The politics of concepts: family and its (putative) replacements

Research and Science Today

This article explores how people who live apart from their partners in Britain describe and understand 'family'. It investigates whether, and how far, non-cohabiting partners, friends, 'blood' and legal ties are seen as 'family', and how practices of care and support, and feelings of closeness are related to these constructions. It suggests that people in LAT relationships creatively draw and re-draw the boundaries of family belonging in ways that involve emotionally subjective understandings of family life, and that also refer to normative constructions of what 'family' ought to be, as well as to practical recognitions of lived family 'realities'. This often involves handling uncertainties about what constitutes 'family'.

Sociological Research Online, 2011

1.1 A good amount of sounding work is present in the sociological fields of family and relationship studies. This work informs the understanding and management of perceived crises in family life and anxieties around the stability of adult couple-parenting relationships that characterize political discourses, social policies and cultural narratives on relationships in the twenty-first century. These works have unpicked early functionalist views; they have built on issues of ethics of care, on social constructivist approaches to gender and on the latest feminist scholarship to carve new conceptual ground. It is incontrovertible that there have been major changes in the composition and experience of families and relationships over the past 50 years or so. In the UK the percentage of adults living in one-person households has doubled over this time; the proportion of single to married individuals has increased, as has the relative amount of divorced individuals . Individuals now live in a diverse range of intimate living arrangements and relationship formations. The conceptual challenge to researchers working in the field of family and relationship studies, and one taken up by the contributors to this Special Section, is how to carry on building concepts and finding new methods to capture the vitality of personal relationships while keeping sight of the social contexts, patterns and practices of contemporary intimate life.

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

Sociology-the Journal of The British Sociological Association, 2004

Making Families: Moral Tales of Parenting and Step-Parenting Durham: sociologypress, 2003, 17.50 pbk (ISBN 1 903457 05 X) Over the last decade the family has become interesting to sociology again. Not only have issues of family and personal relationships been taken up by major social theorists, but this means that theorizing about intimacy and relationships has a kind of sociological street cred that was never the case in the days of Willmott and Young in the 1960s or even when the patriarchal family was the focus of serious feminist critique in the 1980s. Alongside this new vogue is a longer running, indeed almost interminable preoccupation, namely the debate over the decline of 'the' family and the demise of proper family values. The power of this debate has, arguably, tended to frame the agenda of a considerable amount of recent sociological work on family life. It has reached into the work of the theorists such as Bauman and who now produce images of the future of families as dystopian as any produced by the pro-family right. The debate has also shaped much empirical work because it frames such a dominating question that it continues to demand an answer. As tiresome as the question of whether 'the' family is in decline or not has become, it has led to a regeneration of interest and to a renewed intellectual investment in understanding family and kinship. It has also given impetus to research on emergent or diverse modes of intimacy that are not defined by 1043 Sociology

The British Journal of Sociology, 2004

This paper takes issue with the way in which the individualisation thesis -in which it is assumed that close relationships have become tenuous and fragile -has become so dominant in 'new' sociological theorising about family life. Although others have criticised this thesis, in this paper the main criticism derives from empirical research findings carried out with members of transnational families living in Britain whose values and practices do not fit easily with ideas of individualisation. It is argued that we need a much more complex and less linear notion of how families change across generations and in time.

Journal of Social Policy, 1997

The Cambridge Handbook of Sociology

Journal of Family Communication, 2009

This study replicates and extends research initiated by Trost (1990). In particular, 181 university students provided perceptual data on the family status of each of 23 structural constellations. Participants were randomly assigned to one of four experimental groups that manipulated two independent variables: the linguistic term used to assess family status ("a family" vs. "family") and the attributed quantity of communication among constellation members (low vs. high in frequency of interaction). Results indicated that the presence of children, intactness, co-residence of family members, marriage, heterosexuality (but only in the absence of children), and non-fictive union increased perceptions of family status. Across all structural features, the attributed presence of frequent communication increased the perception of family status. "Family" is a hotly contested term among family scholars in general, including family communication scholars. Cheal (1993) observed that changes in societal demographics pushed family science in the 1980s and 1990s toward greater attention to alternative family structures beyond what Stacey (1990) termed the "modern" family based on a two-parent nuclear model. However, consensus is far from evident in the scholarly community. Relatively neglected is the layperson view on what a "family" is. In family communication, a classic study of layperson conceptions of "family" is Trost's (1990) survey among a Swedish population, later replicated among university students in the United States by Ford (1994). The current study