Industrialization and Household Complexity in Rural Taiwan

Abstract

Industrialization is generally believed to undermine the rural extendedfamily household, but this study of Taiwanese farm households finds the contrary to be true. An analysis of 274 townships in 1960 and 1970 reveals that farm household complexity is positively associated with industrialization as measured by the proportion of the labor force in nonagricultural occupations, both cross-sectionally and over time. The propensity offann families to combine into extended units is influenced by the availability of productive resources, whether agricultural or industrial. In the classical case, industry undermines the extended family by drawing kinsmen into cities; in Taiwan, where industry has grown up in proximity to family farms, the extended household has thrived. Ethnographic evidence suggests that the semi-agricultural extended households are less patriarchal and more egalitarian; still, industrial employment itself does not seem inimical to extended living arrangements. When the theory of convergence (Goode 1963) is held up before the empirical record of family change in industrialization, the case of Taiwan is generally supportive. Two decades of rapid industrial and urban growth were accompanied there by a well-documented decline in the proportion of extended households (Freedman, Chang & Sun 1982). Various other fainilial behaviors and values, from mate selection to fertility, have tended to conver e with Western practice (Coombs & Sun 1981; Thornton, Chang & Sun 1984). Against this backdrop, a recent report from rural Taiwan is conspicuous. Returning to a village they had first studied in the 1950s, Bernard and Rita Gallin found that the distribution of villagers by family type had changed considerably over the last 20 years. There were almost one-half fewer nuclear families in 1978-79 than there were in 1958-59.... In contrast, there were almost three times as many joint families in the village.... Obviously, economic development had not been inimical to complex family organization in Xin Xing. (1982:213) *1 am gratefulfor the support of the Population Studies Center of the University of Michigan and to the Taiwan Provincial Institute of Family Planning. Ming-cheng Chang, J. Michael Coble, Ronald Freedman, and Te-hsiung Sun offered valuable advice and assistance. Direct correspondence to William Lavely, Department of Sociology DK-40, University of Washington,