Family Work Among the Astors

Within classical sociological accounts of capitalism, families are curious remnants of the past. Contemporary elite sociology dismisses the family in a different way: by primarily focusing on individual men. When the family does appear within elite studies, scholars frequently follow a stratification framework, which focuses on the transmission of social position from parents to children. This paper breaks with these dominant tendencies to understand the elite family as a shared site of work. Families are social phenomenon in their own right: they are the makers of capitalist enterprises, and they endure and thrive within capitalism. Children do not simply receive potential positions from their parents; their actions can augment or diminish family social positions. Families are impacted by previous generations' material, socio-cultural and narrative work, and by the work done by various members within a generation. The approach we offer is part of a recent development within the sociology of elites to understand the family as the central unit of analysis, with multiple members (children, siblings, spouses, parents, etc.) serving as units of observation. Our approach foregrounds how gender and sexuality structures he work that families do. We develop our approach by tracing multiple generations of the Astor family.