ABSTRACT

This chapter builds on the conference discussion but departs freely from it in the attempt to see the bearing of socialization on the origins and development of competence from a more coherent perspective than the lively exchange between specialists of disparate interests and backgrounds could attain. In its preliminary discussions, the Committee identified a number of currently active lines of research that seemed to bear upon positive outcomes of socialization—outcomes viewed from a frankly evaluative perspective. The self-conceptions and self-attitudes, formed in the light of feedback from effects achieved and from social appraisal, provide the basis for generalized orientations of competence or incompetence, relatively stable across the vicissitudes of particular transactional encounters or role relationships. It is the dialectic interplay of trends toward generalization and differentiation that gives rise to the integrated organization of personality structure.