ABSTRACT
The Organisation Approach is intended to bring out what in many studies on family households has been stored in ‘the black box’. P. F. Barlett mentions several reasons for this seemingly curious tactic. In Organisation Theory, the very structure of an organisation is increasingly viewed as being central to its performance. Within Home Economics and some related fields, the so-called ‘Open Systems Model’ predominates. This model implies that an organisation exists in an environment, that its survival rests upon its ability to make exchanges with the environment, and that it has to adapt to environmental changes. As to allocation of resources within family households, the authors derive a conceptual framework primarily from the writings of J. Pahl. The main aim of Pahl’s study was to gain better knowledge of patterns of financial management within households and to investigate the significance of different allocative systems for individual members of households.
