Page 93 - DSOC201_SOCIAL_STRUCTURE_AND_SOCIAL_CHANGE_ENGLISH

Social Structure and Social Change

Notes family is a “family of procreation,” the goal of which is to produce and enculturate and socialize
children. However, producing children is not the only function of the family; in societies with a
sexual division of labor, marriage, and the resulting relationship between two people, it is necessary
for the formation of an economically productive household.
A “conjugal” family includes only the husband, the wife, and unmarried children who are not of age.
The most common form of this family is regularly referred to in sociology as a nuclear family. A
“consanguineal” family consists of a parent and his or her children, and other people. Although the
concept of consanguinity originally referred to relations by “blood,” cultural anthropologists have
argued that one must understand the idea of “blood” metaphorically and that many societies
understand family through other concepts rather than through genetic distance. A “matrilocal” family
consists of a mother and her children. Generally, these children are her biological offspring, although
adoption of children is a practice in nearly every society. This kind of family is common where
women have the resources to rear their children by themselves, or where men are more mobile than
women.

4.1 Perspectives in Studying Family

Three approaches—functionalist, structuralist and interactionist—have mainly been used in evaluating
family. In the functionalist approach, family is regarded as a sub-system or as a part in relation to
society as a whole. Functionalists examine family in terms of: (a) set of functions it performs and its
contribution to the maintenance of the total social system, (b) functional relationships between the
family and other parts of social system, and (c) functions of family for its individual members. In the
structuralist approach, family is seen in terms of a pattern of inter-related statuses and roles at a
particular time and as an organized pattern of interrelated rights and obligations of its members. In
the interactionist approach, family is concerned with interaction between individual members. The
interactionist perspective, assuming that action is meaningful to those involved, seeks to understand
the meanings which family members give to their activities. The interactionists are, thus, concerned
with the definition of situations in family and the analysis of the way a family member interprets the
language, gestures and manners of other members which affects his behaviour and his interaction
with others. The interactionists are also concerned with the techniques of tension management related
to solidarity in family, that is, with personal and marital adjustment in the family. The functionalist
approach assumes a universality of certain functions of family and around specific functions, it
conceptualizes roles also. It further explains the relationship among family roles and considers the
change in family functions or family roles mainly due to change in society or in norms and values.
The structuralist approach assumes a universality of family statuses (like parent, grandparent, uncle,
etc.) in all societies and believes that variations in the roles of individual family members are associated
with these statuses. For example, in some societies, the grandfather or the eldest male member may
be entrusted with all of the property and personal rights of the members of the family (as in patriarchal
joint family in North India) while in other societies, the grandfather may have little or no authority.
The interactionist approach is concerned with the diversity of both structures and roles in family life.
Interactionists are interested primarily in studying the way in which these variations affect the relations
between members of the family group. The focus of the interactionist sociologist is on the extent to
which husband and wife, parents and children, and parents-in-law and daughters-in-law, etc. have
developed in contemporary families a modus operandi to maintain unity within the family. In describing
the modus operandi, they attempt to discover which aspects of interaction are important in personal
adjustment (for example, joint decision-making and the necessity of giving importance to each other’s
values and aspirations). It may, thus, be maintained that the functionalists analyze liaisons with
other groups and institutions, the structuralists focus on tradition maintenance for sustaining existing
norms and values, and the interactionists assess the sustaining of solidarity among members.
Our approach to the analysis of Indian family here is both structuralist and interactionist. The
assessment is based mainly on the empirical studies of sociologists like I.P. Desai, K.M. Kapadia,

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