Write short note on Industrialization and changes in the family’s functions. (2009)
In pre-industrial society the family was a multi-functional institution: a unit of production, school, welfare agency, church and court rolled into one. Industrialisation moved work to the factory and brought specialised institutions into being. Sociologists disagree on whether the family has consequently lost, specialised or enhanced its functions.
The loss-of-functions thesis
- William F. Ogburn (1933; with Meyer F. Nimkoff, Technology and the Changing Family, 1955) listed seven traditional functions: economic, protective, religious, recreational, educational, status-conferring and affectional. Technology and industry transferred the first six to factories, the police, churches, commercial leisure, schools and the occupational system. Only the affectional function grew.
- The Marxist Eli Zaretsky (Capitalism, the Family and Personal Life, 1976) showed that factory production separated home from workplace. The family changed from a unit of production into a unit of consumption and a private refuge from alienating work.
The specialisation thesis
Talcott Parsons called the modern family almost “functionless” at the macro level: it produces little and wields no political power. He insisted this made it more specialised, not less important. Through structural differentiation, it concentrates on two “basic and irreducible” functions, primary socialisation of children and stabilisation of adult personalities, which society now depends on more exclusively.
The enhancement thesis
- Ronald Fletcher (The Family and Marriage in Britain, 1966) argued that functions have “increased in detail and importance”. State schools and health services add to parental responsibility for children’s education and health rather than replacing it.
- Michael Young and Peter Willmott (The Symmetrical Family, 1973) saw the home-centred family forming an alliance with technology. Its consumer demand sustains industry and motivates workers.
The feminist corrective
Christine Delphy and Diana Leonard (Familiar Exploitation, 1992) deny that the family lost its productive function. Cooking, cleaning, care and childrearing remain unpaid production, done mainly by women. Ann Oakley (1974) showed that housework is real work.
The Indian picture
- Transferred functions. Schools, hospitals, banks, courts and, increasingly, the state have taken over tasks the joint family once did. Anganwadis provide early care, and old-age pensions and the Maintenance and Welfare of Parents and Senior Citizens Act 2007 make elderly care a legal duty.
- Retained functions. Kin networks still arrange marriages, confer caste status, run family firms and farms, and fund education: 95% of students name household members as their main source of funding (NSS Comprehensive Modular Survey: Education, 2025).
- Invisible production. Women who did unpaid domestic work spent 289 minutes a day on it, against 88 for men (Time Use Survey 2024), which supports Delphy and Leonard.
- Milton Singer and A. M. Shah show that industry in India has often adapted the joint family’s functions rather than stripping them away.
Conclusion
Industrialisation did not so much empty the family as redistribute its functions. Some moved to specialised institutions, some narrowed into emotional and socialising work, and others, notably unpaid care, stayed in the home unrecognised. In India the family remains unusually multi-functional, which is why functional change there is uneven and negotiated.