Another sociologist, Michael Anderson found evidence that extended families developed more during industrialisation because while parents were away at work, grandparents or uncles and aunts were there to look after the children so in return the extended kin get looked after too. Peter Laslett, an English historian disagreed and found that after industrialisation, nuclear families was more dominated than the extended family and single parent families became popular
The approach presents the family as a family isolated from wider kinships because of the mobility required by labour markets in industrial societies. The image that functionalists create of the family involves the support for the nuclear family from the wider welfare state. It also suggests that any childcare for the family would be provided by non-family agencies, for example; playgroups. The usefulness of this ‘privatised nuclear family’ is that it gives closure within the family, allowing stability and support. It’s beneficial as there are male and female role models available for the children, and it gives the parents more control of how their children are brought up.
Parsons believes this changed occurred due to society changing what it needs. Society need to change due to geographic mobility due to factories being created in one area and knocked down in another. Therefore people have to be able to just up roots and “follow the work”. The mobility would be a lot easier for a nuclear family than an extended family due to the fact that there are less people to move. Secondly there was a high demand for a socially mobile workforce.
They all worked together to produce the products instead of each of them making a product. How were all of these factory workers recruited? “A good many from the agricultural parts… People left other occupations and came to spinning for the sake of high wages.” [Document 2] People were leaving their farming jobs and other jobs to go to work in the factories because, just like now, money was a necessity in everyone’s life and working in factories gave workers more money to bring home and use to provide their family with other necessities. The process of Industrialization was a slow but fast moving process. There were a lot of new technologies popping up in all fields.
1] succinctly summarizes the de-skilling hypothesis for the Industrial Revolution: new technology brought about “a substitution of mechanical devices for human skills” and “inanimate power—in particular, steam—took the place of human and animal strength.” By several measures, ordinary factory workers were unskilled. Compared to workers in craft and professional occupations, factory workers earned lower wages. Also, factory jobs did not require formal education, training periods were brief, factory work was monotonous and factory workers lacked both social status and market power. Thus a wide body of evidence supports deskilling as a description of the change in the nature of the labor supply. But the de-skilling hypothesis is also about technology.
The view that industrialization led to the decline of the extended family and the rise of the nuclear family is seen to be a functionalist view because this focuses mostly on the social structure and what effects it has to parts of the society, but not directly the people within it. The extended family fits the needs of the pre-industrial society because the extended family consists of extended kin networks who aided each other in mostly agricultural labor with the rest of the family. The nuclear family on the other hand benefits from industrialization because physical labor is not necessarily needed because people would rely on machinery to do things that the extended family would do by hand, therefore meaning that extra family members are not required to live together to get work done. On one hand, you could say that industrialization did not lead to the decline of the extended family and revive the nuclear family. For example, the sociologist Peter Laslett had explored the myth that the family was normal in pre-industrial Britain.
However working class children were put into work houses or in agriculture to help support the low incomes of families’ economic struggles. This, in accordance to Aries, tells us that children were seen more as a financial asset than a symbol of peoples love for one another. This can be supported by looking how families in pre-industrial had larger families because of reasons of needing a better overall family income but also because life expectancy was dramatically lower than it in modern day terms. One thing in common that both sets of children shared in this society was strict control by parents/ adult authoritive figures and severe punishment for defiance. It was only in late industrialisation when significance change occurred, people began campaigning for child rights, something that had never happened until this point.
The industrial revolution took place due to an agricultural revolution that occurred because of an increasing population. The introduction of enclosed farming meant that the poorer people lost out and travelled to towns to seek work. The domestic system meant that many people worked from home, spinning and weaving cotton brought in from North America. They were paid a fraction of the cost that it was eventually sold for. Entrepreneurs started to create new inventions that would speed up the process of spinning and weaving meaning more cotton could be produced and exported.
Essay Questions 1. There are several differences between the industrial society and the postindustrial society. Within the industrial society, new types of technology were introduced in order to mass produce goods needed for the economy to grow. Steam transportation was used in order to send their goods to further locals than ever before. They utilized fossil fuel to increase the rate and scale of their production lines, even though over time this would eventually decrease the need for human labor.
Legislators attacked union organizers; people who held the idea that working class existed, conflicts with the capitalists, and believed that the working class should challenge the power of capitalists. The attacks began due to increase in living standards; the working class was able to buy homes, cars, and make more money. Upward mobility seemed natural in this time period since the working class earned more and had similar living standards to the middle class and capitalist. Unions had different perspectives on “class talk”. The American Federation of Labor (AFL) did not have interest in working class and focused on the prosperity of the members.