The family is the social institution responsible for biological and social reproduction: the sharing of material resources like food and shelter, the giving and receiving of care, and above all the socialization of children into the norms, values and skills of their society. Sociologists describe it as a child's 'family of orientation,' the group that locates them socially and carries out most of their early enculturation, while in adulthood the family also becomes an economically cooperative unit. Max Weber traced the modern Western nuclear-family model to a religio-cultural value system combining elements of Judaism, early Christianity, Roman Catholic canon law and the Protestant Reformation; Friedrich Engels, from a Marxist perspective, instead attributed the shift to economic causes. Extended, multigenerational households were the norm and economic necessity in agrarian societies, whereas industrialization reshaped it toward smaller, more mobile units. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
Facts
Institution TypeSourced to the subject's own accountKinship institution (also serves reproductive, socializing and economic functions) 1 Emergence PeriodSourced to the subject's own accountNot a single datable origin; anthropologist George Murdock's comparative study of 250 societies found some form meeting the definition of family in every one. Its extended, multigenerational form was consolidated as the dominant economic unit in the agrarian period, then reshaped again by industrialization. 1 The Family
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Adoption is the institution through which a child is formally incorporated into a family unit to which they are not born, carrying the full legal and social status of a biological child.
Oakley pioneering sociology of housework treated unpaid domestic labor within the family as real work structured by gender inequality.
Lareau Unequal Childhoods showed how class shapes family child-rearing logics, contrasting concerted cultivation with the accomplishment of natural growth.
The avunculate names a specific structured role within the extended family, most documented in matrilineal societies where a mother's brother assumes duties otherwise associated with fatherhood.
Frazier The Negro Family in the United States traced how slavery and its aftermath reshaped Black family structure in America.
Burgess, working alongside Park at the University of Chicago, described the family as a unity of interacting personalities, reframing family sociology around interpersonal process rather than fixed structure.
One of the two household-composition patterns the family institution can take; see also Nuclear Family.
Furstenberg long-running studies of adolescent parenthood and family change documented how family structure and the transition to adulthood shifted across generations.
The Hindu joint family system is a specific culturally elaborated form of the extended family institution, in which multiple generations and lineal relatives share a household, income and property.
Marriage is the socially and often legally recognized union that most societies treat as founding a family unit, though the two institutions are analytically distinct: marriage is the union, the family is the resulting kinship and residence group.
Chodorow The Reproduction of Mothering argued that the family gendered division of childcare reproduces gendered personality differences across generations.
One of the two household-composition patterns the family institution can take; see also Extended Family.
Ohana, the Hawaiian concept of extended family, is documented as encompassing not only blood and marriage relatives but also close non-kin bound by mutual obligation, an expanded form of the family institution.
Source Wikipedia: Patriarchy
The zadruga is a historically documented South Slavic institution of the joint extended family, in which multiple related nuclear families shared property, labor and household governance under a single head.
Informed By
Functionalist accounts treat the family as an institution meeting the reproductive and socializing needs of the wider social system.
Source Wikipedia: Family
Sources
1. Wikipedia: Family
Wikipedia- lead section; Weber and Engels discussion
Lead section, definition
Family (from Latin: familia) is a group of people related either by consanguinity (by recognized birth) or affinity (by marriage or other relationship).
- synthesized from lead section and comparative-anthropology discussion
Types section, Western family formation (Weber et al.)
According to the work of scholars Max Weber, Alan Macfarlane, Steven Ozment, Jack Goody and Peter Laslett, the huge transformation that led to modern marriage in Western democracies was fueled by the religio-cultural value system provided by elements of Judaism, early Christianity, Roman Catholic canon law and the Protestant Reformation.
History of theories section, Engels
Engels expanded Morgan's hypothesis that economical factors caused the transformation of primitive community into a class-divided society.
- Informed By: Structural Functionalism, lead section, functions of the family
View the Source Wikipedia: Patriarchy
WikipediaAssociated With: Patriarchy, overview section, authority structureView the Source Reader Challenges (0)
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