Revision Notes - Family Perspectives - New Version

Family Perspectives notes now finished - I’ve added on a bit of coverage on Feminism and the Radical Psychiatrists. All in plain vanilla format, so you’ll have to cut and paste to bold things and so on. Anyway, hope they are useful. I’m planning to add more but it is taking longer than anticipated. Sorry if it’s late for exams this year, but we are working at it.

Families, Households and Sociological Perspectives
The role of the family – and its relation to the wider social structure – is, as one of the main syllabuses puts it, a well-trodden area within the AS and A level syllabus and comes up in some form fairly regularly. Here’s a brief summary of some of the key sociological perspectives, with I hope, a few useful insights and critical/evaluative points thrown in. These notes start off with the two main structural or systems theories and then have a look at some of the alternatives. These notes won’t though say much about the individual theorists but will instead focus mainly on the key ideas.

Functionalism
Functionalism is a systems theory so it looks at each part or element of society in terms of the contribution it makes to efficient and harmonious functioning of the whole social structure or system. You might also remember the idea of the ‘organic analogy’; the idea that society is like an organism and needs specialist parts to carry out particular functions.

Well, in terms of these sorts of ideas, functionalists have always tended to see the family as a key building block of society. Theorists like the American sociologist Talcott Parsons, writing in the USA around the middle of the last century, argued that the family had changed and developed as society changed. In a pre-industrial society, large, extended family networks were functional, providing not just social relationships and help – they were also economic structures, as many people worked with or in their family unit – the family was then a unit of production. But an industrial society, Parsons argued, needed a different sort of family – a smaller, more geographically mobile unit – the nuclear family – and it became much more of a unit of consumption, rather than production. It needed this because large scale, industrial societies are meritocratic. They need to be he argued, in order to be fully productive; they simply would not succeed if they permitted the existence of the sort of privileged classes and cliques promoted by pre-industrial societies.

However, Parsons also argues that the shift to an industrial society means that some sort of structure is needed to mould citizens into a common set of shared values. So industrial society sees the creation and proliferation of a nuclear family unit, which becomes vital since it is the sole means of carrying out two essential functions; socialising children and stabilising adults.
Children need to be socialised; they always have of course, but in industrial society the responsibility for primary socialisation falls solely on the nuclear family; it can no longer be farmed out to extended family relatives, to other members of a tribe, or to others in the sort of tight-knit communities which characterised some pre-industrial societies. Adults need ‘stabilising’ as Parsons telling calls it, because more than ever, in an industrial society, they are on the receiving end of stresses which their predecessors could never have imagined; the relentless nature of industrial work, the need to earn to pay bills, and living in cramped urban conditions.
It’s easy to portray Parsons as some sort of conservative, small town, Middle American. He was certainly American, and yes, he was from the Mid-West, but his theoretical vision is not without insight, nor humanity. It is also strikingly modern and even though it was written in 1950s America, it still, to me at least, resonates.
So there is a clear and distinct functionalist view of the family. The family carries out those two key functions. In doing that, it ensures that sexuality is regulated, that there is an institutional ‘safety-valve’ which releases the pressures generated in modern industrial society. It also perfectly fits the needs of industrial society; smaller nuclear units are more socially and geographically mobile. The ties of the old pre-industrial society can be cut; it no longer matters who your family were, or which class you were born into as families are increasingly the same – nuclear – so the nuclear family facilitates the social and the geographical mobility necessary in a prosperous industrial society.

Marxism
If you think the functionalist view sounds modern and perceptive, a Marxist-influenced view of the family forces you to think again. Sure, Marxism is a structural theory, so unsurprisingly, this view of the family does have some similarities with functionalism; but they are slight. Marxists can agree for example, that the nuclear family provides a ‘safety-valve’ for all the tensions generated in the workplace. And Marxists agree, in a sense, that the nuclear family fits the needs of society. But Marxists have a very different view of how that society should be viewed. For a start, they wouldn’t accept that modern societies are primarily industrial – they would argue that we must understand that their key characteristic is that they are capitalist societies. This means, Marxists would point out, that they are highly unequal societies and means that all those Parsonian ideas about the nuclear family facilitating geographical and social mobility are just nonsense.
Marxists would insist that if we want to understand the role of the family in capitalist society, we have to examine how it functions in the context of capitalism; in other words, what it does to uphold capitalist society. This is of course, a similar approach to the functionalist view, but as indicated above, it differs because Marxists start from the assumption that modern societies (with a very few exceptions) are capitalist. Marxists of course, also see society in terms of the base-superstructure model. As the base – the economy – shapes everything else, then the family is no exception and it is seen as reflecting the needs of the capitalist economy.
Marxists therefore argue that far from promoting social mobility, the nuclear family ensures that generation after generation remains ensnared in capitalism. The nuclear family is an ideological conditioning device, Marxists claim, which reproduces the ideologies which prop up capitalism – children are in effect trained to copy the values and behaviours of their parents and so unsurprisingly often follow them into the same sorts of work (link this to education and think of Willis’s Learning to Labour and indeed studies of social mobility, e.g. Goldthorpe, Nuffield). The family’s job is not to rear children, but to reproduce the labour power that maintains capitalism. Women and children, the Marxist view suggests, are in effect, a reserve army of labour; the fact that capitalists can draw upon their labour power, and that workers need to look after their families, means that there is an ever plentiful supply of cheap labour and helps keep wages a bit lower than they might otherwise be. If you think this is fanciful, think about the labour supply of young teenagers in shops and businesses in the UK. Or indeed, take a look at Naomi Klein’s No Logo and consider the sociology of cheap labour in sweatshops in countries elsewhere in the world.
The family also ends up as an institution which exerts social control on parents; in capitalist society which is highly consumerist they have little choice but to work hard in order to buy an ever-increasing variety of unnecessary commodities for their family. The family is thus an integral part of what Marxists call ‘commodity fetishism’; it helps to fuel the creation of false needs, which in order to be satisfied, require people to work hard. Mobile phones, laptops, X-boxes; all these frivolous things need to be bought by someone and in western capitalist societies it is now increasingly young people who are an important market. And young people come from, of course, families.
A few points to remember in evaluating these theories.
• Remember –both of these theories tend to assume that the nuclear family is the dominant structure and so they neglect family diversity. They also assume that the family does in fact fulfil the functions which they say it has – maybe it does other things too?
• Marxist approaches are often criticised for explaining the family solely in terms of its economic functions. This is usually called economic determinism – saying that everything happens for economic reasons. It could be that family forms reflect cultural, e.g religious beliefs. Culture could be as or even more important than economic factors.
• Functionalism gives a highly optimistic view of the family. It downplays negative aspects of family life, e.g. domestic abuse, divorce. It may exaggerate the benefits of family life and it seems to consider that everyone benefits equally from the family. This needs to be considered critically, not just accepted.
• Both of these structural views of the family can be seen as deterministic (functionalists say that the needs of society determine the structure of the family). So it can be argued that both views tend to over-generalise and neglect the considerable diversity of family structures and forms which are found in contemporary capitalist societies.

Other Theories

There are a few other theories you should know about – feminism is a key one, but so to is the work of a very small bunch of radical critics of the family who were active in the 1960s – the radical psychiatrists.
The Radical Psychiatrists
This sounds a rather odd name for any theory, let alone a sociological theory, but sociology is a broad subject (a good thing surely?). In the 1960s the decade of ‘love and peace’ people challenged many organisations and ways of doing things. Conventional medicine was one area which came in for a lot of criticism. Two writers in particular, David Cooper and Ronald Laing, became well known critics of one branch of medicine– psychiatry. Their critique also branched out to include a strong attack on the idea of the nuclear family.
Cooper and Laing argued that the Functionalists had it completely wrong: the nuclear family did not stabilize adult personalities at all. In fact, they claimed it often had exactly the opposite effect. The nuclear family, they suggested, was often a cauldron of competing wills and power games, which led to the individual development of family members being distorted by negative labelling and scapegoating. Family relationships could be suffocating and dysfunctional rather than functional.
The radical psychiatrists are now rather forgotten and many textbooks are editing out material on them. But they are worth considering briefly because they are important historically and also because they provide a useful reminder against the excessively optimistic picture presented by functionalism.

Feminism
Of much greater importance though, is the feminist perspective, which has had a tremendous influence on sociology in general, not just the study of the family.
One important point to note from the outset is that feminism is not a unified theory – there are many different sorts of feminism, so to claim that feminists say ‘x, y, and z’ about the family is really a bit of a generalisation. However, having given that qualification, there are some general observations which can be made of the family from a broad feminist perspective. A few comments on some of the particular branches of feminism will be made later.
In general, feminists have been highly critical of the both the highly positive view of the family presented by Functionalists and the more critical view presented by Marxists. The reason for this scepticism boils down to one key concept: patriarchy. Patriarchy refers to a system of male dominance.
Feminists of all types have argued that the family is a patriarchal institution; it is through and through, male dominated, although on this point, the different versions of feminism kick in, as they all have slightly different explanations of why this is so and on the degree of extent of male dominance.
The implications of thinking about the family in terms of patriarchy are far-ranging. Feminists criticise the functionalist view which sees the family as an institution which benefits all of its members in equal measure. Feminists argue that this view is blind to the gendered aspect of power in the family; it is women who are seen to be responsible for the home and the children. Women’s key role is to reproduce and be child-carers; although in many countries women are now able to have a career, many feminists would point out that this simply leads to a ‘double-burden’. In other words – women can, indeed, may be expected to have careers, but they must also still take the chief responsibility for childcare and household duties.
Feminists may point out that there is an ambiguity and a possible contradiction in functionalist theory on gender differences. Do functionalists believe that gender roles really are learnt through socialisation? If so, surely such patterns can be changed? As the patterns of gender roles in the family seem widespread, does this mean that functionalists take the view that they reflect natural, rather than social differences? A focus on patriarchy in contrast, would involve upholding the view that gender roles are culturally transmitted and learnt and therefore potentially open to change.

Feminists also criticise the Marxist view of the family. This view, some feminists have argued, is also gender blind. That is, it is able to identify the operation of power by one class upon another, but when it comes to gender relations, it is unable to perceive any differences of power or any interests beyond those of capital and labour. So, feminists conclude, the family does not simply reproduce labour power and the relationships which support capitalism, it also supports and reproduces patriarchy. It certainly does act as a ‘safety valve’ – but not just for capitalism, for patriarchy too. Women in the family are simply reproducing labour power for capitalism and indeed, act as a reserve army of labour, able to provide cheap labour in a capitalist system, when it is required (and that of course, is why women are paid less than men).
Finally, the feminist critique makes a broader point about sociology in general. Feminists have claimed that sociology has frequently presented a biased view of many elements of social life. This mainstream view is called the ‘malestream’ viewpoint. It’s a rather tiresome play on words which has unfortunately become part of sociological vocabulary. But that does make a useful point. Just as we might raise the question of whether a white, middle class researcher can really study their own society in a neutral and scientific way, so too we can ask the same sort of questions about bias and the study of the family. Once again we are forced to reflect on the perennial question of whether sociology is value free.
Different Types of Feminism
Here are a few brief points on several of the most important theoretical strands within feminism.
Marxist Feminism
As the name suggests, this is a mixing of these two theories. It leads Marxist Feminists to argue that patriarchy is the result of, or is caused by, capitalism. This is however, highly contentious. It seems to assume that patriarchy is something created by capitalism – to protect property rights – and that the abolition of capitalism would inevitably lead to a brave new era of gender equality. Critics might point out that this certainly has not been something which has been very noticeable in communist societies, e.g. USSR, Cuba, China, countries where women seemed to be more, not less oppressed than in capitalist societies. In contemporary society, some might now also refer to the role of women in Islamic societies – and you could say many/most of these are capitalist. Are women in these societies oppressed? If so, is it by capitalism or by religion? There are difficult questions here – what is oppression and what causes it? And can you be oppressed and yet not realise or admit it? But these are unfortunately, tricky theoretical issues which go way beyond the reach of AS level.
Radical Feminism
Radical feminism sees patriarchy as the result of culture. Patriarchy means that the family helps to transmit the cultural values which portray women’s roles as being fixed and natural. Patriarchy presents women as the weaker sex and their role in to bear children and to raise them.
Patriarchy can exist in very different types of society and is the result of cultural values and beliefs. Culture is a part of the social structure, but in contrast to Marxist views, it isn’t determined by the economy or economic needs. Patriarchy can therefore take different forms in different types of social structure, so it is perfectly possible to have patriarchy in capitalist societies, communist societies and in theocracies: the implication is that it patriarchy can only be changed if the culture changes.
Liberal Feminism
Liberal feminism is really more of a political than a sociological approach and so tends to be more involved with telling us how things should be rather than analysing how they are and how social structures have come to be as they are.
However in sociology, the liberal approach has suggested that improvements in women’s social position and within the family can be made by changes in the law. Liberals might therefore point to the equal opportunities legislation of the 1970s (including the equal pay act). However, although these changes have improved things and certainly changed them, inequalities remain. Sociologists influenced by Marxist and Radical perspectives argue that focusing on choice and opportunity tends to assume that social structures are more flexible and open to change than is actually the case. Those with more power (in this case, men) tend to find ways to keep hold of it.

Difference Feminism
Mainly in the wake of postmodernism and post-structuralism, some feminists have pointed out that women’s social position varies. There are therefore, important differences e.g. on the basis of class, ethnicity, and indeed even other factors such as age, or religion – an important cultural difference. For some Difference Feminists, this may mean that women’s role is one of choice – some may point for example to the flourishing of gay and lesbian identities and families of choice in contemporary societies.
However, sociologists still wedded to a view of structural sociology will of course argue that the ability to make such choices does not mean that structures do not exist and nor are these differences necessarily the most important feature of women’s social position. Nevertheless, the notion of essentialism –which comes from this broad approach is perhaps useful. Essentialism in this context is the idea that there is only one type of woman and only one role or position for women in modern society – the essential role. Essentialism would suggest that women’s role in fixed and natural and unchangeable. Difference Feminists though argue that this is not the case; the role which women take in the family for example, is continually open to change.