BG 2nd Semester Sociology

Social Institutions
 Family as a Social Institution
 People often use the word institution to mean an organization with some specific purpose, as
a public or charitable institution.
 Sometimes it is used to denote any set of people in organized interaction as a family or club
or government.
 According to Bogardus, a social institution is a structure of society that is organized to meet
the needs of people chiefly through well established procedures. These procedures are
recognized and accepted by society and govern the relations between individuals and groups.
 Institutions depend upon the collective activities of people. They are means of controlling
individuals.
 Every institution has some rules, which must be compulsorily obeyed by the individuals.
Institutions are formed to satisfy the needs of individuals in society. It has social recognition
behind it.
 Thus family, marriage, property, state, education, religion are the main institutions of society.
 Family, marriage, religion, politics and economy as institutions are the parts of society which
fulfill the needs of the society through their established procedures.
 These institutions have evolved and changed over a period of time with the corresponding
evolution and change in the society. But they are always there in one or other form.
 Family as a Social Institution
 Word family is derived from the Roman word ‘famulous’ meaning a servant. Every society needs
some form of social arrangement to regulate sexual relations and to provide for child rearing and
socialization.
 Family has survived the ages because it provides a number of essential social functions such as
regulating sexual life, socialization, providing protection and status, economic support and
emotional security and recreation.

 From sociological perspective, a family is a social group of two or more people who live together
and related by marriage, blood or adoption. In this sense, a family is made up of not only
husband and wife, but also two brothers living together or a women and her adopted son.
 A household is different from a family.
 According to A.M. Shah, a household is simply defined as a group of persons living together and
taking food from a common kitchen. ‘Living together’ is usually given more importance than
‘sharing food from a common kitchen’.
 In other words, household is a residential and domestic unit comprising one or more persons
living under the same roof and eating food cooked in a single kitchen. Based on this concept of
household, households can be categorized in two ways: (a) Those comprising of members who
may not be related by consanguineous relations (through blood) and/ or marriage and (b) Those
where the members are related though blood and/or marriage among themselves.
 Thus, the concept of household is by and large synonymous with that of the ‘family’.
 Family as a Social Institution
Similarities between Family and Household:
 Shared Living Space: Both families and households typically live in the same residence or dwelling.
 Economic Activities: Both engage in common economic activities, such as consumption, budgeting, and
resource management, although the extent and nature of these activities may vary.
 Social Unit: Both family and household serve as social units where individuals interact, support one
another, and form bonds.
Differences between Family and Household:
1. Family refers to a group of people related by blood, marriage, or adoption, typically including parents,
children, and sometimes extended relatives whereas household refers to a group of people living together in a
shared residence, regardless of their relationship. A household can include friends, roommates, or other non-
relatives.
2. Family has a specific structure based on biological or legal relationships whereas household is broader
and includes any group of people sharing a living space, whether or not they are related.
3. Family often focuses on emotional support, caregiving, and socialization of children whereas household
primarily functions as an economic unit, where people share resources and responsibilities for living expenses
and daily tasks.
4. Family is typically more stable in its composition and relationships (e.g., parents and children) whereas
household can be more fluid, as it can include people who are not related and can change over time (e.g.,
roommates, friends, or people in temporary living arrangements).
 A family is always a household but every household is not necessarily a family.
 Family as a Social Institution
Definition of Family
 Being recognized as a universal social institution, scholars have defined it in a number of
ways. Some important definitions of family are:
 According to Abraham, family is a ‘social group of two or more people who live together and are
related by marriage, blood or adoption.’
 Maciver and Page define family as a ‘group defined by a sex relationship sufficiently precise
and enduring to provide for the procreation and upbringing of children.’
 For Burgess and Locke, family is a ‘group of persons united by the ties of marriage, blood, or
adoption; consisting a single household, interacting and intercommunicating with each other
in their respective social roles of husband and wife, mother and father, son and daughter,
brother and sister creating a common culture.’
 According to Ogburn and Nimcoff, family is ‘more or less durable association of husband and
wife, with or without children, or of a man or woman alone, with children.’
 Kingsley Davis defines family as a ‘group of persons whose relations to one another are based
upon consanguinity and who are therefore kin to one another.’
 Family occupies a central position in our social structure and unlike other institutions, enjoys
a unique position in society. Some of the distinctive features of family are:
 Family as a Social Institution
 According to Murdock, family is a universal social institution i.e., there is no human society in
which some form of the family does not appear nor has there been such a society.
 It is the nucleus of all other social organizations.
 It has emotional basis. It is built on sentiments of love, affection, sympathy, cooperation and
friendship.
 The family is smaller in size.
 The family as a primary group socializes the new born into the culture of society.
 Each member in the family enjoys a status, privilege, obligation and role.
 Family enjoys the permanent as well as temporary nature. Being an institution, it is permanent
whereas as an association it is temporary in nature.
 Is family an association or institution?
 Family becomes association when it fulfills certain purpose for the society thus acting as an
‘association’ but when family is understood as an abstract system of rules and procedures, it
can be understood as an ‘institution’.
 Furthermore, members of the family do not have interest-based membership in the family,
thus making it a primary group rather than an association.
 Family as a Social Institution: Types
 From the earlier discussion, two aspects of the family can be understood: structural i.e., based
on the relationship pattern, and functional i.e., the functions performed by the family for the
individual and society.
 There are different types of families depending upon the criteria selected for classification.
Classification based on size:
 On the basis of size, family could be nuclear, extended or joint.
 A nuclear family consists of parents and their biological or adopted children.
 They are two generation families. In other words, nuclear family consists of husband, wife and
their unmarried children.
 The extended family is a social group that consists of parents, children, and other members
who are related by blood or marriage.
 Other members usually include parent’s siblings and their families.
 Extended families sometimes included unmarried brothers and sisters or parents.
 In other words, extended families can be viewed as a merger of several nuclear families. Extend
family in India is known as joint family.
 It may be considered as an extension of extended family. Extended or joint families usually
comprise of more than two generations.
 Family as a Social Institution: Types
Classification based on kinship relations:
 Families are also divided into conjugal and consanguine.
 A conjugal family is based on marriage, rather than blood relationships where as in
consanguine family; the emphasis is on blood relationship, rather than marital relations.
Classification based on residence:
 Based on the criteria of residence, families are divided into patrilocal, matrilocal, avunculocal
and neolocal.
 Patrilocal family is a family where wife goes to her husband’s house after marriage whereas
matrilocal is that one where the husband goes and lives in his wife’s house. For example,
Nayars of Kerala.
 Avunculocal family is one where the married couple lives in maternal uncle’s house and
neolocal family is that family where the newly married couple set their own house.
Classification based on descent:
 Based on the line of descent, family can be broadly divided into patrilineal where the property
inheritance and reckoning of descent follow along the line of the father and matrilineal where
property inheritance and descent is traced through mother’s line.
 Family as a Social Institution: Types
Classification based on type of authority:
 On the basis of the criteria of authority, families can be divided into two types.
 Patriarchal family is a family where authority is vested in the male member of the family and it
can be father or eldest male member whereas matriarchal family is one where authority rests
with the female member of the family usually mother or eldest daughter of the family.
 It is not very clear if a truly matriarchal system has existed anywhere in the world.
 There have been matrilocal and matrilineal families in which the wife-mother or eldest female
member has considerable power and influence.
 However such families are more likely to be matricentric in which the mother is the central
figure in the life of the children and the position of the father tends to be peripheral. Example
of such case is Nairs of Kerala.
Classification based on the birth:
 Sociologists use the tern family of orientation to refer to the family in which you are a child
because it is the family that raises and socializes you. This is the family in which one is born.
 There is also the family of procreation, the family in which you are a parent. This is the family
which is established after marriage.
 Family as a Social Institution: Functions
 A society, in competition with other societies and with nature, can survive only if its members,
through their activities, perform certain social functions.
 These functions will not be performed unless the activities are organized.
 Hence any existent society will be found to possess an institutional structure through which its
functions are performed.
 In the case of the family we have institutional complex adapted for meeting certain social needs.
 However sociologists hold different views on various functions performed by the family.
G.P. Murdock:
 According to Murdock, nuclear family is a universal human social grouping.
 Murdock argues that family performs four basic functions in all societies: sexual, reproductive,
economic and educational (socialization).
 Indeed family alone does not perform these functions exclusively, but still it makes important
contribution to them and there is no other institution to match this efficiency.
Talcott Parsons:
 He was an American. Though his analysis is based on American family but it is applicable to
family anywhere because he claims that the American family retains the basic and irreducible
functions of family primarily socialization of children and the stabilization of the personalities of
the adult population of the society.
 Family as a Social Institution: Functions
Ogburn and Nimkoff:
 They have pointed out the following functions of the family: affection, economic, recreational,
protective and educational.
 To sum up, family being a universal social institution performs important social functions such
as procreation, socialization, economic support, sexual regulation, social placement and
emotional security. Let us understand each of the social function of family very briefly:
Procreation:
 Every society needs to replace its members.
 Although reproduction can take place outside the marital union, it is only the family that can
effectively nurture and socialize the young human being to meet the needs of society.
 Family as a social institution gives legitimacy to the children to inherit the name and property of
the family.
Sexual Regulation:
 No society can allow unrestricted promiscuity.
 Every society has to ensure that statuses and roles are defined so that individuals can function
effectively in assigned social positions.
 It is the society which specifies that individuals marry within or outside certain social groups;
society is establishing networks of relationships and forging useful alliances.
 Family as a Social Institution: Functions
Economic Support:
 In the pre-industrial society, the family was the unit of production and consumption.
 Today as individuals pursue independent economic activities outside the home, the family may
no longer be a significant unit of production.
 But the family is still responsible for maintenance of the human young, education, training and
material support.
Social Placement:
 Every individual is recognized as the member of a family and thus has an inherited status.
Children inherit not only the family name and material assets but also a social standing.
 In fact, birth into a family determines a person’s caste, class, religion, clan and to some extent
language.
Socialization:
 The family being a primary social group is the most important and effective agent of
socialization. The human young is dependent on his or her parent for a long time. The child also
spends the most formative years of his or her life in the family.
 The institution of family is responsible for initiating the child into the social circles, religious
groups, language, and caste. Thus the child gets socialized into the group’s values, beliefs,
standards, and practices.
 Family as a Social Institution: Functions
Emotional Security: This is one of the most important functions of the family. Food and shelter
can be provided by other institutions such as the orphanage.
 Studies have shown that children who grow up in loving and caring families tend to become
mentally and physically healthier than those brought up in other institutions.
From the above discussion, it is very much clear that family performs a number of functions
and that justifies the claim that family is a universal social institution.
Dysfunctions of Family:
 Although family has always been a universal social institution and has been an inevitable part of
human society as it performs number of important functions, however, in contemporary modern
societies, this very assumption about the family is being questioned by a number of sociologists.
For them, family has certain dysfunctional aspects also.
 Vogel and Bell: According to Vogel and Bell, tension and hostility of unresolved conflicts
between parents are projected on to the child. The child is often used as an emotional scapegoat
by the parents to relieve their tensions.
 Edmund Leach: Leach argues that the chief malady of the family is the isolation of the nuclear
family from the kins and wider community. Thrown back on its own resources, the nuclear
family becomes like an overloaded electrical circuit. The demands made upon it are too great,
and fuse blows. In their isolation, family members expect and demand too much from each
other. The result is conflict.
 Family as a Social Institution: Functions
 R.D. Laing: According to Laing, family is the root of all problems in society. Themost dangerous
feature of family is the inculcation of attitude of obedience in the minds of siblings. Later in life
they become soldiers and officials blindly and unquestionably following orders.
 David Cooper: Cooper pronounces the ‘death of the family’. He too maintains that the child is
destroyed by family since he is primarily taught how to submit to society for the sake of survival.
Each child has the potential to be an artist, a visionary, and a revolutionary, but this potential is
crushed in the family. The children are taught to play the roles of son and daughter, male and
female. For Cooper, the family is an ideological conditioning device in an exploitative society.
 Fredrick Engels: According to Engels, family changes as per the changes in the modes of
production. Family is seen as a unit which produces one of the basic commodities of capitalism-
labour. It is cheap for capitalism because they do not have to pay for the production of the
children or their upbringing. The wife is paid nothing for producing and rearing children.
Despite enumerating the number of dysfunctions of the family especially that of the nuclear
family, it is still important for fulfilling a variety of needs of society.
 Family as a Social Institution: Functions
Changes in Structure and Functions of Family:
 The origins of the changes are very complex, but several factors can be picked out as especially
important.
 They include impact of modern industry and urban life, modern education, legislations, modern
values of rationality and reason and emergence of new institutions as substitute to perform
some of the functions which were earlier the prerogative of the institution of family.
 Many of these functions continue to be performed in large by the family but some of the
functions such as education, apprenticeship for economic activities, training, recreation, and
religion have been taken over by school, religious organizations and other community clubs.
 In general, these changes are creating a worldwide movement towards the predominance of the
nuclear family, breaking down extended family system and other types of kinship group.
 The following points summarize the most important changes in the structure and function of the
family occurring worldwide:
1. Clans and other corporate kin groups are declining in their influence.
2. Extended family forms are breaking down into nuclear families.
3. There is decrease in the control of the marriage contract. Pre-marital and extra-marital sex
relations are on increase.
 Family as a Social Institution: Functions
Changes in Structure and Functions of Family:
4. The economic role of women in family has changed. She is now moving towards more economic
independence due to the changes in the character of marriage and avenues provided by modern
economic system.
5. There is an increase in the breakdown of families or what is called divorce.
6. The parental care and socialization function is shifted to certain external agencies like hospitals,
kindergartens, nurseries, modern means of media like television and smart phones.
7. The protective functions of family have declined. Families are no more the place of protection for
the specially able and destitute. This function is now carried by other agencies.
8. The recreational function of the family is losing its importance. Recreation is now commercialized
and now external agencies such as movies, dance halls, night clubs and gambling centres have
taken away this function.
9. Family no longer performs the function of status ascription because in modern society much
emphasis is given on the achieved rather than ascribed status.
10. The economic function of the family has been disturbed a lot. The family is no longer the
economic unit, neither it is self-sufficient. It is no longer united by shared work, for its members
work separately. It is more consuming unit than a producing centre. However, the family has not
completely lost this function, but it is transforming this to some external agencies.
 Family as a Social Institution: Functions
Changes in Structure and Functions of Family:
11. Though procreation is still the prerogative of the family. Parents especially in Western families
no longer desire more children and even absence of children has become the most glaring feature of
Western families. In other words, the procreation role of family is decreasing.
From our discussion of the family and its functions, it is possible to draw some conclusions:
(a) the family still enjoys importance as a biological group for procreation and for the physical care
of the children,
(b) there is considerable decline in the ‘institutional functions’ of the family, economic, recreational,
protective and educational,
(c) the personality function or what is called socialization function has witnessed substitution but
still it is important.