Occupation and Family Differentiation.

Beginning with Ogburn, the place of economic factors within the modem conjugal unit has been minimized. It has been argued that the major dimension of the current nuclear unit is the affective, the emotional, the expressive. The very term "marital adjustment" connotes that external constraints are less vital than the "ability" of the couple to "work out" interpersonal problems. The observers leaped from the data-the decrease of joint economic participation between husbands and wives-to the inference that modern marriage coheres or collapses almost solely on the basis of affective elements. Parsons has recently restated and expanded this position by asserting that "it is of course a commonplace that the [my italics] American family is predominantly … an urban middle-class family … there has emerged a remarkably uniform, basic type of family." For Parsons, this "uniform family" rests chiefly on personality variables which he analyzes in a psychoanalytic context. It may be that except at the most general structural level, Parsons' "uniform family" may be as unfortunate a term as was his "isolated family" of a decade ago. For it is also possible to leap from the data to the alternative hypothesis that economic factors still play a vital role within the conjugal family albeit in a differentiated form. Is it not strange to realize that an inherent feature of modern society is complexity, specialization, and differentiation, and that this can be seen in every part of society-every part, that is, except the conjugal family system? Here we are told that there is "remarkable" homogeneity based on the "indispensable function" of expressive gratifications. It seems just as simple and perhaps more logical to assume the opposite, viz., that increasing societal complexity should be related to a more complex family system. In any event, given the ever increasing complexity of our society, the burden of proof is on those who argue that the conjugal family is going the other way occupations of the last century. Yet while agricultural occupations were supposedly inextricable from the family, the impact of modern occupations is largely ignored and thus unexplored.Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to set forth a conceptual schema which indicates that there is significant differentiation among types of conjugal families, and that this differentiation is based on differing relationships to the occupational structure. First, we will outline the five sets of variables within our schema; second, we will attempt to present a rationale for these particular kinds of variables; and finally, we will try to link them in ways that meaningfully demonstrate differentiation between conjugal families. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]