Many people agreed with the view of functionalists on industrialisation, claiming that one of its advantages was that nowadays children have the opportunity to go to school and receive a better education, whereas in pre-industrial societies all members of the family had to work to bring in enough money for the family. All members of the family, whatever age or sex, would be involved in some aspect of work such that duty and obligation to the family and community were key values in the pre-industrial societies. However, although all members of the family were involved in working to maintain the health of the family, the infant mortality rate was high and there was a low life expectancy.
The functionalist view maintains that the nuclear unit allows for a more mobile workforce to meet the needs of modern society. It was also said that such a unit encouraged achievement, whereas in pre-industrial society jobs were created through the existing family trade (primarily agriculture) rather than through educational achievement.
Thus, industrialisation led to the separation of the workplace environment from home life, whereby health, education and welfare issues functioned separately from domestic arrangements, with the home environment concentrating on socialisation and the emotional needs of individuals.
The basic argument is that as society has changed economically so to has the family structure, so that the nuclear unit has become the dominant structure and the extended family is longer significant.
However, others have taken a different view. For example Marxists believe that the relationship between family functions and the economic environment involves the economic system dominating all other institutions. Others also cast doubt on the assumption that the extended family was the norm in pre-industrial society. One such individual was Peter Laslett who used evidence relating to population, size, birth and death rates and household composition to argue that the pre-industrial family was in fact a nuclear one.
Other theorists have also argued that no one family structure was dominant or that family structure was influenced by the class system. It has also been argued that the issue is not simply whether there is a nuclear family or extended family structure, because other factors are relevant, such as various support networks which surround the family group.
In conclusion it would seem that the functionalist view of the relationship between industrialisation and family structure can be regarded as over-simplistic or, at the very least, one which is open to challenge.
