Introduction: The Scientization of the Social in Comparative Perspective

A New Social Risk? Social-Scientific Knowledge and Work-Life Balance in Twentieth-Century Finland

“…For example, in the intellectual context dominated by functionalism and historical materialism-the two macrolevel theoretical traditions focusing on large-scale social developments, structures, functions, and tensions-the self-evident starting point of (national) society apparently guided the design of policy measures, which were universal and rather normative in nature until the 1970s. It was only in the 1980s that social scientists and policy makers began to scrutinize more closely the contexts in which their ideas and policy measures were employed (Ziemann et al 2012). Particularly the sociology of everyday life helped to shift the perspective to people's subjective and individual experiences and was followed by efforts to create more flexibility and choice in work-family policies.…”

“…Furthermore, the social sciences—an element that is seldom taken into account in the social science literature on NSRs and even in historiography on the “social” (Ziemann et al 2012)—played a constitutive role in the ways in which this thinking about social risks developed over the course of the twentieth century in Finland. Sociological theories and their underlying rationalities provided concepts and explanatory frameworks that rendered possible successive problematizations of work-family balance.…”

“…Now the focus was explicitly on the opportunities for parents to “reconcile work and family life” in the context of industrial and postindustrial society. This problematization was informed, above all, by the sociology of everyday life and it marked a process of “secondary scientization,” in which new reflexivity was demanded by policy designers (Ziemann et al 2012). It was still common to invoke functionalist paradigms, explaining the emergence of this issue by reference to structural change and modernization.…”