Yhteiskunnan, kansakunnan ja kansan asialla: Järjestöt, yhteiskuntapolitiikka ja asiantuntijuus Suomessa 1930–60-luvuilla

In my dissertation, I look at Finnish organisations specialised in social policy and welfare, medicine, and health policy, and analyse their role as public policy experts in Finland’s formative welfare state and nation-state development in the 1930s–60s. My empirical research is divided into three parts, which focus on the biopolitical governance of the population, social planning and public policy, and the interaction between the non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and other actors and operating environments. Individual chapters deal with topics like public health and eugenics, mental hygiene (child psychiatry and guidance), housing policy, and social welfare and social work. In my analytical approach, I combine the history of ideas, conceptual history and the history of knowledge.

In my empirical sub-studies, I found that the organisations adopted and constructed a societal role that intertwined expertise and political actorship, as well as blurred the line between state and civil society. In order to address social problems and exploit opportunities brought on by modernisation, the organisations promoted the scientisation, rationalisation and (re)organisation of society. The NGOs’ flexible role also reflected and solidified Nordic corporatist traditions; the Ministry of Social Affairs, in particular, had close official and unofficial relations with the organisations, whose effective status could be characterised as ‘quasi-non-governmental’.

The studied organisations often framed their conceptions and formulations of problems, solutions and goals as rational, pragmatic and non-ideological. Nonetheless, the organisations by and large represented the upper middle class and the political centre-right. This was reflected in their ‘bourgeois social reformism’, which sought to normalise bourgeois values and models like the nuclear family and ruralism. However, it is essential to refrain from overly simplistic labels and instead take note of ‘messy’ nuances and seemingly conflicting ideas or goals. Bourgeois social reformism should not merely be seen as gendered class control, but also as compassionate endeavours to help impoverished and otherwise vulnerable individuals and groups: both aspects were based on the premise of equating good quality of life with the bourgeois middle-class lifestyle.

In addition, the 1930s–60s were marked by an ideational transition from collectivism to individualism – conceptions of social reality do not change overnight. Hence, fundamentally opposite ideas of the rights and responsibilities of the individual vis-à-vis the collective (e.g., the society or state) prevailed simultaneously, and policies were legitimised through collectivism and individualism alike. This manifested itself, for example, as the active promotion of eugenic measures alongside extensive social and health care reforms in the post-war decades.

In conclusion, I characterise the epistemic-political role of the studied NGOs as social engineering. While the term often refers specifically to the collaboration between academic experts and the government/state, I define it as a technocratic and seemingly apolitical ideology: the idea that society, even humanity itself, could and should be improved through knowledge- and data-driven governance. This analytical category encompasses a larger variety of actors, such as expert organisations and other non-governmental and non-academic actors. Furthermore, it lends itself to studying the relationship between state, society and knowledge.