Family Change in Global Perspective: How and Why Family Systems Change
| Date | 01 July 2019 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/fare.12361 |
| Author | Frank F. Furstenberg |
| Published date | 01 July 2019 |
F F. F University of Pennsylvania
Family Change in Global Perspective: How and
Why Family Systems Change
Changes in family systems that have occurred
over the past half century throughout the West-
ern world are now spreading acrossthe globe to
nations that are experiencing economic devel-
opment, technological change, and shifts in
cultural beliefs. Traditional family systems are
adapting in different ways to a series of condi-
tions that forced shifts in all Western nations.
In this article, I examine the causes and conse-
quences of global family change, introducing a
recently funded project using the Demographic
and Health Surveys (DHS) and U.S. Census
Bureau data to chart the pace and pattern of
changes in marriage and family systems in low-
and middle-income nations.
I still vividly recall, from my graduate stu-
dent days at Columbia University more than a
half-century ago, noted sociologist William J.
Goode strutting around the lecture hall com-
plaining that we do not have a good general
theory about why and how family systems are
changing globally. Of course, he didn’t use the
term globally explicitly because the word was
not yet in fashion. In the mid-1960s, Goode
made the theoretical argument that there would
be a transformation in family systems around
the world, from long-standing traditional forms
to the conjugal household. With this term he
Department of Sociology, 277 McNeil Building,
University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104
(fff@ssc.upenn.edu).
Key Words: class differences in family structure, family
change, marriage and cohabitation, transition to adulthood.
was suggesting that family systems around the
world would eventually converge with the West-
ern model of the nuclear family—comprising
a married couple and their children in a sin-
gle household rather than multigenerational or
complex households. Goode contended that the
conjugal family was most compatible with the
growth of market capitalism and a job-based
economy. Consequently, he speculated that the
Western system would eventually spread across
the globe. Evidence of rapid economic growth
and the development of a modern economy that
have come to be called globalism had already
moved beyond the Westin the early postwar era
to parts of Asia, just as Goode was completing
his book World Revolution and Family Patterns
(1963), which contained data from 50 countries
and analyzed the impact of family on societies.
In what became a classic analysis of change in
family systems, Goode (1963) assembled a large
array of extant data describing recent patterns
in a number of the world’s regional family sys-
tems. He convincingly demonstrated that, over
time, traditional agricultural-based economies
and the family systems to which they had given
rise were being undermined by the growth of
job-based economies and the spread of Western
ideas. At the same time, family patterns that had
been in place around the globe were yielding to
more Western-style practices such as the grow-
ing expectation of strong marital bonds, lower
fertility, and fewerintergenerational households.
Goode (1963) argued that the Western family
system had changed to t (adapt to) an econ-
omy that increasingly required more education
and geographic mobility. These changes in turn
326 Family Relations 68 (July 2019): 326–341
DOI:10.1111/fare.12361
Global Family Changes 327
would erode the authority of family elders and
reduce their formal control over their children,
he asserted. Modern family systems in the West,
he predicted, would initiate free mate choice
based on compatibility and sentiment rather than
on family interests or parental control. Finally,
he showed that these modern features of West-
ern family systems were being adopted in many
regions of the world in the aftermath of the
World War II.
Had Goode (1963) been able to imagine
the revolution in gender roles that was also
just on the horizon, he might have pointed to
it as another major change in family systems.
However, he was largely unable to foresee the
events of the next several decades in which the
gender-based division of labor still observed
in the West in the 1960s would give way
to a growing demand for gender equality,
although he hinted at this possibility (see Cher-
lin, 2012; Furstenberg, 2013). More recently,
some theorists have examined the weaken-
ing of gender stratication as an independent
source of family adaptation to economic growth
(Esping-Andersen, 2009; Esping-Andersen
& Billari, 2015; Goldscheider, Bernhardt, &
Lappegard, 2015; McDonald, 2000).
Nonetheless, Goode’s (1963) masterwork
inuenced the writing of the next generation
of sociologists and demographers who studied
global and regional patterns of change in family
systems. Although his theoretical perspective
included the possibility that ideational change
(i.e., a shift in cultural values) might precede
or follow structural changes in family systems,
a number of theorists, in response, emphasized
and even prioritized the importance of value
change through social diffusion (e.g., see Coale
& Watkins, 1986; Hendi, 2017; Johnson-Hanks,
Morgan, Bachrach, & Kohler, 2011; Watkins,
1990). Just as Max Weber (Weber, Baehr, &
Wells, 2002; original work published 1905)
argued in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of
Capitalism more than a century earlier, these
theorists have argued that culture is an inde-
pendent inuence on changing preferences for
individual choice, a value set that is often seen as
an export from the West. However, researchers
(Caldwell, 1976; Inglehart, 1990; Lesthaeghe
& Surkyn, 1988; Thornton, 2001; Van de Kaa,
1987, among others) have challenged the under-
lying assumption of economic determinism that
they saw in Goode’s theory.
In a book on changing family systems
titled Between Sex and Power: Family in the
Wor l d —in some sense a sequel to Goode’s
(1963) book from 40 years earlier—Therborn
(2004) argued for the separate inuence of law
and public policy as an independent institu-
tional driver of change both in the developed
and developing worlds. Others have pointed
to the potentially causal inuence of changing
demographic pressures owing to declines in
mortality and fertility that prompted changes
in the timing of life events such as marriage
and childbearing ages (Bianchi, 2014; Bon-
gaarts, 2015; Bongaarts, Mensch, & Blanc,
2017; Hertrich, 2017). Along the same line,
reproductive technology has brought about new
possibilities in the timing and organization of
the life course, indicating that technology can
also have an independent inuence on change
in family patterns (Golombok, Cook, Bish, &
Murray, 1995; Inhorn & Birenbaum-Carmeli,
2008).
These broad theories of why and how family
systems change have stimulated a sizeable body
of national and regional studies on patterns of
family change throughout the world (Allen-
dorf & Pandian, 2016; Amador, 2016; Cuesta,
Rios-Salas, & Meyer, 2017; Kumagai, 2010;
Kuo & Raley, 2016; Seltzer, 2004; Seltzer et al.,
2005; Thornton, Pierotti, Young-DeMarco, &
Watkins, 2014; etc.). Yet, it is still fair to say that
since the publication of Goode’s (1963) book
more than a half-century ago, there has been no
systematic attempt to test in the broadest sense
his theory of how change in family systems
occurs or the competing explanations that have
been advanced in response to his bold predic-
tions using demographic data on a global scale.
Nonetheless, the idea of a growing conver-
gence in fertility patterns has become a major
topic of inquiry among demographers and
economists (Casterline & National Research
Council, 2001; Coleman, 2002; Crenshaw,
Christenson, & Oakey, 2000; Dorius, 2008;
Hendi, 2017; Rindfuss, Choe, & Brauner-Otto,
2016; Wilson, 2001, 2011). Even taking account
of this distinct line of research, a broader inves-
tigation of how and why family systems change
over time, much less the systematic testing of
Goode’s broad theory and the responses to it,
has been stymied by the absence of comparable
data on global family systems. The availabil-
ity of such data would permit the empirical
examination of competing explanations of the
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