To Tumble and Fall

Evaluation of the impact of the social institutions Sports, Mass Media and Education on the construction and shaping of identity

Social Institutions are sets of organised social arrangements, beliefs, norms and practices which regulate and establish how a society attempts to meet basic needs and affects individual behaviour of citizens. Every society is bound to these foundations in its own way, but the main focus of this essay will be on the function and understanding of common social institutions in Britain, as the plethora of social differences in diverse countries would lead to unjustified generalisations.

A fundamental question of the social sciences addresses the relationship between institutions and human nature, in particular the construction and shaping of identity in the individual.
With this in mind it is important to understand their connection to each other and define the origin of social organisations and how they are build.

Social institutions are often perceived as natural and static organisations, as unchangeable and secure milestones of peoples’ lives. The connotation of indoctrinated law is an abundant perception of the nature of social institutions throughout the modern, British, democratic society.
However, society is defined as a group of interacting people who share a geographical region, a sense of common identity, a common system of political authority and a common culture. Therefore the inherent structure of companionship between people of a social system suggests that social institutions can be seen as naturally arising from human nature and interaction itself. This view distinguishes itself from the belief that social institutions are foremost formed accidentally and in need of reformation and redesign by “external” social analysis.
Theodor W. Adorno argues:

“Not only is the self entwined in society; it owes society its existence in the most literal sense.” (Minima Moralia, 1954)

This implies that no such external mediator or analysis could ever reform social institutions, as every thought and action is part of its own system. In short, whether it was collective human choice or direct individual intention that created social institutions, their existence is merely the societies’, and therefore as well the individual’s responsibility.

Sports in Britain, particularly Football and Rugby, can be seen as social institutions. These activities have a substantial impact on the construction and shaping of national and individual identity.
Sport can operate simply as a type of activity, leisure and entertainment but it also provides a substructure for local communities and their collaborative expression of social and national affinity. Sportive events often build a framework for the display of the alleged superiority of masculine strength and thus gender socialisation. The members, athletes as well as supporters, join into a microcosm where the rules are unambiguous and individuals can test their role and social position by often physical demonstrations of power in “a relatively safe environment that falls short of war” (Armstrong 1998, cited by Williams). The social institution ‘sport’ here binds people together by offering a collective sense of stability and continuity by exerting competitive routines.

This system of flaunting cultural, regional and national identities has a strict necessity ‘of the other side’, the artificially constructed antagonist, e.g. another football team, the other group of fans and hooligans or even another nation. The distinction from the other side and the belief of the own supremacy are inseparably bound to the construction of the own image and identity. Without the often deprecated component and his exclusion, the representation of the own self would be rather vague and shapeless. It is the enemy and his alleged perception of the group that really shape identities. This simplicity and clarity appeals to a broad range of people and overlaps the notion of social class.

The responsibility for this system is often simply handed over to another social institution, the media. It is argued that the ways in which the media describe different teams and fans involved might stereotype, invent ethno-identities and massively contribute to the reflection of the own self. Critics, who love to imagine ‘the media’ as a homogenous apparatus which voluntarily leads the thoughts of people to achieve some kind of greater goal, suppress the fact that the people themselves might feel an urge to re-establish their own superiority in a world of perceived instability in order to have a quick solution at hand. It is the easy way out to transfer the accountability for the own longing to level down universal complexity to the lowest common factor to the fictitious mass media lobby.

The term mass media (Latin plural of medium: ‘instrument’) refers to the part of the media which is specially designed to reach a very large percentage of a national or, in case of the Internet, international population. Main media of mass communication include television, radio, newspapers and magazines, books, cinema, advertising, musical records and the internet. As mass media has the facilities for reaching very broad audiences, it seems predestined to represent the people’s interests as well as taking an important part in educational processes. The term itself originates in the 1920s when the invention of nationwide radio networks, mass-circulation newspapers and magazines first allowed instant interregional correspondence via publication and broadcast. Since then these sources of information, communication, entertainment and leisure activity have become key institutions of formal and supporting education and everyday life.

The mass media facilities in Britain are underpinned by the premise of freedom of speech, not limiting the spreading of any opinion with the power of censorship by the government. However, a set of media laws directly and indirectly control the principles and standards of publications and broadcasts. These ethics include ‘The law of libel’, i.e. a legal prohibition on the publication of statements that make a false claim about an individual, business, product, group, government or nation and expressly state or imply to be factual; Section 7 of the ‘Official Secrets Act’, which defines the circumstances under which a disclosure of secret information may officially be published. This implies that it is a criminal offence to report any official government activity without authorisation; the ‘Obscene Publications Act’ of 1959 and 1964, restricting the publication of obscene matter, providing the protection of literature and ‘serious works of art’ and strengthening the law concerning pornography. This law thus forbids the printing of content which the high court might consider indecent and likely to ‘corrupt and deprave the public’.

Another media regulating facility is ‘The Press Complaints Commission’, a voluntary body charged with enforcing the following of the Code of Practice, framed by the newspaper and periodical industry itself. The code entails that all members of the press have a duty to maintain the highest professional standards, e.g. respecting the rights of the individual while publicising in the public interest.

It is of interest to be informed about these regulations of contemporary mass media in Britain when facing the subject of their quality of involvement in individual identity shaping. The media do not function without boundaries, but, as social institutions, are subject to public negotiation and administration.

Media of mass communication undoubtedly play a key role in providing ideas and images which can be employed to understand and evaluate much of everyday experience. Media criticism attaches to this high level of influence, or action, and proposes that ‘the media’ as a whole has the objective of indoctrinating and blindfolding people. This conspiracy on a high level is said to be accomplished by ‘agenda-setting’ (i.e. the ability of the media to tell people what to talk and whom to think about) and ‘gate-keeping’ (i.e. an internal process through which ideas and information are filtered for publication). The supposed objective for applying these techniques of public deception is the wish to reinforce conformity to social norms among citizens and equalise the individual in order to obtain compliance to certain economical and political interests. The positive and prosper aspects of media of mass communication, such as knowledge exchange, informed discourse and unlimited access to research materials provided by the modern information infrastructure, are nearly totally dismissed and denied. This establishes an inherent inconsistency, as it is the mass media which primarily spread the exaggerated media criticism.

This ‘propaganda model’ (Chomsky and Herman: ‘Manufacturing Consent’, 2001) originates from the imagination of a small circle of profit-orientated companies controlling the media by failing to represent the people’s actual interests and instead pandering to their base desires for sensationalism and celebrities in order to construct brainwashed people with manufactured identities.

An apparent weakness in this accusation is the fact that there is no such thing as a homogenous elite, aspiring the exact same social and cultural ideals throughout. Besides, huge modern companies are never owned by one person alone, but are supported by many shareholders collectively. The only undeniable common ground between all media owning companies is their status as corporations, which per definition makes them orientated toward making profit. However, this does not explain how being an owner with profit interest leads to a desire to advance particular political interest by shaping compliant identities, and especially how promoting only entertainment values should ever be enough to shape people’s political decision making.

The main intellectual inconsistency flawing this theory certainly is the fact that there always are well known and published critics of the mass media in the public eye who are broadcasting their ideas. Their huge influence even channelled their doctrine into nearly every social science book of another major, character shaping institution, the educational system.

Schools are destined to socialise pupils and set up standards of socially expected behaviour. This is achieved be rules and sanctions, but should also and more importantly be conducted by a consistently high level of education and intellectual stimulation. As the shaping and construction of an individual’s identity is a linear and continuous process starting in early childhood, extensive school education is the foremost important contributor to the primary formation of strong sets of beliefs. The collective character of schools also aids the process of forming children’s self-concepts and sociability by experimenting and interacting with peers.

Identity, defined as the distinct personality of an individual in its entity, is based on behavioural characteristics, initiated throughout adolescence. As for this, the values and the certain structure of how a school is organised might encourage pupils to accept basic norms of the British society like competitiveness, gender roles, notions of social class and the inequalities in power and authority. However, the likeliness to comply with unjustified demands of obedience etc. is inextricably bound to the level of education. The better the quality of scholar preparation, the more varied the intellectual tools will be which help to understand social and cultural contexts and the positioning in a multi-layered and complex post-modern society.

The assumption the role of the British school system merely is socialisation through a ‘hidden curriculum’, i.e. the concept that schools do not simply transmit knowledge, but provide gender socialisation, values and norms by the schools’ organisation and teachers’ attitudes outside the formal timetable, reveals an interesting psychological view not only on children, but on human nature altogether. This theory denies to some extent that children are indeed actively involved in shaping their characters and suggests they are rather passive creatures, simply moulded by agents of society.

Since the Age of Enlightenment in the 18th century, which firmly stressed the importance of reason, philosophers emphasised on the revolutionary power of knowledge and scientific endeavour. The French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) approached the very nature of human development as a more conscious and active process:

“As soon as we become conscious of our sensations we are inclined to seek or to avoid the objects which produce them: at first, because they are agreeable or disagreeable to us, later because we discover that they suit or do not suit us, and ultimately because of the judgements we pass on them by reference to the idea of happiness of perfection we get from reason.” (Emilé or On Education, 1762)

Even though Rousseau outlined that the individual’s identity struggles to retain its ‘natural goodness’ when being bound to participation in an ‘inevitably corrupt society’ (The Social Contract, 1762), he always acknowledged that there is in fact an alternative to being passively corrupted- the choice of reason and intellect.

It can be concluded that the sociological perspective on identity is basically the concept of role behaviour, linked to the process of learning about social roles in various social institutions through personal experiences. This, after all is an individual process, as two people with merely the same world of experience might very possibly shape different personalities and identities, although certain psychological and social experience are of course likely to trigger similar outcomes.

By Deborah Passolat

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