Learning to own: Cross-generational meanings of wealth and class-making in wealthy Finnish families

The return of the family

Families and family businesses were once central units of capitalist production and accumulation. Large companies were often owned by a single family, and succession was guided by family continuity, creating dynasties across generations. However, as Michael Gilding (2005) has noted, over the course of the 20th century, the central role of the family was gradually questioned. According to the managerial or managerialist thesis, which gained popularity in the interwar and postwar periods, large corporations with salaried managers and dispersed ownership severed the connection between families and private property (Berle & Means, 1968). As Parsons and Smelser (1957, p. 254) suggested, families that once controlled most of the big businesses ‘failed to consolidate their positions as the dominant class’ and began to hold a secondary position in the overall stratification system.

Consequently, the capitalist class literature on the enduring role of family wealth simply ‘fizzled out’ in the late 20th century (Gilding, 2005), coupled with larger academic amnesia towards the elites (Glucksberg & Burrows, 2016; Savage & Williams, 2008). Recently, however, there have been signs that the claim about the disappearance of dynastic families might have been premature. Different studies have pointed to the central role of accumulated family capital in today’s societies. Piketty (2014) has described the longue durée of wealth accumulation, suggesting that we might see a return to ‘patrimonial capitalism’, in which income distribution is substantially shaped by inheritance. Similarly, Carney and Nason (2016) have shown how, in the United States, business families constitute a significant proportion of the 1%, and other research has revealed the central role of inheritance in mature industrial societies (Barone & Mocetti, 2016; Hansen, 2014). Thus, contrary to previous notions, inheritors and wealthy families seem to have retained control of business interests despite the rise of professional investors, managers and dispersed stock ownership, reflecting Zeitlin’s (1974, p. 1079) old observation that the separation of ownership and control was perhaps a ‘pseudofact’ that directed attention away from families.

Despite this increased awareness of the enduring role of cross-generational family wealth, its social dynamics remain largely unresearched. However, promising new perspectives have recently been tested in sociology, with new research on family offices (Glucksberg & Burrows, 2016), dynastic wealth management (Harrington, 2016) and the link between family relationships and accumulation (Gilding, 2005).

In this article, I approach the endurance of cross-generational wealth from the perspectives of cultural analysis of money and class formation. In using the word family, I refer to kinship relations and to descendants of common ancestors or their spouses. I investigate the cultural and social meanings that members of wealthy families attach to wealth and link these to the processes through which they make and reproduce their class. By social meanings of money, I refer to Viviana A. Zelizer’s (1997) work, which has directed research towards the different meanings that people attach to different ‘monies’. People create monetary distinctions, restrictions and controls on the use of money by, for example, earmarking certain monies for different purposes. As part of a larger turn towards cultural analysis of economy (Aitken, 2007; Du Gay & Pryke, 2002; Zelizer, 1997, 2005), this perspective sees social forces as constitutive of economic actions and, in my case, of economic inequalities. Thus, the social and cultural processes through which sense is made of monies, incomes and wealth are understood as affecting the economic actions that produce them (Hecht, 2017). A cultural perspective on inequalities has been suggested, for example, by Lamont, Beljean, and Clair (2014), who have proposed that cultural processes may help explain how macro-level inequality is made sense of and produced at the micro-level so that the processes of inequality are seen to operate both through controlling material resources and inter-subjectively through shared cultural structures, such as frames and cultural repertoires. However, the dynamics between such shared cultural frames and social stratification, economic inequalities and classes require further theorisation (Toscano & Woodcock, 2015; for stratification versus class, see Skeggs, 2015). This challenge also applies to Zelizer’s work. For example, Steiner (2009, p. 98) has noted that Zelizer’s (1997, p. 1) interest in the cultural dimensions of economy and the ‘various ways in which people identify, classify, organize, use, [and] segregate’ monies can lead one to neglect the political dimensions of these meaning-making processes. This concern is of particular importance for research on the wealthy in times of growing economic inequalities, as the link between political agency and social divisions in the context of the wealthy remains hazy (Toscano & Woodcock, 2015).

To advance the theoretical debate, I thus suggest that understanding how the wealthy may contribute socially, culturally and materially to the widening of economic inequalities requires that the cultural analysis of money is combined with analyses of class-making. Instead of simply describing the social meanings that wealthy individuals attach to their wealth, I argue that such shared meanings should be read in the context of class-making, reflecting Imogen Tyler’s (2015) view that the deepening economic and social inequalities urgently require class analysis. Consequently, I link the perspective of the social meanings of money to an analysis of class formation, exploring how the dynastic class makes itself.

While the making of the capitalist class or elite classes was a recurrent theme in the sociology of the last century (Bourdieu, 1986; Mills, 1956), more recently, empirical studies of the wealthiest or other elite groups rarely foreground the concept of class (Khan, 2011; Sherman, 2017), reflecting perhaps the concept’s wider dismissal in sociology (Tyler, 2015, p. 494). It is mainly the theorists of transnational capitalist class who have kept the class perspective alive in elite studies, suggesting that a transnational capitalist class has emerged from the processes of globalisation (Carroll, 2010; Sklair, 2001). Following the managerialist tradition, however, these scholars have primarily concentrated on corporate elites, setting aside owners as a possibly significant class. Much of this research has also been less interested in the sociological analysis of class-making, focusing instead on statistics and other quantifiable data (see Carroll, 2010, p. 2). Consequently, recent research on the wealthy has not delved very deeply into the empirical reality of class-making – the practices and cultural processes through which classes are actively made at the top. While largely lacking in studies of the elites, such perspectives have often inspired research on the working-class, with scholars focusing on the roles of culture and non-economic factors in class-making (e.g. Skeggs, 2004; Tyler & Bennett, 2010; Willis, 1977; for middle-class, see Devine, 2004; and upper-middle class, Lamont, 1992; for theorisation, see Skeggs, 2015; Walkerdine, 2016).

Consequently, although this article discusses the dynastic class, I also draw inspiration from working-class scholars who have understood class as a dynamic relational process, something that is not given, but rather a probability that is lived, actively created and reproduced through specific practices, techniques and an embodied culture (Bourdieu, 1985, 1987; Thompson, 1966). By analysing the social meanings wealthy interviewees attach to wealth (Zelizer, 1997) and its accumulation, I describe their class-making (Thompson, 1966) and how it forms and coheres through symbolic meaning-making or classification struggles (Bourdieu, 1987) over wealth accumulation.

Researching family wealth in Finland

Defining the economic relevance of wealthy families in Finland, as elsewhere, is challenging, as their members are typically reluctant to provide a comprehensive picture of their wealth (Carney & Nason, 2016). The Finnish situation reflects this wider difficulty, although the publication of the country’s tax and stock ownership records is highly advantageous for researchers. As both labour income and capital gains are listed in the public tax records, identifying wealthy individuals is possible.

Based on these records, it is safe to say that cross-generational wealth has managed to perform relatively well in 21st-century Finland. For the purposes of our larger study on wealthy Finns, our research team compiled a list of the country’s top 0.1% earners (5500 individuals) by combining the taxed earned incomes and capital incomes of the top 10,000 earners each year between 2006 and 2015. Our preliminary categorisations of this group revealed that approximately one-fifth of the top 0.1% were inheritors. Were the tax records to register wealth, instead of income, the proportion of heirs would most likely be significantly higher. Wealth tends to be more concentrated than income, and different fragmented records signal that this is also the case in contemporary Finland. According to one investigation, in 2015, the 20 largest owners of the 1000 largest companies listed on the Helsinki Stock Exchange owned around 9.9 billion euros’ worth of stocks. Of these holdings, inheritors owned approximately 9.1 billion euros (Hänninen & Pietiläinen, 2015).

In 2016 and the spring of 2017, I conducted 26 semi-structured interviews with members of wealthy Finnish families. The interviewees belonged to the top 0.1% earners in Finland in 2006–2015, and they were all identified as inheritors in our preliminary categorisation. Many had hundreds of millions of euros, and the majority, if not all of them, were ultra-high-net-worth individuals holding financial assets of US$30 million or more, but for confidentiality reasons, it is impossible to describe their holdings in more detail: in a relatively small country such as Finland disclosing the size of an individual’s fortune may reveal his or her identity.

Sixteen of the interviewees were men, and nine were women. Their professional profiles varied significantly: some were CEOs or held board positions in large companies, while others ran small businesses, such as cafeterias or flower shops; some worked as researchers or artists; and some did not work. Three interviewees identified themselves as belonging to the second generation (counting from the generation that created the fortune); all others belonged to families that had created their fortunes several generations ago. Most interviewees thus belonged to families that had established their businesses in the 19th century. The interviewees held varying positions in their family businesses or in the management of family wealth. Some were directors or board members of their family companies or sat on family councils, while others had no formal position in any of the family organisations. Some companies in question were businesses with their own production units, whereas others were family-owned conglomerates or investment companies. Some were owned by dozens of descendants, whereas in other cases the group of family owners was relatively small due to intra-family acquisitions. In some cases, the respondents were significant stockholders of listed companies of which members of the same family owned a majority. These diversities lead to an exploration of the continuation of family wealth (Gilding, 2005; Harrington, 2016) rather than family businesses, and the article discusses the dynastic processes around inheritance, irrespective of whether these fortunes reside in specific businesses or are investable assets. Despite their differences, all interviewees had inherited notable wealth and identified themselves as significant owners. While the diversity of backgrounds means that the interviewees do not speak from the same institutional positions, this is also the data’s strength, as it illuminates the horizontal breadth of the dynastic culture.

Interviewees were contacted by email. If the recipient did not respond, a reminder was sent. Instead of inheritors or elites, they were approached as owners and members of important owner families and the research was introduced as concerning the opinions of the wealthy on Finnish society. Like many researchers of the elites, I contacted possible respondents with anxiety, unconfident about their participation (Gilding, 2010, p. 756), but like others, I was pleased to find that 46% of those contacted agreed to be interviewed. I did not ask why the interviewees decided to participate, but the wish to talk about the social and economic importance of private ownership seemed to be one motivator. Family ownership is a politically timely issue in Finland, and many promoted it in the interviews, but many also seemed to find some relief in speaking about the difficulties of privilege (see also Sherman, 2017), reflecting Gilding’s (2010) observation that the wish to promote one’s concerns and the need for confidential discussions are recurrent motives for elites to give interviews with social scientists. Another reason for my interview success was perhaps that the research was funded by a prestigious foundation, run by some members of the wealthiest family in Finland.

Interviews covered a variety of themes, including work life, Finnish society and the interviewee’s family and wealth. The interview schedule included three main sections focusing on the person’s work life, opinions about society, and self-identity and values. As there was very little previous research on members of such families in Finland, and as the research was guided by grounded theory approaches, the interview schedule was slightly adjusted in the course of data collection, in accordance with the emerging analytical categories (Charmaz, 2014).

The duration of the interviews varied between 34 and 180 minutes; most lasted 1.5–2 hours. All interviews were recorded and transcribed, with one exception: written notes were taken instead, in keeping with the informant’s wishes.

For this article, the interviewees have been anonymised and some personal details have been modified. The sample is relatively small, and its limitations need to be recognised. However, this group has a limited number of potential subjects and they are also relatively difficult to access, not because of their reluctance, but because some potential interviewees do not engage in any public activity and are impossible to locate. The data may, thus, contain some biases in terms of personal opinions, but to overcome this limitation, the analysis focuses on opinions and practices that were discussed by several interviewees from different families.

Another limitation of the study concerns its methodology, as studying the discourses offered by the elites themselves has its weaknesses. Through interviews, one can examine the micro-level processes of meaning-making and how these relate to the rationalisation of one’s actions (Hecht, 2017; Lamont et al., 2014); however, compared to ethnographic approaches, the results are necessarily limited (Glucksberg, 2016; Holmqvist, 2017; Khan, 2011). In the context of elites, reported attitudes are not necessarily equivalent to situated behaviour (Khan & Jerolmack, 2013). Thus, as Glucksberg (2016) has noted, the concern with the sociocultural aspects of elite life should not signal a retreat from the structural aspects of elite reproduction (see also Toscano & Woodcock, 2015). By combining the social meanings that the interviewees describe with class analysis and the exploration of the practices and networks that the interviewees refer to, I aim to keep both of these perspectives in view.

It is only a loan: The cross-generational mindset

According to Zelizer (1997), although money works as a universal tool, it is profoundly influenced by cultural and social structures. People attach different social meanings to money and introduce restrictions on its use. A key social meaning that the wealthy Finnish inheritors attach to their wealth is its cross-generational and borrowed nature. Several interviewees explained that their wealth is not really theirs; rather, it is a kind of loan received from the previous generation to be passed on to the next. Saija, a 48-year-old inheritor who lives on her investment returns, stated, ‘I have inherited my wealth, and in that sense, I feel that it is anyway, more or less, a little bit like on loan here.’ Saga, a 26-year-old student whose family’s fortunes go back to the 19th century, used the same metaphor: ‘This money that comes from the family business, it is not … you always have to leave it to someone else at some point. It is like on loan.’ However, unlike an average loan, this one is repaid first when the person dies or chooses to repay it, and it is repaid to his or her children.

In many interviews, the cross-generational nature or loan-like character of the inherited wealth was linked to the view that wealth should be passed on in good shape. Henrik, 52, who sits on the board of his family’s investment company, stated:

The wealth we have, it is … we have not … it is the result of the hard work of the previous generations. In that way, at least I feel that it obliges me to take good care of it and bring it forward.

Several interviewees viewed this cross-generational obligation as a reason to not only preserve the money but also to accumulate more. Sofia, who is 43 and runs a flower shop, noted, ‘Because I have inherited a lot of money from my grandparents, it is my job to make it grow so that I can pass it on. That’s the way it is.’ She described her ‘value system’ in the following way:

We have received money, and then you cannot do whatever [you want] with it. Instead, you have to remember that you have family, you have siblings, you have it all; you need to share it and think about what you are really going to do with the money. It is important. You have not received it so that you can buy 12 new cars. You have received it because you should make it grow in one way or another and then pass it on.

Sofia raises the question of sharing one’s wealth, but in a familistic and dynastic manner, she thinks it should be shared with her close relatives. As Carney and Nason (2016, p. 12) have noted, households have different preferences for wealth accumulation and differ in their abilities to utilise wealth in their own lifetimes versus passing it on. While the leading explanation for wealth accumulation is the lifetime income hypothesis – individuals accumulate wealth during their working lives and consume it during their retirement – an alternative preference is a dynastic explanation which encourages wealth accumulation beyond life consumption needs to fund inheritances (Carney & Nason, 2016). Similarly to gifted money, the use of which is often socially restricted (Zelizer, 1997), many interviewees used the cultural repertoires of modesty and prudence (Lamont, 1992; Sherman, 2017) to describe their inherited fortunes as money that should be spent in a disciplined way to fund further inheritances. Whether such descriptions of prudency translate into planned outcomes is beyond the scope of this article, but from the perspective of class-making, the construction of such a mindset is notable, as it is used not only to restrict consumption but also to legitimise further wealth accumulation. The interviewees thought that inherited money should be invested with high returns to secure cross-generational wealth accumulation. They repeatedly expected, and apparently also receive, exceptionally high annual returns on their investments, and they explained or legitimated this by referencing the rights of the next generations. Henrik, who viewed it as his obligation to take care of his fortune, explained his family’s investment principles:

Our aim is that in the long run, the annual return [on capital] would be 6%–8%. It might be that it is a little bit too low. Some can say it should be much higher. In our family, … we have a principle that we should give this company to the next generation in better shape than it was when we got it from our parents. Then, it requires the wealth to grow because the family grows [laughing].

Similarly, Sofia feels obliged to make the inheritance create further revenues: ‘I have a principle that if I invest in something, I also have to get something back moneywise. That way, you can make your own pot grow, and I can then give to my children.’

Mikael, who is in his mid-forties and sits on numerous boards, where he guards his interests as an investor, stated that he expects his annual profit margin to be 20%, which it has met since the year 2000. He explained the need to accumulate wealth by referring to a growing number of descendants: ‘If we are three in this generation … then in the next, we are six. If you always need to leave everyone an equally large jackpot, then the more we are, the more you need to run.’ He does not challenge the idea that everyone in the next generation of his family should receive a large fortune; instead, he takes this familistic goal as a given towards which his financial actions are directed. Consequently, the social meanings through which he makes sense of his wealth link to his economic actions and can be taken as constitutive of the dynamics that sustain economic inequalities (see Hecht, 2017).

In the simplest cases, such cross-generational views may lead one to try to multiply one’s fortune to coincide with the number of children. Kimmo, a 50-year-old heir, spoke of his brother’s attempts to quadruple his fortune: ‘I like my brother’s view that he tries to quadruple the money for his [four] children so that they can again do their own stuff.’

Even though one should not assume a direct correspondence between respondents’ cultural mindset, described here, and actual economic outcomes – as economic results are always volatile and justifications sometimes untruthful – the fact that many inheritors can be found at the top of the tax records in Finland suggests that they have managed to exploit the economic system and the markets according to their interests. This is not entirely surprising given the tendency of contemporary portfolio capitalism to bring scale effects to those with large fortunes. In today’s financialised economy, the largest fortunes (including inheritances) have grown globally at significantly higher rates (approximately 6%–7% per year) than the average growth rate of wealth, not to mention income (Piketty, 2014). Such scale effects are one reason why the dynastic preferences, familistic views, cross-generational mindsets and investment goals of the top inheritors are relevant to the overall patterns of economic inequality and class dynamics. Their cultural legitimation for high revenues creates a classed dynamic that is bound to deepen inequalities between wealth groups and between the private owners of capital and the rest. As Piketty (2014) has noted, whenever the rate of return on capital is significantly and durably higher than the growth rate, as it tends to be in today’s economy, inheritance predominates over labour and saving. Studying the social normalisation or legitimisation of such scale effects is one way to analyse, in the words of Bourdieu (1987, p. 4), the ‘powers or forms of capital which are or can become efficient … in the struggle (or competition) for the appropriation of scarce goods’.

The possibility of seeking high returns was also expressed by Gustaf, 46, who stated laughingly that he pursues a profit margin that is ‘as high as possible’. In his opinion, in the stock market, a steady annual return of 10% is very good, and ‘if it stays below 5% … you have not taken care of it properly’. His explanation for pursuing such profit margins was also cross-generational:

Inherited wealth comes with a responsibility. … I have seen it as a very positive thing; it has given me the freedom to do the kind of work that I think is important. And the responsibility in it means that I want to give the same opportunity to my children.

Familistic responsibility towards future generations is, thus, used as a reason to introduce controls on the liquidity of money (Zelizer, 1997); however, most importantly, from the perspective of class formation and economic inequalities, it is also used to legitimate further wealth accumulation with high profit margins. This generational outlook (see also Glucksberg & Burrows, 2016) appears to be a key element in the accumulation of dynastic wealth and in the interviewees’ class-making processes. If all the children deserve (as if automatically) an equally large fortune as their parents, this cannot but deepen existing class differences.

The cross-generational perspective does not, however, come naturally; it needs to be socially reproduced, and the families are increasingly creating techniques for this. As Bourdieu (1977) pointed out, people inherit cultural capital (or not) through family practices and are shaped through access (or not) to education and training. I now turn my attention to such reproduction practices, arguing that in the case of my interviewees these cross-generational techniques do not concern only private, familistic interests. Although the emphasis on one’s own children has a familistic dimension, and the cross-generational mindset also serves the very private interests of each family, the associated practices are also coordinated and shared between different families. Thus, what may look like guarding the private family interests reveals a classed dimension and turns into class-making when the reproduction of this mindset is analysed further.

Reproducing the family and the class

The families and chains of generations that the informants spoke about are not stable entities; instead, they are in a constant process of making and reproducing. In addition to their many family-centred stories, the interviewees described their ambivalent relationships with their families. The changing nature of families and cultural individualisation pose a challenge for dynastic families. Traditional models – one factory, one home, one set of children per generation, and children who are physically close – are often no longer relevant (Glucksberg & Burrows, 2016), bringing challenges for families who want to secure the cross-generational accumulation of their wealth. This observation applies also to the dynastic families in Finland. Many industrial families have sold their original businesses and transformed into investment houses. Like the average Finn, many of the interviewees were divorced and had children from different marriages, as well as family living abroad. Reproducing the dynastic mindset has, thus, become increasingly laborious.

Pekka, 61, whose daughter had just started running the family’s investment house, described this cultural change by comparing his father’s legacy to his own:

My father was good [at transmitting the value of the family business]. I must say that I am not as good. The world changes. Of course, the children look and think about whether this makes any sense. We have had issues, sure, yes … it is difficult for all of us.

Reflecting doubts about the family-centred model, Sofia told she has considered withdrawing her money from the family’s investment house, while nevertheless reproducing the symbolic value of the family:

Perhaps [today], I think more about if our family’s investment house is the right place [for the money]. Don’t get me wrong … of course I want to be part of the family; it is so strong in all of us. But maybe I would think differently nowadays. There are so many possibilities.

Different possibilities have started to compete with the family-centred model. Consequently, many parents in the data described new practices through which the family as a unit of wealth accumulation can be maintained. As Finland has no private or boarding schools, elite upbringing is primarily the responsibility of the family. The techniques raised by the interviewees included parenting, business training, networking with other families, training programmes organised by a lobby and learning from international examples.

Despite the variety of professional choices of the interviewees, regarding parenting, they expressed surprisingly homogeneous views. Many explained that their children were raised to value and understand the importance of continuity and what it takes to own and accumulate wealth. Henrik stated,

If you think about a family business, then maybe [you have] a responsibility to raise your children in such a way that they are interested in this thing … so that they won’t have zero interest. In that case, you would have failed in this continuity.

The family business he mentioned was an investment house, not a production unit. Thus, in his case, interest in the business meant interest in wealth accumulation.

Rikhard, 60, the CEO of his family’s retail company, expressed similar ideas: ‘We [need to] start working on the next generation’s understanding … that it takes responsibility and that it must be able to discuss big issues about which it will have to be able to make decisions.’

Training children can also mean training them mentally to value their fortunes against the pressures of meritocracy. Saara, 52, a researcher who belongs to an old wealthy family, explained how her daughter had felt uncomfortable when the size of her fortune was published in the newspaper, and how, as the mother, she tried to teach her to be proud of her ownership:

I just told my nephew and I tell my daughters that you have to learn to own. You have to learn to own. You happen to own, and of course you have the possibility that you just give it away, but what would be the point of it? Of course it would be nice for the one who you give it to, if you give it for a good cause, and certainly I give huge amounts to charity all the time. But these are issues that I don’t think you should advertise … I have told my two daughters and my nephews and nieces … that you have to learn to own. My nephew just asked me, ‘How does that happen?’ I told him that you just have to be proud and not be ashamed of it.

As her daughter had started to feel that her fortune was an awkward issue, the mother attempted to turn this mentality into pride. She mentions the possibility of donating one’s fortune – in fact, she was the only interviewee to mention this – but, at the same time, its feasibility and desirability is ruled out. As Zelizer (2005) has noted, in all economic action, people differentiate meaningful social relations, designate certain economic transactions as appropriate for the relation, and bar others as inappropriate. This relational work (Zelizer, 2005, 2012), which Saara exercises, identifies charity as appropriate but states excessive donation as inappropriate, instead repeatedly emphasising the importance of learning how to own.

The learning can take very practical forms, as in Henrik’s family, in which the children have worked as assistants in the investment company and are being trained to make economic decisions together:

My children and my brother’s children have now started to take care of their own investment portfolios … so those five think together about where they want to invest. It has been one good way to get them … [to] meet, think, and make decisions together, because deciding together is the hardest part.

The social work is also being increasingly systemised in several families. Saara explained how her family has a training programme that teaches the younger generation ‘how to own’:

Each year, before the shareholders’ meeting, the CEO gives them [a briefing]. There is a lot of terminology, so they go through all the accounts that will come up in the meeting: what is the income statement, what is the balance sheet, on what is it based, etc.

Felix described a similar programme:

We have a kind of business academy – a certified educational programme. One task of the administrative council is to ensure that we have this system … that we start to look out for the next generation in due time. It is, in fact, an apparatus.

The emphasis on such programmes was strongest among those whose family fortunes spanned generations. However, second-generation heirs also explained how they had started to operationalise the wealth and business transitions. Jaana, a second-generation heir in her late fifties, explained that their family firm had recently started ‘a process’ with the next generation: ‘The children went through a round of interviews with an external consultant … in which they discussed what they thought of ownership, entrepreneurship, our company, and business.’

Several middle-aged or older interviewees described these training programmes as a new practice. Vera, who is 50 and a member of an old industrial family, described ownership as a skill and stated that this was now being taught to her children much earlier than it had been taught to her:

Today, we have started to pay attention to it much earlier and much more than in the case of [our generation] … I think it is important that the children understand what they own, what it is all about, [and] what the company does.

The succession strategies described by the respondents aimed at preventing property from leaving the family (Bourdieu, 1989/1996, p. 280) are both old and new. If in the past, the elite’s cross-generational continuity was often facilitated through marriages (Bourdieu, 1989/1996), the wealthy inheritors I have interviewed describe more formalised cross-generational preparation processes for ownership, including private educational programmes and consultants. Such new trends detach wealthy elites from traditional forms of elite education (Bourdieu, 1977, 1989/1996) towards custom-made programmes for the wealthy. These private programmes – which are increasingly popular globally and did not exist only a generation ago in Finland – are used both in families where children are expected to continue running the business (such as Felix and Rikhard’s families) and in families where the next generation will simply become stockowners, without managerial status (such as Vera’s and Saara’s families).

In addition to the formal or semi-formal private programmes, however, informal social gatherings, the explicit intention of which is to bring the next generation of different wealthy families together, have also persisted or have been reinvented. Maria, a member of an old wealthy family in her fifties, explained how her children meet other children of wealthy families:

The teenagers have founded this kind of … they have their own ‘next generation’ gang. … These four big families that have, at some point, even loosely overlapped because of some marriages, so these young ones have started this, this something that was not there before. For example, in my generation, I had contacts with these other families only because I happened to hang around with them and some of them happened to belong to my gang. But now they have this, if not an entirely official, then at least this kind of connection … a cause that brings them together and something that they have decided to do together.

Here Maria describes certain continuity in the intimate relationships among the wealthy families over generations, but she also describes the changing nature of this togetherness. She refers to a (common) cause – the cause of ownership – and to the deliberate decision of the youngsters of the different families to meet regularly. This not-entirely-official, but nevertheless deliberately organised, connection has its basis in certain shared interests that the members of these families have recognised. Thus, even though today’s wealthy heirs have different possible points of identification – be they professional, spatial, recreational, or individual principles – they, nevertheless, also recognise themselves as owners and speak and act in its name, a feature that Bourdieu (1987) links to the existence of a class.

Overall, as the different interviews show, there is a tendency towards formalised, or at least deliberate, techniques to ensure that the younger generations come to recognise, and value their roles as owners and accumulators of wealth and as a class that shares common interests. In this class-making process, the older generations work actively to ensure that the younger generations acquire a collective representation of the social world and their own place in it (Bourdieu, 1987), which rests on them as owners of capital. The gradual formalisation of this work in Finland has been closely tied to the Family Business Network Finland, established in 1997. The role of this national branch of the international lobbying organisation was mentioned in several interviews. Its next-generation programme was especially valued because it makes the younger generations prepared for their fortunes. Saara described how the network has made families pay attention to continuity:

This next-generation thinking has been systematised in many of these families, and we have even learned about it a bit from each other and through the Family Business Network. … It is through [the network] that the idea of the next generation has spread. There is a new generation growing that understands much more than, for example, my generation did.

Some explained also how this systematisation has been inspired by international examples. Felix, who described his family’s focus on the next generation as an apparatus, explained:

Today, there is academic research on family businesses, something that there was not 50 years ago. And we know that these are important issues. … We know what the challenges are, because there is researched data on it. … We know already that if we don’t start to do this and that well in advance, in 10 or 15 years, we will have a problem. The Family Business Network Finland and its international equivalent, the Family Business Network, … networking with other family businesses … and the exchanging of experiences, through that, you get a good picture of what might be coming.

As the network is not in the service of one single family, but represents big family businesses more generally, the training it offers serves certain class interests. Through its agenda and its next-generation programme, the interviewees acknowledge their common interests that can be represented by a spokesperson – the network – which is a classic example of the recognition of the class (interest) (Bourdieu, 1985).

Conclusions

One of the key suggestions in Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century is that reducing inequality requires preventing extreme inequality at the top. He argues that economic inequalities must be seen in historical context to see how capital has tended to concentrate for the few, such as the families discussed in this article. However, as argued by many critics, Piketty (2014, p. 203) specifically excludes all human aspects of capital when he approaches it as a thing-like quality that stands outside of relations (Lotz, 2015; Pålsson Syll, 2014). Such critique, thus, suggests that to understand the relationship between various assets and their valuations, we need to explore the social relations and experiences that are untraceable in quantitative measures (Bear, 2014).

In this article, I have described such relations and experiences, by exploring qualitatively the social meanings (Zelizer, 1997) of inherited wealth and the practices through which wealthy inheritors reproduce their class across generations. By approaching capital as both an asset (that accumulates in the hands of the wealthy) and a social relation that needs to be actively reproduced, I have described elements of class-making as they arise from the inheritors’ descriptions and some of the cultural processes that contribute to the continuing power of dynastic wealth in Finland. Some practices, such as parenting, are old, but the interviewees describe also practices that seem specific to our times as they aim at keeping families unified and business-oriented in times of individualisation and meritocracy. These practices – whether official training programmes or informal upbringing – and the underlying social meanings can be taken as elements in the formation of an actual class (Bourdieu, 1985), meaning a group that is sufficiently unified to act as one through a spokesperson and is equipped with an apparatus – the Family Business Network, for example. Thus, in an era of financial capitalism when the majority of ‘people may no longer recognize themselves as belonging to an existing social class’ (Tyler, 2015, p. 498), it seems as if the dynastic class continues to promote such recognition.

The final question is why study such self-perceptions of the wealthy? Are their views not already sufficiently heard? I suggest that the reason is political and particularly pertinent to today’s (or yesterday’s) welfare states. Such societies have traditionally attempted to regulate the power of the rentier class and exploitation between classes, but these attempts have recently faced backlash, as rising economic inequalities indicate. As today’s financial markets bring scale effects for those with large fortunes, it is relatively easy for wealthy inheritors to make their fortunes grow. What is perhaps more difficult is to keep the political and cultural environment favourable for dynastic accumulation. By studying the ways in which dynastic families reproduce their class position culturally and mentally, I hope to facilitate such political discussion in societies that celebrate meritocracy but suffer from growing inequalities and wealth concentration.