ABSTRACT
A small and geographically isolated nation, Sweden had for a long time engaged in cultural borrowing from other nations. The outstanding difference in Swedish urbanization, however, is that Sweden, which just a generation ago was a society of detached, privately owned, single-family houses, is today the Western world's most apartment-oriented society. The bourgeois ethos certainly extended to the family. Although it was a late starter compared to other northwestern European societies, Sweden by midcentury had become largely a nation dominated culturally by small-town and urban middle-class nuclear familism. The handbook also takes the traditional once-familiar moral position about marriage and the family: Marriage occurs at a relatively late age in modern society. One can also detect a strong ideological element in the Social Democratic preference for multifamily housing. The Swedish family also was showing evidence of a marked institutional decline.
