**10. Conclusions**

Individual traits and the range of students' experiences within higher education institutions influence the complexity of socialization processes, which can be complementary. In addition, as shown at **Figure 1**, there are conceptual ways to studying undergraduate socialization in higher education institutions as organizations. As a result, it is reasonable to expect that research in this area will incorporate both wide conceptual foundation and rigorous empirical approaches to elaborate, extend, and deepen our understanding of socialization in higher education. Far too often, studies only pay lip service to conceptual models, addressing a small number of variables and failing to make conclusions about the models when discussing results. Paying attention to stakeholders in research, whether academic or not, can reveal vital information regarding conceptual frameworks as well as the sorts and targets of suggestions that may be made. The frameworks were crude detours from a strictly structural functional approach to studying student socialization in higher education. Each looked at additional paradigmatic ways of framing socialization beyond structural-functionalism that put more emphasis on human motivation and *Socialization Experiences among Undergraduate Students in Higher Learning Institutions (HLI) DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.99007*

#### **Figure 1.**

*Comprehensive framework for student socialization in higher education (adopted from [18, 74, 76]).*

actions in a restricted way. As a result, we came upon Anthony Giddens' structuration theory.

According to structuration theory, social behaviors organized over space and time are more important than individual actor experiences or the presence of any type of societal whole. Human social interactions are recursive, just like some self-reproducing objects in nature. That is, they are not formed by social actors, but are constantly produced by them through the techniques by which they express themselves as actors. Agents duplicate the conditions that allow these activities to take place in and *via* their actions. Structuration theory thus recognizes the significance of human agency in social processes, as well as its potential for mitigating the effects of social structures (such as normative environments) on college students. Students have the ability to change the very higher education situations in which they participate, according to structuration theory.

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