The Family: Meaning and Functions

Essential functions

These are the ones no other institution has taken over.

Reproduction. The family is the socially approved arrangement for producing the next generation.

Physical maintenance and care. Feeding, sheltering and protecting the young, the sick and the old.

Socialisation. The primary agency, as [Socialization] sets out: language, norms, values, sex roles, religion, and the elementary morality.

Regulation of sexual behaviour. Together with marriage, which is the institution that licenses it.

Status ascription. The family confers a person's initial position: caste, class, religion, family name, nationality. Almost everything a person has by ascription rather than achievement comes from it, which is why the family is central to the analysis of inequality.

Emotional and psychological support. Affection, security and companionship, the function whose relative importance has grown most.

Non-essential functions, and how they have moved

These the family once performed and now shares with, or has surrendered to, specialised institutions. This transfer is one of the best answers available on Indian social change, and it is the pattern to learn.

Two conclusions follow, and both are examinable. First, the family has not lost its functions so much as specialised: it has surrendered the ones that can be done at scale and retained reproduction, socialisation and emotional support, which cannot. Second, where the family gave up a function, an institution and a body of law appeared to take it: labour law where production left the household, education law where teaching did, and maintenance and social security law where the care of the aged did. That is the single most useful proposition in this chapter for a law student.

A worked example

A weaver's family in a small town. The loom is at home. Children learn the trade by watching, and are working by twelve. The old are not retired, they do lighter tasks. Income is a household income, not an individual wage. There is no need for schooling, no need for a pension, and no wage to be regulated.

The same family after the loom is replaced by a mill in the next district. The adults leave the house to work. Children are no longer trained at home, so they must be schooled. Income is now individual and paid to the person who earned it, which alters authority inside the household. The old have no productive role, so their maintenance becomes a claim rather than a by-product. And the working relationship, once between father and son, is now between employer and employee.

Every institution and every branch of law that follows was called into existence by that move: compulsory education, factory and wage legislation, employees' provident fund and pension, maintenance of parents. The chapter's whole argument is in that one example, and an examiner asking about the changing functions of the family is asking for exactly this.

The criticisms of the functionalist account

A complete answer states them, because the standard treatment is uncritically warm about the institution.

The conflict criticism. The family reproduces inequality: it transmits property, caste and class, so it is one of the main mechanisms by which advantage is inherited. Marx's collaborator Engels argued that the monogamous family arose with private property in order to secure legitimate heirs, which is taken up in [Theories of the Origin of the Family].

The feminist criticism. The family is the principal site of the unequal division of labour: unpaid domestic and care work falls overwhelmingly on women, whose position within it is subordinate. The functionalist description of complementary roles conceals this. Time-use evidence, including India's own Time Use Survey, supports the criticism.

The dark side of the family. The institution described as the source of security and affection is, on the evidence, also the commonest setting for violence against women and children. Legislation addressed specifically to violence inside the household, including the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act 2005, exists because the family's private character shielded that violence from the ordinary law. An answer that omits this describes something that does not exist.

Diversity. The functionalist account describes one family type, the married couple with children, as though it were the family. Single-parent households, households of grandparents and grandchildren left by migration, households of unrelated adults, and families separated by long-distance work are all common and are not deviations from a norm.

Quick revision

1. Burgess and Locke: united by marriage, blood or adoption; one household; interacting in their social roles; creating a common culture.
2. Murdock's four elements: common residence, economic cooperation, reproduction, and a socially approved sexual relationship.
3. Characteristics: universality, emotional basis, formative influence, limited size, nuclear position, heavy responsibility, close social regulation, permanent as an institution and temporary in each instance.
4. Ogburn and Nimkoff: essential and non-essential functions.
5. Essential: reproduction, physical maintenance, socialisation, regulation of sex, status ascription, emotional support.
6. Non-essential, now transferred: production to firms, education to schools, health to hospitals, care of the aged to pensions and the state, religion to congregations, recreation to commercial media, protection to police and courts.
7. Where the family gave up a function, an institution and a body of law appeared to take it.
8. Criticism: it reproduces inequality; it rests on the unequal division of domestic labour; it is a common site of violence; and the standard account ignores the diversity of actual households.

Test yourself

1. Define the family and give Murdock's four elements. A group of persons united by ties of marriage, blood or adoption, constituting a single household and interacting in their respective social roles, in Burgess and Locke's formulation. Murdock's four elements are common residence, economic cooperation, reproduction, and the inclusion of adults of both sexes at least two of whom maintain a socially approved sexual relationship, together with one or more children.

2. Distinguish essential from non-essential functions and give three of each. Essential functions are those no other institution has taken over: reproduction, socialisation of children, and status ascription, to which are added physical maintenance, regulation of sexual behaviour and emotional support. Non-essential functions are those the family once performed and has largely surrendered to specialised institutions: economic production, now in firms; education, now in schools; and care of the sick and the aged, now in hospitals, insurance and pensions.

3. Has the family lost its functions? It has specialised rather than declined. It has surrendered the functions that can be performed at scale by specialised institutions, production, education, health care, protection, and retained those that cannot: reproduction, primary socialisation, status ascription and emotional support. Those retained functions are the ones most consequential for the individual, so the family's importance to a person has not fallen even as the number of its functions has.

4. Why does a lawyer care about the transfer of family functions? Because a body of law appeared wherever a function left the household. When production moved out, labour, wage and factory legislation followed; when training moved to schools, education law followed; when the care of the aged ceased to be a by-product of the joint household, maintenance and social security law followed. The pattern predicts where legal regulation appears: at the point where an informal family arrangement stops working.

5. Give three criticisms of the functionalist account of the family. That it reproduces inequality, transmitting property, caste and class and so making advantage heritable; that it rests on an unequal division of labour in which unpaid domestic and care work falls overwhelmingly on women, which the language of complementary roles conceals; and that it ignores the institution's dark side, since the family is on the evidence the commonest setting for violence against women and children, which is why legislation directed specifically at violence within the household became necessary.