Murdock and Talcott Parsons Views on Family Free Essays.
Marxism believes the family is socially constructed to benefit the bourgeoisie while interactionists look at family at a micro-scale without generalisation. Functionalists view the family as a nuclear family and assume that the family is a positive beneficial institution in which family members receive unconditional love, nurturing and care.George Murdock is most recognized for his landmark work on the family and kinship classification. In 1949, he wrote the book Social Structure, which presented the family structure as a cultural.Functionalists view the family as a nuclear family structure, i.e. a mother, father and 1 or 2 children. Murdock surveyed 250 societies from the small hunting tribes to the large industrialised societies. He found that in every society there was some form of a nuclear family, he concluded from this study that the nuclear family was universal.
Functionalist sociologists suggest that the nuclear family is the norm in modern day industrial societies. George Peter Murdock (1949) supports the idea of functionalism. After analysing 250 societies, Murdock argues that the family performs four basic functions; sexual, reproductive, economic and educational.G.P. Murdock, Functionalism and the Family The anthropologist G.P. Murdock conducted a study entitled Social Structure in 1949. In this study of 250 societies of various types Murdock provided a definition of the family and a theory suggesting that the nuclear family was a universal social unit.
Functionalist View of the Family Functionalist View of the Family 2 The Development of Functionalism The development of the functionalist perspective in sociology has been linked with the discipline of anthropology, which is the study of small-scale, non-industrial, tribal societies.
