Families and social change.

Summary The family is often cited as one of the most important and foundational social institutions in society: it fulfills essential material and emotional needs and plays a major role in the integration of individuals into society. Although families continue to play these roles, they have undergone, as a social institution, important transformations in recent years: entry into adult life is increasingly delayed, the number of marriages per year is falling, while the number of couples who prefer a union under the Civil Solidarity Pact (Pacs) is increasing and marriage is now possible for homosexual couples. The spread of cohabitation and blended families, as well as the drop in fertility rates in several countries, also show that new family configurations are emerging. These demographic transformations have not occurred at the same time or to the same degree in all industrialized countries. These changes in the structure of families are interwoven with profound changes in contemporary societies, one of the most important of which is the increasing participation of women in the labor market, which has altered their role in the private sphere and made visible the need to reconcile paid and unpaid work. The issue of reconciliation is far from being resolved, as comparative research on time use shows. Gender inequalities persist in this area. The response of public policies to reconciliation issues is diverse and several adjustments are possible, in parallel with companies, whose intervention in the articulation between private life and work is becoming crucial. New work arrangements and what has been called the 24/7 economy are also part of the changes. The links between social change and family change are complex and often have a dialectical relationship: the integration of women into the labor market makes the articulation between family and work more complicated - a task that continues to fall mostly on them when it should also fall on men -, which in turn can influence fertility, but the fertility envisaged also shapes in turn training or employment decisions. In this introduction, we will first present an overview of the most important changes that are bringing about what we call new family configurations. We will then describe the social transformations that accompany these new configurations, especially with respect to paid work and public policies. In a final section, we will present the articles selected for this thematic issue and their relevance to understanding the change of families in contemporary societies.