What Is a Family and Why Does It Matter?
Esther Dermott2020, Social Sciences
Sign up for access to the world's latest research
checkGet notified about relevant papers
checkSave papers to use in your research
checkJoin the discussion with peers
checkTrack your impact
Abstract
The family is increasingly a site of political intervention as a locus of pervasive social inequalities and a potential resource for resolving injustices. Contemporary political theory has engaged in extensive debate about what justice in the family requires, but rather less on how family is understood: ethicists have tended to use placeholder definitions which dismiss the need to engage with real-world practices. We show that this is problematic because it obscures morally important aspects of day to day family life and risks taking privileged positions as representative. The paper proposes that theorists could gain from adopting the sociological ‘family practice’ framework, which we argue can form the basis of a distinct and plausible ethical theory of family. This can provide a fruitful basis for further research and engagement in political debate because it better conceptualizes contemporary family life. The paper therefore also illustrates how research from empirical social sci...
Related papers
Wishful Thinking and Harmful Tinkering? Sociological Reflections on Family Policy
Journal of Social Policy, 1997
The politics of the family today
Irish Marxist Review, 2019
The one model of the 'natural' family, promoted by right wing lobby groups, is a myth. It is argued that a Marxist explanation of the family shows how the family suits capitalism, is linked to social class, and also points the way to radical change.
Introduction: Family Minded Policy and Whole Family PracticeDeveloping a Critical Research Framework
Social Policy and Society, 2010
The politics of concepts: family and its (putative) replacements
The British Journal of Sociology, 2012
The central concern of this paper is that there has been a move within British sociology to subsume (or sometimes, even replace) the concept of 'family' within ideas about personal life, intimacy and kinship. It calls attention to what will be lost sight of by this conceptual move: an understanding of the collective whole beyond the aggregation of individuals; the creation of lacunae that will be (partially) filled by other disciplines; and engagement with policy developments and professional practices that focus on 'family' as a core, institutionalized, idea. While repudiating the necessity (and indeed, pointing out the dangers) of providing any definitive answer to definitions of 'family', the paper calls for critical reflection on the implications of these conceptual moves.
The Family and Justice in Political Philosophy
The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics, 2020
Political philosophers´ interest in the family - understood as a unit in which one or more adults discharge a socially and legally recognised role as primary carers of their children – has a long pedigree. But there is no doubt that over the last half century philosophical discussions of the family have intensified and given rise to an increasingly rich and multi-faceted body of literature. After briefly introducing the key reasons why political philosophers have been interested in the family, this chapter discusses two main sets of questions that arise concerning justice and the family. The first set of questions are about what the family owes society as a matter of justice, that is, about how the family can and should help realise, or how it may hinder the achievement of, independently formulated demands of justice. For example, does the existence of the family necessarily threaten the pursuit of equality of opportunity for children? Should prospective parents constrain their freedom to found and raise a family in light of considerations about the environmental impact that their having and rearing children will have for future generations? The second set of questions concern what society owes families, that is, what we owe our fellow citizens as a matter of justice, insofar as they are actual or potential members of families: Do adults have a right to parent, and to parent particular children? Do children have a right to being raised in families? Should society share in the costs of having and raising children, or may it let most or all of those costs fall on the shoulders of those who freely choose to become parents?
Family matters and the state: policy and everyday life
Transformation, 1992
The ANC's Working Document 'A Bill of Rights for a New South Africa ' (1990) has, under Article 7 'GenderRights', that 'Men and women shall enjoy equal rights... within the family'. Similarly, its 'Constitutional Guidelines for a New South Africa' state that 'the family, parenthood and equal rights within the family shall be protected'. The ANC has not been alone in such formal declarations -in the Freedom Charter it was asserted that 'the laws which break up families shall be repealed';
Introduction: change and continuity in recent family policies
Journal of European Social Policy, 2010
Families have become a focal point in debates of ‘new risks’ and much needed ‘new policies’ for Western welfare states. Family policy responses to the new challenges and even the goals associated with welfare policies designed to aid families have, however, varied across countries, and there is much uncertainty about the sources of this variation and the future development of the policy field. This special issue takes stock of recent developments in the field of family policy. It brings together a range of countries that, taken together, map the full spectrum of advanced industrial countries’ family policy dilemmas, responses, and intervening institutional and ideational variables. Its goal is to take a first step towards explaining the varied degrees and forms of family policy activism in mature welfare states of Western liberal democracies. The introduction to the special issue first sketches the changing nature and social roles of the family, as they evolved along with public law...
Civil society: Bringing the family back in
Journal of Civil Society
This article explores the complex and contradictory positioning of the family within civil society literature. In some accounts, the family is seen as the cornerstone of civil society. In others, the family is positioned firmly outsideeven antithetical tocivil society. This paradox arises from the ways in which civil society is variously defined through a series of binary oppositionsin relation to each of which the family sits uneasily. And while feminist critiques have tried to bring women back into view, they too tend to marginalize the family. In addition, the normative nature of these oppositions has meant that while civil society tends to be seen as the property of the political 'left', the family is often associated with the political 'right'. The article argues that we need to move beyond oppositional definitions of civil society and assumptions about the family if we are to understand the multiple ways in which the family is implicated as not only the 'reproducer' of particular resources and dispositions but as a principal source and focus of civil society engagement and activism.
Papadopoulos T. & Roumpakis A. (2019) 'Family as a socio-economic actor in the political economy of welfare' in Heins E., Rees J. and Needham C. (eds.), Social Policy Review No 31, Bristol: Policy Press
Social Policy Review No 31, 2019
In this chapter we provide a new conceptualisation of the family as a socio-economic actor. We propose a new research agenda that treats the terrain of family’s collective agency as a separate level of analysis. This agency is (re)defined and fundamentally affected by its interactions with both the state and the market in capitalism, especially as the latter evolves under the pressures of financialization. Our paper moves beyond narrow conceptualisations of the family as a care provider by elevating the family as an analytical concept in social policy research without resurrecting traditionalist or essentialist conceptualisations of (patriarchal) ‘family values’. We argue that the family is a social subjectivity that can generate unique relational goods. It comprises ‘infungible’ and irreplaceable properties in nurturing trustful, reciprocal and responsible social relations, essential for individual and societal wellbeing. At the same time, the family is an economic actor that co-ordinates and deploys different types of economic practices (i.e. householding, reciprocity, redistribution and market exchange) to secure the wellbeing of its members. Our approach challenges us to re-imagine the family’s socio-economic agency in its intersections of class, racial, gender and generational inequalities within the wider political economy of welfare. This is an urgent task, in light of successive waves of austerity and pro-market reforms that, while promoting the re-familization of social risks and costs, have been undermining families’ capacities to generate high quality relational goods and protect their members vis-à-vis both state and market failures.
Related papers
Response to Essays in PEGS Symposium on <i>The Place of Families</i>: Family Life, the Politics of the Family, and Social Transformation
The Good Society, 2008
The Family and Political Justice – The Case for Political Liberalisms
The Journal of Ethics, 2000
This paper examines two central arguments raised byfeminist theorists against the coherence andconsistency of political liberalisms, a recentrecasting of liberal theories of justice. They arguethat due to political liberalisms' uncritical relianceon a political/personal distinction, they permit theinstitution of the family to take sexist and illiberalforms thus undermining its own aims and politicalproject. Political liberalisms' tolerance of a widerange of family
Family and Justice in Political Philosophy
2020
Work for this article has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme (Grant Agreement Number: 648610; Grant Acronym: Family Justice).
The disorganized family: institutions, practices and normativity
The British Journal of Sociology, 2016
This paper considers the value of a normative account of the relationship between agents and institutions for contemporary efforts to explain ever more complex and disorganized forms of social life. The character of social institutions, as they relate to practices, agents and norms, is explored through an engagement with the common claim that family life has been deinstitutionalized. The paper argues that a normative rather than empirical definition of institutions avoids a false distinction between institutions and practices. Drawing on ideas of social freedom and creative action from critical theory, the changes in family life are explained not as an effect of deinstitutionalization, but as a shift from an organized to a disorganized institutional type. This is understood as a response to changes in the wider normative structure, as a norm of individual freedom has undermined the legitimacy of the organized patriarchal nuclear family, with gender ascribed roles and associated duties. Contemporary motherhood is drawn on to illustrate the value of analysing the dynamic interactions between institutions, roles and practices for capturing both the complexity and the patterned quality of social experience.
Family Minded Policy and Whole Family Practice – Developing a Critical Research Framework
Social Policy and Society, 2010
“Family Troubles” and “Troubling Families”: Opening Up Fertile Ground
Journal of Family Issues, 2019
The twin themes of 'family troubles', and 'troubling families', explored through this special issue, are closely linked, but they are also each distinct in themselves, and nuanced in particular ways, which we consider in this introductory discussion. We will also argue that these themes offer fertile ground for opening up new dialogue between contrasting bodies of work concerned with family lives and relationships. We are thus particularly delighted for the Journal of Family Issues to be hosting this special issue, since our twin themes are intended to cross (and indeed to question) such boundaries, and to encourage fresh perspectives as a result. The history and institutionalisation of family studies In what follows, we offer an account of family studies as siloed between a binary of 'the mainstream'-focused on what may be implicitly understood as 'ordinary' family lives-and 'the problematic'-focused on aspects of family lives that may be of interest to social policy experts, professionals and practitioners, and geared towards interventions of some sort. At the same time, we are conscious that these distinctions and contrasts are also perhaps understood in variable ways in different countries even within the affluent Minority worlds of Anglophone and Western European societies, let alone in Majority world countries. The account we offer here is primarily rooted in our UK based experience of family sociology on the one hand, and social policy and social work on the other. It has thus been our experience over many years that these are inclined to constitute distinct bodies of work, with limited dialogue between them either in publications or in conference venues, and, consequently, that this binary between the study of 'ordinary' and 'problematic' families is to some extent structurally embedded and institutionalised.
Family sociology as a theoretical enterprise? A personal reflection
Families, Relationships and Societies, 2022
David Morgan’s contributions to family sociology started from a direct engagement with theoretical perspectives, but his 1996 publication, Family Connections, took his family sociology in a new, somewhat ‘fuzzy’ direction. Two key motifs for his later work are the emphasis on ‘family’ as an adjective, and its fruitfulness when conjoined with the doing of ‘practices’. Yet his 1996 text also identified key theoretical themes he considered important for family sociology to retain. I trace some of the theoretical concerns that he carried forward in his later work, while drawing attention to some aspects that invite further development, including the significance of everyday family meanings, the challenge of considering ‘family practices’ beyond affluent Minority worlds, and the need to critique the ‘individual’ along with the ‘family’. I offer this discussion on the basis that family sociology is a central issue for sociology in general as a theoretical enterprise.
Key Concepts in Family Studies
2011
IntroducIng famIly studIeswhat thIs book Is about Family studies is a broad and fascinating area. In this book, we set out to offer what we hope is a thoughtful overview of the key concepts through which family lives may be explored, and to provide clear and even-handed signposts to the main debates at stake in many of these concepts, and associated readings. As an area of academic interest, however, family studies is not easy to define, not least because the core term 'family' has become a matter of considerable controversy and dispute. Although the word itself continues to be widely evident and generally unquestioned in everyday lives as well as in political debates and professional practices, researchers may ponder how to use it, or whether to use it at all. Many academics have grown wary of using the signifier 'the family' as this draws on stereotypes that fail to take account of, and marginalize, the realities of diverse family lives that do not fit the implicit model in 'the family', of a heterosexual two-parent nuclear family with breadwinning husband and father and home-making wife and mother. There are a variety of responses to these dilemmas within family studies. • Some researchers continue to use the term 'the family' unproblematically, often in practice referring to interrelated issues of residence, close ties based on blood or marriage, and the care of children. Talk about 'the family', in this way, is most likely to occur in discussions of broad patterns and structures, perhaps looking across different societies or examining how 'the family' as an institution relates to other major social institutions such as economic, employment or
Loading Preview
Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.