THE THIRD WAVE
THE STREAMLINED FAMILY
This Second Wave techno-sphere, however, needed an equally revolutionary “socio-sphere” to accommodate it. It needed radically new forms of social organization.
Before the industrial revolution, for example, family forms varied from place to place. But wherever agriculture held sway, people tended to live in large, multigenerational households, with uncles, aunts, in-laws, grandparents, or cousins all living under the same roof, all working together as an economic production unit—from the “joint family” in India to the “zadruga” in the Balkans and the “extended family” in Western Europe. And the family was immobile—rooted to the soil.
As the Second Wave began to move across First Wave societies, families felt the stress of change. Within each household the collision of wave fronts took the form of conflict, attacks on patriarchal authority, altered relationships between children and parents, new notions of propriety. As economic production shifted from the field to the factory, the family no longer worked together as a unit. To free workers for factory labor, key functions of the family were parceled out to new, specialized institutions. Education of the child was turned over to schools. Care of the aged was turned over to poor-houses or old-age homes or nursing homes. Above all, the new society required mobility. It needed workers who would follow jobs from place to place.
Burdened with elderly relatives, the sick, the handicapped, and a large brood of children, the extended family was anything but mobile.Gradually and painfully, therefore, family structure began to change. Tom apart by the migration to the cities, battered by economic storms, families stripped themselves of unwanted relatives, grew smaller, more mobile, and more suited to the needs of the new techno-sphere.
The so-called nuclear family—father, mother, and a few children, with no encumbering relatives—became the standard, socially approved,“modern” model in all industrial societies, whether capitalist or socialist.Even in Japan, where ancestor worship gave the elderly an exceptionally important role, the large, close-knit, multigenerational household began to break down as the Second Wave advanced. More and more nuclear units appeared. In short, the nuclear family became an identifiable feature of all Second Wave societies, marking them off from First Wave societies just as surely as fossil fuels, steel mills, or chain stores.
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