Give a brief account of the trends in sociological analysis of change in traditional family and kinship systems in the face of industrialisation. (1993)
Sociological analysis of how industrialisation affects family and kinship has moved through distinct phases. It began with a thesis of breakdown and convergence, met a historical-revisionist challenge, and then gave way to conflict, feminist and non-Western readings that stress adaptation and diversity.
1. Breakdown and “fit”: the classical–functionalist trend
- Ferdinand Tönnies (Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, 1887) and Louis Wirth (“Urbanism as a Way of Life”, 1938) expected impersonal industrial-urban life to erode kin solidarity.
- Talcott Parsons (with Robert F. Bales, Family, Socialization and Interaction Process, 1955) argued that the isolated nuclear family fits industrial society. It permits geographical and social mobility and prevents clashes between ascribed family status and achieved occupational status. It also sheds functions while keeping two “basic and irreducible” ones: primary socialisation and the stabilisation of adult personalities.
- William J. Goode (World Revolution and Family Patterns, 1963) generalised this into a convergence thesis: clans decline, mate choice becomes free and the conjugal family spreads. He added that the ideology of the conjugal family travels faster than the economy.
2. Historical revisionism: continuity, not rupture
- Peter Laslett found only about 10% of English households between 1564 and 1821 containing extended kin. There was no large extended family for industry to destroy.
- Michael Anderson (Preston, 1851 census) found that 23% of households contained wider kin. Early industrialisation increased co-residence as mutual aid among the poor.
- Tamara Hareven (Family Time and Industrial Time, 1982) showed kin recruiting and protecting workers in New England mills. On this view, families act as agents, not victims, of industrialisation.
- Michael Young and Peter Willmott (Bethnal Green, 1957) and Eugene Litwak (the modified extended family) showed kin ties surviving without shared residence.
3. Conflict and feminist analysis
- Eli Zaretsky (Capitalism, the Family and Personal Life, 1976) argued that capitalism split home from work, turning the family into a private refuge that reproduces labour power.
- Ann Oakley (Housewife, 1974) held that the full-time housewife role is a product of industrialisation, and that talk of “symmetry” hides unequal domestic labour.
4. Indian studies: an adaptive joint family
- K. M. Kapadia (Navsari) and I. P. Desai (Some Aspects of Family in Mahuva, 1964) found jointness persisting in towns. Desai distinguished residential jointness from functional jointness.
- Milton Singer (1968) found that Madras industrialists used the joint family to pool capital and staff firms: tradition adapted to industry.
- A. M. Shah (The Household Dimension of the Family in India, 1973) and Pauline Kolenda read joint and nuclear households as phases of a developmental cycle. Kolenda showed jointness to be more common among landed upper castes.
- The trend continues. NFHS-5 (2019–21) recorded average household size falling from 4.6 to 4.4. The Maintenance and Welfare of Parents and Senior Citizens Act, 2007 shows the state stepping in to enforce filial duties that the family once enforced by itself.
Conclusion
Analysis has moved from a unilinear model, in which industry dissolves the extended family, to a multilinear one: kinship is reorganised, not destroyed, and outcomes depend on class, gender, culture and welfare provision. The Indian evidence of nuclear households with joint obligations confirms that industrialisation reshapes the form of kinship more than its salience.