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contexts is just beginning to emerge. Consequently, what is known about the size of the informal economy, its participants, its determinants, and its relationship to the formal sector remains limited.

Most of what we currently know about informal work comes from ethnographic and field studies using in-depth interviews and other qualitative data-collection techniques. These provide a rich and varied collection of information about the nature and meaning of informal work in different regions. These regions include remote rural areas such as the Ozarks (Campbell et al. 1993), rural Pennsylvania (Jensen et al. 1995), and the Southwest (Roberts 1994). Other researchers have also looked at urban subpopulations, including Latin American immigrants in New York City (SassenKoob 1989) and in Miami (Stepick 1989). These studies offer a intensive look at the kinds of informal activities that occur, who does them and why, and when people engage in informal economic activities.

Case studies and other qualitative methodologies have provided a rich source of data on specific groups and locales, but their limited geographic scope means that there is little information on informal economic activity in larger populations and subpopulations, thus limiting our understanding of the prevalence of such activities across rural and urban places. Furthermore, there appear to be inconsistencies about the nature of informal work across areas, and case studies can only begin to explore these seeming differences. For example, studies of informalization in rural areas suggest that bartering and self-provisioning are both a means of supplementing a meager income and a normative way of life. On the other hand, urban studies depict informal work as an activity engaged in when the avenues to work in the formal labor market are blocked.

Attempts to quantify informal activity for use in policy making have been made by several national and international agencies, although the methods employed are often crude. Portes (1994) separates these strategies into categories based on the following approaches: (1) the labor market, (2) the very small enterprise, (3) macroeconomic discrepancies, and (4) household consumption.

The first three approaches rely on data taken from industry reports and measures of national

economic activity such as the gross domestic product. The labor-market approach entails assigning all labor as informal if it is reported as self-employ- ment in areas not typically assumed to be high status or high paying. The very small enterprise (VSE) approach, like the labor-market approach, is also based on industry data. Instead of focusing on self-employment, however, VSE-based estimates are predicated on the notion that all businesses employing fewer than ten workers are engaging in informal activity. In the third approach, discrepancies in different measures of similar economic activity are attributed to the informal economy.

The household consumption approach was developed in 1987 in an effort to surpass the limitations involved in estimating informal activity based on reported, presumably formal, production activities. Estimates of informal economic activity, using this approach, are based on consumer reports of ‘‘the amounts spent . . . on goods and services acquired off the books or on the side’’ (Smith 1987). This method is unique in that it focuses on consumption; however, it is also limited in that it assumes that all products are consumed by individuals rather than firms.

In recognition of the inability to generalize to larger geographic areas based on ethnographic data, in acknowledgment of the limitation of the assumptions entailed in current estimation strategies, and in order to limit the costs entailed in labor-intensive qualitative methodologies, some researchers are turning to more direct survey methodology to examine informal economic processes. Recent studies using survey methodology include work by Jensen and colleagues (1995), Tickamyer and Wood (1998), and Tolbert and colleagues (1996). They note that in order to provide systematic, representative, and comparable data across different locales on who participates and how extensively, where and when participation occurs, and under what circumstances, different data are needed. The goal of these researchers is to provide the baseline data that will enable future researchers to determine if informal activity is increasing or decreasing over time and with changing economic conditions. They are also interested in exploring the relationship between informal work and other social processes, including the relationship to formal labor-market participation, to household, family, and community structures and processes, and to human and social capital formation.

These newer studies are significant because they demonstrate that collecting direct information on informal work using structured survey techniques is possible despite the elusive nature of such activities, their often semilegal status, and respondents’ seeming lack of awareness of the extent of their participation in informal work. These studies also underscore the need for better, more extensive tests of survey methods both to determine optimal strategies for using survey methodology on this topic and to provide definitive answers to the many questions posed about informal labor.

CONCLUSIONS

While sociologists, economists, and other researchers continue to provide information on informal work, there are many issues that remain unaddressed. These issues include questions regarding the prevalence, importance, and nature of informal activities. Why do people participate in the informal economy? How important is it to their economic survival? Is it vital or is it more socially driven, carrying little expectation for immediate economic reward? What percent of households engage in informal work, and which members of the household are most likely to be the workers? What are the economic returns to participation? Do formal and informal work complement or substitute for each other? Do people turn to the informal economy as a last resort in times when formal work is curtailed, or are certain types of people likely to engage in both formal and informal labor? And, finally, how is the probability of informal work shaped by individual, household, and labor-mar- ket characteristics?

Future research will need to address these issues. Furthermore, more studies will be needed at the national and international level (including comparative research) in order fully to understand the importance of the informal economy in shaping the larger economy as a whole. In order to understand this, it is essential to understand where the informal economy fits vis-à-vis the formal economy and how it has evolved. Is the informal economy merely a pure market response to unwanted government interference in commerce, or is it merely a reflection of expected social relationships in a given place and time? Most likely, the informal economy arises from a combination of

factors including poverty and normative pressures to help neighbors and for self-provision. A purely formal economic focus, however, limits our understanding of the range of possibilities entailed in informal work and the impact that such work has on shaping interpersonal processes. Furthermore, by limiting our measures of economic growth, household and individual well-being, inequality, and production to official statistics of formal economic activity, we see only a fraction of the entire picture. This is particularly problematic when policies that attempt to address these issues are shaped from these fragmented images.

Since modern economic policy has been shaped almost exclusively by focusing on the formal economy, conventional definitions of employment, unemployment, poverty, and economic growth may be insufficient to explain the myriad of issues that emerge when informal work is added to the picture. As it has become increasingly recognized that informal economic activity is vital to many individuals and households in both developed and developing countries, the need for more research has become more pressing. By addressing many of the unanswered questions that remain about the informal economy, policy makers can begin to address the labor-market problems that may force workers into informal economic activity, to regulate those activities that exploit certain segments of the work force, and to understand the importance of both formal and informal work as a means of improving living standards.

REFERENCES

Campbell, R. R., J. C. Spencer, and R. G. Amonker 1993 ‘‘The Reported and Unreported Missouri Ozarks: Adaptive Strategies of the People Left Behind.’’ In T. Lyson and W. Falk, eds., Forgotten Places: Uneven Development in Rural America. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas.

Cappechi, Vittorio 1989 ‘‘The Informal Economy and the Development of Flexible Specialization in EmiliaRomagna.’’ In A. Portes, M. Castells, and L. A. Benton, eds., The Informal Economy: Studies in Advanced and Less Developed Countries. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Castells, Manuel, and Alejandro Portes 1989 ‘‘World Underneath: The Origins, Dynamics, and Effects of the Informal Economy.’’ In A. Portes, M. Castells, and L. A. Benton, eds., The Informal Economy: Studies

in Advanced and Less Developed Countries. Baltimore:

Johns Hopkins University Press.

Edin, Kathryn, and Laura Lein 1998 Making Ends Meet. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

Feige, Edgar 1990 ‘‘Defining and Estimating Underground and Informal Economics: The New Institutional Economics Approach’’ World Development 18(7):989–1002.

Fernandez-Kelly, M. P., and A. M. Garcia 1989. ‘‘Informalization at the Core: Hispanic Women, Homework, and the Advanced Capitalist State.’’ In A. Portes, M. Castells, and L. A. Benton, eds., The Informal Economy: Studies in Advanced and Less Developed Countries. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Fitchen, Janet M. 1981 Poverty in Rural America: A Case Study. Boulder, Colo.: Westview.

Gaber, John 1994 ‘‘Manhattan’s fourteenth Street Vendors’ Market: Informal Street Peddlers’ Complementary Relationship with New York City’s Economy.’’

Urban Anthropology. 23(4):373–407.

Graughan, Joseph, and Louis Ferman 1987 ‘‘Toward an Understanding of the Informal Economy.’’ Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 493 (September): 15–25.

Gringeri, Christina 1994 Getting By: Women Homeworkers

and Rural Economic Development. Lawrence: Kansas

University Press.

Hart, Keith 1973 ‘‘Informal Income Opportunities and Urban Employment in Ghana.’’ Journal of Modern African Studies 11:61–89.

Hoyman, Michele 1987 ‘‘Female Participation in the Informal Economy: A Neglected Issue.’’ Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 493 (September):64–82.

Jensen, Leif, Gretchen T. Cornwell, and Jill L. Findeis 1995 ‘‘Informal Work in Nonmetropolitan Pennsylvania.’’ Rural Sociology 60(1):67–107.

Lozano, B. 1989 The Invisible Work Force: Transforming American Business with Outside and Home-Based Workers. New York: Free Press.

Miller, S. M. 1987 ‘‘The Pursuit of Informal Economies.’’ Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 493 (September):26–35.

Mingione, Enzo 1991 Fragmented Societies: A Sociology of Economic Life Beyond the Market Paradigm. Cambridge, Mass.: Basil Blackwell.

Portes, Alejandro 1994 ‘‘The Informal Economy and Its Paradoxes.’’ In N. J. Smelser and R. Swedberg, eds.,

The Handbook of Economic Sociology. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

———, Manuel Castells, and Lauren A. Benton, eds. 1989 The Informal Economy: Studies in Advanced and Less Developed Countries. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Roberts, Brian 1994 ‘‘Informal Economy and Family Strategies.’’ International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 18(1):6–23.

Sassen-Koob, Saskia 1989 ‘‘New York City’s Informal Economy.’’ In A. Portes, M. Castells, and L. A. Benton, eds., The Informal Economy: Studies in Advanced and Less Developed Countries. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Smith, James D. 1987 ‘‘Measuring the Informal Economy.’’ Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 493 (September):83–99.

Stepick, Alex 1989 ‘‘Miami’s Two Informal Sectors.’’ In A. Portes, M. Castells, and L. A. Benton, eds., The Informal Economy: Studies in Advanced and Less Developed Countries. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Tickamyer, Ann R., and Teresa A. Wood 1998 ‘‘Identifying Participation in the Informal Economy Using Survey Research Methods.’’ Rural Sociology 63(2):323–339.

Tolbert, Charles, L. Tobin, and D. Haynie 1996. ‘‘Informal Economic Activity in Louisiana Farm and Rural Households.’’ Paper presented at the annual meetings of the Rural Sociological Society, Des Moines, Iowa.

ANN TICKAMYER

STEPHANIE BOHON

INFORMATION SOCIETY

Increased reliance on activities directly associated with the production, distribution, and utilization of information has led to characterizing many advanced countries of the world as information societies. The term information society and related concepts, such as information age and knowledge economy, describe a social system greatly dependent on information technologies to produce and distribute all manner of goods and services. In contrast to the industrial society, which relied on internal combustion engines to augment the physical labor of humans, the information society relies on computer technologies to augment mental labor.

Trends in labor-force composition both define and measure the extent to which a nation can be described as an information society. Machlup

(1962) was perhaps the first to describe U.S. society in these terms. He estimated that nearly onethird of the labor force in1958 worked in information industries such as communications, computers, education, and information services, which accounted for 29 percent of the gross national product (GNP). Using a slightly different methodology, Porat (1977) estimated that information activities had risen to just under half of the U.S. GNP by 1967.

A defining attribute of the information society is the search for improvements in productivity through substituting information for time, energy, labor, and physical materials. In practical terms, this means supplying workers with computerized workstations that are networked to other workstations through intranets as well as the Internet. It allows the use of software to reprogram equipment in distant locations, and it often eliminates the physical delivery of messages and even products. These changes are aimed at making organizational production, distribution, and management decisions more efficient. An early indicator of the extent to which industries sought productivity improvements through the use of information equipment is that whereas only 10 percent of all U.S. investments in durable equipment was spent on the purchase of computers and communications equipment in 1960, that investment increased to 40 percent in 1984 (U.S. Congress 1988) and is now much higher.

The concept of postindustrial society, developed most notably by Daniel Bell (1973), anticipated development of the information society. The term post-industrial described the decline of employment in manufacturing and an increase in service and professional employment noted by Machlup (1962) and Porat (1977). Knowledge and information were viewed by Bell as the strategic and transforming resources of postindustrial society, just as capital and labor were the strategic and transforming resources of industrial society.

Advances in the capabilities of information technologies to process large quantities of information quickly have been a crucial factor in the development of the information society. These technologies are of two types, computer power and transmission capability. Development of inexpensive silicon integrated circuits containing as many as a million transistors on a single chip had

already been achieved by the mid-1980s, making it possible to pack enormous information processing power into very little space. As a result, desktop microcomputers gained the processing power comparable to the largest mainframe computers of the previous decade. Computational power continued to increase by a factor of ten every five to seven years in the 1990s (Martin 1995). Improvements in microprocessor technology, coupled with developments in parallel processing, storage methods, input–output devices, and speech recognition and synthesis, have continued to increase dramatically the nature, scale, and speed of tasks that can be accomplished on computers. All this has happened while prices for computers declined in an equally dramatic way.

Corresponding advancements have occurred in photonics as a result of the development of laser technology and ultra-pure glass fiber. These developments resulted in the ability to transmit enormous quantities of information long distances on tiny optic fibers without amplification. By the mid1980s, AT&T Laboratories had transmitted 420 million bits per second of information over 125 miles without amplification. Advancements of this nature, as well as the use of satellites, made it possible for computers located thousands or tens of thousands miles apart to share large amounts of information nearly as quickly and effectively as would happen if they were located in the same building. Like the price for computing power, the price for transmitting large amounts of information from one place to another also has declined.

These changes in computational and transmission power have made possible new ways of interacting and doing business. Automatic teller machines located on one continent can dispense cash from a bank located on another continent. Cash registers and gasoline pumps are connected to a telecommunications system so that credit card balances can be checked before making a sale. By pressing numbers on a touch tone telephone and without talking to another human being, products can be purchased, library books can be renewed, newspaper delivery can be started or stopped, survey questionnaires can be answered, and money can be transferred from one account to another. These examples illustrate not only the substitution of information technology applications for

human labor, but also the creation of services that could not previously be provided.

However, these developments pale beside the huge capability being unleashed by development of the World Wide Web. Once a system for the exchange of simple text messages among scientists, it has now expanded to a required form of communication for many, if not most, businesses and professionals. It is estimated that as many as 160 million users are now connected to the Internet, of which nearly half are in the United States and Canada. The rapid growth in Internet use in the mid-1990s has led to increases in connections among geographically dispersed work groups and to new methods for the selling of goods and services.

Development of the information society happened neither suddenly nor without warning. According to Beniger (1986), its roots go back to a crisis of control evoked by the Industrial Revolution in the late 1800s. Industrialization speeded up material-processing systems. However, innovations in information processing and communications lagged behind innovations in the use of energy to increase productivity of manufacturing and transportation systems. Development of the telegraph, telephone, radio, television, modern printing presses, and postal delivery systems all represented innovations important to the resolution of the control crisis, which required replacement of the traditional bureaucratic means of control that had been depended on for centuries before.

However, an entirely new stage in the development of the information society has been realized through advances in microprocessing technology and the convergence of mass-media telecommunications and computers into a single infrastructure of social control (Beniger 1986). An important factor in this convergence was digitalization of all information, so that distinctions between types of information such as words, numbers, and pictures become blurred, as does communication between persons and machines on the one hand, and between machines on the other. Digitalization, therefore, allowed the transformation of information into a generalized medium for processing and exchange by the social system, much as common currency and exchange rates centuries ago did for the economic systems of the world. Combining

telephone, television, and computer into a single device represents an important likely and practical consequence of this convergence.

Quite different views exist about the possible effects of the development of a full-fledged information society (Lyon 1988). One view is that it will empower workers, providing direct access to opportunities unavailable to them in an industrial society except by high organizational position and proximity to centralized positions of power. In 1985, Harlan Cleveland described information as being fundamentally different from the resources for which it is being substituted; for example, it is not used up by the one who consumes it, hence making its use possible by others. It is also easily transportable from one point to another, a characteristic made strikingly clear by the rapid rise of the World Wide Web. Cleveland argued that the information society would force dramatic changes in longstanding hierarchical forms of social organization, terminating taken-for-granted hierarchies based on control, secrecy, ownership, early access, and geography. A similar view was provided by Masuda (1981), writing in a Japanese context, who envisioned the development of participatory democracies, the eradication of educational gaps between urban and rural areas, and the elimination of a centralized class-based society.

A more pessimistic view of the consequences of knowledge as the key source of productivity was offered by Castells (1989). Fundamentally, the new information infrastructure that connects virtually all points of the globe to all others allows for great flexibility in all aspects of production, consumption, distribution, and management. To take advantage of the efficiencies offered by full utilization of information technologies, organizations plan their operations around the dynamics of their information-generating units, not around a limited geographic space. Individual nations lose the ability to control corporations. Information technologies, therefore, become instrumental in the implementation of fundamental processes of capitalist restructuring. In contrast to the view offered by Cleveland, the stateless nature of the corporation is seen as contributing to an international hierarchical functional structure in which the historic division between intellectual and manual labor is taken to an extreme. The consequences

for social organization are to dissolve localities as functioning social systems and to supersede societies.

There can be no doubt that the use of information technologies is significantly changing the structures of advanced societies. Yet it would be a mistake to think of the use of information technologies as a cause only, and not a consequence, of changes in societal structures. Laws have evolved in the United States in an attempt to regulate rates that can be charged for cable television, how much can be charged by providers for telecommunications services to schools and libraries, and what levels of telephone transmission services must be provided to individual households as a part of universal service. The influence of people’s values is also being exerted on the extent and means by which confidentiality of data records must be protected; it also is being exerted through state and local laws mandating the accessibility of computers to schoolchildren.

Our rapid evolution to an information society poses many important sociological questions about how our increased dependence upon information technologies influences social interaction and other aspects of human behavior. The ability to transmit work across national boundaries, even the high likelihood that information essential to the operation of a nation will be stored outside rather than within a country, raises important questions about what is essential for preserving national sovereignty. The ability to control operations at long distance encourages an even greater division of labor among nations. As a result, labor unions may become powerless in the face of the ability of corporations to move production activities across national boundaries (Lyon 1988). And, just as elements of national society have weakened in the face of globalization, a set of counterforces have been unleashed whereby identity-based social movements compete to fill the void of power and control (Castells 1997). It is important for sociologists to seek an answer to the question of how the increased reliance on information technologies affects the sovereignty of individual nations and related social movements.

The information age provides new challenges for nearly all areas of sociology. It influences how and from whom we learn, with lifelong distance education changing the once essential learning

triangle of professor, student, and classroom. New types of crime, such as creating and spreading computer viruses, have been elevated from curiosities to major threats to the functioning of organizations, society, and the world order. The impact on people’s self-concepts may also be substantial. From preschool on, computers have become part of the sociological and psychological development of children, the potential effects of which have yet to be fully understood (Turkle 1984). This interaction with computers now extends via the Internet to others with computers, so that the core sociological concept of social interaction must make room for electronic, long distance interaction and its consequences. Many adults now spend far more of their lives in interchange with computers than with another technological development, the automobile, which also dramatically changed people’s lives in the industrial society.

Information technologies also have the potential for breaking down boundaries of individual communities, making it possible for people to bypass forming traditional community ties, unless extraordinary efforts are made to maintain them (Allen and Dillman 1994). Thousands of new job titles are added to the occupational structure of countries, while other job titles disappear. Robert Reich, for example, describes the evolution of jobs into three broad types—routine work, in-person service workers, and symbolic analysts (1991). The latter are theorized to be the creators of ‘‘value’’ in the information age, replacing land, plants, and equipment as the most valued production resource. These anticipated changes, to the extent they occur, provide the basis for evolution of a new class structure in society, based more upon educational accomplishment than upon the ownership of material resources.

Some have argued that we are evolving into a world of the information-rich and informationpoor, with computer access and skills forming the great divide (Castells 1997; Lyon 1988). Even though computers seem omnipresent in society, they are present in only a minority (about 40 percent) of U.S. households and only half of those households have e-mail or Web access (National Telecommunications Information Administration [NTIA] 1998). To the extent that computers with Web connections shift from an optional way of

accessing important information and purchasing good and services to a mandatory means of obtaining competitive prices, a case can be made that class differences will expand.

It’s appropriate that Daniel Bell, besides being one of the earliest prognosticators of the information age, also has more recently described quite different ways in which it could evolve (1989). He points out that the telecommunications revolution makes possible an intense degree of centralization of power if the society decides to use it in that way. However, because of the multiplicity, diversity, and cheapness of the modes of communication, decentralization is also possible. One of the important challenges for sociology is to understand which of these visions will prevail and why.

REFERENCES

Allen, John C. and Don A. Dillman 1994 Against All Odds: Rural Community in the Information Age. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press.

Bell, Daniel 1973 The Coming of Postindustrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting. New York: Basic Books.

——— 1989 ‘‘Communication Technology: For Better or for Worse.’’ In Jerry L. Salvaggio, ed., The Information Society: Economic Social and Structural Issues. Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associations.

Beniger, James R. 1986 The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society.

Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Castells, Manuel 1989 The Information City. Cambridge,

U.K.: Basil Blackwell.

Castells, Manuel 1997 The Information Age Economy, Society and Culture: Volume II. The Power and Identity.

Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers.

Cleveland, Harlan 1985 ‘‘The Twilight of Hierarchy: Speculation on the Global Information Society.’’

Public Administration Review 45:185–196.

Lyon, David 1988 The Information Society: Issues and Illusions. London, U.K.: Polity Press.

Machlup, Fritz 1962 The Production and Distribution of Knowledge in the United States. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

Martin, William J. 1995 The Global Information Society.

London: Aslib Gower.

Masuda, Yoneji 1981 The Information Society as Postindustrial Society. Tokyo: Institute for the Information Society; Bethesda, Md.: World Future Society.

National Telecommunications Information Administration 1999 ‘‘Falling Through the Net: Defining the Digital Divide.’’ Available at: http://www.ntia.doc.gov/ ntiahome/net2/falling.html

Porat, M.U., et al. 1977 The Information Economy. OT Special Publication 77-12. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Commerce.

Reich, Robert 1991 The Work of Nations. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Turkle, Sherry 1984 ‘‘The Second Self’’: Computers and the Human Spirit. New York: Simon and Schuster.

U.S. Congress, Office of Technology Assessment 1988

Technology and the American Transition: Choices for the Future. OTA-TET-ZA3. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office.

DON A. DILLMAN

INHERITANCE

NOTE: Although the following article has not been revised for this edition of the Encyclopedia, the substantive coverage is currently appropriate. The editors have provided a list of recent works at the end of the article to facilitate research and exploration of the topic.

Statutory and common laws governing inheritance have a profound effect on the formation or dissolution of household structures and the patterns of inheritance transfers over generations. A society, for any political or social reason, can initiate and promulgate a law or civil code controlling inheritance; inevitably, new laws or codes cause drastic change in the structure and functions of family systems.

In order to understand the subject of inheritance, it will be necessary to define many terms. To inherit is by law to receive property, resources, or, often, status from an ancestor at her or his decease or to take by intestate succession or by will. Intestate succession is a transfer of resources according to legal procedures that control distribution of the resources when there is no will. A person is intestate when he or she has not made a will. In a will, usually a written document, a person (or testator) makes a deposition of his or her property, and the deposition takes effect, at least in modern societies, upon the testator’s death. A will is changeable and revocable during the lifetime of a testator.

Takers are successors or beneficiaries. Impartible inheritance is a situation, established by statute,

in which the property and resources are indivisible and are given to one person (devisee); this type of inheritance is likely to occur within family households primarily in rural areas of most historic societies, especially in Eastern and Western Europe. Partible inheritance, dividing assets for conveyance to one’s heirs, is linked to nuclear family households found in those locations where there is accelerated industrialization and urbanization.

Any system of inheritance promotes the continuity of family and societal structures over generations. The transfer of resources from the older to the younger generation helps maintain a family’s position and power in the social order. Such transfers also provide stability to existing societal caste and class arrangements and ordinarily are ensconced deeply in tradition and myth. It is more likely that inheritance systems function to perpetuate existing social structures than to change society’s organizations and institutions.

INHERITANCE, LAWS, AND CHANGE

Those most affected by changes in laws are persons with little power in society. This is evident in eighteenthand nineteenth-century European societies, in which the promulgation of laws and decrees drastically affected the structure and practices of rural families. For example, Gaunt (1983) indicates that in nineteenth-century central Europe, in a section that is now part of Czechoslovakia, the decree to conscript unmarried men for military duty caused parents of serf families to encourage early marriage of their children. As a consequence, the incidence of complex family households increased, and there were changes in the patterns of inheritance succession. During a labor shortage in eighteenth-century Poland, fiefdom rulers encouraged endogamous marriage and attempted to restrict their chattels from leaving their villages. The economy was based on household unit sharecropping. The peasants encouraged complex family households consisting of two or more conjugal units, while the Polish lords favored neolocal household residence (Kochanowicz 1983). The inheritance outcomes of these efforts to circumvent political, economic, and social measures, often repressive in intent, affected existent family structures, their forms, and inheritance patterns.

The possession of equities, property, possessions, resources, and land (especially in the case of European peasants) determined whether these would compose an impartible or partible inheritance. For example, an impartible inheritance pattern is most likely when land is the primary family asset. In addition, the transfer of authority over these rights depended upon the timing of ‘‘stepping down,’’ a process deeply embedded in the cultural traditions of the society (Gaunt 1983; Plakans 1989). Stepping down usually occurred through a retirement contract, which was essentially a will that indicated the conditions of the transfer from parents to children. This inter vivos phenomenon, a conveyance of property and other equities while the individual was alive and engaged in stepping down, was ‘‘one made of preserving intergenerationally the match between family and the property that provides its livelihood’’ (Sorensen 1989, p. 199). Stepping down, or disengaging, usually occurred when the oldest son married or when the parents were near or at retirement age. Stepping down was invoked by law or tradition, and it resulted in variations in inheritance patterns and in the organization of the life course of various family members.

Sorensen (1989) provides a detailed retirement contract of his great-grandfather on his mother’s side, a prosperous farm family in the western part of Jutland, Denmark. The transfer of this medium-sized farm, substantially undervalued, when Laurids Poulsen was fifty-six, was apparently to make certain that the property remained in the family to buttress its position in the society.

It is not explicitly stated in the Poulsen retirement agreement that the heir, Alfred, would care for his parents in their declining years. The contract’s provisions enabled Laurids and his wife, Maren, to be independent. Yet in this situation and, as Sorensen (1989) indicates, in Scandinavia since before the Middle Ages, transferring property to a son implied the promise of care in old age. Thus, there existed two motivations for conveying property to a son, but the stronger proved to be the hope of maintaining the property in the family over generations.

In former ages, conveying property and its accompanying position, status, and power was the intent of inheritance patterns. The preservation and maintenance of the family unit was the goal.

Impartible inheritance expressed this intent of maintaining the family property and social position, but it created obvious winners and losers. The transfer of a family’s property to a single heir meant that other family members could leave to seek opportunities elsewhere or remain with the family enterprise in a subservient position.

The possibilities for fuller expression of family members’ abilities, where talent and skills and not family membership determined the individual’s life course trajectory, would come at a later period. Partible inheritance reduced the requirement that family members subordinate their desires, interests, and expectations to those of the family unit. Changes in a society’s demographics, such as fertility and mortality, and changes in the means of producing goods and services resulted in lessened need for impartible inheritance. Partible inheritance became identified with the modern period of Western civilization.

MODERN PERIOD

Rules for succession and rules for inheritance of property are related but distinct from one another. Inheritance of property usually follows lines of succession to social position. Codified systems of secular law governing inheritance and status succession emerge in complex societies and are sufficiently precise and uniform to meet the majority needs of the population (Radcliffe-Brown 1935).

For urbanites in complex societies such as those in Europe and the United States, the transfer of land, dwelling unit, tools, and equipment is less critical to the survival and maintenance of the family over generations than it is for the rural resident. Economic assets other than land and buildings—that is, personal mementos and posses- sions—become the content of such transfers.

Rural landholders of modest means were unable to effect a pattern of impartible inheritance. Increasing societal complexity nurtured corporate agriculture in preference to the family farm. The reduction in the number of family-owned farms, the increasing dependence of farm family members upon the larger, mostly urban society for jobs that are not located close to the farm dwelling, price supports, and payment for nonproduction have diminished the possibilities for maintaining

the family farm over generations. Partible inheritance has become the norm.

This shift to partible inheritance under new rules of succession meant that for the first time the claims of the surviving spouse outweighed those of the surviving kin of one’s lineage, a reversal of the pattern found in eighteenthand nineteenth-cen- tury Europe and in primitive societies (Benedict 1936; Hoebel 1966). Under U.S. state statutes governing intestacy the surviving spouse and children share in the estate. The spouse receives at least one-third, depending on the number of surviving children and the specifics of the state law governing inheritance. If there is no surviving spouse the children share and share alike. Where there is no surviving spouse or children the estate passes to grandchildren. In the absence of grandchildren the next to receive are grandparents, then siblings, then more distant relatives.

Where testacy exists the estate usually passes to the surviving spouse. This horizontal transfer in the generational line of succession is uniquely modern and represents an evolution from the Roman definition of inheritance as ‘‘succession to the entire legal position of a deceased man’’ (Maine 1963, p. 208). In Rome the heir functioned as a guardian or executor of the estate to perpetuate the honor and status of the deceased and family survivors and to keep intact and extend the estate’s holdings. The stepwise shift from decedent to surviving spouse and subsequent vertical transfer of equities to children after the death of the surviving spouse resulted in a family system based more on individual relationships, feelings, perceptions, and interactions and less on tradition, primogeniture, and maintaining properties and estates.

The pattern of conveying all property to the spouse, to be discussed further in this article, is a practice seemingly not in consonance with the concept and exercise of testamentary freedom.

TESTAMENTARY FREEDOM

Testamentary freedom, the individual’s right to will away property to persons outside the family or to distribute to a number of heirs and legatees related by blood, consanguinity, or adoption, is a fundamental Anglo-American concept of the U.S. inheritance system. The primogeniture system, which passed all property to a single heir and was

most suited for the wealthy, was replaced in eight- eenth-century England by a new law of the land— testamentary freedom. This occurred at the time England disposed its feudal land tenure system. The 1789 French Revolution, in keeping with its ideology of justice, freedom, equality, and fraternity, and for more concrete social and political reasons, enacted laws requiring equal distribution of a deceased person’s assets among surviving children. Colonial settlers in the United States undoubtedly inspired by and enamored of the changes in English and French societies, brought with them this notion of testamentary freedom as part of their intellectual and cultural heritage.

At first blush the practice of testamentary freedom would seem at least to contradict if not destroy the major intent of an inheritance system. According to Edmund Burke, ‘‘the power of perpetuating our property in families is one of the most valuable and interesting circumstances belonging to it, and that which tends the most to the perpetuation of society itself’’ (1910, p. 121). The major question is whether testamentary freedom as it is practiced negates what Burke suggests is a most critical process for generational and societal continuity.

Testamentary freedom, like justice or liberty, is a relative and not an absolute condition. In practice it accommodates to family continuity over generations; a multilineal descent system; a highly differentiated society where the majority of assets owned by individuals are moveable; and values that espouse rationality, choice, freedom, and democracy. The right of an individual to dispose of property according to her or his wishes is recognized if the individual disposes property in a responsible fashion—when one takes care of one’s kin, thus maximizing the possibilities of family continuity and orderly social relationships among family members. Testamentary freedom is not exercised absolutely. It accommodates to the norms of responsibility. Empirical data support the idea that compromise occurs among the interests of the individual’s family and state in the exercise of testamentary freedom (Sussman, Cates, and Smith 1970).

Courts, social norms, and societal economic patterns limit the expression of testamentary freedom. Courts use the soundness of mind principle

in determining if an individual acts in a responsible fashion. Knowing what one possesses, the nature of the business in which one is engaged, and the natural objects of one’s bounty are the essential components of the legal definition of a sound mind. In practice, courts almost universally consider the well-being of the family in addition to considering whether an individual has knowledge of his or her assets and successors (Cates and Sussman 1982). Neglecting or abandoning the family is viewed as unnatural, and being unnatural is equated with being of unsound mind. The media abound with cases regarding will contests involving decedents’ bequests to loved pets, charities, strangers, or acquaintances. Preventing a distant relative from taking from or receiving an adequate share of an estate may result in legal action. Sussman, Cates, and Smith (1970) report a case in which charities were the major beneficiaries. The sole surviving relative, a niece, contested the will and lost, but she received a large out-of- court settlement of $150,000. Courts, plaintiffs, and defendants normally favor out-of-court settlements because of lower economic and psychic costs. In 1965, when this case occurred, a settlement of $150,000 was judged to be ample compensation. The settlement was also an indication that the well-being of a distant family member had been considered.

Prevalent social norms foster concern for the well-being of surviving family members. Believing that families should take care of their own and that family members should not be pauperized, the state has more than a legal interest in seeing that testamentary freedom be exercised with regard for the well-being of the family.

PATTERNS OF GENERATIONAL

DISTRIBUTIONS

Complex societies have developed systems of statewide resource transfers that have replaced in part some of the functions of the family inheritance system. These large-scale transfer systems, based on the principle of serial service, are society’s way of taking care of those deemed dependent, those unable to contribute to the gross national product through gainful employment. Preponderant numbers of the very young and the elderly receive support from such transfers. The preeminent philosophical notion is that the young adult and middle