Functionalist and New Right Views of the Family

Functionalism and the New Right are two of the most influential — and most heavily criticised — perspectives on the family in the AQA A-Level Sociology (7192) specification. Both treat the conventional nuclear family (a married heterosexual couple and their children, with a male breadwinner) as the most desirable family form, but they reach that conclusion by very different routes. Functionalism is an academic consensus theory that asks what the family does for society; the New Right is a conservative political ideology that asks what the family ought to be and how policy should defend it. Understanding both, and the feminist, Marxist and postmodern critiques arrayed against them, is essential because almost every 20-mark essay in this topic asks you to weigh consensus optimism about the family against conflict and diversity perspectives.

Key Definition: A consensus theory holds that society rests on shared values (a "value consensus") and that its institutions function to maintain order and integration. Functionalism is the leading consensus theory; it contrasts with conflict theories (Marxism, feminism), which see society as divided by competing interests.

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Spec Mapping

This lesson addresses the AQA A-Level Sociology (7192) Paper 2, Section A — Families and Households content:

• The relationship of the family to the social structure and social change, with particular reference to the economy and to state policies (the functionalist functional-fit thesis and the New Right's policy prescriptions).
• It also feeds the bullets on changing family patterns and the relationship of the family to social policy, since the New Right is fundamentally a policy perspective.

You should be able to describe (AO1) Murdock's four functions, Parsons' two irreducible functions and instrumental/expressive roles, and the New Right's underclass thesis; apply (AO2) these to an Item; and evaluate (AO3) them using feminist, Marxist and postmodern critiques and the correlation/causation problem. Both perspectives recur as the "target view" in essays and as material for the 10-mark "analyse two functions/two criticisms" question.

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Synoptic Links

• Sociological Theory: functionalism is the paradigm consensus/structural theory (Durkheim, Parsons), while the critiques come from conflict theory (Marxism, feminism) and from postmodernism. This topic is a direct application of the consensus–conflict debate.
• Crime and Deviance: the New Right's underclass thesis (Murray) is the same argument used to explain crime — inadequate socialisation by lone-mother families producing delinquent young men. The family and crime topics share this evidence base and its critiques.
• Education: Parsons' primary socialisation dovetails with his functionalist account of school as the agency of secondary socialisation and role allocation; the New Right's emphasis on parental responsibility links to debates about parenting and underachievement.
• Social policy: the New Right directly shaped UK policy (e.g. debates over benefits, the Child Support Agency, marriage tax allowances), connecting to the family-and-social-policy lesson and to Donzelot's account of state surveillance.
• Research Methods: the claim that children in lone-parent families have "worse outcomes" raises the correlation vs causation problem and the difficulty of operationalising and controlling for poverty — a core methods issue.

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The Functionalist Perspective

Functionalism sees society as a system of interdependent institutions that work together to meet society's functional prerequisites (basic needs) and maintain stability. The family is one such institution, and functionalists argue it performs vital functions for both individuals and the social system as a whole.

Murdock (1949): Four Functions of the Family

George Peter Murdock (1949), on the basis of his 250-society survey, argued the nuclear family is universal because it performs four essential functions:

Function	Explanation
Sexual	Channels sexuality into socially approved relationships (marriage), limiting the conflict and jealousy that unregulated sexuality might cause
Reproductive	Provides a stable setting for producing and raising the next generation
Economic	Members cooperate economically — sharing income, food, housing and labour
Educational (socialisation)	The primary agent of socialisation, transmitting culture, norms and values to children

For Murdock these functions are so indispensable that no society has found a workable substitute for the nuclear family.

Criticisms of Murdock

• Feminists (e.g. Oakley) argue Murdock ignores the "dark side" of family life — domestic violence, child abuse, the exploitation of women's unpaid labour — and presents an idealised picture.
• Marxists argue the family primarily serves capitalism, not "society" as an undifferentiated whole; benefits flow to the ruling class.
• Functional alternatives exist: the state provides education and welfare; religion, peer groups and the media also socialise children. The family is not the only institution able to perform these tasks (the kibbutz and Nayar evidence reinforces this).

Parsons (1955): The Functional Fit and Two "Irreducible" Functions

Talcott Parsons (1955) argued that as society industrialised, the family lost many functions (production, formal education, healthcare, welfare) to specialised institutions — a process he called structural differentiation. In modern industrial society the family is left with two irreducible (essential) functions:

1. Primary socialisation of children — the family is uniquely placed to socialise children in their earliest years, internalising society's norms and values and shaping personality. Drawing on Freud, Parsons saw early family experience as decisive for personality formation.
2. Stabilisation of adult personalities (the "warm bath") — the family provides emotional security and stress relief for adults. After the strains of competitive, impersonal work, the family is a haven — a "warm bath" in which the (male) worker can de-stress, sustaining his mental health and, by extension, social stability.

Key Concept — The Warm Bath Theory: the family is a "warm bath" that soaks away the stresses of the outside world. In Parsons' model the expressive wife/mother provides the emotional nurturing that restores the instrumental husband/breadwinner for another day's work.

Parsons: Instrumental and Expressive Roles

Within the nuclear family Parsons argued adults adopt complementary roles rooted, he claimed, in biology:

Role	Performed by	Function
Instrumental	Husband/father	Breadwinner — earns money, provides materially, links the family to the wider economy
Expressive	Wife/mother	Homemaker and carer — provides emotional warmth, nurtures children, stabilises adult personalities

Parsons treated women's "natural" suitability for the expressive role (via childbearing and nurturing) as functional for family and society alike — a claim that became a central target for feminism.

Criticisms of Parsons

Criticism	Source	Detail
Gender roles are socially constructed, not natural	Ann Oakley (1974)	The instrumental/expressive split is an ideological justification for gender inequality, not biological necessity; cross-cultural evidence shows enormous variation in gender roles
Ignores family diversity	Various	Parsons assumes the male-breadwinner nuclear family is the norm, ignoring lone-parent, dual-earner, same-sex and reconstituted families
Ignores conflict and inequality	Feminists, Marxists	The "warm bath" idealises family life, ignoring domestic violence, the "stressed bath" of conflict, unequal power and the exploitation of women's domestic labour
Functional-fit timeline is wrong	Laslett (1972), Anderson (1971)	The nuclear family pre-dated industrialisation and extended kin grew in some early industrial areas (see the social-structure lesson)
Deterministic	Various	Assumes the family passively adapts to economic needs, downplaying cultural values, state policy, feminism and individual agency

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The New Right Perspective

The New Right is a conservative political perspective that gained influence in the 1980s and 1990s, associated with the Thatcher (UK) and Reagan (USA) governments. It is not an academic sociological theory but it borrows functionalist assumptions and has strongly shaped family policy.

Core New Right Arguments

1. The conventional nuclear family (married heterosexual couple, father as breadwinner) is the ideal — the best environment for raising children and for social order.
2. Lone-parent families (especially mother-headed) are a major source of social problems — underachievement, crime, welfare dependency, moral decline.
3. The welfare state has created a dependency culture: over-generous benefits make it too easy to have children outside marriage and to avoid work, eroding family responsibility.
4. Marriage should be actively promoted by the state (e.g. through tax incentives), while cohabitation and lone parenthood are discouraged.
5. Traditional gender roles are beneficial — fathers supply discipline and a male role model; mothers supply care and emotional security.

Charles Murray (1984, 1990): The Underclass and Family Breakdown

Charles Murray is the most influential New Right writer on the family. He argued that:

• A growing underclass has emerged in the USA and UK, marked by welfare dependency, worklessness, crime and family breakdown.
• Its key cause is the decline of the conventional family — specifically the rise of lone motherhood and absent fathers.
• Generous benefits create perverse incentives, rewarding what he saw as irresponsible behaviour by making lone parenthood financially viable.
• Without a resident father, boys lack discipline and a male role model, leading to anti-social behaviour and educational failure.

Key Quote — Murray (1990): "The civilising force for young men is the family... A young man who grows up without a father has no model of what it means to be a responsible adult male."

Other New Right Thinkers

• Dennis and Erdos (1992), in Families Without Fatherhood, argued fatherless families produce children more likely to underachieve, offend and become welfare-dependent.
• Patricia Morgan (2000) argued that marriage offers children a more stable environment than cohabitation and that policy should actively support it.

graph TD
  A["Generous welfare benefits"] --> B["Perverse incentives to lone parenthood"]
  B --> C["Rise in mother-headed families / absent fathers"]
  C --> D["Boys lack a male role model & discipline"]
  D --> E["Underclass: crime, worklessness, dependency"]
  F["New Right remedy"] --> G["Cut benefits + promote marriage"]
  G --> H["Restore conventional nuclear family"]

Evaluation of the New Right

Strengths	Limitations
Highlights real concerns about child welfare; some research does associate stable two-parent families with better average outcomes	Correlation is not causation: disadvantages in lone-parent families largely reflect poverty, not structure; controlling for income shrinks most differences (cf. McLanahan & Sandefur, 1994)
Draws attention to fathers' role in child development	Stigmatises diversity: labelling lone-parent, same-sex and cohabiting families as inferior is ideological, not evidence-based
Questions whether welfare always produces good outcomes	Blames the victim: lone mothers are blamed for problems whose structural causes are unemployment, low pay and poor housing
	Ignores the dark side of the nuclear family: domestic violence and abuse occur within conventional families
	Feminists argue it seeks to push women back into a subordinate domestic role, reversing gains in gender equality
	Chester (1985): the (neo-conventional) nuclear family remains the norm most people pass through; "decline" is exaggerated. Golombok (2000) found children of same-sex parents are not disadvantaged

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Comparing Functionalism and the New Right

Feature	Functionalism	New Right
Nature	Academic sociological theory	Political/ideological perspective
View of nuclear family	Performs essential functions for society	The ideal form; morally superior
View of diversity	Nuclear family is "functionally fit" for industrial society	Diversity (esp. lone parenthood) is harmful
View of gender roles	Instrumental/expressive roles are functionally necessary	Traditional roles are morally desirable
View of welfare state	Part of the institutional structure of modern society	Creates dependency; undermines family responsibility
Key thinkers	Murdock (1949), Parsons (1955)	Murray (1984, 1990), Dennis & Erdos (1992)
Main criticism	Ignores conflict, inequality, diversity	Ideological; blames victims; ignores structural causes

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Functionalism's Theoretical Roots: Value Consensus and Functional Prerequisites

To evaluate functionalism fully, it helps to locate Murdock and Parsons within the wider functionalist tradition founded by Émile Durkheim. For Durkheim, the central problem of modern society is social order: how do millions of individuals come to cooperate rather than descend into a "war of all against all"? His answer is the value consensus — a shared framework of norms and values into which each generation must be socialised. Parsons builds directly on this: the family's primary socialisation function is the mechanism by which the value consensus is reproduced, while the stabilisation of adult personalities keeps already-socialised adults integrated and functioning. The family is thus, for functionalists, the institution that meets society's functional prerequisite of value-transmission. This theoretical grounding is a genuine strength — it gives functionalism an account of why socialisation matters that the New Right, as a political programme, simply assumes. But it is also the source of the perspective's deepest weakness: by treating shared values as given and beneficial, functionalism cannot ask whose values are being transmitted, a question Marxists (ruling-class ideology) and feminists (patriarchal norms) place at the centre of their analyses.

It is also worth noting the functional-alternative critique. Murdock claimed no society had found a workable substitute for the nuclear family, yet the kibbutz (communal child-rearing) and Gough's Nayar (matrilineal kin-group rearing) demonstrate that the family's functions can be performed by other arrangements. D.H.J. Morgan and others argue this fatally weakens the claim that the nuclear family is functionally indispensable: at most it is one efficient solution among several, which is a far weaker claim than the universality functionalists assert.

The New Right's Policy Influence and the Underclass Controversy