RELATIVE VALUE: THE FINANCING OF FAMILIES

Abstract

For most individuals, financial survival depends upon luck, matching income to expenditure, paid work and the mobilization of resources via a series of links acquired through kinship, neighbourliness, friendship, ethnicity, religion or shared interests. This is a guide to some of the secondary sources that discuss external resources; friendly societies, building societies, life insurance, businesses and the co-operative movement and the relationship of each of these to families. The aim is draw attention to disparate studies in these fields and to encourage further small-scale research that challenges the privileged position so frequently accorded to aggregate evidence accumulated by focusing on the national level, rather than the family and community level.