Sociology Revision Notes - Family Perspectives

Hi folks. Let no one tell you writing sociology notes is easy or quick! Today’s offering is family perspectives - Functionalism and Marxism. Feminism and some others need to be added and will be asap, so consider these as work in progress. Hope they are useful.

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.