Family and the State of Theory

Elaine Porter is an associate professor of sociology at Laurentian
University.

In the 1970s, acceptance of familial diversity was offered as the
solution to post-Parsonian concerns about the nuclear family. The
pivotal thesis of Cheal’s book is that family diversity in society and
theory has now become the central problematic. The postmodern thinking
that underpins his argument does not so much raise new issues as force
us to consider the implications of those already extant. For instance,
the pesky problem of defining the object of family studies cannot be
resolved by individual fiat, because it reflects the proliferation of
social arrangements that people make to manage their private lives.

Much of the book is a pastiche of the standard family theories and
their critiques, organized to address what Cheal considers to be the
central contradictions of modernism. One chapter, “Progress and
Decline,” discusses the rise and fall of the nuclear family; another,
“System and Liberation,” examines the ramifications of social policy
and systems theory for individuals and families. “Private and
Public” delves into feminist analyses of the tensions and crossover
points between these two dimensions. While he acknowledges the large
indebtedness of his theoretical critiques to feminist theorizing, he
does not give enough recognition to the ambiguous position of feminist
theory within postmodernist theorizing.

Rather than trace central concepts of modernist theorizing (e.g.,
individualism) across the chapters, his analyses seem to be organized to
prove the postmodernist thesis that every theory is set up for grabs and
can be attacked from any other theoretical position, with no
reconstruction possible unless theoretical constructs conform to the
social constructs of societal members. By the end of the book, he
assumes that the battleground of previous chapters, littered with the
corpses of slain theories, leads the reader to conclude that the variety
of individualist choices endemic to modern societies have annihilated
the twin goals of progress and reason. This conclusion, however, may
well be an overreaction to the loss of simplicity that the golden era of
the nuclear family model guaranteed.

Although Cheal seems to have gone a long way toward adopting the
postmodern vocabulary, he appears to remain wary of its consequences for
theory and research. His book is meant to warn us that postmodernism is
not just another theory but an approach to theorizing without all the
familiar rules. Unable to accept the call for reunification between
macro and micro theory advocated by Giddens, and regarding as overly
simplistic the antimodernist solutions, he hesitantly adopts the
implications of postmodernism that despairs of contributing to that
modernist project of building a verifiable body of knowledge.

Cheal’s survey of the literature acquaints the reader with a wide
variety of sources in all the major theoretical perspectives, and the
broad brush strokes given to the theories allow even the uninitiated to
access the ideas. To evaluate his provocative points about
postmodernism, however, the reader must become familiar with the great
variety of positions embodied in that amorphous field of postmodernism.
Cheal’s book will have succeeded if it drives the reader to
investigate postmodernism as a serious project. His bibliography is a
useful guide for such a quest, though since he gives no page references
for articles, it is best to have a postmodern library to profit from it.