ABSTRACT
The vast majority of families in such societies are ‘proletarian’ families in the sense that their members subsist by selling their labour power, or are dependent upon someone who does sell his/her labour power. Equally they are all ‘bourgeois’ families in the sense of being ‘closed domesticated nuclear families’. Culture is usually regarded as being initially acquired through interaction within the family. In sociology the model of such acquisition is usually either the symbolic interactionist model elaborated by G. H. Mead or the neo-Freudian model developed by Parsons. The advantage of this orientation from the sociological standpoint is that it constitutes the family as the locus of a process, which (however closely that locus is determined by other social processes) is autonomous in its operation. Sennett wishes to claim that in its pure form the nuclear family is dysfunctional in industrial society, and that its extension is functional for the education and mobility of children.
