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The Finnish pre-industrial family and the occupational inheritance
| ‘To transmit human and material capital, property, occupational facilities and skills, education, social networks, preferences, and orientation from one generation to the next is an immanent feature of culture and society’ (Bertaux & Bertaux-Wiame 1997). The aim of the study has been to re-construct a two centuries long period of history through the life histories of selected Finnish families comprising more than thirty thousand individual life stories and approximately seven generations, starting from the beginning of the 18th century and ending to the beginning of the 20th century.
In this study, special attention has been paid to an intergenerational transmission of occupation and social positions, including social mobility and impoverishment in a historical perspective. The research period covers such processes as industrialisation and urbanisation and modernisation, which have created the changing historical contexts for the lives of successive generations.
The first result is related to the mechanism of an overall social slide down of most of the families. The period from the beginning of the 19th century to the end of the 19th century shows a slow slide down the social ladder during five generations time. This phenomenon was in close relation to the disparity problem between land and population. However, by using special marriage strategies, some of the families were able to maintain their positions quite well. The turning point dated at the end of the 20th century, when the overall social and spatial mobility increased fast. The yielding inheritors of the farm and croft owners were forced to provide new ways of earning their livelihood and this meant adopting new types of industrial occupations and an increasing of spatial mobility. On the other hand in the changing conditions, the big farmers were not able to maintain their social positions by using previous marriage strategies but were forced to adopt new livelihood means. Overall the end of the 19th century meant a remarkable growth of social diversification and stratification. By using HISCO classification system, the Finnish case has been compared with the international ones.
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