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Previous research on social mobility in both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland has confined itself exclusively to the linkages between male occupational origins and destinations. In this paper, three unique aspects of the Irish occupational mobility experience is investigated. First, the question of women's intergenerational occupational mobility is considered for the first time. Second, as in some recent North American research, traditional models of male intergenerational occupational mobility are modified to allow only the occupational achievement of mothers in the portrayal of a woman's occupational origins. Third, the occupational category of housewife is included as one possible occupational outcome for Irish women. The general conclusion of this paper is that not only does a mother's occupational attainments more realistically display the influence of occupational origins on women's subsequent occupational activities, but one vital component of this influence must be the occupational category of housewife. Only via the introduction of both these elements may the notably ascriptive nature of both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland in relation to female occupational mobility become understandable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The high point of research investment in mobility research was in the early 1970s, when three major national surveys of England and Wales, Scotland, and Ireland absorbed very substantial proportions of the spending of the SSRC on sociology. Only the Oxford Social Mobility Group retained a sufficiently large team of scholars to sustain active work on the data collected, although the number of publications that have subsequently made use of the three data-sets must now be several hundred in number. The dismal economics of large-scale survey research have since prevented ant similar follow-ups of mobility per se, but there have been some smaller specialist studies and new data have been derived from other sources. Both the range of articles featured in this paper, and the secondary analysis referred to, demonstrate how the original paradigm of mobility research and has become modified. Social mobility is now not so much a single area of sociology as four or arguably five connecting clusters of work. The first, not least in terms of paradigmatic dominance, concentrates on discovering and describing large-scale flows of people between social origins and social definitions. It is this which gives rise to our knowledge about patterns and rates of mobility.