What has been the impact of industrialisation on family and kinship organisation? Illustrate the significance of kinship organisation in the industrial societies. (1995)
In kinship-based and peasant societies, kinship is the organising principle of social life: it allocates land, work, authority, marriage partners and protection. Industrialisation separated work from home and status from birth, which transformed this organisation. Research shows that it reshaped kinship rather than abolishing it.
Impact of industrialisation
- Nuclearisation and neo-local residence. Talcott Parsons argued that a mobile, achievement-based economy favours the structurally isolated nuclear family, whose ties with wider kin become voluntary.
- Decline of corporate kin groups. William J. Goode (World Revolution and Family Patterns, 1963) found clans and lineages losing control over property, jobs and marriage everywhere industry spread. He also found a trend towards free spouse choice and greater rights for women and children.
- Loss and transfer of functions. Production, education and welfare moved to factories, schools and the state. The family became a unit of consumption specialising in socialisation and emotional support.
- From ascription to achievement. Occupational status no longer follows lineage position, which weakens the authority of elders and patriarchs.
- Changing gender roles. Women’s wage work and schooling led, over time, from segregated to more joint conjugal roles (Michael Young and Peter Willmott, The Symmetrical Family, 1973).
Significance of kinship in industrial societies
Kin as a resource in early industry
- Michael Anderson found that 23% of households in Preston in 1851 contained other kin. Kin shared rent, cared for children while mothers worked, and insured against sickness and unemployment.
- Tamara Hareven (Family Time and Industrial Time, 1982) showed that kin networks recruited and trained workers at New Hampshire’s Amoskeag mills. They also placed relatives in jobs and eased migration.
Kin in mature industrial society
- Eugene Litwak (1960) identified the modified extended family: separate households joined by help with money, childcare and care in illness.
- Peter Willmott (1988) described the dispersed extended family. Julia Brannen (2003) found “beanpole” families with strong vertical ties, as grandparents provide childcare and financial help.
Kinship and capital Family firms remain central to industrial economies. India had 111 companies in the Credit Suisse Family 1000 database (2018), the third-highest number after China and the USA.
Indian illustrations
- Milton Singer (1968) found that Madras industrialists used a modified joint family to supply capital, trust and managers. Marwari and Chettiar business houses show kinship driving industry rather than being dissolved by it.
- I. P. Desai found that urban kin support rural relatives with hospital care, schooling and jobs, and caste-kin networks still guide migrants to urban work.
- Kinship also shapes mobility itself. In PLFS 2020–21, 86.8% of female migrants had moved on marriage, and 17.5% of male migrants had moved because a parent or the family’s earning member migrated.
- A. M. Shah showed that residentially separate households often remain one family in property, ritual and obligation.
Conclusion
Industrialisation weakened the corporate, obligatory character of kinship and strengthened the conjugal unit. Kinship survived as a flexible, elective network that supplies care, capital, jobs and identity where market and state fall short. In India, and even in the West, industrial society has been built partly on kinship, not simply in place of it.