10. Perspectives Of Family Flashcards
____ approaches focus on how the structure or shape of families are co-ordinated in such a way as to support some outcome instead of others and that these outcomes are power laden.
Structuralist
_____ focuses on the consequences of the relations for the operation of society.
Functionalism
____ focuses on the micro-social processes of symbolic meaning making that are embedded in the details of our everyday interactions with one another.
Interactionism
Whereas functionalism and Marxism focused on the big picture: the structure of society and the functons of institutions within society; symbolic interactionism focuses much more on the smaller picture of ____ between individuals and groups in everyday life.
interactions
F. A functionalist perspective focuses on how _____ and ____ function to make the whole work. In this respect, the family plays an important role as an institution that fulfils certain functions within society.
individuals and institutions
F. From the functionalist perspective, the nuclear family is seen as the appropriate family form for complex ____ societies.
industrialised
F. In functionalism, ____ ____ are defined as those things that challenge the status quo and can involve such things as political dissent and different sexual preferences.
social problems
F. ____ families or at least conjugal families (small self-supporting family groups even if they do not consist of husband, wife and children) do seem to be effective ways for organising care, support and socialisation within industrial societies.
Nuclear
F. The move to recognise same-sex marriagesand gay and lesbian couples rights to adopt alongside the rising numbers of blended families, suggests that ____ families are effective and supportive forms in a post-industrial age.
conjugal
F. Functionalist theory about the family was high fashion in the ____ and ____.
1950s and 1960s
F. As a theoretical perspective functionalism links closely with some of Durkheim’s ideas about the structure of society, the division of labour in society, and the way that the collective conscience operates as a glue that makes society possible. The most famous functionalist was ____ ____.
Talcott Parsons
F. For Parsons the ____ family was the appropriate form for complex industrialised societies.
nuclear
F. Following a functionalist approach, the key ____ of the nuclear family are: isolated (from traditional kinship ties), forms a separate household, and is relatively ‘mobile’ geographically.
characteristics
F. The key functions of the nuclear family are to ____ children and to stabilise adult personalities through affective ties.
socialise
F. Durkheim theorised that the ____ ____ (the common beliefs and sentiments of a society) obligate individuals to be social, and that through the collective conscience society is present in the individual.
collective conscience
F. For Parsons, the family is a ___ ____ where those shared norms and values are transferred from generation to generation.
key institution
S. Not all sociologists have seen the relationship between the family and society as so benign. For example, the structuralist approaches of Marxists and Feminists, while still concerned with the functions that families perform, focus on the way in which particular family forms are implicated in capitalist and patriarchal ____ ____.
power relations
S. In general, Marxists believe that the family is an institution principally concerned with upholding the ____ and ____ of capitalist society.
values and structure
S. The modern family is understood as an effective way to fuel the capitalist system of ____ ____ - in fact, since it is traditionally unpaid, domestic labour is itself a form of capitalist exploitation.
labour exploitation
S. The family is theorised in relation to the mode of ____. That is, the mode of production determines the form and function of the family.
production
S. Classical Marxist approaches often emphasise the ____ ____ of the family in capitalist society. For Marxists, reproduction takes two forms.
reproductive function
S. The first is the ‘reproduction of the ____’. This refers to the biological aspects of reproduction. Under capitalism, the family is the context in which biological reproduction occurs.
species
The second form of reproduction is the ‘_____ reproduction’ of the relations of production. In this sense, the family is the institution where capitalist labour power is reproduced socially.
social
S. Workers bodies and minds are ‘replenished’ to ensure fitness for another day at work and the children of workers are raised within families to become ‘good _____’.
workers
S. This later function is achieved as the family is an institution where capitalist ideology shapes an individual’s class consciousness. Thus, through the family, the norms and values of capitalism are ____.
reproduced
SI. Symbolic interactionists have taken a different view from both the functionalist perspective on the family and the structural approach of Marxists and Feminists. While symbolic interactionists do not deny the macro and structural relationships that exist between families and societies, they turn their attention to the processes that are involved in developing parental and marital ____ and ____.
behaviours and identities
SI. Rather than seeing mother, father, son and daughter roles as pre-existing and given structures that are adopted quite unproblematically, interactionists focus on the ____ and ____ ____ associated with these roles and explore how roles within the family are constructed through interaction.
meanings and lived experiences
SI. From this perspective, the roles of mother and father are rather different from the ____ ____ used by functionalists which assumes that family members can easily identify and take up the norms associated with the roles of mother, father, child, husband, wife and so on.
static model
SI. Backett argues that parental roles are much more problematic and subject to a constant process of ____ and ____ between the parents.
construction and negotiation
S. Feminist sociologists have turned their attention to how the family produces and reinforces ____ ____.
men’s power
S. Feminists argue that the family is ____ in such a way that women are systematically disadvantaged and, in particular, that the organisation of labour between men and women in the family benefits men.
structured
SI. Symbolic interactionist approaches to the family focus on the processes involved in ‘_____’ the everyday routines of family life.
negotiating
SI. Contrary to the structural approaches like Marxism and functionalism, symbolic interactionists focus on the _____, ____ and ____ relationships between people that produce shared meaning.
interactive, interpersonal and communicative
SI. According to symbolic interactionism, there is no such thing as ‘_____’ or ‘social structure’ that exist independently of ways in which people think and talk about them.
society
