On Wed, 13 Jan 2010, James Heartfield wrote:
> She has to find some experts that say that gender is substantially
> determined by socialisation.
>
> I thought that she ought to look at sociologists, and feminist ones,
> rather than psychologists.
>
> Does anyone have any good references to academic papers, preferably
> recent, or better still, know some academics who are hot on this.
James, your problem here is that this is such a taken-for-granted fact in sociology that people don't write papers on it any more because it's not a way to distinguish yourself.
So rather than hot young things, you're probably better off talking scholars who are eminences. And I guess for your purposes, it would be best if they lived in the UK, right? Off the top of my head, I would email Angela McRobbie. I think she teaches in London at Goldsmith. She was the most prominent feminist in Stuart Hall's old Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies. She wrote several ethnographies of how girls are socialized, and how age, class and style enter into it as well.
I'm sure she could suggest many more people who would be perfect. I could search you down many great people in the US, but again, I think what you really want are people to interview there. Such people could not only recommend books, they could probably suggest good game plans for your friend to film. She might be able to recreate some famous socialization study and make that her film.
If you absolutely need to pile up a list of academic cites, then the thing to do get someone with an academic email account, log onto the complete sociology journals archive, and search sociology using the terms gender and socialization. You'll get thousands of hits. Sex and Gender Roles were also key terms back in the day. Pick the article you like the best by your criteria, and if it's a professional journal, it'll have a substantial bibilography at the end. Use that.
If you need an alternative option, you can google up women's studies and gender studies departments (their numbers are legion) and check out their syllabi. But I think once again your problem will be an embarassment of riches, and if you are only looking for citations, better to use online journals. If you want to be really thorough, you could use citation indexes to "prove" these are the most influential views, and that no one in the field reads the people the editors think are important.
Secondly, you might simply find the latest edition of the intro to sociology textbook for any school that they would consider prestigious and there will be a chapter on it, I guarantee you. Most people would consider that pretty much the imprimatur of educated common sense. If her editors are saying all the schools are wrong, it's incumbent on them to be experts in the field and prove it, not for her to disprove their vague intuitions from reading the science sidebars in lad magazines.
(FWIW, if it makes her feel any better, no sociologist believes in sociobiology, esp. the ueber reductionist version put forth by her editors. In fact I think it's fair to say that virtually all of them (including myself) would consider her editors morons.)
Lastly, if you want it ready to hand, one of the most elegant and concise refutations of sociobiology (or "evolutionary psychology," as it is now usually called) is Louis Menand's review of Steven Pinker's _The Blank Slate_ in the New Yorker. I highly recommend it not only to crib for a debate but also simply as a very enjoyable essay:
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2002/11/25/021125crbo_books
Michael