Fertility rates vary considerably across and within societies,
and over time. Over the last three decades, social demographers
have made remarkable progress in documenting these axes of
variation, but theoretical models to explain family change and
variation have lagged behind. At the same time, our sister
disciplines-from cultural anthropology to social psychology to
cognitive science and beyond-have made dramatic strides in
understanding how social action works, and how bodies, brains,
cultural contexts, and structural conditions are coordinated in
that process. "Understanding Family Change and Variation: Toward a
Theory of Conjunctural Action" argues that social demography must
be reintegrated into the core of theory and research about the
processes and mechanisms of social action, and proposes a framework
through which that reintegration can occur. This framework posits
that material and schematic structures profoundly shape the
occurrence, frequency, and context of the vital events that
constitute the object of social demography. Fertility and family
behaviors are best understood as a function not just of individual
traits, but of the structured contexts in which behavior occurs.
This approach upends many assumptions in social demography,
encouraging demographers to embrace the endogeneity of social life
and to move beyond fruitless debates of structure versus culture,
of agency versus structure, or of biology versus society.
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