Industrialisation & the family

• Pre-industrial families


  Large, extended families, where the family acted as a unit of production working in agriculture
• Industrial revolution


  Required people to move to urban areas
• Nuclear families


  More geographically mobile and also socially mobile (in that there was less expectation for a son to keep doing what his father did)
• Urban nuclear families


  People had an achieved status rather than an ascribed status (it was more meritocratic)
• Men


  Worked in industry
• Women


  Took on a domestic role (were the expressive leaders rather than the instrumental leaders)
• Nuclear family


  Had a functional fit with an industrial society
• Talcott Parsons (1951): 'Argued that...'