In Feeding the Family (1991),DeVault deploys the concepts of social organisation and shared understandings in her analysis of why it is women who are recruited into the project of caring for the family.

The notion of social organisation emphasises the significance of individual agency as well as the bearing of larger social relations on this activity. DeVault, who draws on Dorothy Smith's feminist methodology, suggests that the starting point of her analysis is the careful listening and interpretation of accounts of ‘everyday lived experience’, by which she means ‘what happens in people's everyday lives – as well as the processes of interpretation that give meaning to everyday lives’ (1991: 11). Individual accounts reveal something about the wider social power relations within which everyday life takes place; ‘we find that social organization is “in the talk” and that we can mine the talk for clues to social relations’ (DeVault, 1990: 101).

DeVault uses the ‘family’ as example. ‘When we speak about contemporary families’, she argues, ‘we refer to two kinds of realities, to both experience and institution’ (1991: 14). People experience ‘family’ in diverse ways.