Families And Households - Theories Of The Family (topic 3) Flashcards
What is Murdocks perspective on the family?
Murdock argues that the family is a universal institution, meaning it exists in every society, though its specific forms may vary. He identified four key functions of the family, which he believed are essential to the stability and functioning of society:
1. Sexual Regulation : the family controls sexual behaviour, promoting monogamous relationships between adults. This regulation ensures stable relationships and prevents social disruption from unregulated sexual activity. - this benefits the capitalists as their wealth gets passed down without any other relations interrupting it damaging not on,y their reputation but the future generations wealth.
2. Reproduction : the family is responsible for the reproduction that raising of children, ensuring the continuation of society.
3. Socialisation : the family okays a key role in the socialisation of children, teaching them the norms, values and roles necessary for functioning in society.
4. Economic support : the family provides economic support and care for its members, especially children and the elderly.
What are some criticisms of Murdocks view?
Marxists critique that Murdock overlooks how the family helps maintain capitalist society by socialising children to accept their future roles as workers. The family reinforces class inequalities, with wealthier families providing better opportunities, while poorer families remain at a disadvantage. The nuclear family solely benefits the ruling class which exploits the working class. It is also seen as an ideological institution that teaches children to accept authority and social roles helping to sustain the capitalist system.
Feminists critique that Murdock overlooks how the nuclear family enforces traditional gender roles, with women often confined to caregiving and men as breadwinners. This division reinforces gender inequality and limits women’s independency. Feminist claim that Murdock ignores how the family can be oppressive for women, who bear the burden of unpaid domestic labour. This unequal distribution of work reinforces women’s subordination.
What is Parsons functional fit theory on family?
He argues that the nuclear family fits the needs of industrial society and is the dominant family type in that society, while the extended family fits the needs of pre-industrial society.
In Parsons’ view, when Britain began to industrialise, from the late 18 century onwards, the extended family began to give way to the nuclear. This was because the emerging industrial society had different needs from pre-industrial society, and the family had to adapt to meet these needs.
1. A geographically mobile workforce:
In traditional pre-industrial society, people often spent their whole lives living in the same village, working on the same farm. By contrast, in modern society, industries constantly spring up and decline in different parts of the country, even different parts of the world, and this requires people to move to where the jobs are.
Parsons argues that it is easier for the compact two-generation nuclear family to move, than for the three-generation extended family. The nuclear family is better fitted to the need that modern industry has for a geographically mobile workforce.
2. A socially mobile workforce:
Modern industrial society is based on constantly evolving science and technology and so it requires a skilled, technically competent workforce. It is therefore essential that talented people are able to win promotion and take buthle has important jobs, even it they come from very humble backgrounds.
In modern society, an individual’s status is achieved by their own efforts and ability, not ascribed (fixed at birth) by their social and family background, and this makes social mobility possible. For example, the son of a labourer can become a doctor or lawyer through ability and hard work.
For this reason, Parsons argues, the nuclear family is better equipped to meet the needs of industrial society. In the extended family, adult sons live at home in their father’s house - where the father has a higher ascribed status as head of the household.
However, at work, the son may have a higher achieved status (a more important job) than his father. This would inevitably give rise to tension and conflict if they both lived under the same roof.
What are criticisms of Parsons functional fit theory?
Parsons theory assumes that the family evolves to fit the needs of society in a harmonious, consensus driven way. Critics argue that this view neglects the conflict and power imbalances within families and society (e.g. class an gender). Feminists and diverse theorists argue that this neglects the diversity of family forms and ignores the negative aspects of the nuclear family such as gender inequality or the oppression a lot of women face.
What is Marxists perspective on the family with inheritance of property?
Marxists argue that the family plays a crucial role in the transmission of wealth across generations. In capitalism societies, private property is often passed down within families, ensuring that economic power remains concentrated within a certain social classes. As wealth is inherited it helps to preserve class division because wealth stays within the same family or class, preventing it from being redistributed to the lower class. In this sense, the family is not just a unit of emotional support or reproduction but a key mechanism for maintaining capitalist structures by securing the accumulation of wealth among the bourgeoisie and passing it on to the next generation.
What is Engels argument with inheritance of property (private property)?
In Engels view monogamy became essential because of the inheritance of private property - men had to be certain of the paternity of their children in order to ensure that their legitimate heirs inherited from them. The rise of the monogamous nuclear family represented a world historical defeat of the female sex. This was because it brought the women’s sexuality under male control and turned her into a mere instrument for the production of children.
What is Marxists argument on the family with ideological functions?
The family teaches values that benefits capitalism such as respect for authority the acceptance of hierarchical roles (e.g. parents having control over children) and the notion of private property. This socialisation process helps to ensure that children grow up to bc compliant workers who accept the class structure and capitalists economy. Families so often socialise into gender roles, which can reinforce traditional division of labour. For example women are often socialised to domestic roles, which benefits the capitalist system by ensuring a source of unpaid labour for raising the next generation of workers (warm bath theory).
What is Marxists arguments on family with a unit of consumption?
The family functions as a unit of consumption in a capitalists economy. This means that families purchase goods and services, thereby contributing to the economy and maintaining consumer demand. Capitalist thrives in constant consumption and the family unit is central to this. Families buy goods such as food, clothes, and entertainment which benefits capitalists enterprises by creating demand for products.
What are criticism of Marxists perspectives?
- Marxists tend to assume that the nuclear family is dominant in capitalist society. This ignores the wide variety of family structures found in society today.
- Feminists argue that the Marxists emphasis on class and capitalism underestimates the importance of gender inequalities within the family. In the feminists view, these are more fundamental than class inequalities and the family primarily serves the interests of men, not capitalism.
- Functionalist argue that Marxists ignore the very real benefits that the family provides for its members.
What is the liberal feminists perspective on the family?
Liberal feminists are focused on advocating for equal rights and opportunities for women, including equal pay and an end to discrimination in the workplace, as well as against sex discrimination.
• They maintain that we are moving towards greater equality, but that complete equality will require additional reforms as well as changes in the attitudes and socialisation patterns of both sexes. They contend that women’s oppression is being gradually lifted through changes in the law and in people’s attitudes, such as the Sex Discrimination Act (1975), which forbids discrimination in the workplace.
Regarding the family, they share a viewpoint with proponents of the march of progress theory like Young and Willmott. Liberal feminists contend that although there has been some progress, complete gender equality in the home has not yet been attained.
According to certain research, for instance, males are performing more household chores, and parents now socialise their children more equally and have similar goals for them than they did in the past.
Liberal feminists, on the other hand, are criticised by other feminists for not addressing the root causes of women’s oppression and for assuming that legal or cultural reforms will be sufficient to achieve equality.
What are Marxists feminists perspectives on the family?
Marxists feminists argue that the main cause of women’s oppression in the family is not men, but capitalism. Women’s oppression performs several functions for capitalism:
Through their unpaid household work, socialisation of the next generation of workers, and upkeep and maintenance of the existing one, women reproduce the labour force. They also take on the resentment that would otherwise be aimed at capitalism. Wives are ‘takers of shit’ who absorb their husbands’ frustrations due to their exploitation and isolation at work, according to Fran Ansley (1972). This explains male domestic violence against women, according to Marxists.
• When more labour is required, women can be called upon as a cheap labour pool. Employers can ‘let them go’ when they are no longer required so they can resume their primary function as unpaid domestic workers.
Marxist feminists believe that the exploitation of the working class is connected to the subjugation of women within the home. They contend that a socialist revolution that replaces capitalism with a classless society must also eliminate the family.
What are radical feminists view on the family?
Men are the root of women’s exploitation and oppression, making them the enemy. The two most important institutions in a patriarchal culture are the family and marriage. Men control women through sexual and domestic violence or the threat of it, and they profit from the unpaid domestic work and sexual services provided by women.
Radical feminists believe that the patriarchal system must be abolished. They believe that the family, in particular, is the source of women’s oppression and should be eliminated. They contend that separatism is the only way to accomplish this and that women must band together to live apart from men.
“Political lesbianism,” the belief that heterosexual relationships are inherently oppressive because they include “sleeping with the enemy,” is advocated by many radical feminists.
The fact that women now have more access to divorce, better employment possibilities, control over their own fertility, and the freedom to choose whether to marry or live together is something that radical feminists like Jenny Somerville (2000) fail to acknowledge.
Additionally, Somerville contends that secession is unlikely to succeed because of heterosexual desire.
Somerville acknowledges that women have not yet attained complete equality, though. She contends that in order to foster greater equality between couples, “family friendly” policies—like more flexible working hours—are necessary.
What does the personal life perspectives argument on functionalists, Marxists and feminists view?
- They tend to assume that the traditional nuclear family is the dominant family type. This ignores the increased diversity of families in our society.
- They are all structured theories. They assume that families and their members are simply passive puppets manipulated by the structure of society to perform certain functions (e.g. to provide the economy with a mobile labour force, or serve the needs of capitalism or a man).
What is the sociology of personal life?
The sociology of personal life is a new perspective on families. It is strongly influenced by interactionist ideas and argues to understand families. The personal life perspective considers relationships beyond traditional family ties, focusing on the meanings of personal or intimate relationships beyond blood or marriage ties. It highlights that a person may not feel close to their own sister but also care for someone they are not related to, such as an elderly woman who cohabited with her late father. This perspective helps understand how people might act and navigate various personal or intimate relationships beyond traditional family ties.
Everyone has a different way of conventionally defining someone as family and these include all kinds of relationships that individuals see as significant and that give them a sense of identify, belonging or relatedness such as:
- Relationship with friends = who may be like a sister or brother to you.
- Fictive kin =close friends who are treated as relatives, for example your mum’s best friend who you call ‘auntie’.
- Gay and lesbian ‘chosen families’ = made up of a supportive network of close friends, ex-partners and others, who are not related by blood or marriage.
- Relationships with dead relatives = who live on in people’s memories and continue to shape their identities and affect their actions.
- Even relationships with pets = For example, Becky Tipper (2011) found in her study of children’s views of family relationships, that children frequently saw their pets as ‘part of the family’.
What might be some problems with donor conceived children?
Nordqvist and Smart’s research revealed that the issue of blood and genes can raise various feelings among parents. Some emphasize the importance of social relationships over genetic ones in forming family bonds, while others may feel uncomfortable if their child looks like them. Differences in appearance also raise questions about the donor’s identity and potential ‘donor siblings’. For lesbian couples, concerns about equality between genetic and non-genetic mothers and the donor being treated as the’real’ second parent are also raised.
Evaluation of the personal life perspective.
Nordqvist and Smart’s study illustrates the value of the personal life perspective as compared with top down, structural approaches. It helps us to understand how people themselves construct and define their relationships as ‘family’, rather than imposing traditional sociological definitions of the family (based on blood or genes, for example) from the outside.
However, the personal life perspective can be accused of taking too broad a view. Critics argue that, by including a wide range of different kinds of personal relationships, we ignore what is special about relationships that are based on blood or marriage.
The personal life perspective rejects the top down view taken by other perspectives, such as functionalism. Nevertheless, it does see intimate relationships as performing the important function of providing us with a sense of belonging and relatedness.
However, unlike functionalism, the personal life perspective recognises that relatedness is not always positive. For example, people may be trapped in violent, abusive relationships or simply in ones where they suffer everyday unhappiness, hurt or lack of respect.
