Does the domestic group of our day still play a determining role? A reading of sociological studies might persuade us to think that it perhaps does not. The current view seems to be that it was once a unit of production but is now only a unit of consumption, and yet there is at the same time a view of society as a consumer society. This must mean that the domestic group tends to carry out a central function of a rapidly developing society. Consumption is not the minor factor that such a view might suggest. As a result of higher standards of living, it has become diversified and extended. Spending and consuming imply decisions made in terms of hierarchies of needs. The domestic group is becoming a unit of planning in areas that go beyond merely monetary matters, since every decision concerning expenditure has an affective aspect.

In the United States in particular, the ‘new home planning’ trend in research is rediscovering the family, and more especially domestic relationships in so far as they shape decisions about the allocation of time and goods. The household is becoming the directing factor in a complex economic organisation in which the process of consumption merits as formal a treatment as that of a commercial or industrial undertaking. Such research, however, does not take cognizance of the social, psychological and affective constraints that guide the choices made by households, seeing them simply as subject only to that of scarce resources. For sociologists, these investigations cannot be totally convincing.