While primary socialization in childhood is foundational, secondary socialization continues throughout adulthood as individuals enter new roles and institutions. Adults learn new norms, values, and identities through occupational socialization, marriage, parenthood, and major life transitions. Resocialization is intense secondary socialization in total institutions, requiring significant identity change.
Your prerequisite — socialization — established how people become social beings through learning the norms, values, roles, and expectations of their society. Primary socialization, concentrated in childhood, is the most powerful because it establishes the foundational dispositions through which all later experience is filtered. But socialization does not end at adolescence. Secondary socialization is the ongoing process through which adults acquire the knowledge, norms, and identities associated with specific institutions and roles encountered later in life. Every time you enter a new institution — a university, a profession, a religious community, a marriage — you undergo some degree of secondary socialization.
Occupational socialization is one of the most studied forms. Medical students, police officers, and lawyers do not just learn technical skills; they absorb an occupational culture — characteristic ways of thinking about clients, handling uncertainty, distinguishing insiders from laypeople, and managing the emotional demands of the role. This process is often formalized in training and internship structures, but it also operates informally through mentorship, observation, and the slow acquisition of professional identity. The person who emerges from medical training is not just the same person with new knowledge; their values, perceptions, and self-concept have been reorganized around the professional role. Secondary socialization of this depth approaches identity transformation.
Resocialization is the extreme case: the deliberate and intensive dismantling of an existing identity and its replacement with a new one. Erving Goffman's analysis of total institutions — prisons, military boot camps, monasteries, psychiatric hospitals — provides the classic framework. Total institutions are characterized by the collapse of boundaries that ordinarily separate different spheres of life (work, play, sleep, all happen in the same place, under the same authority). The first step in resocialization is a mortification of self: the stripping away of identity markers — civilian clothes, personal possessions, distinctive appearance, one's name — that anchor the prior identity. This creates a kind of identity vacuum that the institution then fills with a new identity organized around its values, hierarchy, and purpose.
The sociological significance of secondary socialization and resocialization is what they reveal about the relationship between identity and social structure. Primary socialization can make identity feel essential and fixed; secondary socialization demonstrates that identity is more malleable and institutionally produced than it feels from the inside. Adults can internalize genuinely new values, not just perform compliance. This has implications in both directions: institutions can produce meaningful positive transformation (education, religious conversion, rehabilitation), and they can also produce harmful conformity to institutional norms (the literature on institutional corruption and normalization of deviance shows how good people absorb the culture of bad institutions). The key insight is that the self is always, to some degree, a product of the current institutional context — not just the history of one's childhood.
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