Posted by Peter on October 20, 2002 at 23:34:28
In Reply to: good questions posted by mini mouse on October 20, 2002 at 22:21:30:
Probably the best way to get figures that are relatively accurate would be to ask The Family
themselves. Although I don't have any reliable current info my best guess is that there are less than 7500 CM members and over two-thirds of these are children. Over the years, The Family population has increased primarily as a result of having children rather than recruiting new members. A lot of people have left in the past two years and many of those who didn't want to leave were reclassified to FM status.
A couple years ago I wrote an undergraduate sociology paper about The Family using Rosabeth Kanter's committment mechanisms as a theoretical framework and came up with the following membership levels over the years based on info from some Family publications (Grapevine #90, S2K, etc) and James Chancellor's book "Life in The Family."
This only includes DO or CM members (not FM or TS) and figures for some years are missing.
1968 50
1969 100
1970 300
1971 1475
1972 2080
1973 2244
1974 3031
1975 4215
1976 4283
1977 5101
1978 5062
1979 5937
1980 7865
1981 9013
1981 9333
1983 10020
1984 9793
1985 9626
1986 10714
1987 11329
1988 11541
1989 10242
1990 ??
199110213
1992 9062
1993 8936
1994 8648
1995 ??
1996 ??
1997 ??
1998 ??
1999 10242
2000 9304