Paper short abstract:

The paper will explore the Finnish post-war mobilization from the rural primary production to the urban service industry discussing the changes of lifestyle and cultural meaning-making in it. The perspective is on the views of the migrated people whose personal narratives I have analysed.

Paper long abstract:

There have been enormous changes in the lives of the people in Finland since the World War II. Until the 1950s, most of the Finns lived in rural areas and a majority of them earned their living primarily from agriculture and forestry. Migration to the towns and urban areas proceeded rapidly from the 1960s onwards since the means of rural earning could not give livelihood for all. In the personal narratives of the Finns who moved from the rural farms to the urban milieu, from the farm work to the offices, mobility was described as non-privileged and as out of necessity. In the small rural communities, people knew one another's social background and this made social stigmatizing and control easy. However, urban lifestyle, with its fundament elements such as factory work, living in block of flats, monetary economy and mass consumption, did not bring down the old, rural based command hierarchies. For example, the same old master - subservient -motifs are found in the personal narratives that are narrated in the urban milieu decades after the rural way of life. In the narratives of the migrated common people, the difference between the old poor and the current wealthy can be interpreted as the Tönniesian dichotomy Gemeinschaft - Gesellschaft. In the first people feel solidarity and informality towards social life, the latter representing an impersonal society, which with the aid of technologies, supervises individuals without a personal contact.