Unit 1 SCLY1 - Culture and Identity; Families and Households; Wealth, Poverty and Welfare
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Sociological Theories of The Family
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Unit 1 SCLY1 - Culture and Identity; Families and Households; Wealth, Poverty and Welfare
Institution
AQA
Looking for a comprehensive and detailed set of revision notes for AQA A-Level Sociology Families & Households? Look no further than this in-depth Google Document, which covers all of the key sociological perspectives on the family, including postmodernists, marxists, functionalists, personal life ...
Unit 1 SCLY1 - Culture and Identity; Families and Households; Wealth, Poverty and Welfare
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Theories On The Family
The Functionalist Perspective
Overview
★ Society is based on a value consensus in which society socialises
its members to enable them to cooperate harmoniously to meet
society’s needs + achieve shared goals
★ CONSENSUS THEORY
★ The family is a fundamental building block of society
Murdock (1949)
★ The family performs four essential functions to meet the needs
of society + its members: SEER - stabilisation of the sex drive,
education/socialisation, economic and reproduction
★ Stabilisation of the sex drive (with the same partner)
preventing the social disruption caused by a sexual ‘free-for-all’
★ Reproduction of the next generation, without which society
could not continue
★ Socialisation of the young into society’s shared norms and values
★ Meeting its members’ economic needs, such as food and shelter
★ He argues that the sheer practicality of the nuclear family as a
way of meeting these four needs explains why it is universal –
found in all human societies without exception
Criticisms of Murdock
★ The 4 functions could be performed equally well by other
institutions, or by non-nuclear family structures
, ★ Marxists and feminists reject his ‘rose-tinted’ harmonious
consensus view that the family meets the needs of both wider
society and all the different members of the family
★ Feminists see the family as serving the needs of men and
oppressing women
★ Marxists argue that it meets the needs of capitalism, not those
of family members or society as a whole
Parsons (1955)
★ Functional Fit Theory
○ the functions that the family performs will depend on the
kind of society in which it is found
○ argues that the particular structure and functions of a
given type of family will ‘fit’ the needs of the society in
which it is found
○ 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
○ when Britain began to industrialise, from the late 18th
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
○ the industrial society has two essential needs:
■ A geographically mobile workforce
● in modern society, industries constantly spring up
and decline in different parts of the country and
, even in different parts of the world, and this
requires people to move to where the jobs are
● it’s easier for the compact two-generation
nuclear family to move, than for the
three-generation extended family
■ A socially mobile workforce
● Modern industrial society is based on constantly
evolving science and technology and so it requires
a skilled, technically competent workforce
● In modern society, an individual’s status is
achieved by their own efforts and ability, not
ascribed by their social and family background,
and this makes social mobility possible
● The nuclear family encourages social mobility as
well as geographical mobility
■ The result is the mobile nuclear family, which is
‘structurally isolated’ from its extended kin
● Though it may keep in touch with them, it has no
binding obligations toward them
★ Loss Of Functions
○ The pre-industrial family was a multi-functional unit
■ It was a more self-sufficient unit than the modern
nuclear family, providing for its members’ health and
welfare and meeting most individual and social needs
○ when society industrialises, the family not only changes its
structure from extended to nuclear, but it also loses many
of its functions
■ the family ceases to be a unit of production and the
family becomes a unit of consumption only (for
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