Family Management

https://www.jstor.org/stable/350159 Nichols, A., Mumaw, C., Paynter, M., Plonk, M., & Price, D. (1971). Family Management. Journal of Marriage and Family, 33(1), 112-118. doi:10.2307/350159 Home management, by definition, takes place in the context of a family organization. Families, if effective social agents, fulfill the sociogenic and biogenic needs of their members by performaing instrumental and expressive functions. Instrumental functions are those that provide and allocate scarce economic resources to multiple goals. Expressive functions provide for the love and belonging needs of individual members as well as developing the affective bonds and morale that foster the cooperative teamwork needed in integrated organizations. Family management has primarily focused on the instrumental activities of families, and family relationships, on the expressive activities (Broderick, 1970). Likert (1961), however, has shown that effective management as a group process requires agreement on goals and cooperative teamwork for their achievement. The two functions, therefore, interact and are interdependent and cannot be treated as mutually exclusive functions. Social and economic decision making processes and structures provide the medium of this interaction: the expressive function requires social decisions which aim at tension reduction or conflict resolution or greater stability and harmony; economic decisions attempt to maximize the achievement of given ends. For families to achieve both aims requires a combined method which aims to reconcile morale needs with economic means by allotting economic resources to morale uses and converting such expressive resources as loyalty into the means of goal achievement (Diesing, 1958). An analysis of the performance of members of a social group cannot ignore the concept of role with its status, expectations, and sanctions nor its interaction with other roles if the analysis is adequately to describe, explain, or predict behavior of any one actor. Family economics and management research has primarily focused on the female homemaker as the actor’s behavior with which it is concerned. It has generally made two assumptions: the first is that the wife-mother-homemaker is a major instrumental leader for the provision of goods and services of family use and the selection of consumption items in the market; secondly her performance in this role is independent of the other roles as wife or mother, i.e., as a major expressive leader also. The emphasis likely accounts in large measure for the scarcity of research which would help to describe more realistically the complexity of her role and contribution as a family member. Is it not possible because she plays major roles in both the instrumental and expressive domains that her primary role is one of mediator between the two domains in family interaction with its attendant complexity and constraints? Such a view of her role cannot only provide research nearer to the reality of her performance but can be a means of coordinating and reinforcing the research efforts of both sides of the family studies field.