Chris Curtin

The Stem Family in Ireland

The subject of this paper is the question of the stem family, in the sociological literature and in anthropological studies of Ireland. The notion of the stem family is said to derive from the work of the nineteenth-century French sociologist Frederic Le Play (1806–82). Le Play divided the history of the family into three stages. Ancient societies were supposedly characterized by what he called the ‘patriarchal’ family, in which all the sons were retained within the household, over which the oldest member of the family ruled and in which any number of generations resided. Most of the worlds population were said however to have experienced their primary socialization in the ‘stem’ family. The stem family was a threegenerational structure which functioned to retain its original location (land and/or house) by means of dispersing most younger members, while preserving the main family stem by a principle of single inheritance. Parents married off and kept within the group only those children nominated as successors. Finally, there was the modern, ‘unstable’ family which formed upon marriage and dissolved upon the death of the parents.

The Stem Family in Ireland: A Debate

It has lately become commonplace to suspect that most household and family structures in history were much the same. Under the pugnacious influence of the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, historians have grown wary of drawing attention to apparently abnormal household structures, and perhaps weary of reiterating the predominance in northwestern European societies of the simple or nuclear family household. Ireland, however, was not easily squeezed into the Cambridge standard model as generated for preindustrial England. Not only were Irish households before the First World War uncomfortably large, but their bulges appeared in the wrong places. Admittedly these divergences were not great; yet to students following the path of Conrad M. Arensberg and Solon T. Kimball they betokened a more fundamental divergence between the underlying structures of English and Irish families.

Replaying the ‘Match’: Marriage Settlements in North Galway

In this paper, marriage settlement records from a north Galway legal practice are utilised to provide additional insights into the socio-legal aspects of the marriage practices of west of Ireland farmers. The significant new findings include: the complexity and variety of forms of property transfer; the wide range of actors and interests involved in the settlements; and the far from universal presence of the dowry. While the empirical base of the paper is limited, the findings are such as to question some of the taken-for-granted elements of farmers marriage patterns as they are described in previous accounts.

Review: The Politics of Civil Society: Neoliberalism or Social Left? Frederick Powell Policy Press, Bristol, 2007, 264pp, ISBN 978—1—86134—764—0, £22.99 (pbk)

Le Grand, J. (1982) The Strategy of Equality. London: Allen & Unwin. Le Grand, J. (1991) Equity and Choice: An Essay in Economics and Applied Philo sophy. London: HarperCollins. Le Grand, J. (2003) Motivation, Agency and Public Policy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Le Grand, J. and Bartlett, W. (eds) (1993) Quasi-Markets and Social Policy. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Le Grand, J. and Estrin, S. (eds) (1989) Market Socialism. Oxford: Clarendon. Mooney, G. and Law, A. (eds) (2007) New Labour/Hard Labour? Restructuring and Resistance inside the Welfare Industry. Bristol: Policy Press. Pollock, A. M. (2004) NHSplc: The Privatisation of our Health Care. London: Verso. Robert M. Page University of Birmingham

Book reviews : Midgley, James (1995) Social Development: The Developmental Perspective in Social Welfare. London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi: Sage, 194pp

The failure of economic development, despite its impressive results in generating high growth rates and incomes, to eliminate poverty and social exclusion and significantly raise the living standards of the majority is the starting point of this book. For Midgley, the critical test of development programmes is that they promote social welfare by ensuring that families, communities and societies can manage social problems, meet needs and provide opportunities for social advancement. While accepting that using approaches based on the principles of Social Philanthrophy and Charitable Giving social work and social services have made significant contributions to social welfare, he argues that what is required is Social Development, an approach which emphasizes the relationship between social policies and economic development and steers a middle route between state welfare and New Right individualism. Social development is defined by Midgley as ’a process of planned social change designed to promote the well-being of the population as a whole in conjunction with a dynamic process of economic development’. Having elaborated the distinctive features of social development in the Introduction, Midgley proceeds to show how social development has been adopted by different social groups and influenced by different ideas and debates in social science. The notion that social welfare could be advanced through planned intervention by governments has a long history. In more recent times it is evident in the emergence of the welfare state, colonial government programmes on mass education and community development and United Nations efforts to integrate social and economic development. Equally, social development has been associated with diverse social theories and ideological positions ranging from individualism to populism and social-