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The paper explains why so many people exercising freedom of choice and living in a world of privatized religion, elect to make use of religious rites of passage, in the form of religious rituals associated with birth, marriage and death, while at the same time rejecting other social forms of religious action. The phenomenon is a complex one and therefore any simple causal explanation will probably be inadequate. Moreover, the undergirding of rites has changed with the course of time, no longer are they upheld by legal or quasi-legal sanctions. Recognition has to be given to the social setting of rites of passage. A crucial mark of differentiation between rites of passage and other rituals is that such rites directly involve, or are intended to involve, family and kin groups, extending even to the local community, that is, participants stand in a socially structured situation. Rites have some religious significance for participants. To actors, occasions related to rites of passage, the birth of a child, marriage and death, are in themselves times of personal importance, although not necessarily of crisis proportions.

This article analyzes the patterns of social life of youth in the social structure of Israel. A large part of adolescents in Israel participate in patterns of behaviour and social organizations specific to them. The predominance of groups of age-mates in immigration countries has been for long noticed and analysed by some American sociologists and this tendency can be even more strongly discerned in Israel. Moreover, this paper will discuss a proposition that the emergence of youth culture is closely related to the prevalence of the second type of social division of labour. The traditional oriental family may be seen as an example of the first type of division of labour. Almost the whole social organization has been organized on the basis of patriarchal families. The families were the units of occupational specialization. The cooperative-settlement and the moshava are less pure and extreme examples of a division of labour based on the family. In fact there is some degree of discrepancy between some important social roles and the familial roles. The second type of social division of labour is most clearly discernible in the urban sector, in which the family does not function either as a full economic or cultural and political unit. In the communal settlements (Kibbutzim) the clearest correlation between the unfamilial division of labour and a very intensive and formalized youth culture is discernible.

The article presents information on the relationship between the family breakdown and social networks in the United States. Scholar C. J. Bott terms the relationship between community and family as complex and indirect. Internal structure of conjugal families is different in rural and urban settings. Families with loose-knit social networks lead to instability and ultimate breakdown within urban communities in the United States. Middle-class families have more close-knit social networks. In rural communities the family breakdown factor is limited.

The number of married women workers has increased greatly in Scotland, as in England and Wales. It seems likely that this trend will be maintained and even be strengthened. This raises questions of policy for the government and practical difficulties for employers, who can no longer afford to ignore domestic responsibilities of their workers. It confronts society with the need to consider whether the employment of married women, especially mothers, is compatible with a satisfactory family life and with the healthy physical and psychological development of children. The relationship between employment of mothers and the quality of family life is not a simple one and the accumulated evidence suggests that the reasons why a mother goes out to work or stays at home may be more important than the fact that she does so. Mothers who go out to work do not form a homogeneous category. The decision to go out or to stay at home depends upon a complicated interplay within the family of economic, social and psychological factors, and this takes place in the wider context of local customs and industrial conditions.

The article discusses the significance of extra-familial kinship among the inhabitants of a rural area in South Wales known as the Vale of Glamorgan. The discussion is based on field material obtained in the course of anthropological inquiries carried out between 1957 and 1960. Childbirth, marriage, illness and death are the most common and universal of such situations. In conclusion, brief mention must be made of the relevance of this discussion of the ceremonial and evaluative functions of extra-familial kin ties to any study of their supportive function in crisis situations. The mobilization of extra-familial kin to fill supportive roles is usually restricted to those who were once members of the same elementary family, together with their affines. It is here that the elementary family, in Raymond Firth's phrase, juts out in a prominence which has been recognized by the overwhelming attention paid to it by social scientists. Even where genealogically more remote extra-familial kin support individual relatives in times of crisis they commonly express their feelings of obligation to do so not in terms of a larger kin unit but in terms of their role as deputies for pivotal kin.

Social history in Great Britain ceased long ago to be a description of manners and customs although traces still survive as, for example, in a war-time best-sellers reference to the history of people with the politics left out. It has now become the history of men and women in their social relationships and groupings. As such, the subject derived from economic historians driven to seek explanations of the causes and consequences of economic change in fields outside their own immediate province. Two examples within the field of interest of this Conference may serve to illustrate some limitations of the traditional approach to the period which experienced the transition to industrialism. First, for forty years or more economic historians have been investigating the mechanisms of eighteenth-century population growth. Defective data have been interpreted with such sophistication by students concerned to relate demographic change and economic development that, an increase in of population seems the only remaining certainty today. Second, historians have been providing contradictory answers to the question, on the standard of life of the working classes in the late decades of the eighteenth and the early decades of the nineteenth centuries.

The article focuses on umemployability in Jamaica. In Jamaica the term unemployable is frequently applied to many unemployed, although it is recognized that what is called unemployability may be simply lack of interest in getting or keeping a job. Lack of response to economic incentives is statistically measurable in cases where increases in wages have resulted in increases of unemployment, but the common opinion of economists, nevertheless, is that lack of response is not normal and is to be explained by special circumstances or is not worth any comment. Increased family instability, crime and juvenile delinquency, the excessive use of drugs and alcohol, the growth of extremely emotional religious sects are some of its symptoms. Along with these goes the appearance of great timidity or of its opposite, exhibitional behaviour, especially among the young: deviant conduct generally. The nature of the Jamaican family system in the lower economic classes is something of an obstacle to the expansion of standards of living, and in two quite different respects.

The article discusses problems related to housing needs. Housing conditions are commonly measured in terms of density of occupation, the number of persons per room, or reciprocally, the number of rooms per person. The average density of occupation in England and Wales in 1951 was 0.74 persons per room, but for one-person households it was 0.30 and for households of ten or more persons it was 1.90. The number of persons per room ratio increases steadily with increasing size of household. So far as the number of requisite houses are concerned, the relief of overcrowded families will, involve no addition to the total, provided that sufficient public control is retained over the new supply to permit of the necessary redistribution, and that sufficient forethought is exercised in regard to the size of the new houses to render that redistribution physically possible. Redistribution could only solve the overcrowding problem if there were sufficient dwellings of the size required and if control were exercised over the allocation of housing space. A rise in the real income of old people may increase the number wishing to live separately. A general rise in the standard of living may make physically fit houses socially obsolete.

Stereotypes die hard even among sociologists. The purpose of this article is to see how far the stereotype is upheld in social legislation. Whether "the family" conceived simply as a small isolated unit of parents and young children, or is the reality of the wider family acknowledged and how far are kinship rights and obligations recognized outside of the "immediate family." If people are to judge by a recent authoritative book, the legal conception generally deals with the "family" in the more limited sense. The Master of the Rolls, in his foreword to "A Century of Family Law," says "in popular conception, as in the eyes of the law, the family unit of the husband, wife and children of the marriage remains the essential social component, and he goes on to say that the book is limited by the scope of the conception of the family. The greater part of "family law" in Great Britain is indeed concerned with relations between husband and wife, and to a lesser extent between parents and dependent children, and has little to say about wider kinship rights and duties. In particular, if one considers the kinship obligations enforced by law the conception is certainly limited in this way.

This article discusses the distribution of income within the family. It is obvious that the growing knowledge about the distribution of the national income between families has not so far been matched by a growth in knowledge about the distribution of the family income between its members. In place of knowledge, the assumption has often been made, though not stated, that the family, while no longer generally considered a unit for the purposes of earning, can still be treated as a unit for the purposes of spending. It has been taken for granted that some members of a family cannot be rich while others are poor. Half a century ago Rowntree formulated the concept not only of primary poverty but of secondary poverty. Families were considered to be suffering from the former where their total earnings are insufficient to obtain the minimum necessaries for the maintenance of merely physical efficiency, and from the latter where their total earnings would be sufficient for the maintenance of merely physical efficiency were it not that some portion of it is absorbed by other expenditure, either useful or wasteful. The hypothesis behind the changes in the distribution of income within the family since the early years of the war is that wives' housekeeping allowances have not increased as much as husbands' earnings.