Family Form and Economic Production

Abstract

This chapter examines arguments about the main features of the relationship between the family and the economy in modern society with a view to establishing a general framework within which the issues of the remaining chapters may be located and understood. It considers the possibility that, by virtue of the family’s relationship with economic structures and processes, there is a dominant family form in advanced industrial capitalist societies (exemplified by modern Britain). It investigates competing theoretical approaches to the analysis of the modern family, and in particular those which attribute primary explanatory importance to either the process of industrialisation or the progress of capitalism. It assesses the recurring claim that underlying the emergence and development of the modern family has been the demise of families as ‘units of economic production’.