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The substantive concerns and theoretical insights of sociologies of family, intimate and personal life ought to place this body of work in closer dialogue with environmental sociology over the 'big issue' of climate change. However, its research active practitioners typically have a narrower repertoire of engagement with global issues and those who are outside the topic area often miss the value of its contributions. This article discusses common ground between this specialist area and sociologies of environmental issues in unpacking processes of social change through empirically grounded theoretical work. This includes the renewed theoretical emphasis on relationality, empirically based critique of the 'individualisation thesis', uses of 'practice' to transcend 'micro'–'macro' and 'social'–'natural' divisions, and interest in I/we boundary shifts. More fully recognising the potential of this overlapping territory may help leverage more effective sociological responses to the global challenge of climate change.

Few of the many social science researchers writing about personal life are simultaneously addressing the cluster of issues sometimes referred to by the shorthand 'environment' – sustainability, climate change, loss of biodiversity and depletion of natural resources. This article argues for much more effort in this direction, suggesting agendas for new research, and advocating knowledge exchange engagement with activists and policy-makers. A theoretical and empirical case is made for seeing families and personal relationships as multiply engaged in producing or inhibiting the possibilities of a more sustainable and equitable planet. For sustainable development to be a global reality, there must be very significant reduction of high carbon footprint and resource-depleting consumption in the rich regions of the world, here referred to as the 'minority worlds' (Punch and Tisdall 2012). Researchers studying families and relationships, whether within or across national contexts, are well placed to engage their work with policy, practice and activist discussions of the needed shift towards more sustainable practices, pro-environmental dispositions and a collective politics of change.

This article focuses on intimacy in terms of its analytical potential for understanding social change without the one-nation blinkers sometimes referred to as 'methodological nationalism' and without Euro-North-American ethnocentrism. Extending from the concept of family practices, practices of intimacy are sketched and examples considered across cultures. The cultural celebration and use of the term 'intimacy' is not universal, but practices of intimacy are present in all cultures. The relationship of intimacy to its conceptual relatives is clarified. A brief discussion of subjectivity and social integration restates the relevance of intimate relationships and practices of intimacy to understanding social change in an era of globalisation, despite the theoretical turn away from embodied face to face relationships. Illustrations concerning intimacy and social change in two areas of personal life, parental authority and gender relations, indicate that practices of intimacy can re-inscribe inequalities such as those of age, class and gender as well as subvert them and that attention to practices of intimacy can assist the need to explain continuity as well as change.

The claims that locality, kinship, and social class are no longer the basis of ties that bind and of limited significance for identity in late modernity, remain seductive, despite their critics. Those who remain rooted are then presented as inhabitants of traditional backwaters, outside the mainstream of social change. This article presents young people's reasons for leaving or remaining in a rural area of Britain, the Scottish Borders. Young people's views about migration and attachment demonstrate a contradictory and more complex pattern than that of detached late-modern migrants and traditional backwater stay-at-homes. These stereotypes have some resonance in local culture, for example in disdain for rootless incomers lacking real sympathy with 'the community' and in the common accusation of the parochial narrow mindedness of locals who have never been elsewhere. However, such stereotypes emerge from complex social class antagonisms and cross-cutting ties to locality. Many young people's ties contradict the classifications these stereotypes imply. There are young out-migrants who are the children of 'rootless' in-migrants, but also, nevertheless, have lasting attachments to the locality of their childhood. Then there are young 'stayers' who are the children of 'born and bred' locals but yet feel serious disaffection from their locality. These 'attached migrants' and 'detached stayers' may not represent settled orientations to their locality of childhood, but they, nevertheless, contradict both certain local stereotypes and Baumanesque 'late modernist' sociological theorising.