
4. Visit the net and read Frank L. Perry’s article on limiting police corruption, available at
5. Visit the Florida Department of Law Enforcement website and read through the
Correctinoal Officer Ethical Standards of Conduct, available at