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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.

A remarkable variety of academic treatments of family life are in broad agreement as to the processes of development and change occurring within families in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A wide range of authors regard the following as a set of interconnected changes: family household members increasingly come to have a sense of themselves as a distinctive and sacrosanct unit, `the family', which is separated from the wider social world; emotional relationships within the family household become very intense; gender divisions become more acute, with the sharp demarcation between a housewife/mother role and an earner/father role; respect for the rights of the individual is increased - loyalty to oneself may take precedence over loyalty to the family. My aim in this paper is to confront this `classical' corpus of historical and sociological analysis with a particular set of experiential data - oral accounts of growing up in urban Scotland in the early 1900s gathered by me in 1975 - 77 (Jamieson 1983). As we shall see, these data cast into doubt several of the generalisations contained in the `classical' corpus.