Family, daily life and social inequality in Europe1

Couples and Family Therapy in Clinical Practice, 2015

In the year 2010, the author conducted a sociological research aimed to study family of Ural singleindustry city (mono-city). Processes in Ural families taking place in close connection with other social institutions are analyzed in this article. The author singles out three stages of Ural family evolution: period before the October revolution, Soviet period and modern period. Family of each period has its own characteristics preserving a steady kernel that consists of special attitude to labour, peculiarities of family lifestyle, certain communicational traditions in and outside a family. Woman played a significant part at every stage of family's existence in Ural. This fact is testified by historical sources and research papers including authoring research. In this article one can find assessments that female respondents gave to their marital relations as priority among other kinds of family relations. Besides, here we consider the reasons for women to be dissatisfied with their family life. These reasons are based on women's unrealized egalitarian sets that promote disappointment in their marriage. Research findings allow us to conclude that modern Ural woman living in a mono-city takes the lead in treating matrimony as a value. At the same time, patriarchal values usually initiated by a man are still being kept. The empirical basis of this paper is the ground for statement of changes in family culture.

2012

The family is a basic institution of society and it fulfils many functions. While several family functions are constant over centuries (like reproduction, socialization, emotional and physical support for family members, etc.), the content of these functions, the modalities of family formation, family structures or the stability of families may undergo important changes within relatively short periods, as has been the case in Hungary over the past twenty years. Economic and social processes and changes in people’s demographic behaviour in postsocialist Hungary have had a significant impact on family formation and structure. New forms of living arrangements have appeared and, even more significantly, previously marginal family types have gained in importance. With regard to the recent social processes, the most influential factors to have shaped family formation would include the expansion of higher education and the longer time spent in study, growing job insecurity and the rigidity...

Journal of Comparative Family Studies, 2006

Firstly, this paper intends to analyze the kind of relationships existing inside a family. In order to do that, the author makes an effort to reconsider its historical forming process applying classical anthropological texts. At this stage, the analysis proposes two different types of relationships between human beings: the primal, which arose from the most elementary feelings of love, protection, accompaniment and a strictly social relation rose from needs of cooperation and collective work. Family is an expression of both kinds of relationships. Secondly, this work analyzes nuclear family as a result of a historical process associated with the development of capital and social conditions, which make its consolidation possible. Thirdly, the author proposes a discussion about crisis of nuclear family under the contemporary global transformation perspective of capital accumulation. As a conclusion, it describes some reflections on perspectives that those transformations brought to th...

Population - INED, 2017

Key Concepts in Family Studies, Sage, 2012

2000

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

Last years have witnessed a growing interest in economics and cross-cultural studies in the role of the historical family as the instigator of disparate developmental trajectories. This new emerging literature has already provoked a considerable amount of controversy, involving debates on the precise underlying mechanisms, the role of non-familial institutions and the possibility of reversed causality, as well as the quality of historical data. Using novel historical database of European family this paper reaffirms the hypothesis that historical family organization could be one of the intermediate factors associated with developmental and value disparities among European nations today pointed out in earlier scholarship. We show that countries starting out from more patriarchal family structures in the past exhibit more hierarchical gender relations, more collectivist mindsets, and lower levels of economic and human development in the present. These findings suggest that the criticis...

Standard collective publications on European family history manifest large differences in their temporal structure. This article examines three examples from different countries and currents of research for the last five centuries. It discusses the question of whether, and to which degree, time theory can be applied to adjust and balance investigations of the domestic domain in the long run. For that purpose, this article uses the theoretical framework of US-American scholar Andrew Abbott. His work has provided important inputs for contemporary family research. Can we also use it for long-term investigations?

The Cambridge Handbook of Sociology

2008

In addition to the legal and statistical data, Durkheim used a wide range of historical and ethnographic data in his study on the family (Lamanna 2002). 9 Emile Durkheim (1908) Débat sur l'explication en historie et en sociologie. Bulletin de la société française de philosophie viii: 229-245.

Acta Poloniae Historica, 2008

Des registres paroissiaux a l'histoire de la population: manuel de depouillement et de l'exploitation de l'état civil ancien, Paris 1956. 2 N atural fertility is a demographic regime in which the num ber of children a couple has does not decrease the probability of another child being born. The definition stressing non-use of contraceptives is too general, for m eans of th at kind have always been used, for instance by putting off marriage, a m easure widely applied by populations in old times.

An essential part of the strategies used by families to secure their position in an ever changing social and economic environment was the mutual assignment of present and future tasks. Family members were given roles connected with domestic labour, education and careers, according to their sex, age and order of birth. These collective decisions could have far-reaching implications for marriage or migration. Family strategies structured the lives of individuals and were therefore reflected in their courses. This article is concerned with the question of whether it is possible to gain a better understanding of family strategies in the past by analyzing and comparing individual life courses. This question leads immediately to many others. Which sources and methods can be used to detect and compare patterns in these life courses? How were these patterns related to collective decisions? Were individual lives differently determined by family interests in different social groups and different historical periods? When and where did the influence of the family become weaker? Were the family strategies primarily concerned with survival, or were there long-term plans for improvement of the family situation? Did the interests of certain family members predominate? Finally, to what extent were family goals defined by rational economic calculations?

The Journal of African History, 1983

This paper explores some of the major methodological problems associated with the study of the history of the family in Africa. It sets out to explore the problem of the unit of analysis, concluding that the historian must be careful to distinguish between idealized family forms and the reality of family structures. Using both historical and contemporary examples from southern Malawi the paper explores this problem further by analysing the role of the matrilineage vis-à-vis the household over time.Both oral and written sources specifically concerned with the history of the family tend to emphasize the formal structure of kinship relations and it is difficult to know how these relate to the facts of social and economic organization. Even using present-day evidence it is difficult to integrate cultural perceptions of kinship and family relations with realities – in particular with the economic realities, which may change much faster than cultural norms. In the final section of the pap...