Postmodernist Perspective on The Family

9 Key excerpts on "Postmodernist Perspective on The Family"

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  Changing Family Values

  Difference, Diversity and the Decline of Male Order

  • Gill Jagger, Caroline Wright(Authors)
  • 2003(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  9 From modern nuclear family households to postmodern diversity?

  The sociological construction of ‘families’

  Jo VanEvery

  The ‘modern’ family of sociological theory and historical convention designates a family form no longer prevalent in the United States—an intact nuclear family household unit composed of a male breadwinner, his full-time homemaker wife, and their dependent children—precisely the form of family life that many mistake for an ancient, essential, and now-endangered institution….

  For better or for worse, the post-modern family revolution is here to stay.

  (Stacey, 1992:93 and 110)

  Although referring to trends in the US, Stacey’s comments might equally apply in the UK. The precise ways in which family life is changing may differ but the overall pattern is certainly recognisable. Also recognisable are the public anxieties and political debates about the causes and consequences of these changes, and the legislative solutions aimed at halting the ‘post-modern family revolution’.

  Family is not the only institution undergoing a postmodern revolution. Sociology, too, is finding the ‘modern’ formula increasingly problematic. In a highly theoretical body of work, the implications of a shift from ‘modernity’ to ‘postmodernity’ for both sociology and society are debated and discussed. One key component of these debates is the relationship between sociology and public debates and political actions.

  Post-modernism calls into question the belief (or hope) that there is some form of innocent knowledge to be had…. By innocent knowledge I mean the discovery of some sort of truth which can tell us how to act in the world in ways that benefit or are for the (at least ultimate) good of all. Those whose actions are grounded or informed by such truth will also have their

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  Postmodernism, Religion, and the Future of Social Work

  • Jean A Pardeck, John W Murphy, Roland Meinert(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  Renewing Social Work Practice Through a Postmodern Perspective

  John W. MurphyJohn T. Pardeck

  SUMMARY. Postmodernism is one of the most recent significant developments within the social sciences. This paper reviews the movement toward a postmodern perspective beginning in the late 19th century in the field of sociology. The evolution toward a postmodern perspective in the social sciences has important implications for the profession of social work. The authors suggest that the postmodern perspective has the potential to renew the profession of social work. [Article copies available for a fee from The Haworth Document Delivery Service: 1-800-342-9678. E-mail address: [email protected] ]

  Postmodernism is probably one of the most significant intellectual developments in recent years (Ritzer, 1992). Variations of the postmodern movement are emerging in all fields of the social sciences including social work. One of the clear strengths of postmodernism is the emphasis that it places on diversity of ideas, a perspective highly compatible with the profession of social work.

  A postmodern point of view rejects objectivism and absolution-ism and stresses pluralism, relativism, and flexibility (Laird, 1993).

  The postmodern perspective challenges old theories, in particular those grounded in the modern world, and calls for new paradigms. The movement toward a postmodern perspective in the social sciences has its roots in 19th century sociology. The purpose of this paper is to trace this historical development and to discuss the implications of the postmodern movement on the profession of social work.

  TRADITIONAL SOCIOLOGY AND SOCIAL ORDER

  Positivism emerged within the field of sociology in the late 19th century. A number of early social theorists, specifically Comte and Durkheim, viewed the social changes occurring in the late 19th century as a threat to the social and moral order of France (Aron, 1968). Positivism was seen as a scientific theory that would offer strategies for effectively dealing with the perceived breakdown of society.

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  The Family

  A Christian Perspective on the Contemporary Home

  • (Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Baker Academic

    (Publisher)

  ART 7 Family Life in Postmodern Society

  A ny meaningful understanding of the family must integrate analysis at both the micro and macro level. We have focused mainly on microfamily issues—looking inside the family for an understanding of its dynamics. We turn now to an analysis of macrofamily issues—looking outside the family to explore the relationship between the family and the wider social context. Through this exploration, we will see that many microfamily issues are, in reality, a reflection of macrofamily issues.

  In chapter 1, we developed a theology of family relationships based on the biblical concept of covenant. Now we move beyond the family to examine the broader social context. The contemporary family lives in a world of urbanization, bureaucracy, and technology, developments that make covenant commitment increasingly difficult. Modernity, first, and then postmodernity have profoundly affected contemporary family life. Rather than replacing modernity, postmodernity exists as a layer upon modernity, as both interact in their effect on the family. Chapter 19 introduces major aspects of modernization (an issue first addressed in the 1950s and 1960s) and their profound negative influence on contemporary family life. Not only has covenant commitment eroded within the family, but the very structures intended to support and maintain this ideal have collapsed. In chapter 20, we discuss postmodernity’s effects on family life and present a biblical response to modernity and postmodern thought. We suggest ways in which broad social structures can, and must, incorporate covenant commitment. Only by recapturing the covenantal meaning of living in community, whether localized or universal, can the family be strong. We need a family-friendly society.

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  The Family

  A Christian Perspective on the Contemporary Home

  • Jack O. Balswick, Judith K. Balswick, Thomas V. Frederick(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Baker Academic

    (Publisher)

  Postmodern thinking represents a second category of response. Rejecting both a return to the family of an idealized past and the certainty of modernist thinking, this approach embraces the potential good and usefulness of a variety of alternative family forms. Postmodernity represents a radical response to the excessive emphasis on rationalism found in modernity and sees truth as what is in the eye of the beholder—that is, what one experiences. Postmodernity can be a useful corrective to the certainties of modernity, which promote human reason as the basis for a universal human morality. However, in its extreme form, postmodernity also has the potential to undermine family values and structures because it takes an all-inclusive point of view.

  Postmodernists do not regard the general laws of nature as grounds for accepting or rejecting ideas. Viewing reality as multilayered, they believe there are many ways of knowing, many flavors of truth. Although the Christian perspective is acknowledged as one possible view, many others are considered equally acceptable. Postmodernism sees danger in accepting one truth or morality over the myriad of other options; to do so is regarded as restrictive and intolerant. Ironically, this is in itself a restrictive and intolerant position (Lee 2004). That is, the perspective of the “truth-teller” takes precedence over the objective truth that is being told. It stands in contrast to a Christian worldview that focuses on continued compliance with God’s revelation.

  Herman Bavinck (2019) captures the sentiment: Worldviews are fluid and adapting. Worldviews are constantly being confronted with the truth that God created the world with a definite goal and purpose. Humans need to reflect and adapt their worldviews to this purpose, that God has intentionally created the cosmos for his benefit and glory. God’s purpose in creation is most clearly revealed in Scripture. This emphasis on worldviews means that we are constantly in an evaluative process: To what does my worldview conform? How do I conform my worldview to Christianity and postmodernity, especially when there are points of tension between the two? Christians acknowledge their limited ability to know the truth perfectly; however, there is an objective truth outside the perspective of the perceiver. Christians are continually trying to conform to this truth. This means that worldviews are fluid and adapting in more fully apprehending God’s truth.

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  The Handbook of Systemic Family Therapy, Set

  • (Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  18 Postmodern Family Therapy Ronald J. Chenail, Michael D. Reiter, Maru Torres‐Gregory, and Dragana Ilic

  Postmodern family therapy is one of the newer overarching frameworks for therapeutic practice. It marks a shift from the cybernetic and mechanical metaphors used at the start of the profession to text‐based constructions (Mills & Sprenkle, 1995 ). Modernism posits that people progress by being able to access legitimate knowledge. Postmodernism, on the other hand, holds that there is no absolute truth. As Anderson and Levin (1998 ) explained, “Modern and postmodern are umbrella epistemological and philosophical positions that inform the culture of therapy” (p. 47). This chapter presents some of the core philosophical underpinnings of postmodernism and postmodern family therapy and how these ideas inform the practice of therapy.

  Influential Postmodern Ideas

  Although it is challenging to summarize the rich world of postmodern ideas championed by writers such as Lacan, Foucault, Lyotard, and Derrida (Hicks, 2011 ), by reflecting on what has emerged as postmodern family therapies, it is easier to highlight what postmodern ideas have been more influential. Four of these prominent influences are (a) language, the self, and society; (b) instability of language, meaning, and knowledge; (c) rejection of global theories; and (d) shifting from the philosophical to the political.

  Language, self, and society

  Human beings become social with language, and through this circular and reciprocal relationship, the distinctions between the self and society become blurred. In a postmodern world, the family, like other social institutions, becomes less like bricks‐and‐mortar buildings with finite borders as in distinct historical family roles and generational boundaries and more like virtual portals with infinite channels through which language can empower, liberate, disrupt, and marginalize (Jencks, 2011 ). In such a world, family therapists shifted their theoretical foundations from social and biological systems theories to social construction theories to better position their work within this flow of words. This move helped postmodern family therapists to understand that language (a) can saturate families with harmful discourse and (b) is also a way to unframe problematic framing to help families generate healthier possibilities in their lives (Hoffman, 2002

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  Family Therapy Beyond Postmodernism

  Practice Challenges Theory

  • Carmel Flaskas(Author)
  • 2003(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  1 This is surely a worry, but it is perhaps more of a worry if we are not even too sure quite what the postmodernist landscape looks like.

  Attempts to map the postmodern in family therapy have generally framed it within a progressive narrative, with postmodernism being painted as something like an historical advance, part of the flowering of the ‘better’ and ‘new’ replacing the ‘old’ and supposedly ‘worse’. I would love to go off on a tangent and note that in family therapy we have always been rather vulnerable to heralding the new and vanquishing the old, but of course this would be a distraction which I should resist till much later in the book. Instead, I will simply note here that as soon as you look outside family therapy to the broader intellectual milieu of postmodernism you, find, as you would expect, far more complex accounts. These accounts draw distinctions about postmodernism across time (particularly, the postmodernism of the 1960s and 1970s, and the postmodernism of the 1980s and beyond); across countries and continents (particularly the flavour of postmodernism in Europe versus North America, and the pivotal role of French intellectuals in postmodernist theorising); and across its expression in the diversity of the fields of the creative arts, the humanities, cultural studies and the social sciences.

  To think of postmodernism as, at one level, simply a social and historical condition, is to situate it in a neutral way without the positive valence of a progressive narrative. Accounts both from within and outside family therapy reference the relationship between the major social changes in the latter part of the twentieth century and the move beyond modernism. Retrospectively, modernism has come to be understood as a dominant metaphor for knowledge and the arts which emerged from, and fitted with, the social conditions of the second half of the twentieth century.

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  Education and Training

  • Tony Lawson, Tim Heaton, Anne Brown(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Red Globe Press

    (Publisher)

  For this reason, the term postmodernism will be used in what follows to incorporate both the poststructural and postmodern approaches. As a perspective or theory, postmodernism can be difficult to pin down, and indeed there is a range of quite diverse approaches that have attracted a post-modern label. However, in general terms, the popularity of postmodernism has been associated with a particular view of the role of language in social life – a view that has resulted in scepticism regarding enlightenment principles, and therefore our ability to generate social scientific knowledge based on objective proof. The postmodern view of the role of language is as follows. The distinctive characteristic of social life is that it is meaningful. We socially construct a set of meanings which give sense to our actions and interactions with others within a linguistic and cultural context. All social life is, according to postmodernists, dependent on language. That is not to say that there is no physical dimension to our everyday lives – we need only to attempt to pass through a doorway without first opening the door to realize that is the case! However, society is social only in so far as it has a symbolic existence, in so far as it is meaningful for its members, and meaning resides solely in language. For writers such as Foucault, Derrida and Baudrillard, though different in their theoretical contri-butions, society is essentially a linguistic construction. Because society has no objective existence, because it exists only in and through language, so it follows that there can be no objective, scientific knowledge of social reality. Instead, we are left with relativism – the idea that, since social reality is essentially con-structed, all constructions have equal merit. It is simply not possible to say, as the modernists would wish, that some versions of events are objectively more valid or accurate than others.

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  Theorizing Practice

  A Guide for the People Professions

  • Neil Thompson(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Red Globe Press

    (Publisher)

  Postmodernism, under the influence of post-structuralist thinking, is therefore critical of any theoretical perspectives that incorporate the notion of enduring structures – whether social structures of power or (cultural) structures of meaning. Postmodernism, unlike existentialism, fails to recognize that flux and enduring structures are both aspects of social life, aspects that interact dialectically, rather than competing concepts to choose between. This failure, as we shall see, is a serious problem when it comes to making sense of the complexities of the social world in general and the world of professional practice in particular. THEORY AND POSTMODERNISM 37 The rocks of postmodernism Here I am returning to the analogy of the Siren call. My argument is that, in many ways, postmodernism is seriously flawed. It has been criticized for being, in effect, new wine in old bottles and for offering a far from defensible theoretical approach. For example, Sibeon’s ( 2004) criticisms have been quite telling, as have those of Clarke ( 2004 ): postmodernist claims about flux and fluidity tend to conflate different levels of analysis. It may be true that abstractly, everything is contin-gent, polyvalent, contestable and changeable. In concrete situations, however, social arrangements have differing densities, proving more or less resistant to change. They are also more or less contested: some pass themselves off as natural features of the social world for generations. Similarly, everything may have different potential meanings, but this is empirically only significant in the process of contestation: the strug-gle to articulate alternatives to the dominant, established and heavily sedimented meanings.

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  Theorising Welfare

  Enlightenment and Modern Society

  • Sue Penna, Martin O′Brien(Authors)
  • 1998(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  In so doing it has helped to challenge entrenched theoretical assumptions about an essential identity and a universal standard of truth that can be realised in both theory and practice. The ideal of a 'universal humanity', denuded of religion, loca lity, conflict, and contingency, for example, is considered an abiding myth of Enlightenment. Postmodernism 207 In conclusion, it is worthy of note tha t postmodern perspectives have provided fruitful philosophica l and theore tical resources for the explor-ation of gender, race, embodiment and sexuality and a productive space where post-colonial, feminist, anti-racis t and queer-theoretic discourses have encountered one another. This encounter has generated new sets of theoretical problems and new sets of responses to those problems tha t are characterised at least by the at tempt to theorise withou t foreclosing on the divergent experiences of marginalised groups. In doing so, postmodern-ism has questioned critically the integrative ideology of social policy, indi-cating that the problem of social and political inclusion is not equivalent to the extent to which a public sphere bestows rights or enti tlemen ts on citizens as a means of mitigating their socio-economic disadvantage. Social membership is an ongoing, dynamic struggle tha t reconstruc ts the experience and the organisation of rights and enti tlements in the every-day conduct of social life. By highlighting the categories and the logics of inclusionary / exclusionary welfare, postmodern theory refocuses the soci-ology of welfare on to critical connections between identity, agency and institu tions in contemporary society.

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