ABSTRACT

Contemporary social change is understood by a number of prominent social theorists in terms of certain overarching trends, among which individualisation, democratisation and globalisation have particular significance for the analysis of families, social change and the state. The accounts of the profoundly unsettling implications for family relationships of the unfolding trend of individualisation provided by Beck and Beck-Gernsheim (1995, 1996) and Beck-Gernsheim (1998) have been widely discussed, as have Giddens’s (1998) thesis concerning the democratisation of traditional family life and his related (1999) ideas about the impact of globalisation on intimate relationships within and beyond the family. As a result, there is much discussion of whether what is being witnessed is nothing less than the emergence of ‘the new family’ (Silva and Smart 1999), ‘brave new families’ (Stacey 1998), ‘the nuclear family’ (Simpson 1998) or, more prosaically, ‘the intertwining of change and continuity’ (McRae 1999: 19) in the sphere of family and household arrangements.