The Family as a Social Organization: Key Ideas for the Twenty-First Century

How should we study families as organizations in the new century? By evaluating how they are doing. At least that is how I think we should study families. We can evaluate any organization, including families as organizations, by deciding on what we value about them and then assessing the extent to which they produce what we value and under what circumstances they do so. This evaluation is always and necessarily ideological, since we frame our findings and make sense of them by valuing the processes or outcomes we are studying. This makes values a crucial part of the (sociological) research process a part that we too rarely make explicit. Scholars of the family need to think deliberately about the values that we apply to our research. And, of course, we need to think about the values that families apply to their lives and to choices about them. But families as organizations operate within institutional constraints; we also need to think about the institutional framework(s) within which families as organizations act. I organize this essay as follows: First, I outline the key functions of the family and describe the major changes in its form and structure over the last 50 years. Next, I argue that sociologists can and should evaluate organizations, including the family, by assessing their output. Then I provide an example from my work on marriage as a social institution. Next, I discuss some important institutional constraints on families as organizations, and finally I argue that social scientists should be, consciously, social activists in disseminating the implications of their research to the rest of the world.