ABSTRACT

In Finland the first phase of transition from an agrarian to an industrial society stretching up to the mid-1940s may be described as a 'gentle' industrialization. Within a few decades the Finnish society has developed from a 'late arrival in modernism' to a highly modernized, welfare state centred service society. A central element of this change was the succession of the dominant family economic model by an egalitarian dual breadwinner model with the state assuming a considerable part of the care functions. This chapter assumes that the dominance of the family economy model during the transformation towards an industrial society in Finland is also an important explanation for the fact that the Finnish agrarian sector had maintained its relatively high importance with respect to employment for an astonishingly long period. In the 1950s the model of the family economy was still the culturally dominating and also the most common one.