Why do funeral practices vary between modern Western countries? In the mid-nineteenth century, managing the rapidly expanding number of corpses had to be controlled and rationalized, but this control could be exercised by business, the municipality, or the church, leading to three pure types of funeral organization (commercial, municipal, religious) and a number of mixed types. These institutional types interacted with wider cultural factors to create in each country an identifiable national solution to the problem of disposing of the dead in a mobile, urban, modern society. By the late twentieth century, a global demand for more freedom and individuality spawned reform movements, targeting a different bastion of institutional power in each country.
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