Functionalist

• Functionalists

  See the family as a sub-system - a basic building block of society
• George Peter Murdock (1949)


  • Argues that the family performs four essential functions to meet the needs of society and its members:
  • Stable satisfaction of the sex drive with the same partner, preventing the social disruption caused by a sexual 'free-for-all'
  • Reproduction of the next generation, without which society could not continue
  • Socialisation of the young into society's shared norms and values
  • Meeting its members' economic needs, such as food and shelter
• Murdock accepts that other institutions could perform these functions


  However, he argues that the sheer practicality of the nuclear family as a way of meeting these four needs explains why it is universal - found in all human societies without exception
• While few sociologists would doubt that most of these are important functions, some argue that they could be performed equally well by other institutions, or by non-nuclear family structures</b>
• Marxists and feminists reject Murdock's 'rose-tinted' harmonious consensus view that the family meets the needs of both wider society and all the different members of the family


  They argue that functionalism neglects conflict and exploitation
• Feminists

  See the family as serving the needs of men and oppressing women
• Marxists

  Argue that the family meets the needs of capitalism, not those of family members or society as a whole
• Similarities and differences can be seen between society and a biological organism such as the human body
• Alternatives to the nuclear family can be found at www.sociology.uk.net
• parsons functionally fit theory

  • a geographically mobile workforce - people were living in extended families but industrialisation caused people to move, therefore families broke up into branches of nuclear families.
  • a socially mobile workforce - there is competition between a son and father, the fathers ascribed status is higher than the son but the sons achieved status is higher