Riitta Jallinoja Livres

Focusing on the concept of families as dynamic assemblages rather than static entities, this book explores how various relationships and interactions shape familial connections. It emphasizes the importance of context and transactions in understanding kinship, revealing the complexities of how people relate to one another as family. This fresh perspective challenges traditional notions of family structures and highlights the fluidity of kinship in different social settings.

This book takes a novel approach to family, exploring in detail how status is inherited and maintained within families; the process of upward social mobility; and how the roots of social decline start within families. The author also examines how rigidly status equivalence determines choice of spouse. Exceptionally extensive in its coverage, the book ranges from the seventeenth century to the present day, across a large range of European countries and part of the United States, and across several class groups, including royalty, nobility and entrepreneurial dynasties, as well as families of professionals, artists and those in lower ranks. The book also discusses the viability of the central sociological concepts of class and status. The book will be of interest to scholars and students in the areas of family sociology, history, social equality and inequality and class and elitism research.