Family Configurations

A Structural Approach to Family Diversity

Eric D. Widmer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317136620
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Family Configurations develops current scholarship on families and intimate lives by demonstrating that family relationships, far from being fluid and inconsequential, are more structured and committed than ever. Based on a series of empirical studies carried out in the US and Europe, this volume reveals the diversity of family relationships that emerge as a result of various key family issues, emphasizing the supportive and disruptive interdependencies existing among large sets of family members beyond the nuclear family. By applying social network methods to uncover the relational patterns of contemporary families, and making use of rich empirical data, this book draws on recent developments in family sociology, social network analysis and kinship studies to present a fascinating interdisciplinary approach to the family.

Chapter 1
A Configurational Perspective on Families

What do we need another perspective on families for? The decline of the nuclear family resulting from the pluralization of life trajectories has made the work of sociologists more difficult. Indeed, family members that matter cannot be defined a priori, using the household as a natural limit to the Family. The number of relationships to be taken into account is much greater than that between partners, or between parents and their resident children. In sum, the Family cannot be theorized as a small group with obvious boundaries, a clearly defined and consensual division of labour, and a collective identification. As a matter of fact, approaches that focus on the nuclear family disregard the diversity of families in late modernity.

An alternative is therefore needed. The configurational perspective on families traces complex patterns of emotional, cognitive and practical interdependencies among large numbers of family members beyond the nuclear family. It focuses on interdependencies between partners, children and other individuals such as relatives and friends (Widmer, 2006; Widmer and Jallinoja, 2008). Its main assumption is that key family dyads, such as the conjugal and the parent–child dyads, are embedded in a larger set of family interdependencies which explain how they develop. Relatives can be a source of strength for couples and parents by acting as a resource to help alleviate their conflicts. Support from relatives and friends may however also foster tensions and conflicts for structural reasons that we will uncover. Simultaneously, key family dyads influence the way in which family configurations are shaped. This chapter stresses some of the main features of the configurational perspective on families. The various issues that it raises will be tackled in later chapters.

Configurations

The concept of configuration was first proposed in the 1930s by Jacob Moreno (1934), once a much praised scientist and the founder of sociometry and of the sociodrama. Moreno defined a configuration as an collection of individuals of any size, from the smallest personal networks, which he termed ‘social atoms’, to humanity as a whole, in which meaningful ties link individuals with each other. He first stressed that configurations concerned actual relationships rather than relationships as defined by organizational charts, administrations or census offices.

He also put much emphasis on the fact that configurations are patterned: any dyad belonging to a configuration is influenced by the shape of the configuration as a whole. Interdependencies within a configuration are not randomly organized but follow informal rules, such as reciprocity. Indeed, individuals tend to balance what is given with what is received in most relationships. An imbalance in reciprocal exchanges triggers either frustration and conflict, or an inequality of power between the exchange partners. Moreno also stressed that ‘chaining’, or what was later called ‘transitivity’ or ‘structural balance’, occurs in social relationships. One significant result of research on networks is that they develop transitively. Typically, friends of friends also become friends, and friends of enemies become enemies. Using Fritz Heider’s theory of balance (Heider, 1946, 1958), social network scholars later found that people feel uncomfortable when their friends do not like each other and they avoid these situations in their personal networks (Cartwright and Harary, 1956; Festinger, 1957, Newcomb, 1961). Transitive hierarchies and power structures have higher legitimacy in the eyes of individuals than non-transitive ones. Transitivity has significant social consequences, as it strengthens role differentiation, cohesion and clustered sub-groups. To summarize, transitivity fulfils the individual’s need for consistency in their relational life and creates differentiated and cohesive social structures.

The concept of configuration as it relates to networks was developed from the 1930s to the 1990s by German sociologist Norbert Elias, who contributed greatly to various fields of sociology (Dunning and Mennell, 2003). Elias (1994) defined configurations as ‘structures of mutually oriented and dependent people’ (p. 214). Individuals, Elias proposed, are interdependent in a configuration because each one fulfills some of the others’ needs for social recognition, power, emotional proximity, financial and practical resources, sexuality or other socially defined needs (Quintaneiro, 2005). Interdependencies are not dyadic in nature, Elias stated, but rather organized in large networks. Individuals develop a variety of ties with family members, friends and colleagues, who branch out to other persons. As such, configurations have to deal with power issues: resources are scarce and individuals, while cooperating, also compete for them within groups. This competition creates tensions and conflicts that are beyond an individual’s control. The patterns of interdependencies that characterize configurations, therefore, are commonly unintended. They, in turn, shape the cooperation strategies and the conflicts that occur in each dyad belonging to them.

Based on this theoretical stance, the configurational perspective posits that family dyads are interdependent (Widmer and Jallinoja, 2008). It stresses on the one hand that parent–child or couple relationships are shaped by the larger networks of interdependencies with relatives, friends and others in which they are embedded. On the other hand, patterns of interdependencies among relatives and friends depend to a significant extent on partnerships and parent–child relationships (Widmer, 2004). Various research results pointed at the fact that what happens in couples influences networks. For instance, the courtship process interferes with other strong ties and tends to lower their importance. Therefore, individuals are concerned about mate selection of their network members. When couples split, conjugal networks are again profoundly changed. When individuals remarry, this has implications for a large number of persons beyond their couples or their households. Courtship, conjugal roles, conjugal quality, divorce and remarriage show that the fragility of couples in Western societies is intertwined with larger relational contexts that they shape while being shaped by them (Widmer, 2004).

Although the configurational perspective cannot be considered a theory at this stage of its development, it makes a number of assumptions that facilitate the study of complex patterns of relationships, such as those characterizing families in late modernity (Widmer et al., 2009). First, families that matter are not defined by institutional criteria such as belonging to the same household or being married. Family interdependencies, what we need others for, and the tensions and conflicts that they set up, are given prime importance. Second, the configurational perspective rejects the assumption that family dyads can be analysed as independent and separate entities each with their own logic. Instead, it focuses on the influence of the larger configuration of relationships in which each dyad is embedded.

Finally, a configurational perspective on the Family emphasizes its temporal and spatial nature. It measures change and stability of family relationships in individual life courses and across historical periods. Both Elias and Moreno stressed the developmental dimensions of configurations. Elias was the most emphatic about it, as he claimed that the historical dimension of configurations should never be overlooked. Because he stressed the changing balance of tensions as a main feature of large social configurations such as the royal court of Versailles, historical sociology is the only discipline that fitted his expectations. Similarly, Moreno emphasized the need to follow configurations over time. As his empirical work was based on smaller groupings and involved sociometric measurements, he focused on short-term changes. Both authors however stress the importance of time, either historical or personal, as a main feature of configurations.

When applied on families, this set of assumptions emphasizes the embeddedness of partnerships and parenting in large and complex sets of relationships with step-relatives, in-laws, grandparents, uncles and aunts, cousins, friends or neighbours, and even care professionals considered as family members. A structural approach to relationality and the embeddedness of families and personal lives is currently lacking. This book reconsiders some main issues of family research by defining families as large, open and personal configurations rather than as small, closed and collectively organized groups. It illustrates the fruitfulness of this theoretical shift by presenting a series of empirical results.

Interdependencies

Interdependency is a central concept of the configurational perspective. It stems from the fact that individuals depend on a variety of others, without necessarily being aware of that dependency and willing to admit it in standard surveys or comprehensive qualitative interviews. If practical services and money transfers clearly constitute a set of interdependencies within families, they are certainly not the only or even the most significant ones. There is a long tradition in sociology that emphasizes the cognitive and emotional importance of group members. Concepts such as the ‘reference person’ (Hyman, 1942), the ‘reference individual’ (Merton, 1957) or the ‘orientational others’ (Kuhn, 1964) stress the importance of specific persons as cognitive and emotional benchmarks throughout one’s life. Kuhn (1964) defines orientational others as people to whom individuals are committed emotionally and psychologically, who provide individuals with a concept of self and who influence an individual’s self-definition through communication. Note that, once established, the persistence of someone as an orientational other does not require frequent, recent, long or even positive interactions (Milardo, 1989; Surra and Milardo, 1991).

It is readily apparent that many family members beyond the nuclear family meet Kuhn’s definition of the orientational other (Kuhn, 1964). Frequency of interactions, practical help or financial help are not the sole indicators of family interdependencies. Various contingencies from late modernity may decrease such interdependencies while cognitive and emotional interdependencies remain strong. People may not receive money from their parents or they may not see them regularly because they do not need the provision of money, or because they live far away from them. Despite that, they may still be very much emotionally and cognitively interdependent with them. Emotional support and communication are prime features of individuals’ relationships with their parents and siblings in adulthood. It comes as no surprise that partners also play such a role, some also after divorce. Although sociologists often prefer the hard facts of money, face-to-face interactions and domestic support, the strength of feelings and cognitions should not be underestimated as indicators of interdependencies, especially in the family realm (Milardo, 2010). Indeed, some anthropologists have cleverly argued that financial or material support gain a special value in families since they are interpreted as proofs of love (Schneider, 1980). From the work of Marcel Mauss (1997), we know that material exchanges have meaning beyond their monetary value. In all cultures, including Western cultures, exchanges of material goods in families are signs of interpersonal acknowledgement (Caplow, 1982). Individuals care about family gifts and support because they give meaningful information on whether or not they matter for other family members. A large number of studies show that perceived support, rather than received or provided support, influences individual development.1 The strong feeling that family members are concerned by us is a key dimension of interdependencies.

Interdependencies are also unintended (Newton, 1999). Cooperation in configurations creates unexpected tensions and conflicts because it is associated with various constraints that individuals enforce on each other by their interdependencies (Elias, 1984; Widmer, Giudici, Le Goff, Pollien, 2009). Resources in time, love, money, support and social recognition are scarce and their unequal distribution within family configurations is subject to power and control attempts that make them shift from one state of balance to another state over time. Those shifts go beyond individual control because of the complex patterns of interdependencies shaping configurations (Letonturier, 2006). The balance of tensions and cooperation in the configuration in turn shapes processes of cooperation and conflict occurring in each dyad (Elias, 1983). By linking power issues and conflicts with positive interdependencies, the configurational perspective enables researchers to understand them as social processes rather than as outcomes of a group’s failure to function properly. This is especially significant, as we will see, for the understanding of families in late modernity.

Family Issues Revisited

Various scholars have felt the need to cross the borders of the nuclear family and address family relationships as sets of interdependencies, both negative and positive, with an emphasis on cognitive and emotional dimensions. Research on conjugal interactions and parenting has stressed the importance of taking the relational context of nuclear families into account. Demographers have acknowledged the impact of close family members and friends on fertility issues (Widmer and Jallinoja, 2008). Gerontologists have underlined the importance of personal networks for the understanding of health (including psychological health) in old age (Guilley and Lalive d’Epinay, 2008). A series of studies on conjugal interactions and satisfaction have also shown the embbededness of couples in larger social networks (Widmer, 2004; Widmer, Kellerhals and Levy, 2004, 2006a).

How shall we proceed from there? A first central issue, from a configurational perspective, relates to the very definition of ‘families’. What is a family? How do we define families that matter, that truly influence one’s life? What are the boundaries of such families, especially those stemming from divorce and remarriage? The usual assumption of family research is that significant family units are obvious. They are defined either as including members of a single household or individuals linked by marriage or biological parenthood. On the contrary, the next chapter stresses that no institutional criteria are comprehensive enough to define families that matter. It underlines the emergence of significant family interdependencies that cannot be circumscribed with reference to a household or a limited set of institutionalized statuses. It first discusses studies of the ways in which individuals define the boundaries of their family. Then, the chapter focuses on empirical studies that were conducted in the United States and Switzerland. It presents several types of family configurations, each with a distinct emphasis on children, step-parents, in-laws, grandparents, siblings, partners or previous partners, and friends defined as family members. Using interdependencies rather than institutionalized roles to define families is a prerequisite to the understanding of their overall relational logic from a configurational perspective.

A second major issue that this book addresses is the contribution of families to social integration. The large increase of non-marital cohabitation, divorce and serial remarriages in recent decades have lead several prominent sociologists to question the ability of families to provide care and meaning to their members in late modernity. Families are no more in charge of social integration said Beck and Beck-Gernsheim (2002b). Chapter 3, ‘Family Social Capital’, first reviews the evidence pointing to the integrative role of family members beyond the nuclear family. Then it describes two alternate conceptualizations of relational resources provided by family members in terms of bonding and bridging social capital. As we shall see, the composition of family configurations makes a great difference for social capital.

Because of the emphasis on the integrative function of families in many scholarly works, only little interest for conflict developed until the rise of divorce in the 1960s, which pressured sociologists to address family conflict as an issue. Since then, rather broad explanations of family conflict were given, stemming from the contradiction between individualization trends of women and men (for instance, Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2002a). The configurational perspective proposes to analyse conflict as intertwined with positive family interdependencies. Individuals develop family conflicts because they depend on each other for various resources that cannot be found in other relationships: sexual intimacy, emotional support, communication and social recognition are central dimensions that relate families to the construction of personal identity. Dependencies are never easy to tackle as they create fairness and power issues. Therefore, conflict and support are not opposite processes in families but rather the two faces of the same coin. In order to understand how family conflicts develop, it is necessary to take into account the complex patterns of contradicting interdependencies linking a large number of individuals.

In that regard, post-divorce families are a telling case. Individuals belonging to them are hypothesized as part of divorce chains or remarriage chains, in which interdependencies exist among a large number of persons living in different households and linked indirectly (e.g. a child and her father’s new partner’s children’s father). When divorce and partnering occur more than once, on several sides (father, mother, parents’ partners) or in multiple generations (oneself, one’s parents but also one’s grandparents), interdependencies become complex and create a variety of power issues. Based on several empirical studies, the book carefully considers flows of emotional support and conflict in post-divorce families. Rather than assuming that a single pattern of interdependencies captures the complexity of post-divorce family configurations, it emphasizes the diversity of such contexts in terms of composition, social capital and conflict. It is indeed plainly wrong, as we will see, to equate all post-divorce family configurations to the same patterns of interdependencies.

Another crucial issue of family research concerns the interplay between family relationships and psychological outcomes. Are individuals with psychological problems embedded in similar family configurations than other individuals? The interrelation existing between family relationships and psychological health has been a classical focus of system theory (Kerr and Bowen, 1988; Broderick, 1993; Minuchin, 1974). The results of various empirical studies done on clinical samples will be reviewed which show that the model of the nuclear family should indeed be revisited if one wishes to better understand the relational contexts of individuals experiencing psychiatric problems. Again, much variability of family configurations exists in clinical samples. It is a shortcoming, as we shall see, to consider that the majority of individuals in psychotherapy or in daycare psychiatric facilities have similar family configurations.

Family configurations are not static entities but constantly adapt to life events and life transitions. The issue of change over time will be addressed in this book, as it is a central assumption of the configurational perspective that configurations...