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Sarah Irwin (2000) ‘Reproductive Regimes: Changing Relations of

Inter- dependence and Fertility Change’

Sociological Research Online, vol. 5, no. 1, <http://www.socresonline.org.uk/5/1/irwin.html>

To cite articles published in Sociological Research Online, please reference the above information and include

paragraph numbers if necessary

Received: 31/1/2000 Accepted: 26/5/2000 Published: 31/5/2000

Abstract

Within sociological and demographic research many argue that recent demographic transformations can be

explained, at least in part, by a growth in individualism. Such approaches, with their emphasis on growing

individual autonomy, offer a model of human action in which the social recedes from analysis. This paper

offers an alternative framework for analysing processes shaping demographic change, taking as a particular

focus aspects of changing patterns of fertility in the UK. Interpretations of the fertility decline at the turn of the

twentieth century emphasise the importance of changing patterns of inter-dependence across generations

and between women and men. It is argued that in parallel, although to a lesser degree, recent decades have

manifest a change in the social positioning of these groups. Change in the reproductive regime is offered as

a concept for denoting this restructuring of inter-dependencies. We are witnessing a reconguration of social

ties and not their displacement. It is as an integral part of such changes that developments in fertility are best

interrogated.

Keywords: Childlessness.; Demographic Transition; Family Formation; Fertility;

Gender; Generation; Inter-dependence; Reproductive Regime

Introduction

1.1 Recent decades have witnessed a series of signicant demographic developments which, for many

commentators, reveal a transformation in patterns of relational and reproductive behaviour. Apparently

linked, the developments include decline in rates of fertility, an increased incidence of childlessness,

growth in cohabitation and in the proportion of births outside marriage, rapidly increasing divorce

rates, and growth in step-parenting. The developments are described by some authors as a second

demographic transition,

[1]

to compare with the rst demographic, principally fertility, transition at the turn

of the twentieth century.

1.2 Of particular interest to this paper is the apparent convergence of some recent sociological explanations

of change in family demography and interpretations of change by demographers. Within sociology an

inuential position is that family ties and obligations appear increasingly anachronistic in the modern

age, as current trends encourage, or force, increased individual autonomy and choice and an associated

dissolution of prior family forms (eg. Bauman 1995, Beck 1992). Within demography Lesthaeghe has

argued, inuentially, that ideational change is important to understanding the second demographic

transition, with a growing value placed on individual rights and autonomy in the latter part of the twentieth

century (eg. Lesthaeghe 1998, Lesthaeghe and Surkyn 1988). In other words the motivations of

demographic behaviour are deemed to have changed in recent decades.

1.3 I will argue that accounts which emphasise individualisation as a key trend shaping demographic

changes are, in fact, partial. As we will see, they over- privilege choice and individual autonomy within

explanation, and risk emptying human conduct of its social content. Arguments of individualisation offer a

limited interpretation of the changing social relations which are inuencing contemporary transformations,

typically locating them in a long run ‘working out’ of historical contradiction, or within an unfolding linear

historical logic. There are similarities here with another demographic perspective in which current

developments in fertility patterns are interpreted as a continuation of trends set in place over one hundred

years ago (eg. Cliquet 1991). However, this view has to account for the increases in fertility rates in the

early post-war decades which confound the long term ‘trend’ to fertility decline. Additionally, the notion of

continuity does not readily square with any detailed consideration of the vastly different contexts of fertility

behaviour across more than a century.

1.4 Whilst certain aspects of change in family demography are at the heart of much recent sociological

research there has been relatively little engagement by sociologists with the processes shaping

demographic change. This is unfortunate since the latter has a good deal to reveal, potentially, about

changing social relationships. In the paper I will focus principally on aspects of changing fertility patterns.

I use the notion of reproductive regime to denote the relational structures and ties between social groups

as these reect inter-dependencies, social claims, obligations and patterns of care. It includes, but also

helps to locate, patterns of sexual reproduction. It is my argument that changing patterns of fertility

behaviour can be best understood not as a result of a new (and newly intense) round of individualisation

in the current era nor as outcomes of an unfolding linear historical logic. Rather, recent changes can, like

prior ones, be located within changing reproductive regimes which hold within particular congurations of

inter-dependence between social groups. One of the most general features of analyses of the rst fertility

decline is that it was intricately bound up with changing patterns of inter- dependence across generations

and between women and men. It is an argument of this paper that these dimensions, of changing

relations of inter-dependence between these groups, and change in their social location and claiming

position, remain crucial to an understanding of recent patterns of fertility change. The discussion focuses

on experience in the UK, although cross-national and regional experience suggests the wider potential of

reproductive regime as an analytical tool in comparative research in industrialised Western nations.

Rationality, Individualism and Explanations of Contemporary Demographic Change

2.1 Inuential gures within recent sociological and social demographic theorising have emphasised the

importance of a growth in individualism in late modern society, identifying an increase in individual

autonomy and a novel signicance of individual agency and choice within social life. Paradoxically

perhaps there are parallels here with the conception of individual action that lie within versions of

economic theorising. It is therefore helpful to outline the latter, in the context of descriptions of the nature

of demographic change.

2.2 Neoclassical economic theory hinges on a set of assumptions about the nature of human behaviour,

and rational, utility maximising individuals are at the core of these assumptions. Gary Becker has been a

driving force in the development of ‘the economic approach’, and inuential in its application to areas of

human experience not previously considered amenable to economic analysis (see Coleman 1993). The

family is one such area. Becker’s writings on the family have been inuential and provide the background

to the emergence of analysis of family organisation under the rubric of New Home Economics. Becker

explores various postwar family demographic changes, including declining fertility, increasing divorce

rates, and rapidly rising female participation in employment, locating these developments in relation

to the growth in earning power of women as the economy develops. In the approach, the gendered

division of labour in the household is understood as a strategy for maximising well being in the context of

differential earnings between women and men (Becker 1991, see alsoErmisch, 1988; de Cooman et al,

1987). Increased earning power for women raises their labour force participation since the opportunity

costs of marriage and childbearing increase. Marriage becomes less attractive consequently, and fertility

rates decline as the relative costs (to women) of children increase. This narrowing of wage differentials is

consequently seen to generate demographic changes, including declines in fertility, trends towards delay

in family formation, and increasing rates of divorce. As the advantages of the domestic division of labour

diminish so the economic logic which ties women and men into given (unpaid caring and breadwinning)

roles within the family dissipates and the conventional family form looks increasingly tenuous.

2.3 The initial process leading to increasing female wages is unspecied, a seemingly logical outcome of

economic growth. For Becker the ‘logic’ of the domestic gender division of labour arose on the basis of

women’s natural proximity to childrearing. Presumably Becker now believes this state of affairs to have

been superceded by a social challenge to ‘the natural’. Yet we do not need to go too far back in history to

see that the predicates of this ‘natural’ state of affairs are largely social (Tilly and Scott 1987; Honeyman

2000). The economic approach elides the potential importance of demographic processes in the

structuring of gender inequalities within employment. It offers us a model of decision making and behaviour

in given contexts, rather than offering an adequate theory of such behaviour. Empirical evidence highlights

the difculty of accepting context as given, with a reversal of the relationship between female labour force

participation and fertility rates, across European countries, between the 1970s and 1990s (Coleman

1998). Neoclassical theory too has been widely criticised for treating the economy as a distinct arena of

human activity. Rather we should locate ‘economic’ processes as predicated on social and cultural bases

(eg. Swedberg et al 1987, Friedland and Robertson 1990, Di Maggio 1990, Rubery 1996).

2.4 For some commentators it is notable that the cultural bases of social interaction have undergone

signicant changes which are bound up with processes of individualisation. Paradoxically, the gure

who emerges in these accounts bears some resemblance to the individualistic decision making units

of neoclassical economic theory. The term individualisation is generally used to signify a diminution

in the strength and permanence of social ties and obligations which previously bound people into

groups, networks and allegiances which were crucial to their social experiences, beliefs and ways of

acting in the world, in short, to their social identities. Many have argued that emergent trends in family

demography, and new forms of diversity in family arrangements, can be understood in terms of a growth

in individualism and a change in the nature of the social, or moral ties that bind individuals and groups

in contemporary society (eg. Aries 1980; Beck 1992; Bauman 1995; MacInnes 1998). The emphasis

on individualism, or the changing relationship of the individual to the contemporary social environment,

is seen to help account for new forms of diversity in family structure (eg. McRae 1997) and, for some

writers, a greater autonomy of individuals and freedom (or a new need) to be authors of their own

biographies and lifestyles (eg. Beck 1992; Strohmeier and Kuijsten 1997).

2.5 Traditional status constraints with respect to gender are weakening and, in some versions, the

commodication of female labour is paralleled by a growing contingency of family relationships,

and it is here that explanations of demographic transition are located. In this way, social ties give

way to the logic of capital accumulation which consequently draws in cheaper female labour. Beck

argues that a consequence is the marketisation of family relationships, and a growing contradiction

between reproduction and production, or between the spheres of family and work (Beck 1992). Family

relationships are undermined and increasingly contingent. In a parallel argument MacInnes maintains

that a long term process of rationalization in the cultural sphere draws women into the labour market

on similar terms to men - and this too transforms the basis of demographic behaviours and familial ties

(MacInnes 1998).

2.6 Lesthaeghe is a demographer who has long advocated the importance of a cultural interpretation of

economic logics and demographic behaviour (Lesthaeghe 1998, Lesthaeghe and Surkyn 1988). He has

identied patterns of cultural change which he characterises in terms of ideational shift. This is construed

as a long term trend to increased individual autonomy, and a diminished acceptability of institutional

regulation of family life. Individuals are more free to choose and this greater freedom or autonomy is

the key cultural dynamic altering family demography (Lesthaeghe 1998). Lesthaeghe proposes a form

of explanatory eclecticism in which different, micro-economic and cultural, theories may have differing

salience in relation to different aspects (or stages) of the problem under consideration. However, it may be

that the scope for convergence of theories lies in the similarity of the individual who emerges in models of

cultural, ideational shift and the “rational” (a-social) individual of neo- classical economic theory.

2.7 There are two, linked, difculties arising from these accounts on which I wish to focus, as background to

developing an alternative perspective on recent changes. The rst difculty relates to the articulation of

culture in many recent accounts of demographic behaviours. We need reect upon the parallels between

the above explanations of changing family demography and neo-classical economic assumptions about

how people act. In both perspectives people appear to be individualised decision-making units, a view

which tends to absent culture from accounts of contemporary social action (eg. Irwin 1995, Irwin and

Bottero 2000. See also Oppenheimer 1994; Block 1990; van Krieken 1997). Accounts of individualisation

and of ideational shift provide a novel gendered dimension to descriptions of change yet it sometimes

seems that rational economic man has been joined by rational economic woman. The shadows of the

past appear to give way to a contemporary gure with no shadow at all: the rational modern individual.

[2]

Additionally, the notion that female labour is being ‘commodied’ raises difculties since the labour of

young and older workers has been ‘decommodied’ over the period under consideration. In particular,

since the early 1970s, women have spent signicantly greater amounts of time in paid employment

through the middle stages of the life course, whilst young adults and older workers have become much

less likely to be in paid employment. Commodication is an economic process which should not admit

‘social’ (life course related) boundaries. Block sees as one of the central conceits of modernity the

supposition that our institutions are ‘shaped by the dictates of practical reason rather than by the kinds of

deeply held, but unexamined, collective beliefs that are known to dominate in less enlightened societies’

(Block, 1990: p.27). Cultural patterns and related inter-dependencies still shape people’s lives and

livelihoods and the ways in which they interact.

2.8 The second major difculty with accounts of individualisation and rationalisation lies in the tendency

to view economic and cultural processes in terms of an unfolding logic. In consequence, history is

reconstructed in a linear fashion, in terms of how we arrived at the present. The ‘logic’ of capitalist

development is accompanied by a ‘logic’ of demographic transition, within which prior social, familial ties

break down under the pressures of an individualising tendency, engendered by economic change and, in

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