Understanding Family Change and Variation: Toward a Theory of Conjunctural Action PDF
Preview Understanding Family Change and Variation: Toward a Theory of Conjunctural Action
Understanding Family Change and Variation Understanding Population Trends and Processes Volume 5 Series Editor J. Stillwell In western Europe and other developed parts of the world, there are some very significant demographic processes taking place at the individual, household, community and national scales including the ageing of the population, the delay in childbearing, the rise in childlessness, the increase in divorce, the fall in marriage rates, the increase in cohabitation, the increase in mixed marriages, the change in household structures, the rise in step-parenting and the appearance of new streams of migration taking place both within and between countries. The relationships between demographic change, international migration, labour and housing market dynamics, care provision and intergenerational attitudes are complex to understand and yet it is vital to quantify the trends and to understand the processes. Similarly, it is critical to appreciate what the policy consequences are for the trends and processes that have become apparent. This series has its roots in understanding and analysing these trends and processes. This series will be of interest to a wide range of individuals concerned with demographic and social change, including demographers, population geographers, sociologists, economists, political scientists, epidemiologists and health researchers as well as practitioners and commentators across the social sciences. For further volumes: http://www.springer.com/series/8113 Jennifer A. Johnson-Hanks · Christine A. Bachrach· S. Philip Morgan · Hans-Peter Kohler Understanding Family Change and Variation Toward a Theory of Conjunctural Action with contribution by Lynette Hoelter The University of Michigan, USA Rosalind King National Institute of Child Health & Human Development, USA Pamela Smock University of Michigan, USA 123 Jennifer A. Johnson-Hanks Christine A. Bachrach University of California at Berkeley Cardinal Lane 6253 Department of Demography 21044 Columbia, Maryland Piedmont Avenue 2232 USA 94720-2120 Berkeley, California Acknowledgements and Note on Authorship The four primary authors—Johnson-Hanks, Bachrach, Morgan, and Kohler—wrote the introduction, Chapters 1 and 2, and the conclusion. Chapter 3 is the work of Morgan and Kohler. Chapter 4 was co-authored by Bachrach, Pamela Smock, and Lynette Hoelter. Chapter 5 was written by Johnson-Hanks and Rosalind King. We are indebted to an unusually large number of readers and interlocutors—literally hundreds of people have helped us over the past 7 years, in ways large and small. This book would never have come to fruition without their kind comments, assis- tance, advice, and, sometimes, skepticism. These generous people include: Elijah Anderson, William Axinn, Jennifer Barber, John Bartkowski, Eli Berman, Suzanne Bianchi, Caroline Bledsoe, Thomas Bradbury, Peter Brandon, Susan Brown, Larry Bumpass, Linda Burton, Charles Camic, Lynne Casper, Avshalom Caspi, Shannon Cavanaugh, P. Lindsay Chase-Lansdale, Andrew Cherlin, John Comaroff, Jean Comaroff, Carolyn Pape Cowan, Philip Cowan, Robert Crosnoe, Janet Currie, Thomas DiPrete, Kenneth Dodge, Liz Drogin, Sarah Edgington, Kathryn Edin, Phyllis Ellickson, Paula England, Barbara Entwistle, V. Jeffrey Evans, Kathy Ewing, Marion Fourcade, Thomas Fricke, Sally Gallagher, Linda Garro, Jennifer Glass, Frances Goldscheider, Reid Hamel, William Hanks, Amal Harrati, Kathleen Mullan Harris, Robert Hauser, Tess Hauser, Sarah Hayford, John Hobcraft, Sandra Hofferth, V. Joseph Hotz, Johannes Huinink, Guillermina Jasso, David S. Johnson, Valarie King, Rachel Kranton, Rose Kreider, Nancy Landale, Annette Lareau, Celine Le Bourdais, Ron Lesthaeghe, Matt Lieberman, Shelly Lundberg, Wendy Manning, Steven P. Martin, Dan P. McAdams, Thomas McDade, Kathleen McGarry, Sara McLanahan, Miller McPherson, Robert Moffitt, James Moody, Mignon Moore, William Mosher, Kelly Musick, Susan Newcomer, Randall Olsen, Randall Olsen, Anne Pebley, Charles Pierret, Kelly Raley, Jen’nan Ghazal Read, Jennifer Richeson, Ronald Rindfuss, Michael Rosenfeld, Laura Sanchez, Seth Sanders, Liana Sayer, Christine Schwartz, Judith Seltzer, William Sewell, Merril Silverstein, Lynn Smith- Lovin, Megan Sweeney, Ann Swidler, Duncan Thomas, Arland Thornton, Judith Treas, M. Belinda Tucker, Greg Urban, Stephen Vaisey, Susan Watkins, Sandra R Waxman, Alexander Weinreb, Bradford Wilcox, John Wilson, and Lawrence Wu. Our thanks to all are heartfelt and profound. In addition, we are grateful to the participants in colloquia at: the Bay Area Colloquium in Population; UC v vi Acknowledgements and Note on Authorship Berkeley Department of Sociology; UT Austin Population Research Center; Brown University Population Studies and Training Center; and the University of Chicago Population Research Center. Our work was largely funded by the NICHD Contract “New Approaches to Explaining Family Change and Variation” (RFP 2003-03). All errors and omissions remain our own. Introduction Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina begins with the observation that “All happy families are alike. Each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Regarding the unhappy, Tolstoy is likely right. But happy families differ, too. Indeed, the diversity of family form and function is striking, particularly when viewed in a broad comparative or historical context. Is childbearing limited to marriage? What about sex? What rights and obligations does marriage confer? Who is permitted to marry whom?Who does, empirically, marry whom? How many children do women bear, when, and with whom? Is remarriage practiced after the death of a spouse? What about divorce? The answers to these questions differ widely across contexts, and have significant social and demographic consequences. Understanding family change and variation is critical both for making sense of the broad social and cultural patterns of late modernity and for explaining demographic rates. Studies of the family are therefore of central importance throughout the social sciences. The importance of family change and variation has not gone unnoticed; to the contrary, it is the focus of a large and vibrant body of research. So vibrant, in fact, that one component—social demography—has become an independent subfield. The wealth of data on American families, ease of their analysis with new devel- opments in computer hardware and software, and wealth of important questions needing answers have together given rise to a plethora of studies on the correlates of single motherhood, divorce, and age at marriage, to name only a few. This vibrant literature in social demography has become increasingly separate from the rest of the social sciences, even on similar topics. Patterns of citation, loci of publication, even the division of labor in graduate training programs all show a separation between social demography and social theory. It has come to a point where a senior professor can say that he studied demography because it meant that he could earn a PhD in Sociology without ever reading Weber, Marx, or Durkheim . . . and no one laughs. This increasing isolation of social demography is the primary impetus for this book. All the authors view ourselves as social demographers, either full-time or hyphenated with other titles, and we want our work and our discipline to be in dia- logue with the broad issues in contemporary social science. We are concerned that in its partial isolation, social demography has missed some critical opportunities for richer, better, more compelling explanations of social phenomena—opportunities vii viii Introduction derived from recent findings or standard approaches in other social, human, and in some cases even biological, sciences. We therefore orient this book to other social demographers specifically, and to scholars interested in family change and difference more broadly. We draw our examples from social demography, and hope to show that the model we develop will be useful for it. However, we do not see the usefulness of our theoretical framework as bounded by substantive domain; the approach advanced here is very general and should be a useful guide to any study of social change or difference. The book has a long and unusual history. Morgan and Bachrach began for- mally collaborating in 2004 as part of a large, multisite and multidisciplinary NICHD contract to review and critique existing research, theory, and practice in 1 the social demography of the family. Part of the charge of that contract was to think boldly about potential “next steps”—how could studies of the family be done really differently in order to advance knowledge? Responsible for the topic of fer- tility, Morgan and Bachrach took this part of the charge especially seriously, and recruited Johnson-Hanks and Kohler to join the project of rethinking fertility stud- ies from the ground up. (In one meeting, the phrase “tip the tables over” was used repeatedly.) We began with a shared dissatisfaction with current theoretical models and a sense that minor alterations to existing approaches were insufficient. We did not begin with a predetermined theoretical framework but rather with the realiza- tion that existing theories of family change and difference have both empirical and conceptual limitations. In particular, we were struck by the many empirical and conceptual advances in sociology, anthropology, psychology, and biology over the past two decades, and by how little these advances have transformed social demography. Concretely, we sought to incorporate research from psychology (on the pervasiveness and importance of schemas and on identity), from neuro- and cognitive science (on brain function and its implications for action), from behav- ioral economics (on the importance of heuristics and biases), and from sociology and anthropology (on the interplay of material and ideational aspects of structure, and on the mutual constitution of selves and contexts). Although we are concerned about the theoretical state of much contemporary demography of the family, there is also a lot of wonderful, creative work being done—Fisher (2006), Swidler and Watkins (2007), Watkins and Swidler (2009), or Weinreb (2006), for example. And we are by no means the only ones to call for a rethinking of the theoretical basis of contemporary social demography. In recent years a number of demographers have voiced concerns about the limitations of cur- rent scholarly paradigms and have made efforts to address them (see for example Hobcraft, 2006). Although these works are quite diverse, each parallels our work here in drawing attention to one or more of three central themes: developing demo- graphic science that is consilient with the knowledge from evolutionary biology and cognitive science; integrating cultural theory into demographic research; or argu- ing for alternatives to dominant “positivist” perspectives and methods in the field. 1 The work of this broader group is described elsewhere (Morgan et al., 2008; Seltzer et al., 2005). Introduction ix These works reflect a widely shared sense that productive change in the methods and approaches of demographic research is both possible and desirable. Massey’s Strangers in a Strange Land (2005) and his Presidential Address to the American Sociological Association (Massey, 2002) parallel our efforts to under- stand social life and social action while accounting for “human nature”. While Massey’s substantive focus is on inequality and urban life (and we focus on fam- ily), both his efforts and ours are firmly anchored to key biological mechanisms developed over the course of human evolution, especially the evolution of the brain. In particular, the challenges that brain modularity poses for rational choice mod- els of human behavior are front and center in Massey’s approach: “we . . . should ground our theories and models in established knowledge about how people think and interact using both their emotional and rational brains” (2002, p. 25). In this book, we try to do exactly that. In another recent work, Culture, Biology, and Anthropological Demography, Eric Roth (2004) argues that population studies would benefit from a synthesis of knowl- edge from two branches of anthropology—human evolutionary ecology and cultural anthropology. Roth argues that demographic strategies—decision rules about how we adapt demographic behaviors to particular contexts or circumstances—are deeply influenced by both biology and culture. Indeed, because demographic strate- gies are so central to mechanisms of natural selection and reproductive success, they provide an essential link between biology and culture. Two other volumes that integrate knowledge of human evolution and biology with demographic research were published by the National Research Council. Between Zeus and the Salmon (Wachter & Finch, 1997) integrated biological, evolutionary and demographic knowledge about human longevity. Offspring (Wachter & Bulatao, 2003) undertook a similar integration focusing on human fertility behavior. We echo their emphasis on thinking about demography through a biosocial lens. Anthropological Demography: Toward a New Synthesis was an effort to revitalize the sporadic and often ambivalent relationship between demography and anthropol- ogy. In arguing for the value of such a move, volume editors, David Kertzer and Tom Fricke (1997) argue persuasively that anthropology offers demography not only an extension of methods but also richer theory. They suggest that demography, while embracing the importance of context, has had limited success in extending notions of context to the ideational realm. Rather, consideration of cultural variables has generally been limited to factors such as attitudes and beliefs measured at the indi- vidual level. They stress the potential for embracing anthropological theories that engage culture at both micro- and macro- levels and concepts of culture as variable and dynamic. The model we develop here traces its roots to anthropologists as well as sociologists and historians who have contributed to the development of new theo- ries of culture; it is no surprise that our argument is highly supportive of the agenda laid out in the Kertzer and Fricke volume. The call for greater attention to cultural phenomena is also implicit in Arland Thornton’s (2005) Reading History Sideways: The Fallacy and Enduring Impact of the Developmental Paradigm on Family Life. Although Thornton carefully acknowl- edges the many contributions and continuing value of quantitative approaches in
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