Analyze critically David Morgan’s views on family practices. (2023)
David H. J. Morgan, a British sociologist, proposed family practices (Family Connections, 1996; Rethinking Family Practices, 2011) as a way out of an impasse. The structural approach of Talcott Parsons froze “the family” into one type. Radical postmodernism threatened to dissolve family analysis altogether. Morgan’s solution is to study not what the family is but what people do as “family”.
The core argument
- From noun to adjective. “Family” is a quality of certain activities, not a bounded group. People are not simply in a family; they are “doing” family.
- “Past-modern” stance. Borrowing the term from Rob Stones, Morgan combines feminism, interactionism and postmodern sensitivity to fluidity without abandoning empirical evidence or an independent social reality.
- Blurred boundaries. Family living overlaps with work, schooling, hospitals and leisure, which household statistics miss.
Six themes of family practices
- Actor and observer: how people themselves draw the line between family and non-family.
- Active, not passive: people construct gender and kin roles through action rather than merely occupying them.
- The everyday: how breakfast or bedtime is organised reveals as much as a wedding.
- Regularities: routines recur and are taken for granted.
- Fluidity: family practices flow into gendered, leisure and economic practices.
- History and biography: a family outing links to the wider history of leisure, transport and ideas of childhood.
Strengths
- Captures diversity. Carol Smart and Bren Neale (Family Fragments?, 1999) found post-divorce parenting creating “fragments of families spread across a number of households”. That is family done across households, not contained in one.
- Fits Indian evidence. A. M. Shah‘s distinction between household and family shows jointness practised across separate residences: shared rituals such as Raksha Bandhan, remittances and care of ageing parents.
- Resonates with law. In Deepika Singh v. CAT (2022), the Supreme Court recognised “atypical” families (single parents, unmarried partners, queer and blended families) as “as real as their traditional counterparts”. The test is what relationships do, not their form.
Critical appraisal
- Vagueness. If almost any activity can be a family practice, the concept loses analytical edge.
- Display is missing. Janet Finch (“Displaying Families”, 2007) argues that practices must also be displayed and recognised by others to count as family. This matters most for non-conventional families.
- Too narrow a frame. Smart (Personal Life, 2007) prefers “personal life”, which includes friends and chosen kin who fall outside “family”.
- Agency over structure. The emphasis on doing can understate power: patriarchy, property and state regulation. In India, caste endogamy, dowry and honour-based violence tightly constrain practices. Uma Chakravarti‘s “Brahmanical patriarchy” is a reminder that the family is also a structure of control. The Supreme Court’s refusal to recognise same-sex marriage in Supriyo v. Union of India (2023) shows that the state still defines which practices count.
- Western setting. It assumes a degree of individual choice unevenly available elsewhere.
Conclusion
Morgan’s lasting contribution is methodological. He moves family sociology from structure to process, and his attention to regularities and history keeps it from sliding into relativism. The concept is most powerful when combined with Finch’s display and with a structural analysis of power, especially in societies like India where family is both done and imposed.