Roy, Kevin. 2014. Invited Commentary: Fathers on the Frontiers of Family Change. Journal of Family Theory & Review 6: 91-96.
The author introduces three themes of fatherhood on the frontier of family change. The three themes are allocative fathering, do not reify fathers as traditional actors and taking notes of the diversity of men’s experiences.Allocative fathering is a useful conceptual tool to advance careful consideration of complexity in family relationships. It is in sync with the concept of complexity to describe the staggering diversity of family configurations in contemporary society. Then, we should notreify fathers as traditional actors. The author suggests scholars to situate the meaning of fatherhood under Beck’s risk society and Gidden’s modernity to address: a global social structure that feels like autonomy but in fact may be fixed or stratified in its own unique way. Last but not least, the diversity of men’s experiences should be taken note of. Various scholars are struggling to place of fatherhood in the changing contexts of families and society. The author suggests that an intersectionality approach will be more promising, such as integrating gender, race, ethnicity and social class into a whole cluster idea.
作者总结了三个在家庭研究领域前沿涉及到父职的主题：分配的父职、非传统父职以及男性体验的多样性。分配的父职是一个非常有用的概念，把当今社会多样性的家庭关系和爸爸角色结合在了一起考虑。其次，我们应该窥测到传统爸爸角色后面的非传统结构。作者建议家庭研究者参考贝克的风险社会概念以及吉登斯的现代性概念——看似自主性的全球化社会结构，其实是以特殊的方式在进行分化的。最后，尽管爸爸的角色发生了剧烈的改变，但是性别、种族、族裔和社会阶层等概念依然在发挥着作用，并且影响了不同社会群体内的父亲所发生的不同程度和维度的变化。