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Ten Generations – Three Centuries: Social mobility and impoverishment in Finland
| Daniel Bertaux and Paul Thompson have pointed out how important for our culture is the transmission between generations. They write: “Because culture is the essence of what makes individual humans into a group, the core of human social identity, its continuity is vital.” To transmit human and material capital, property, occupational facilities and skills, education, social networks, preferences, and orientation from one generation to the next generation, is an immanent feature of culture and society. The aim of my study is to re-construct a three centuries long period of history through the life histories of ten Finnish families that comprise more than ten thousand individual life stories.
In the conference paper special attention will be paid to an intergenerational transmission of occupation and social classes and includes social mobility and impoverishment in a historical perspective. The research period covers such processes as industrialisation and urbanisation, modernisation, de-industrialisation and globalisation that have created the changing historical contexts for the lives of successive generations. At the moment the data consists of ten thousand individuals, members of ten Finnish families, whose social and occupational position are compared with their parents and grandparents. In this analysis the main concepts are continuity and change.
The methodological point has been to study and define the factors that have maintained continuity at individual and family level on one hand and have caused changes on the other. It means that the study has been focused on two possible breakages of the continuity: the processes of intergenerational transmissions and the turning points of individual life courses. The former refers to uneven practises of material, social and human inheritance, the latter refers to the factors that one way or another has changed the expected life course: education, changing place of residence or job, marriage, divorce, illness, ageing etc. These breakages has been analysed by comparing factors depending on period, residential area, sex, ethnic origin, social networks, class and occupation. To analyse the occupational continuity and stratification, the methods and classifications of HISCO is used which makes international comparisons possible.
After the Second World War the study of social mobility has been one of the major areas of sociological and historical research. The specific feature of such research field is that phenomena are understood as long-term, multigenerational continuities in which material, human and social capitals are resources that are both inherited and “deserved” during ones’ life time. The study will give basic knowledge about long-term mechanisms of social mobility and impoverishment. It strives to understand how individuals and families manage their material, human and social capitals when faced with profound economic and social changes. It aims to discuss, develop and qualify the forms and meanings of different modes of capital in the processes of transmission between generations.
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