Sociology of the Families

The family has been a key topic for sociology since the days of the founding fathers. The ways in which people view and build families, and the variety of experiences and types of family life, are powerful indicators of the specific society and of social change. The sociology of the family also benefited from the contributions of related disciplines (history and demographics, first and foremost) and other perspectives (firstly women's studies, then gender studies). In this chapter I have taken an interdisciplinary view of the sociology of the family, selecting approaches that enabled us to distance ourselves from the “obviousness” of the family as a topic of study and the various ideological discourses that accompany it. These approaches help us to identify a number of dimensions of family life, focusing on the connections and the interdependencies between the family and other arenas of social change, such as technology and the world of work. I have shown how the family is a complex social actor, embedded in multiple interactions with society. Families influence us so profoundly that it is difficult to overstate their importance. Yet their power to shape our lives depends on their connections with other institutions. Families are shaped by the societies they inhabit, but they also have the power to transform those societies. In recent years, this has led to the study of different types of families, such as French or American or Swedish families; urban or rural families, families in the north or south; working class or middle class families, rather than “the family.” To use a metaphor coined by an American academic (1982 Thorne), the family can be seen as a fabric of different threads that make up a pattern. If you add or remove a thread, the pattern changes and if you detect a thread that was previously hidden, or had escaped your notice, your whole perception of the pattern changes.