The purpose of this assignment is for you to apply what you learned through the activities and chapter readings. You can reflect on the results from the reading and activities this week to inform your answers.

Review the Sociology Matters prompt at the end of Ch. 8.

Write a 700-word response to one bullet at the end of the chapter.

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Social Institutions: Family and Religion

Sociological Perspectives on Social Institutions

The Family: A Global View

Sociological Perspectives on the Family

Labeling and Human Sexuality

Religion as a Social Institution

Components of Religion

Among the Nyinba people of Nepal and Tibet, a woman may be married to more than one man at a time, usually brothers. This system allows sons to share the limited amount of good land they may inherit. Among the Betsileo of Madagascar, a man has multiple wives, each one living in a different village where he cultivates rice. Wherever he has the best rice field, that wife is considered his first or senior wife. Among the Yanomami of Brazil and Venezuela, it is considered proper to have sexual relations with your opposite-sex cousins if they are the children of your mother’s brother or your father’s sister. But if your opposite-sex cousins are the children of your mother’s sister or your father’s brother, the same practice is considered to be incest. What can we learn from such varied patterns of family life? Though they may seem to defy generalization, sociologists have discovered that the stunning diversity of families around the world masks similarities in their social function (Haviland et al. 2015; Kelly 2012; Kottak 2015).

Similar observations may be made about the diversity of religion around the world. When we in the United States think of religion, a variety of images may spring to mind. We may picture a solemn prayer service in a small New England town, a passionate revival meeting in

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the Deep South, or a Hare Krishna group chanting on the streets of San Francisco. If we think of worldwide religious observances, we may imagine Islamic travelers on pilgrimage to Mecca, Orthodox Jews praying at Jerusalem’s Western Wall, or an African tribe marking the birth of a child through ritual. Around the world, we find an amazing diversity in religion. Yet sociologists would stress the social functions that all religions perform.

Religion and the family are both social institutions—organized patterns of beliefs and behavior that are centered on basic social needs, such as replacing personnel (the family) and preserving order (the government). All societies have social institutions; they may be thought of as cultural universals—general practices found in every culture, such as sports, cooking, marriage, religious ritual, and sexual restrictions (see Chapter 2). The fact that all societies have these cultural universals is not surprising, for they meet our needs for food, clothing, and shelter as well as for support and reassurance, occupational training, and social order. In this chapter we will begin by considering social institutions from the three major sociological perspectives: functionalist, conflict, and interactionist. Then we will apply those perspectives to two major social institutions, the family and religion. We will also consider human sexuality, which is integral to the family’s function of replacing personnel. In Chapter 9 we will extend the analysis to three more social institutions: education, government, and the economy (Murdock 1945).

Sociological Perspectives on Social Institutions

Though social institutions are fundamental to the well-being of any society, not all sociologists see them in the same way. Functionalists, as we will see, stress the basic needs that social institutions fulfill. But conflict theorists see social institutions such as the family and religion as mixed blessings—as sources of inequality and oppression as well as of nurturing and reassurance. Interactionists stress the ways in which social institutions help to define individuals’ social roles and statuses.

FUNCTIONALIST PERSPECTIVE

One way to study social institutions is to examine how they fulfill essential functions. To survive, any society or relatively permanent group must accomplish five major tasks, or functional prerequisites (see Table 8–1).

1. Replacing personnel. Any group or society must replace personnel when they die, leave, or become incapacitated. This function is accomplished through such means as immigration, annexation of neighboring groups, acquisition of slaves, or sexual reproduction. The Shakers, a religious sect that came to the United States in 1774, are a conspicuous example of a group that has failed to replace personnel. Their religious beliefs commit the Shakers to celibacy; to survive, the group must recruit new members. At first, the Shakers proved quite successful in attracting members, reaching a peak of about 64,000 in the 1840s. As of 2017, however, the only remaining Shaker community was a farm in Maine with two members—a sixty-year-old man and a seventy-eight-year old woman (The Economist 2017; Schaefer and Zellner 2015).

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summing UP

Table 8–1 Five Major Functions of Institutions

Functional Prerequisite	Related Social Institutions
Replacing personnel	Family
	Government (immigration)
Teaching new recruits	Family (basic skills) Economy (occupations) Education (schools) Mass media Religion (sacred teachings)
Producing and distributing goods and services	Family (food preparation) Economy Government (regulations regarding labor and commerce) Health care system
Preserving order	Family (childrearing, regulation of sexual behavior) Government Religion (morals)
Providing and maintaining a sense of purpose	Government (patriotism) Religion

1. Teaching new recruits. No group or society can survive if many of its members reject the established behavior and responsibilities. Thus, finding or producing new members is not sufficient. The group or society must encourage recruits to learn and accept its values and customs. Such learning can take place formally in schools (where learning is a manifest function) or informally, through interaction and negotiation in peer groups (where learning is a latent function).
2. Producing and distributing goods and services. Any relatively permanent group or society must provide and distribute desired goods and services to its members. Each society establishes a set of rules for the allocation of financial and other resources. These rules must satisfy the needs of most members to some extent, or the society will risk the possibility of discontent and ultimately disorder.
3. Preserving order. Throughout the world, indigenous and aboriginal peoples have struggled to protect themselves from outside invaders, with varying degrees of success. Failure to preserve order and defend against conquest leads to the death not only of a people but of a culture as well.

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1. Providing and maintaining a sense of purpose. In order to fulfill the first four requirements, people must feel motivated to continue as members of a group or society. Patriotism, tribal identities, religious values, or personal moral codes can help people to develop and maintain such a sense of purpose. Whatever the motivator, in any society there remains one common and critical reality: if an individual does not have a sense of purpose, he or she has little reason to contribute to a society’s survival.

This list of functional prerequisites does not specify how a society and its corresponding social institutions should perform each task. For example, one society may protect itself from external attack by amassing a frightening arsenal of weaponry, while another may make a determined effort to remain neutral in world politics and to promote cooperative relationships with its neighbors. No matter what the strategy, any society or relatively permanent group must attempt to satisfy all these functional prerequisites for survival. If a society fails on even one condition, it runs the risk of extinction (Aberle et al. 1950; Mack and Bradford 1979).

CONFLICT PERSPECTIVE

Conflict theorists do not concur with the functionalist approach to social institutions. Although theorists of both perspectives agree that institutions are organized to meet basic social needs, conflict theorists object to the implication that the outcome is necessarily efficient and desirable.

From a conflict perspective, the present organization of social institutions is no accident. Major institutions, such as education, help to maintain the privileges of the most powerful individuals and groups in a society, while contributing to the powerlessness of others. To give one example, public schools in the United States are financed largely through property taxes, an arrangement that allows people from more affluent areas to provide their children with better-equipped schools and better-paid teachers than people from low-income areas can provide. As a result, children from prosperous communities are better prepared to compete academically than children from impoverished communities. The structure of the nation’s educational system permits and even promotes such unequal treatment of schoolchildren.

Conflict theorists argue that social institutions such as education are inherently conservative. Without question, it has been difficult to implement educational reforms that promote equal opportunity—whether bilingual education, school desegregation, or mainstreaming of students with disabilities. From a functionalist perspective, social change can be dysfunctional, since it often leads to instability. But from a conflict view,

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why should we preserve the existing social structure if it is unfair and discriminatory?

Social institutions also operate in gendered and racist environments, as conflict theorists, as well as feminists and interactionists, have pointed out. In schools, offices, and government institutions, assumptions about what people can do reflect the sexism and racism of the larger society. For instance, many people assume that women cannot make tough decisions—even those in the top echelons of corporate management. Others assume that all Black students at elite colleges represent affirmative action admissions. Inequality based on gender, economic status, race, and ethnicity thrives in such an environment—to which we might add discrimination based on age, physical disability, and sexual orientation. The truth of this assertion can be seen in routine decisions by employers on how to advertise jobs as well as whether to provide fringe benefits such as child care and parental leave.

INTERACTIONIST PERSPECTIVE

Social institutions affect our everyday behavior, whether we are driving down the street or waiting in a long shopping line. Sociologist Mitchell Duneier (1994a, 1994b) studied the social behavior of the word processors, all women, who work in the service center of a large Chicago law firm. Duneier was interested in the informal social norms that emerged in this work environment and the rich social network that the female employees had created.

The Network Center, as it is called, is a single, windowless room in a large office building where the law firm occupies seven floors. The center is staffed by two shifts of word processors, who work either from 4:00 p.m. to midnight or from midnight to 8:00 a.m. Each word processor works in a cubicle with just enough room for her keyboard, terminal, printer, and telephone. Work assignments for the word processors are placed in a central basket and completed according to precise procedures.

At first glance, we might think that these women labor with little social contact, apart from limited work breaks and occasional conversations with their supervisor. However, drawing on the interactionist perspective, Duneier learned that despite working in a large office, these women found private moments to talk (often in the halls or outside the washroom) and share a critical view of the law firm’s attorneys and daytime secretaries. Indeed, the word processors routinely suggested that their assignments represented work that the “lazy” secretaries should have completed during the normal workday. One word processor in particular resented the lawyers’ superior attitude and pointedly refused to recognize or speak with any attorney who would not address her by name (Duneier 1994b).

Interactionist theorists emphasize that our social behavior is conditioned by the roles and statuses we accept, the groups we belong to,

How would a functionalist, a conflict theorist, and an interactionist view your college as a social institution?

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Tracking Perspectives

Table 8–2 Sociological Perspectives on Social Institutions

Perspective	Role of Social Institutions	Focus
Functionalist	Meeting basic social needs	Essential functions
Conflict	Meeting basic social needs	Maintenance of privileges and inequality
Interactionist	Fostering everyday behavior	Influence of the roles and statuses we accept

and the institutions within which we function. For example, the social roles associated with being a judge occur within the larger context of the criminal justice system. The status of “judge” stands in relation to other statuses, such as attorney, plaintiff, defendant, and witness, as well as to the social institution of government. Although courts and jails have great symbolic importance, the judicial system derives its continued significance from the roles people carry out in their social interactions (Berger and Luckmann 1966).

Table 8–2 summarizes the three major sociological perspectives on social institutions.

The Family: A Global View

As we saw at the beginning of this chapter, there are many variations in “the family” from one culture to the next. Yet the family as a social institution exists in all cultures. Moreover, certain general principles concerning its composition, kinship patterns, and authority patterns are universal.

COMPOSITION: WHAT IS THE FAMILY?

A family may be defined as a set of people who are related by blood, marriage (or some other agreed-upon relationship), or adoption who share the primary responsibility for reproduction and caring for members of society. If we were to take our information on what a family is from what we see on television, we might come up with some strange scenarios. The media don’t always present a realistic view of the family. Moreover, many people still think of the family in very narrow terms—as a married couple and their unmarried children living together. However, that is but one type of family, what sociologists refer to as a nuclear family. The term nuclear family is well chosen, since this type of family serves as the nucleus, or core, on which larger family groups are built.

Most people in the United States see the nuclear family as the preferred family arrangement. Yet as long ago as 2000, only about a third of the nation’s family households fit this model. The proportion of households in the United States composed of married couples with children at home has decreased steadily over the last 50 years and is expected to

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continue shrinking. At the same time, the number of single-parent households has increased (see Figure 8–1).

A family in which relatives—such as grandparents, aunts, or uncles—live in the same home as parents and their children is known as an extended family. Although not common, such living arrangements do exist in the United States. The structure of the extended family offers certain advantages over that of the nuclear family. Crises such as death, divorce, and illness put less strain on family members, since there are more people who can provide assistance and emotional support. In addition, the extended family constitutes a larger economic unit than the nuclear family. If the family is engaged in a common enterprise—a farm or small business—the additional family members may represent the difference between prosperity and failure.

In considering these differing family types, we have limited ourselves to the form of marriage that is characteristic of the United States—monogamy. The term monogamy describes a form of marriage in which one woman and one man are married only to each other. Some observers, noting the high rate of divorce in the United States, have suggested that “serial monogamy” is a more accurate description of the form that monogamy takes in the United States. In serial monogamy, a person may have several spouses in his or her life, but only one spouse at a time.

Serial monogamy is certainly more common today than it was a century ago due to a greater incidence and acceptance of divorce. In the United States and many other countries, divorce began to increase in the late 1960s but then leveled off; since the late 1980s, it has declined by 30 percent. This trend is due partly to the aging of the baby boomer population and the corresponding decline in the proportion of people of marriageable age. However, it also indicates an increase in marital stability in recent years (Coontz 2006).

In a society that maximizes the welfare of all family members, how easy should it be for couples to divorce? How easy should it be to get married?

Some cultures allow an individual to have several husbands or wives simultaneously. This form of marriage is known as polygamy. In fact,

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most societies throughout the world, past and present, have preferred polygamy to monogamy. Anthropologist George Murdock (1949, 1957) sampled 565 societies and found that some type of polygamy was the preferred form in more than 80 percent. While polygamy declined steadily through most of the 20th century and into the 21st, in at least five African nations 20 percent or more of the men are still living in polygamous unions (Population Reference Bureau 1996).

There are two basic types of polygamy. According to Murdock, the most common—endorsed by the majority of cultures he sampled—was polygyny, in which a husband may have several wives at the same time. The wives are often sisters, who are expected to hold similar values and to have experience sharing a household. In polygynous societies, relatively few men have multiple spouses. Most individuals live in monogamous families; having multiple wives is viewed as a mark of status.

The other principal variation of polygamy is polyandry, in which a woman may have several husbands at the same time. Such is the case in Tibet, as we saw in the chapter opening. Polyandry, however, is exceedingly rare. It is accepted in some extremely poor societies that practice female infanticide (the killing of baby girls) and thus have a relatively small number of women. Like many other societies, polyandrous cultures devalue the social worth of women (Zeitzen 2008).

KINSHIP PATTERNS: TO WHOM ARE WE RELATED?

Many of us can trace our roots by looking at a family tree or listening to our elders talk about their lives—and the lives of ancestors who died long before we were born. Yet a person’s lineage is more than a personal history; it reflects societal patterns that govern descent. In every culture, children encounter relatives to whom they are expected to show an emotional attachment. This state of being related to others is called kinship. Kinship is culturally learned, rather than being totally determined by biological or marital ties. For example, adoption creates a kinship tie that is legally acknowledged and socially accepted.

The family and the kin group are not necessarily one and the same. The family is a household unit, but kin do not always live together or function as a collective body on a daily basis. Kin groups include aunts, uncles, cousins, in-laws, and so forth. In a society such as the United States, the kinship group may come together only rarely, usually for a wedding or funeral. However, kinship ties frequently create obligations and responsibilities. We may feel compelled to assist our kin, and we feel free to call upon relatives for many types of aid, including loans and babysitting.

How do we identify kinship groups? The principle of descent assigns people to kinship groups according to their relationship to their mother or father. There are three primary ways of determining descent. The United States follows the system of bilateral descent, in which both sides

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of a person’s family are regarded as equally important. For example, no higher value is given to the brothers of one’s father than to the brothers of one’s mother.

Most societies—according to George Murdock, 64 percent—favor one side of the family or the other in tracing descent. Patrilineal (from Latin pater, “father”) descent favors the father’s relatives in terms of property, inheritance, and emotional ties. Matrilineal (from Latin mater, “mother”) descent favors the mother’s relatives.

In your own family, which relatives do you have a significant relationship with? Which do you hardly ever see? Explain the reasons for the difference in relationships.

New forms of reproductive technology will soon force a new way of looking at kinship. Today, a combination of biological and social processes can “create” a family member, requiring that more distinctions be made about who is related to whom.

AUTHORITY PATTERNS: WHO RULES?

Imagine that you have recently married and must begin to make decisions about the future of your new family. You and your spouse face many questions. Where will you live? How will you furnish your home? Who will do the cooking, the shopping, the cleaning? Whose friends will be invited to dinner? Each time a decision must be made, an issue is raised: Who has the power to make the decision? In simple terms, who rules the family? Conflict theorists examine these questions in the context of traditional gender distinctions, which have given men a dominant position over women.

Societies vary in the way that power is distributed within the family. If a society expects men to dominate in family decision making, it is termed a patriarchy. In patriarchal societies such as Iran, the eldest male frequently wields the greatest power, although wives are expected to be treated with respect and kindness. An Iranian woman’s status is typically defined by her relationship to a male relative, usually as a wife or daughter. In many patriarchal societies, women find it more difficult to obtain a divorce than a man does. By contrast, in a matriarchy, women dominate in family decision making. Matriarchies are rare; they emerged among Native American tribal societies and in nations where men were absent for long periods, for warfare or food gathering expeditions (Farr 1999).

In a third type of authority pattern, the egalitarian family, spouses are regarded as equals. This pattern does not mean that each decision is shared, however. Wives may hold authority in some spheres, husbands in others. Many sociologists believe the egalitarian family has begun to replace the patriarchal family as the social norm in the United States.

Clearly, there is great variation in the composition, kinship patterns, and authority patterns of families around the world. Yet as we have seen, the family fulfills certain universal social functions. In the next section we will examine those functions from three different sociological perspectives.

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Sociological Perspectives on the Family

Do we really need the family? A century ago, Friedrich Engels ([1884] 1959), a colleague of Karl Marx, described the family as the ultimate source of social inequality because of its role in the transfer of power, property, and privilege. More recently, conflict theorists have argued that the family contributes to societal injustice, denies women opportunities that are extended to men, and limits freedom in sexual expression and mate selection. In contrast, the functionalist perspective focuses on the ways in which the family gratifies the needs of its members and contributes to social stability. The interactionist view considers the intimate, face-to-face relationships that occur in the family. And the feminist approach examines the role of the wife and mother, especially in the absence of an adult male.

FUNCTIONALIST PERSPECTIVE ON THE FAMILY

The family performs six major functions, first outlined nearly 80 years ago by sociologist William F. Ogburn (Ogburn and Tibbits