Changing Relationships

Malcolm Brynin, John Ermisch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9780415541046
• eBook ISBN: 9781135890209
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Some relationships are within the family -- such as between parents and children, grandparents and children and between siblings -- while others are between friends. In some cases, these distinctions are blurred (Are short-term partners family members? Are family members seen as such when relations become unfriendly? Does divorce, if amicable, replace a family with a friendship?). Using quantitative, cutting-edge statistical analysis, in conjunction with a multi-disciplinary approach, the contributors to this volume address the contemporary state of and dynamics in these various types of relationships, linking these to key rites of passage such as leaving home, marriage and childbirth, to see how these stand after a period of rapid social change. The book will be of interest to scholars in a broad range of disciplines, including sociology, social policy and economics.

Part I
Forming and Maintaining Relationships

1 Introduction

The Social Significance of Relationships

Malcolm Brynin and John Ermisch

Romeo and Juliet hide their marriage because it would dishonour their families. The family has to appear united, of one mind; each member is subordinate to it but also represents it. But in addition, and despite this power of the family itself, the two families are internally highly differentiated—by gender and across the generations—with power residing unequivocally with the fathers. The story resonates with us still because now, as in Shakespeare’s time, the family can be seen as distinct from the relationships which comprise it. In the case of the families of Romeo and Juliet we observe several key relationship: between parents and children, wife and husband, boyfriend and girlfriend, cousins, nurse and child. We can therefore interpret the conflict of the play not as the outcome of two dysfunctional families but as one between different (and conflicting) forms of relationship.

Only twenty years ago, the British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, said that ‘The basic ties of the family at the heart of our society are the very nursery of civic virtue. It is on the family that we in government build our own policies for welfare, education and care’ (quoted in Finch 1989: 3). But examine any relatively recent book in the social sciences on ‘the family’ to see that it is rarely about the family as a whole. We have moved from a concern with the family as a unit to a much more complex phenomenon, a network of relationships:¹ between members of a couple, between parents and children, less often between the children themselves or perhaps wider family members. For instance, as confirmed in many countries, cohabitation is more likely to arise where parents are divorced (Kiernan 2000: 55). This represents not a family effect but the effect of one relationship on another. There might even be doubt as to what counts as family, so that the boundaries of the network of relationships we call the ‘family’ are fuzzy. Take as an obvious example a young man and woman who might be described as boyfriend-girlfriend, but they sometimes live together, so some people would call them a couple—and therefore a family. The distinction between friendship and family relationship is nebulous (Spencer and Pahl 2006).

What do we mean by a ‘relationship’? Robert Hinde’s suggested route to an integrated science of relationships provides one such answer:

At the behaviour level, a relationship implies first a series of interactions between two people, involving interchanges over an extended period of time…. The interchanges have some degree of mutuality, in the sense that the behaviour of each takes some account of the behaviour of the other. However this mutuality does not necessarily imply ‘cooperation’ in its everyday sense: relationships exist between enemies as well as between friends, between those who are forced into each other’s company as well as between those who seek it. (Hinde 1997, p. 37)

That is, a relationship is created by participants out of a series of ‘interactions’, by which we mean such incidents as one individual showing some behaviour X to another individual, who responds with behaviour Y. An essential character of a relationship is that ‘each interaction is influenced by other interactions in that relationship…. A relationship exists only when the probable course of future interactions between the participants differs from that between strangers’ (Hinde 1997, p. 38). We can perhaps add to this the idea that a relationship ‘typically involves individuals who view themselves as a unit with a long-term commitment to continue their relationship’ (Milardo and Duck 2000: xi)

This perspective provides an empirical basis for the analysis of relationships derived not from biological, legal, or normative definitions but in terms of observed interactions. We can therefore in principle abstract relationships out of observations we make of individuals interacting in the world that we experience directly. As Dunbar (2004, p. 66) explains:

… we have to be able to move backwards and forwards between the physical world of interactions (real events) and the virtual world in which these events are constituted into relationships in order to be able to understand what the significance of specific actions is or might be, or how two relationships impinge on each other.

In this sense, relationships vary enormously in their significance and intensity. One way of looking at this is in terms of a nested hierarchical structure, with larger numbers of progressively less intense relationships maintained at higher levels (Dunbar 2004, p. 67). What might be called human group size has been claimed to number about 150 (Dunbar 1997, 2004)—the number with whom you have some kind of meaningful social relationship—not just by sight or a business relationship. The next level is sometimes called a sympathy group, numbering about 10–15 individuals. Finally, a subset of the sympathy group is what Dunbar and Spoors (1998) call the support clique, ‘the inner clique of intimates that individuals would normally approach for advice and assistance when in difficulty’ (p.275). Typical numbers in the support clique appear to be about 3–5 (Hill and Dunbar 2003, p. 67). Hill and Dunbar contend that there are cognitive constraints on the number of individuals that can be maintained at a given intensity of relationship, but from our point of view the important point is that people with whom we are linked through birth or marriage in what we call family may appear in any of these groupings. For instance, a spouse would undoubtedly be in most people’s support clique as would the parents of dependent children, while adult children might appear only at the sympathy group level.

A related but different approach is described by Spencer and Pahl (2006), who call groups of relationships ‘personal communities’, which might be drawn from any of the preceding three groups. Each community contains individuals of different degrees of closeness and interreliance. Each therefore cuts across several levels of friendship (Spencer and Pahl 2006: 60), while friendship itself is defined in terms of intensity, ranging from simple (‘associates’, ‘useful contacts’), through friends from whom either favours or fun might be sought, to complex friendships (‘helpmate’, ‘comforter or confidant’, ‘soul mate’), many of whose members would be family.²

We can therefore see relationships in two ways: first, as biologically and/ or legally given connections between people, such as parent-child relationships or marriages; second, as connections formed by observable interactions, which can therefore additionally include other relationships such as cohabitation or friendship. But it is the interactions which make the relationship meaningful even if they do not define it. My sister is related to me, but if we do not interact it is difficult to see that our relationship is any different from a relationship between two strangers. Spouses almost certainly have a relationship, almost by definition while currently residing together, but here too the relationship might resolve to virtually nothing after a separation. Parents and children vary enormously in the extent to which they maintain an observable relationship once children have left home. In this book we look at some relationships—couples who have a romantic relationship but do not live together, and friendships—where we rely for information about these on observed or stated interactions. In respects of the family,³ the relationships have some biological and/or legal force but interest is nevertheless always in the nature of the interactions associated with these. It is what people do in their relationships that counts.

Research on the family habitually starts with the concept of decline, attested primarily through change at the couple level, with the rise in divorce and cohabitation, but also in the view of some in the decline in the role of the family as a model and framework for young people (Popenoe 1988). Part and parcel of this perceived decline is the growth of the relationship, which, as Giddens observes in respect of the sexual relationship, is a term of relatively recent usage (1992: 58). Analytically, the one concept replaces the other. It is only through the analysis of these relationship dyads that we can observe power differentials, flows of influence, and the balance of individual welfare. It is the last of these in particular that forms the basis for this book. The questions of interest are now not what is the social function of the family, how stable it is, or even what can it provide for its members but how are relationships formed and dissolved, how long do they last, what are their effects on their members? Of course, there is much overlap between an approach based on the family and an approach based on relationships, because the former clearly comprises a number of the latter, but as a result of this focus it is clearer that what is at issue is not the decline of the family so much as the rise of the relationship.

At the heart of the approach based on this concept within economics is a concern for the analysis of individual welfare, and indeed the apparent decline of the family fits in naturally with the underlying theory of individualism.⁴ As examples: for women in couples or for young people in relation to their parents, while inequalities in resources are still important, they are less so than in the past, enabling greater independence of action and bargaining power. Such changes have of course been a major source of analysis within sociology too, if nevertheless with entirely different theoretical and formal starting points. For instance, sociologists have been more concerned with family forms, within which the balance of power becomes more complex and contested. In this case the decline of the family is in part a story of the decline of the conventional family, defined by two married parents and their natural children.

There are, of course, other ways of looking at relationships. For instance, an approach based on psychology will in general relate to the emotions in couple relations and the nature of parenting. In the case of the latter there is a strong emphasis on measures of parenting rather than on social background as in sociology or the distribution of welfare as in economics. Yet the difference between these and psychology is often thin, and even more so when the field of study is called ‘family studies’.⁵ In order to demonstrate the areas of common ground but also the differences, we outline below some of the main building blocks of the two approaches, based in economics and sociology, used in this book.

AN ECONOMICS OF RELATIONSHIPS⁶

It is not obvious that economists, traditionally concerned with trade, prices, productivity, and so on, should be interested in the family at all. The family is an emotive thing. It is hedged in by laws, customs, morality. But economists have begun to argue that the family is subject to the laws of individual rationality like most other institutions, and they have applied the analytical methods of microeconomics to family behaviour. Even customs and moral duty may be the outcome of cultural evolution toward an equilibrium sustained by selfish people (Binmore 2005).

The aim of economics is to analyse the impacts of public policies, social change and technological developments on the welfare of individuals, the only unit for whom the word welfare is meaningful. Individualism is in fact the foundation of family economics. This means that the concerns of economists of the family are typically: how people become couples—involving the analysis of ‘marriage markets’; the distribution of welfare within couples, especially of material resources; fertility—the decision if and when to have children; the devotion of material and other resources to children; and the factors that lead to marital breakdown. Uniting all these is the concern for individual utility or welfare. For instance, decisions about marriage and divorce must make comparisons between individual welfare within and outside a couple.

It is assumed that people seek to be at least as well off after a decision such as marriage as before. Such outcomes are not guaranteed but provide a baseline for analysis. In this context, the family is best viewed as a ‘governance structure’ for organising activities rather than a firm in which family members work, as has sometimes been suggested, or a set of long-term contracts (Pollak 1985). This approach is suitable for analysing any relationships within the family—e.g. between spouses, between parents and adult children—but also relationships more generally when they involve resource allocation and the distribution of the ‘surplus’ from interaction.

Regarding relationship dynamics, some family relationships, such as parent-child, are initially formed by the decision of one side of the relationship. Others are formed through purposive behaviour by both sides. Inevitably the couple is the starting point for analysis. The most obvious and most studied relationship within economics, therefore, is marriage. In addition to love and companionship, marriage offers two people the opportunity to share resources, to benefit from the division of labour, and to facilitate risk-sharing. How are marriage decisions made, and with what effect? What sorts of people do people choose to marry? Of course, the process of finding a spouse is often one in which information is scarce, and it takes time to gather it. Such market ‘frictions’ affect who marries whom, the gains from each marriage, and the distribution of gains between spouses, as well as fertility decisions. Nevertheless, we can predict certain outcomes on the basis of the assumption of rational behaviour (which holds on average even if many individual decisions might seem irrational to outsiders or even to the actors themselves).

Let us start with a simple example. Do people marry others like themselves? Suppose that people’s utility from a marriage depends on the characteristics of their partner (which can be defined by various attributes, such as education) associated with their ‘attractiveness’ as a husband or wife, but also that there is no way to transfer utility between spouses. This assumption means that an individual who would obtain large gains from a match with a particular partner (because the former has less of one or more desirable attributes than the other, such as education) cannot compensate that potential partner to ensure the match is made. Then if marriage market frictions are not too large, positive assortative mating by attractive attributes emerges: that is, people on average do best in terms of their own welfare by marrying people like themselves.

Alternatively, and perhaps more realistically, if we allow ‘transferable utility’ and assume away any frictions, jointly efficient matches are made, so each match can be characterized by the ‘total utility’ it generates. They are efficient in the sense that neither party could do better marrying someone else or staying single. What does this mean? Suppose that each person is endowed with a single attribute (again, such as education), which has a positive effect on total utility from the marriage—that is, both gain from each other’s education. Positive assortative mating with respect to the attribute still occurs, but only in some cases—when attributes are complements (in the sense that the effect of one person’s attribute is increased by the attribute of the spouse), in the production of total ut...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• PART I Forming and Maintaining Relationships
• PART II Relationships and Social Welfare
• Contributors