An increasing prevalence of the nuclear family has been tied to processes of industrialization, urbanization, westernization and capitalist development (Goode 1963) and the apparent decline of the nuclear family to post-industrial processes. But in some situations, such as migrant labour regimes in southern Africa, or the conditions imposed by contemporary structural adjustment prescriptions, capitalist development simultaneously fosters the nuclear family and creates the conditions for its dissolution. This highlights a complex picture relating to the differences in historical experience that underlie aggregate cross-national variation, as well as differences among communities or between individuals within a country.
Economic change affects household arrangements and patterns of family formation in both facilitating and inhibiting ways and is in turn mediated by other factors. Among them are the encoded beliefs and practice bearing on the family, sexuality, procreation, etc., embodied in ‘culture’, ‘tradition’ or indeed ‘religion’. As both the product and precursor of change in household arrangements, their articulation with changing economic forms and relations yields many specific variations. The role of the political ideologies in respect of this articulation is often of crucial importance. While referring specifically to Malaysia, Stivens’s comment that ‘kinship and family have their own history, the effects of a continuous social process of construction through state legislation, economic changes, political action, and the rise of social practices like welfare and public health measures, and class action’ (Stivens 1987:91) has much wider application. Other writers have similarly confirmed the interplay between culture, economy and the state in reference to household and family, while also highlighting the specific role of agency in promoting change or resisting its imposition.
Stacey (1983:266), for example, refers to the way in which socialism, as a political ideology and economic system, both transformed a traditional patriarchal social order of China and was in turn structured by it. Bozzoli’s (1983) discussion of the variable impact of capitalism on gender relations in southern Africa utilizes the phrase ‘patchwork quilt of patriarchies’ to describe how the effects of colonial capitalism and the domestic struggles waged within it resulted in ‘a system in which forms of patriarchy are sustained, modified and even entrenched in a variety of ways depending on the internal character of the system in the first instance’. Besson describes how a ‘new conjugal complex’ was constructed in the Caribbean in resistance to the system of slavery that destroyed African marital traditions (Besson 1993:21). Each of these reflects an appreciation of the ways in which ideologies, legal forms and economic processes articulate with existing structures and processes in a complex fashion, involving resistances, stumbles and readjustments. The outcome in any given case cannot be read off from the tenets of an ideology or the assumed requirements of a particular economic system, but is mediated by circumstance and historical experience.