Theorizing Family Change: A Review and Reconceptualization

Abstract

We review how recent family scholarship theorizes recent family change as either a process of deinstitutionalization, in which family can no longer be understood in institutional terms, or a process of diversification, in which family life is expanding but not losing its institutional character. We argue that both approaches emerge out of and depend on a social institutional framework for understanding family that was developed in 20th‐century sociology. Despite producing a wealth of research, both approaches have difficulty adequately conceptualizing the institutional character of family and providing ways of theorizing family change. We introduce an alternative to a social institutional framework, a Weberian institutional logics approach, which provides a different way to understand the institutional character of family life and thereby affords new interpretations and avenues for theory and research on family change in the 21st century.

Degrees of Change: An Assessment of the Deinstitutionalization of Marriage Thesis

“…Nevertheless, many theorists have written about how change occurs, even if slowly and with resistance. Building on the cultural‐cognitive pillar, one framework for change focuses on institutional logics—the sets of cultural symbols and material practices by which people organize and provide meaning to their daily activities (Knapp & Wurm, ; Thornton, Ocasio, & Lounsbury, ). From this perspective, the family can be seen as having an institutional logic that differs from the logics of other institutions such as the labor market or the bureaucratic state.…”

“…Moreover, in theoretical terms, scholars have questioned whether a framework based on institutional decline is useful at all in understanding contemporary family change (Knapp & Wurm, ). In thinking about this question, it would help to have a stronger theoretical basis than I provided.…”

Multidimensional family development theory: A reconceptualization of family development

“…The theory has also included many aspects of life course theory (Elder, 1998) since the work of Aldous (1990). However, the extant theory continues to be rooted in a social institutional approach, which has fallen into disuse over the last 30 years or so (Cherlin, 2010; Knapp & Wurm, 2019). Because many scholars no longer ascribe to a social institutional approach to the study of families and family diversity, FDT—despite its advancements—is far less relatable to the work done by these scholars.…”

“…Decades of scholarship on family development suggest that despite some commonalities, family stages are not universal (Rodgers & White, 1993), and recent scholarship reflects plurality in conceptualizing how individuals and families are changing (Knapp & Wurm, 2019). In MDFT, stages are viewed as fluid and non‐stepwise, and emerge through interactions of family members' respective roles.…”

Marriage counterfactuals in Japan: Variation by gender, marital status, and time

“…These family changes have been viewed as evidence that marriage is undergoing deinstitutionalization, which has been defined in terms of the rise of marriage alternatives and a decline in the dominance of marriage (Cherlin 2004(Cherlin , 2020 as well as the lesser governance of spouses' behaviors by social norms (Cherlin 2004(Cherlin , 2020Lauer and Yodanis 2010). An alternative perspective is diversification, which does not focus on understanding family change in terms of the marital institution but in other ways, including personal life and relationships (for a comprehensive discussion, see Knapp and Wurm 2019). However, putting aside questions of whether alternatives to marriage (i.e., contexts external to the institution) should be interpreted in terms of deinstitutionalization or diversification, in this paper we focus on a less-studied aspect of marriage, namely, how social, economic, psychological, and personal dimensions of the marital experience, or what might be considered features of the internal context of marriage, are changing over time and across relevant stakeholders.…”