Functionalism and the Family
- Created by: BWards18
- Created on: 14-06-17 18:32
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- Functionalist View of the Family
- Core Concepts
- Functionalists believe that the family plays a role in the maintenance of the social system
- Consensus
- Macro Approach
- Organic Analogy - representing how all institutions are interdependent on each other
- Brain - Political System
- Lungs - Education System
- Heart - Economy
- Liver - Pollice/Law Enforcement
- Private Parts - The Family
- Murdock
- Nuclear Family is best at performing the following functions and is essential in all 250 societies he studied
- Sexual and Reproduction - Nuclear Family provides the best opportunity for socially controlled expression of sex drive'
- Socialisation - Clear, Identifiable roles
- Economic - 'units of production and consumption'- contributing to the circular flow of income
- Bell and Vogel
- Highlights the dysfunctional aspects of the nuclear family
- Children are scape-goats - parents come home and take out their stress on the children
- Seen as good as it creates calmness at work making the parents more productive at work
- Parsons
- Believes the family performs two functions - Primary Socialisation and Stabilisation of Adult Personalities
- They also have traditional views on gender roles
- Men perform an instrumental role - 'Breadwinner'
- Women play an expressive role - 'Emotion Work'
- There fore stating that a women's job was to relieve men's stress from the alienation of capitalism - 'Warm Bath Theory'
- 'Loss of Functions Thesis' - Pre-Industrail families lived in extended families so performed many functions/roles
- After Industrialisation - Families had to be mobile so became nuclear families leading to a loss of functions as specialisation/differentiation toke place
- Criticisms
- Functionalists overplay the harmonious nature of the family
- OAKLEY - Disagrees with Parsons notion of expressive and instrumental roles
- DOBASH and DOBASH - Violent husbands and wife battering
- Doesn't consider the mergence of other family types
- Core Concepts
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