Being Sociological
Chapter 10
Relating: families
Does the family exist?
• For sociologists, the family is not a stable or
unchanging universal phenomenon; some even claim
that it does not exist.
• Empirical studies of family life over the last few
decades have documented significant changes to
family life and relationships in western societies and
have shown how dominant myths about the family,
promulgated by the media and by politicians, often
bear scant resemblance to reality.
• For many people, family life expresses and
symbolises order in society (Cameron, 1990).
• Family also shapes, even determines, the lives of
family members in irrevocable and fixed ways,
reproducing certain sets of social relations and
ways of behaving and interacting over time.
The dual or double life of the family
(Bittman and Pixley, 1997)
• The family is a site of intimacy and disclosure of
personal feelings and closeness to others, as well
as an institution that reproduces a whole host of
inequalities and not so loving, unethical, and
sometimes violent behaviours.
Affective Individualism
• We often think of family relationships as made up of
intimate interactions that confirm the importance of
emotional bonds, ties and closeness to others. This
ideology about familial closeness and bonding is
tied to the thesis of affective individualism, which
describes an alleged series of changes to social life
in the Western world during the eighteenth century.
• The gradual separation of work from home, which
led to the privatisation of the family, meant the
formation of marriage ties on the basis of romantic
attraction rather than economic or political necessity.
• Correspondingly, childrearing became increasingly
centred on the needs of the child and the parentchild relationship, and children were no longer seen
as merely economic resources or production units
within the household itself.
• Family life can be enriching and fulfilling, but it can
also be based on relationships that are quite
oppressive, destructive and harmful to family
members.
• Although the quality of family life can be said to have
improved in the last hundred years, family
environments can still be dangerous, especially for
women and children.
The Family and Power Relationships
• Deeply unequal power relations underpin families.
• On the one hand, there is an expectation and desire
that families will fulfil our human need for intimacy, but
family life can be exploitative because it is permeated by
inequalities that stem from gender imbalances and
generational differences.
In short, the family is not the most democratic
institution in most societies.
Structural Functionalism and the
Family
• This is based on the model of the North American
middle-class, nuclear family;
• The nuclear family is defined as a ‘social group
characterised by common residence, economic cooperation, and reproduction. It includes adults of both
sexes, at least two of whom maintain a socially
approved sexual relationship, and one or more
children, own or adopted, of the sexually cohabiting
adults’ (Murdock cited in Gittins, 1985, p. 60).
The typical family fulfils a number of basic functions as
an institution:
•The socialisation of children;
•The stabilisation of adult personalities;
•The regulation of sexuality;
•The provision of food, warmth and shelter.
All these are functions or tasks that the family
presumably fulfils in all societies.
Talcott Parsons (1902-1979)
Parsons describes a nuclear family as made up of a
sexually involved man and woman, with their offspring,
who are joined by blood, marriage or adoption. The
man and woman have sex for reproductive and
procreative purposes, and raise their children together
in a shared common residence (Parsons and Bales,
1955).
• Structural functionalists (such as Parsons) famously
claim that family members in modern societies share
an equitably distributed division of labour in which
men and women perform different, but
complementary, tasks.
• Structural functionalism assumes a public role for
men and a private role for women.
• Women are primarily charged with
‘affective/expressive roles’ while men perform
‘instrumental’ roles.
Problems of Parsons’s family model
• Because Parsons was actually describing the North
American middle-class family he knew and understood,
his model, and Murdock’s definition of it, fail to
accommodate a whole host of different family
arrangements in the real world.
• Policy makers have nonetheless tended to plan as
though the ideal-type nuclear family predominated in
their societies.
• Parsons’s model was never appropriate for the majority
of working-class families where both parents were, of
economic necessity, performing paid labour in industrial
processes or in other people’s houses and businesses.
• The model also ignores the numbers of women who,
since the 1970s and with access to education and to
professional and managerial jobs, choose to enter the
paid workforce.
An analysis of Time Use Surveys carried out in
Australia in 1992, 1997 and 2006 found that while nonmothers in couples’ households did around ten hours
more unpaid work per week than non-fathers across
the three time periods, mothers spent on average
around 40 hours per week more on unpaid work
(housework and child care) than fathers (Woods et al.,
2010, p. 6).
LATs (Live Apart Together)
• LAT might produce more equitable relationships,
providing women with a way of avoiding traditional
feminine roles associated primarily with cooking,
cleaning and caring (Mary Holmes, 2004).
• Certainly we cannot assume that families everywhere
always live together.
• In the Dominican Republic, for example, families may
live in separate households, and although these groups
appear to resemble nuclear family arrangements, they
are in fact extended family groupings of people living
within close proximity to one another (Leeder, 2004).
Cultural Diversity and Situational
Diversity (David Cheal, 2002)
• Cultural diversity refers to the different ideals
underpinning different family practices of people from
different cultural and ethnic groups.
• Situational diversity occurs where people share similar
family values, but organise and practice family life
differently due to work patterns and attitudes toward
marriage.
• Sociologists also make reference to social class
diversity, life cycle diversity, and family life course
diversity.
Other types of family
• Commuter Marriages: Partners live in different
cities due to work commitments and travel to be with
one another in the weekends.
• Satellite or Multi-local Families: Partners have
jobs some distance away from one another and may
maintain a second household where one of them
lives during the week. These families may be
separated by hundreds or thousands of kilometres.
• Physical proximity does not always define a family,
nor does physical distance indicate an absence of
love, affection or intimacy.
However, persons living together in one household
may or may not be a family.
If the nuclear family is in part simulation, or a figment of
dominant cultural imagination, then we not only need to
ask what a satisfactory definition of ‘family’ would look
like, but also which sociological perspectives are best
equipped to understand and explain the multi-faceted
nature of family life in contemporary society.
Marxist Approaches to the Family
• Friedrich Engels: the form of family life changes as the
mode of production changes.
• When property was collectively owned and sexuality
was not closely regulated, task sharing within family
arrangements was rather more egalitarian than the
division of labour within the patriarchal nuclear family.
• Women’s subordination and economic dependence on
men can thus be traced back to monogamous
marriage, which provided men with a means to ensure
that their property would be inherited by their sons
The crux of the Marxist argument is that families
perpetuate the class structure, as well as perpetuating
the social dominance of men over women, thereby
benefiting the ruling class.
Marxist Feminism
• Marxist feminists emphasise that the domestic labour
that wives and children perform in the family is essential
to ensure the continued reproduction of capitalism.
• If domestic services such as housework were not
provided through women’s unpaid labour then men’s
wages or salaries would have to be high enough to
absorb the costs of purchasing these services in the
marketplace.
• The structural features of the nuclear family support
capitalist commodity production and capitalist ideology
encourages people to want to reproduce normative
family arrangements.
Feminist Approaches to the Family
• Families are in fact constituted by a complex set of
relationships and practices, and because no member
of the same family experiences family life in the same
way, the interests of all family members will be
relatively divergent (Stevi Jackson, 1997).
• The asymmetrical nature of the household division of
labour has prompted feminist sociologists to claim that
the family is a site of inequality, in which men receive
greater material benefits than women.
Christine Delphy and Diana Leonard
(1992)
• The nuclear family is an economic system, which has
historically been headed by men who have made key
decisions about how to allocate family income.
• Even when women engage in work in the paid labour
force, their jobs tend to be regarded as secondary in
the family, and women often have little decisionmaking autonomy.
In short, feminist sociologists argue that women are
systematically disadvantaged in families. Not only
does women’s housework and domestic labour go
unrecognised, it is also unrewarded.
Micro-Sociology and the Family
• In contrast to macro-sociological approaches to the
family that stress the interplay of social institutions and
broad societal processes, micro-sociological
perspectives focus on family members’ interactions with
one another, and how individual family members
construct and experience family life.
• These sociologists are interested in the sorts of
relationships that people have with one another within
families and households, and how people negotiate and
re-negotiate changes to family formation.
Micro-Sociology looks at:
• How people negotiate their relationships with one
another when they are involved in adoption processes
or assisted reproductive strategies, such as surrogate
pregnancy arrangements.
• Changes to behaviours between members of the
family group due to changes in the life course: for
instance, how a person experiences parenthood or
how childhood is experienced within the family.
• The meanings that people attach to their relationships
with one another in families and how patterns of
caring and intimacy within familial arrangements and
households operate.
‘Doing’ Family
• Increasingly sociologists have eschewed a view of the
family as a static structure or timeless monolithic entity.
Instead, they have tended to characterise family life and
familial arrangements, especially in contemporary
societies, as dynamic, fluid and open-ended social
groupings and relationships (Gittins, 1985, p. 4).
• This has produced a shift of focus from defining the
boundaries of family in terms of blood kin and conjugal
roles and duties to how different participants in family
groupings ‘practise’ family life (Morgan, 1996).
As well as taking account of the practices that family
members engage in, as sociologists we also need to
consider their differential moral and emotional
investments in those practices (see Morgan, 1996).
• Family is constituted through actions and
interactions, and is reiterated in particular contexts,
sites and locations.
• It is this blurring of the boundaries between what we
take the family to be or official normative definitions
of the family, and how we live and experience family
life that many contemporary sociologists are
increasingly interested in.
De-traditionalisation and Families
• Modern relationships are more flexible and less
enduring than traditional couplings;
• People remain in new types of ‘pure relationship’
only for as long as they satisfy emotional,
psychological and sexual needs (Giddens, 1992).
• Sociologists have begun to pay increasing attention
to the complex ways people create a sense of
relatedness within families by how they draw
boundaries of intimacy with others, with pets, and
even with things, like gifts, inherited objects, and
‘keepsakes’ (Gabb, 2008).
Diverse family types
• Sociologists (e.g. Stacey, 1996; Weeks, 2002) have
recently compared notions of the normal or typical
family based on blood kin with quite diverse and fluid
forms of household that include non-marital,
heterosexual partnerships, de facto marriages, samesex partnerships, single-parent families, blended and
extended family arrangements, as well as numerous
combinations of these types.
These families are referred to as follows:
• ‘Fictive kin’ (Gittins, 1985; Leeder, 2004)
• ‘Elective families’
• ‘Families of choice’ (Weeks, 2002).
Fictive Kinship
Fictive kinship is a strategy people use to render as kin
those who are unrelated by blood or marriage. It is used
when people choose to redefine their relationships with
one another to account for forms of intimacy and
sentimental bonds that are intense, enduring, and
extend beyond conventional notions of friendship.
Fictive Kinship: Organ Donor
Families
• Although organ donor families who donate the
organs and tissues of a deceased family member to
transplant recipients do not always meet, some do
establish close social relationships.
• Anthropologist Lesley Sharp (2006), who
researched organ transfer for several decades in
North America, suggests that these relationships
approximate ‘fictive kinship’.
• Organ transfer processes, however, eliminate the need
for procreation as a basis for building or making
families. In these relationships, shared substance is
activated by the literal incorporation of the donor’s flesh
(body organs or tissue) into the transplant recipient’s
body.
• So powerful are the feelings associated with this
embodied connection that some organ donor families
and transplant recipients come to see each other as
surrogate mothers, fathers, siblings, children, cousins,
etc. Where this occurs, aspects of the deceased
donor’s identity is said to be transferred to the recipient
through the organ transplantation process.
The experience of donor families and transplant
recipients in this example confirms micro-sociological
views that notions of kin ‘relatedness’, to borrow
anthropologist Janet Carsten’s (2000) term, are not only
grounded in biological ties but also how people define
and practice what they mean by family.
Divorce and the Family
• Rising divorce rates have not led to a concomitant
decline in marriage or cohabitation rates overall;
• Accompanying these trends has been a rise in blended
and reconstituted families, made up of children and
biological and step-parents;
• The proportion of family households headed by a loneparent has also risen. Lone-parenthood is mainly the lot
of women, and whilst some women decide to become
single parents (especially in Scandinavian countries
where single mothers are paid a living wage), loneparenting is largely the result of separation or divorce
rather than choice.
Family and Children
• Since the late nineteenth century, and particularly
since the 1960s, fertility rates in the western world
have been falling, and these patterns have had
profound demographic consequences.
• The total fertility rate is the average number of
children a woman has during her lifetime of childbearing years, and in western countries this needs
to be above the population replacement level of 2.1
children per woman.
• The latest data from the United Nations (updated on
24 August 2011) shows the fertility rate of the
Russian Federation at around 1.4 children per
woman; in the United Kingdom, 1.9; in Italy, 1.4;
Spain, 1.5; and Germany and Japan, 1.3.
Why is this happening?
• Economic costs and emotional burdens of raising
children;
• Overpopulation;
• The loss of adult autonomy;
• Complications associated with changes to
relationship patterns;
• Women’s increased financial independence and
workforce participation.
Contingent Childlessness
• Contingent childlessness is not a voluntary fertility
choice but results from being busy with other life
activities: career, education pursuits, paying off a
mortgage, re-partnering, or being in a same-sex
relationship.
• Additionally, the increased availability of reliable
contraception and the attendant uncoupling of sexuality
from reproduction means that more and more people
are making lifestyle decisions not to have children.
Assisted Reproduction Technologies
(ART)
• Assisted Reproduction Technologies have contributed to
the flexibility of family formation and have enabled
infertile couples, same-sex couples, and single persons
to have children and thus create families where they
would otherwise be unable.
• ART may also have contributed to changing attitudes
around fertility behaviour.
• Today, a child’s parents could include an ovarian egg
donor, sperm donor, gestating mother, social mother,
and social father.
ART and Cultural Difference
• In New Zealand, it may be possible for third party donors
to establish relationships with offspring of assisted
reproduction assuming all parties - donors, social and
legal parents, and offspring - consent (New Zealand Law
Commission, 2005).
• In the Middle East, Al-Azhar University in 1980 prohibited
third- party donation from sperm, ova, embryos, or
surrogate pregnancy arrangements. The reason for
prohibition relates to ideas about adultery, incest due to
third-party anonymity, and worries about descent lines and
inheritance.
• However, in Iran, which is predominantly Shi’a Muslim, a
Fatwa issued by Ayatollah Ali Hussein Khamanei in 1999
allowed third- party donation to preserve marital bonds.
As a consequence of Iran’s liberalism in this domain many
people in the Middle East travel to Iran to access ART
services unavailable in their own jurisdictions (Inhorn,
The ‘postmodern family condition’
‘The postmodern family condition is not a new model of
family life equivalent to that of the modern family; it is not
the next stage in an orderly progression of family history;
rather the postmodern family condition signals the moment
in history when our belief in a logical progression of stages
has broken down…The postmodern family condition
incorporates both experimental and nostalgic dimensions
as it lurches forward and backward into an uncertain
future’ (Stacey, 1996, pp. 7-8).
Summary
• Family formations are made up of a mixture of both old
and new, and incorporate beliefs about kin stemming
from traditional values.
• Traditional ways of ‘doing’ family are often tempered
with pragmatism and, on occasion, innovative
technological and social practices.
• Essentially, older, more traditional forms of kinship
relations persist and proliferate alongside newly
emerging, ostensibly more democratic and openended family forms.
Discussion Point 1: Domestic Labour
in the Family
•What are the main reasons for women doing the
majority of domestic labour (eg. preparing meals,
washing dishes, cleaning the house, washing
clothes, and parenting and playing with children)?
•Are the inequalities of domestic labour likely to
reduce over time? Are young men more likely to
do their share?
•Are young women happy with the traditional
division of labour?
Discussion Point 2: Technology,
Family and Parenting
•What technologies are most important in
supporting the most common forms of family in
contemporary society?
•How have cell phones changed family life?
•Can you imagine a technological breakthrough
that would do away with the nuclear family and its
variants?