Agency, Accountability, and Embedded Relations: “What's Love Got to Do With It?”

Key Words: agency, ambivalence, dualism. The last decade of research on families and intergenerational relations has struggled with appropriate theoretical frames within which to understand the growing multiplicity of family relations, the societal causes of familial forms and dynamics, and the consequences for society (communities, families, and individuals) as a result of changes in family forms. The case for better theorizing is made plain with Economic Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen's observation about the problem (Sen, 1990): Members of the household (family) face two different types of problems simultaneously, one involving cooperation (adding to total availabilities) and the other conflict (dividing the total availabilities among members of the household). Social arrangements regarding who does what, who gets to consume what, and who makes what decisions can be seen as responses to this combined problem of cooperation and conflict. (p. 129) Although this is a very utilitarian metaphor for explaining what goes on within families, the "what" that gets done, consumed, and decided upon can easily be generalized beyond material goods to emotional resources. It is also apropos to reference Sen's work because he is the most recent Economic Nobel Laureate of three whose theories have directly or indirectly influenced thinking about family dynamics. Two previous Economic Nobel Laureates, Gary Becker and John Nash, have had important influences upon the sociology of family literature, the former most profoundly through his observations in the Treatise on the Family (Becker, 1981) and the latter more recently through the growing application of cooperative and noncooperative bargaining models in the economics of the family literature, which has recently influenced the work of gender and family sociologists (Bittman, England, Folbre, Sayer, & Matheson, 2001; Brines, 1994; Brines & Joyner, 1999). One might see the economists as trespassers upon the domain of sociologists and for some it is seen as so. But for these economists and their disciples, the attempt has been to desegregate analysis of family life from that of other social institutions, recognizing the importance of what happens within families to the dynamics of market transactions (and vice versa). In the case of Becker, this is to take the logic of market and corporate behavior and apply it to family life. In the case of Sen, it is to add nuance and context to the bargaining model, with particular emphasis on the way poverty disrupts both the corporatist and bargaining models of family relations. This kind of attempt is also at the heart of Connidis and McMullin's theorizing about intergenerational relations. Coninidis and McMullin want to understand the coexistence of solidarity and conflict when analyzing family relations because they believe it is related to larger social processes within which families are situated. In doing so, they are explicit in their intent not to isolate family life dynamics from other social institutions and structured sets of relations and not to psychologize individual interpersonal relations. Instead, they attempt to answer the challenge posed by the economists, whose unitary and bargaining models are less than satisfactory to sociologists. Among these economists the most recent laureate himself admits to the difficulty of theorizing the dilemma (Sen, 1990), yet provides no explanation. In fact, the failures of economic theory for explaining family dynamics have forced a reexamination of the social institutions from which the theories were first derived. This in turn has created an intellectual space for sociologists and the emergence of a new subdiscipline, economic sociology. Even so, economic sociologists have been slow to reconsider how their theories apply to varying patterns of gender and family dynamics. I employ conceptual innovations from this new subdiscipline to assist Connidis and McMullin in the elaboration of their model. …