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

Abstract

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, institutionalised, 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.

Constructions, reconstructions and deconstructions of ‘family’ amongst people who live apart together (LATs)

“…Similarly to previous research suggesting that family belonging is often created by marriage and blood ties (Jamieson et al ; Gilding ; Edwards et al ), a third of our interviewees saw their family as constructed around legal and kin bonds. These LATs referred to the default bonds of ‘whoever comes with the package’ to draw the boundary around their family and seemed to prioritise the importance of these over other connections, such as friends.…”

Higher Stakes: Generational Differences in Mother and Daughters’ Feelings about Combining Motherhood with a Career

“…A substantial 64% of the mothers' generation described themselves as feminists and the clear objective of the liberal feminism they grew up with was to achieve equality for women in the workplace (see, for example, Lorber 2010). in the 1990s saw children as a social asset for the state, and this led to a plethora of policy interventions, including the championing of parenting advice and skills (Edwards et al 2012). Other markers include the growing public scrutiny of how one is ' expected' to mother, which is facilitated by the media and, especially, the internet.…”

Theorizing Family Change: A Review and Reconceptualization

“…Therefore, even if one were to conclude with Cherlin () that the proper characterization of marital life today is something akin to a “marriage‐go‐round”—a play on words to describe the increasingly common cycling back and forth by individuals between “normative” ideals of marriage and the cultural ideals of an expressive individualism—the marriage‐go‐round frames the individual's relation to marriage as “just one life‐style among others” (Giddens, , p. 154). Situating itself as part of a wider individualization process that comes with modernity (Bauman, ) and a detraditionalization of virtually everything in society (Heelas, Lash, & Morris, ), the deinstitutionalization approach contends that a “qualitative change in the character and meaning of commitment and relationships” has occurred (Edwards, McCarthy, & Gillies, , p. 733).…”

“…For some, the worry is that, despite the value of recognizing diversity and renewing “ideas about personal life and kinship informed by notions of relationality rather than individualism. .. [such conceptualizations] cannot deal with any meaning of family as a collective fusion beyond an aggregation of individual persons‐in‐relationships” (Edwards et al, , p. 735). It may be that theorizing family remains “hard to grasp through theoretical and methodological frameworks that emphasize the individual, however relationally conceived” (Edwards et al, , p. 735).…”