Which four functions did Murdock attribute to the nuclear family?

Adaptation, goal attainment, integration and latency

Protective, affectional, status-giving and religious

Religious, political, legal and recreational

Bowles and Gintis's 'correspondence principle' holds that:

The social relations of schooling mirror those of capitalist work

Educational attainment corresponds strictly to intelligence

Religious and secular education correspond in content

School curricula correspond to students' interests

The social relations of schooling mirror those of capitalist work

Lewis Henry Morgan's Ancient Society arranged human history in which sequence?

Savagery, barbarism, civilisation

Traditional, take-off, high mass consumption

Theological, metaphysical, positive

A large part of the upward mobility of the children of farmers into office jobs occurred because the number of office jobs expanded. This is:

Intragenerational downward mobility

Assertion (A): Yogendra Singh analysed the modernization of Indian tradition at both cultural and structural levels. Reason (R): He distinguished orthogenetic (internal) from heterogenetic (external) sources of change. Choose the correct option.

Both A and R are true, but R is not the correct explanation of A

Both A and R are true, and R is the correct explanation of A

Both A and R are true, but R is not the correct explanation of A

Social Institutions, and Social Change and Processes

This chapter joins two blocks of Unit 3: 'Social Institutions' — marriage, family and kinship; economy; polity; religion; education; and law and customs — and 'Social Change and Processes' — evolution and diffusion; modernization and development; social transformations and globalization; and social mobility. The official document numbers these blocks 2 and 5 (its Unit 3 runs 1, 2, 3, 5 with no block 4), and that is its own numbering, recorded here as printed. They are taken together because they answer paired questions — how a society is ordered, and how that order changes — while the stratification block (numbered 3) has the next chapter to itself. Each institution also has a full unit of its own later in the syllabus, so here the emphasis is on the classic definitions and theoretical approaches.

1. Institutions I: marriage, family and kinship; economy; polity

An institution is an established, organised and enduring set of norms and roles centred on a basic social need. George Peter Murdock (Social Structure, 1949), comparing 250 societies, held the nuclear family to be universal and credited it with four functions — sexual, reproductive, economic and educational — a claim later contested by cases such as the Nayar taravad, where husbands did not reside with wives. Marriage is classified by number of spouses (monogamy; polygyny and polyandry, both forms of polygamy), by rules of choice (endogamy, exogamy, hypergamy, hypogamy) and by residence after marriage (patrilocal, matrilocal, neolocal). Kinship is organised by descent — patrilineal, matrilineal or bilateral — and by affinity, relations through marriage.

The economy as an institution is the organisation of production, distribution and consumption. Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation (1944) argued that in most societies the economy was embedded in kinship, religion and politics, and that the self-regulating market of nineteenth-century Europe, which tried to disembed it and treat land, labour and money as commodities, provoked a protective 'double movement'. Economic anthropology split into formalists, who applied market economics universally, and substantivists, who followed Polanyi. The polity is the institution of power and governance. Weber defined the state as the human community that successfully claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a territory. Fortes and Evans-Pritchard's African Political Systems (1940) separated centralised states from stateless societies such as the Nuer, whose order rested on segmentary lineages that combined and opposed one another by genealogical distance.

2. Institutions II: religion, education, and law and customs

Institution	Functionalist reading	Conflict or critical reading
Religion	Durkheim: integrates society around the sacred; Malinowski: relieves anxiety at crises of life	Marx: 'the opium of the people', legitimating inequality; Weber adds that religion can also drive change
Education	Durkheim: the methodical socialisation of the young generation; Parsons: the school allocates roles by achievement	Bowles and Gintis: the correspondence principle — school mirrors the workplace hierarchy; Bourdieu: cultural reproduction
Law and customs	Durkheim: repressive law with mechanical, restitutive with organic solidarity	Marxist and critical legal studies: law as an instrument or expression of dominant interests

On law, Henry Maine's Ancient Law (1861) proposed that 'the movement of progressive societies has hitherto been a movement from status to contract' — from positions fixed by family and birth to relations freely entered by individuals. Customs are norms sanctioned by long usage and community opinion; legal pluralism describes the coexistence of state law with customary, religious and community legal orders, which is the everyday reality of India's personal laws, caste panchayats and tribal customary law in Sixth Schedule areas.

3. Evolution and diffusion; modernization and development

Evolutionism explained change as the passage of all societies through the same stages. Comte's law of three stages, Herbert Spencer's movement from simple to compound societies and from militant to industrial types (and his phrase 'survival of the fittest'), and Lewis Henry Morgan's Ancient Society (1877), with its sequence of savagery, barbarism and civilisation, are the classic unilinear schemes. Julian Steward later proposed multilinear evolution, in which similar ecological conditions produce parallel sequences. Diffusionism replied that most culture traits spread by borrowing rather than being independently invented. The British school (Grafton Elliot Smith, W.J. Perry) derived civilisation from ancient Egypt; the German-Austrian Kulturkreis school (Fritz Graebner, Wilhelm Schmidt) traced 'culture circles'; the American school (Franz Boas, Clark Wissler) mapped culture areas.

Modernization theory (1950s–60s) cast change as a movement from tradition to modernity along Parsons's pattern variables: Daniel Lerner's The Passing of Traditional Society (1958) stressed empathy and media exposure, and W.W. Rostow's five stages of growth ran from traditional society to high mass consumption. Its critics argued that underdevelopment was produced, not merely left over: dependency theory (André Gunder Frank's 'development of underdevelopment') located it in the metropolis-satellite relations of world capitalism, and Immanuel Wallerstein's world-systems theory divided the world economy into core, semi-periphery and periphery. Amartya Sen (Development as Freedom, 1999) redefined development as the expansion of human capabilities. In India, Yogendra Singh's Modernization of Indian Tradition (1973) analysed change along orthogenetic and heterogenetic sources at cultural and structural levels, and the Rudolphs' The Modernity of Tradition (1967) showed caste associations and traditional forms adapting to serve modern democratic ends.

4. Social transformations and globalization; social mobility

Arjun Appadurai (Modernity at Large, 1996): global cultural flows move through five 'scapes' — ethnoscapes (people), mediascapes (images), technoscapes (technology), financescapes (capital) and ideoscapes (ideas) — which are disjunctive, not synchronised.
Roland Robertson: glocalization — global products and ideas are adapted to local contexts, so globalization produces heterogeneity as well as sameness.
George Ritzer (The McDonaldization of Society, 1993): the principles of the fast-food restaurant — efficiency, calculability, predictability and control — spread through ever more sectors, a contemporary version of Weber's rationalisation.
Giddens (time-space distanciation) and Harvey (time-space compression) theorise the shrinking of distance that makes these flows possible.

Social mobility is movement of individuals or groups between positions in a system of stratification. Pitirim Sorokin (Social Mobility, 1927) distinguished vertical mobility (up or down the hierarchy) from horizontal mobility (a change of position at the same level). Mobility is intergenerational (comparing children with parents) or intragenerational (within one career). Structural mobility results from changes in the occupational structure itself — the expansion of white-collar jobs pulls people up — while exchange (circulation) mobility is movement that would occur even if the structure stayed the same. Blau and Duncan's The American Occupational Structure (1967) modelled status attainment — how father's status, education and first job shape a person's occupational status. In India, group mobility through Sanskritisation and individual mobility through education and reservation run side by side.

⚠️ The document's own block numbers

In the official syllabus, 'Social Change and Processes' is numbered 5 within Unit 3, directly after 'Social Stratification' at 3; there is no block 4. This platform records that numbering as printed rather than renumbering it, so if you compare these chapters with the document you will find the same gap.

Key takeaways

Murdock's universal nuclear family with four functions is the functionalist baseline for marriage, family and kinship; descent, affinity, residence and marriage rules classify kinship systems.
Polanyi's embeddedness, Weber's state as monopoly of legitimate force, and Fortes and Evans-Pritchard's stateless segmentary societies define economy and polity as institutions.
Religion, education and law each have a functionalist reading (integration, socialisation, solidarity) and a critical one (ideology, correspondence and reproduction, dominant interests); Maine saw law moving from status to contract.
Unilinear evolution (Comte, Spencer, Morgan) gave way to multilinear evolution and diffusionism; modernization theory was challenged by dependency and world-systems theory and by Sen's capability approach.
Globalization is theorised through Appadurai's scapes, Robertson's glocalization and Ritzer's McDonaldization; Sorokin's vertical and horizontal mobility and the structural-exchange distinction organise the study of mobility.

Practice questions (10)

Attempt each one before opening the answer. Every explanation names the tempting wrong option as well as the right one, because that is where marks are lost.

Which four functions did Murdock attribute to the nuclear family?
1. Sexual, reproductive, economic and educational
2. Adaptation, goal attainment, integration and latency
3. Protective, affectional, status-giving and religious
4. Religious, political, legal and recreational
Show answer
Answer: A — Sexual, reproductive, economic and educational
Murdock's Social Structure (1949) named sexual, reproductive, economic and educational functions. AGIL is Parsons's scheme for any social system.
Polanyi's argument that in pre-market societies economic activity is submerged in kinship, religion and politics is expressed by the concept of:
1. Cultural lag
2. Embeddedness
3. Rationalisation
4. Commodity fetishism
Show answer
Answer: B — Embeddedness
Embeddedness is Polanyi's central idea in The Great Transformation; the market society's attempt to disembed the economy produced a countermovement for social protection.
'The movement of progressive societies has hitherto been a movement from status to contract.' Who wrote this?
1. Herbert Spencer
2. Ferdinand Tönnies
3. Henry Maine
4. Emile Durkheim
Show answer
Answer: C — Henry Maine
The sentence is from Maine's Ancient Law (1861). Durkheim's parallel contrast is mechanical versus organic solidarity; Tönnies's is Gemeinschaft versus Gesellschaft; Spencer's is militant versus industrial society.
Bowles and Gintis's 'correspondence principle' holds that:
1. Educational attainment corresponds strictly to intelligence
2. Religious and secular education correspond in content
3. School curricula correspond to students' interests
4. The social relations of schooling mirror those of capitalist work
Show answer
Answer: D — The social relations of schooling mirror those of capitalist work
In Schooling in Capitalist America (1976) Bowles and Gintis argued that the hierarchy, discipline and extrinsic rewards of school prepare pupils for the hierarchy of the workplace — a Marxist reading of education.
Lewis Henry Morgan's Ancient Society arranged human history in which sequence?
1. Militant, industrial
2. Savagery, barbarism, civilisation
3. Traditional, take-off, high mass consumption
4. Theological, metaphysical, positive
Show answer
Answer: B — Savagery, barbarism, civilisation
Morgan's scheme (1877) runs from savagery through barbarism to civilisation, each subdivided by technological markers. The other sequences belong to Comte, Spencer and Rostow.
Which of the following are among Appadurai's five dimensions of global cultural flow? Select all that apply.
1. Ideoscapes
2. Kinscapes
3. Ethnoscapes
4. Financescapes
Show answer
Answer: A — Ideoscapes; C — Ethnoscapes; D — Financescapes
Appadurai's five are ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes and ideoscapes. 'Kinscapes' is not among them.
The 'development of underdevelopment' is a thesis of:
1. Talcott Parsons
2. André Gunder Frank
3. W.W. Rostow
4. Daniel Lerner
Show answer
Answer: B — André Gunder Frank
Frank, a dependency theorist, argued that satellite regions were actively underdeveloped by their incorporation into the capitalist world system, contradicting the modernization view of Rostow, Lerner and Parsons.
A large part of the upward mobility of the children of farmers into office jobs occurred because the number of office jobs expanded. This is:
1. Intragenerational downward mobility
2. Exchange mobility
3. Structural mobility
4. Horizontal mobility
Show answer
Answer: C — Structural mobility
Mobility produced by a change in the occupational structure itself — more positions at higher levels — is structural mobility; exchange mobility is the reshuffling that would occur even with an unchanged structure.
Which term did Roland Robertson use for the adaptation of global products and ideas to local conditions?
Numerical answer — type the value.
Show answer
Answer: glocalization
Glocalization blends global and local: it captures how globalization produces local variants rather than simple homogenisation, a counterweight to Ritzer's McDonaldization thesis.
Assertion (A): Yogendra Singh analysed the modernization of Indian tradition at both cultural and structural levels. Reason (R): He distinguished orthogenetic (internal) from heterogenetic (external) sources of change. Choose the correct option.
1. Both A and R are true, and R is the correct explanation of A
2. Both A and R are true, but R is not the correct explanation of A
3. A is true, but R is false
4. A is false, but R is true
Show answer
Answer: B — Both A and R are true, but R is not the correct explanation of A
Both statements describe Singh's framework, which crossed two axes — level (cultural and structural) and source (orthogenetic and heterogenetic). The source distinction does not explain why he worked at two levels; they are independent axes of the same scheme.