Goode's World Revolution and Family Patterns: A Reconsideration at Fifty Years

摘要

Fifty years ago, William J. Goode published World Revolution and Family Patterns (Goode 1963b, henceforth WRFP), probably the most widely cited book on international family change written in the twentieth century.1 Goode was the preeminent family sociologist of his time and served as president of the American Sociological Association in 1972. He sought to raise the study of the family, which was something of an intellectual backwater, to the higher status of fields such as social structure and stratification. In this spirit he undertook a cross-cultural and historical analysis of family change around the world as industrialization—the revolution alluded to in his title—spread. Rich in its description of family patterns in India, China, Japan, Africa, the Middle East, and the West, WRFP was the most comprehensive study of the family to have appeared since Edward Westermarck's 1891 treatise on the evolution of family life, The History of Human Marriage. The result of his efforts, Goode wrote in thepreface to the paperback edition, was not a "rigorous, general theory" but rather "a structure of linked empirical propositions," a set of "empirical regularities about change" that he hoped would be seen as a contribution to social theory (Goode 1970,p. x).