The family itself can be recognized as having two subsystems- psychosocial subsystem and managerial subsystem. Management in family involves the interaction with various subsystems. These subsystems are the three environments surrounding the family. They are the household’s environment, near environment and the larger environment as depicted in the following figure.
The psycho-social subsystems is concerned with the expressive functions of the family like integration or solidarity of the group, internal relations of the family embers to each other , personality development and socialization of the family members.
The managerial subsystem is related to the instrumental functions of the family. These are concerned with goal achievement and the transactions between the group and the environments. The instrumental activities are termed as means to ends, and hence the behavior is nothing but the managerial behavior.
Though both the subsystems have distinct functions, each system cannot exist independently. Transactions between both the subsystems are frequent and intense. The directional arrows shown in the figure represent the input and output from one subsystem to the other and between the family and its environments. The boundaries of each environment are shown irregularly to denote that each family will determine its own environment, particularly the household and near environment.
Participants