Microsoft Word Socialized Choices 31-12 pod docx

Chapter 8 - Synthesis: overview and discussion 
199 
freely from social structures, but often have subtle and complex origins in 
childhood.  
Moreover, in the qualitative study, there were only few parental anti-examples 
– it appears relatively rare that mothers feel they needed to resist parental 
expectations, values and norms, both implicit and explicit. This is interesting in 
itself, and might express a relatively stable culture within the Netherlands since 
the 1970s and 1980s, where despite the obvious increase in the employment 
activity of current mothers, there seems to exist continuity and conformity 
between generations of current mothers and their parents. Presumably the parents 
(especially the mothers) of the respondents of this study already paved the way 
for their daughters, which then opened alternative scripts of behaviour to the 
traditional stay-at-home option once their daughter became a mother herself. This 
clearly differed from their own upbringings during the 1950s and 1960s, which 
were deeply implicated within the figuration ideal of “harmonious inequality’, 
since the ideal of women as housewives and men as breadwinners had by then 
reached its most glorious days. For the mothers of the respondents who 
themselves were raised during this period, the withering away of the ideal of 
being a housewife had not yet led to new ideals or guidance for behaviour. And 
thus their trials of new behaviour would have been automatically and more often 
acting against their parents’ norms, values and attitudes. Nonetheless, there might 
also be a selection effect. Daughters who have ‘chosen’ the opposite behaviour of 
their own parents might have not become parents at all, and therefore they were 
not included in this research. Whatever the reason may be, the association with 
several parental verbal and mental codes shows that part of mothers’ gender 
values and ideal family lives maintains some stability throughout the course of 
their life, and that these do not easily adapt to changing circumstances. Part of the 
individual has become what is transmitted by significant others (Berger and 
Luckmann, 1967, p.152; Handel, 2006, p.15; Mead, 1934). 
8.5 
A mother endorses more egalitarian values and attitudes if she 
has perceived the professional and career support of 
significant others 
Mothers do not continue to live in one normative social system. As their lives go 
on, they interact with different social settings or circles, and each circle has its 
own normative and cultural system, with its own specific rules, norms and values. 
This study’s particular interest is the character of transitions from primary to 
secondary socialization. Is this process characterised by reproduction and re-
enforcement, or by recreation? Handel (2006) concluded that there is still no 
satisfactory explanation for the transitional process of primary socialization to 
adult socialization (p.18). According to Berger and Luckmann (1967), within 
secondary socialization, there is always a problem of consistency between the 
original and new internalizations when individuals are confronted with new 
alternative realities and potential identities that appear as subjective options 

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Socialized Choices - Labour Market Behaviour of Dutch Mothers  
200 
(p.160). People tend to re-enforce their values and attitudes by clinging to self-
affirming relationships (referring to the process of self-selection) rather than 
subject themselves to new subjective normative realities. Others scholars instead 
argue that people try to establish throughout their lives a new acceptable position 
for themselves, expressing a less deterministic view of the effect of primary 
socialization (Bandura, 1977, p.48; Eagle, 1988; Handel, 2006). 
This study aims at revealing whether mothers tend to sustain their (acquired) 
attitudes through secondary social relations by creating and recreating the 
familiar, or whether they adapt their attitudes when confronted with new models 
of behaviour or supportive others. Nonetheless, clearly a limiting frame of this 
examination is the cross-sectional research design of this study. Mothers were 
invited to look back upon their lives, while I tried to reconstruct, using qualitative 
and quantitative research methods, patterns in the possible influences of 
significant others on their diverse values and attitudes. For this reason, I have 
chosen to focus on mothers’ own perceived support of significant others towards 
their professional choices and career ambitions. This theoretical choice is also 
induced by the socialization theory of Berger and Luckmann (1967), the theory of 
planned behaviour (Ajzen and Fishbein, 1991, 2005) and the social learning 
theory of Bandura (1977), as well as by different partial theoretical notions 
(Grube and Morgan, 1990; Tiemeijer et al., 2009, p.142). These theories all 
emphasise that the perceived approval of significant others towards specific 
behaviour will have a positive impact on people’s own values and attitudes 
towards the behaviour of interest. 
Before I elaborate and compare the qualitative findings and quantitative 
results with respect to the process of secondary socialization, some initial remarks 
can be made here. A disadvantage of the qualitative study is that it is impossible 
to draw representative conclusions about the strength of social influential 
processes. We can only detect some indications of mechanisms or patterns that 
emerge from the research material. Yet, an advantage of the qualitative study is 
that we can listen to mothers’ labour market biographies and try to disclose 
consistent and contradictory patterns within their narratives especially in relation 
to their social relational contexts and job relevant choices. In this way I could 
display something about the supposed continuity between primary and secondary 
socialization (Berger and Luckmann, 1967). Whereas, with the quantitative 
analysis, I could shed some light on the statistical representativeness of the 
disclosed mechanisms.  
Teachers 
The qualitative findings revealed that in general, mothers could not remember any 
teachers who stimulated or supported them in choosing a certain professional 
direction. Full-time home-makers in particular appeared rather negative about 
their received guidance at (high) school. Only a few interviewees described how 
teachers at school had encouraged them to consider their working life – stories 

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