In the organismic analogy, ‘topographical factors’ are those manifestations that reveal which site or system in the body is involved with disease/disorder. Accepting for scientific purposes Talcott Parsons’s thesis that the nuclear family is functionally adapted to be the reproduction agency of a differentiated society, in the body social of North Dundee the reproductive system appears to be a primary site of malfunctioning, visible in four categories of what Parsons would view as ‘disorder’:
a) Asocial conceptions are those pregnancies which do not form part of a family-building strategy appropriate to the way in which families are societally expected to carry out their social reproduction function. Of all asocial conceptions, ‘teenage pregnancies’ are a significant sub-class in North Dundee. Asocial teenage conceptions occur disproportionately in families which have not maintained some control over their teenage children’s sexual apprenticeship, a control which our evidence suggests is difficult to maintain if i) the girl has lost her grip on the educational ladder, ii) accelerated autonomy from adult tutelage has been overemphasized, and iii) her nuclear family has broken up. Hence the model would propose teenage asocial conceptions as a late developmental mutation in established families, rather than as occurring within a new family as an early part of its self-formation, since few such conceptions lead to new families. The therapy implication of this is that attention should focus on the system of the adolescent girl and her parents, as against the non-system of the girl and the baby’s father.
b) Asocial parenting. The report presents a picture of family functioning in which the model of parenting being adhered to by the parents in the schemes accelerates to the maximum children’s capacity to fend for themselves. The more children can bring themselves up the better, not just for the lightening of the parental burden, but also because this community, built around women working in insecure and low-wage jobs, has always required independence and self-reliance at an early age. As long as these children were at work by their early teens, this minimalist parenting style made complete sense. It is the historical transition in the labour market which has made it ‘asocial’: it is no longer adapted to the wider social environment, which exerts harsh exclusionary pressure on its incompletely developed or/and communicationally challenged personalities.
c) Hypertrophy of the peer group. Asocial parenting is accompanied by high deference to the peer group, both among teenagers and their parents. Traditional working class competitiveness prompts adults to demonstrate they are good providers. This feeds the needs of teenagers to demonstrate that they are part of the ‘in crowd’, conforming to group norms both in consumer behaviour (designer labels, access to media) and in precocious ‘adult’ behaviours (sex, drink, smoking, ‘defending territory’). Diffuse low-level violence makes peer group membership semi-obligatory in the early teens, even for girls. The price of social acceptance is accepting the community and its norms; where these include anti-school values, peer pressure acts on marginal pupils as an ‘extract’ factor, reinforcing the ‘expel’ factor of indicator-sensitive teachers to undermine educational commitment/success and exclude them from education. Educationally failing peers push each other into socially mandated hyperadult behaviours, including substance use and sexual risk-taking (e.g. at parties).
d) Parenting work distributed across extended family and public agencies. Raising independent children able to fend for themselves at an early age is not the only means whereby poor parents lighten the parenting burden. Female relatives able and willing to help are pressed into service in the child-care team, notably grandmothers (who are socially expected to take a lead role in managing it), aunties, and older siblings. Little is expected of men, and little received. Much of men’s functional role within the family is lost when they lose their breadwinner status, and it passes to the social father, the spectrum of public agencies which support households with children in the spheres of income, housing, security, health, individual development and pro-social behaviour. A matching ‘culture of entitlement‘ has grown up around these services, households vying with each other to maximise overall benefits. From the state agency side there exists an established ‘tradition of intervention‘, assuming directive and even state-as-parent powers, either where families are judged to be falling below a certain standard of child care, or where children become frankly antisocial. The work of reproducing the community through new members is thus a collaborative effort between mothers, their female relatives, and agency professionals and their resources. Functionally these should be considered as much part of the family as any other major in-putter of child support resources.
