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Despite predominantly lower social class origins, the second generation of established immigrant groups in the UK are now attaining high levels of education. However, they continue to experience poorer labour market outcomes than the majority population. These worse outcomes are often attributed in part to their disadvantaged origins, which do not, by contrast, appear to constrain their educational success. This paper engages with this paradox. We discuss potential mechanisms for second‐generation educational success and how far we might expect these to be replicated in labour market outcomes. We substantiate our discussion with new empirical analysis. Drawing on a unique longitudinal study of England and Wales spanning 40 years and encompassing one per cent of the population, we present evidence on the educational and labour market outcomes of the second generation of four groups of immigrants and the white British majority, controlling for multiple measures of social origins. We demonstrate that second‐generation men and women's educational advantage is only partially reflected in the labour market. We reflect on the implications of our findings for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This commentary critiques Betthäuser, Bourne and Bukodi's (2020) paper which finds that cognitive ability does not substantially mediate class of origin effects on educational and occupational outcomes. From these results, they conclude that cognitive ability is only of minor importance for social stratification, reasserting their view of the primacy of class origins for social stratification. The central issue surrounding cognitive ability in social stratification is its effects on socioeconomic attainments vis‐à‐vis socioeconomic origins, not the extent that cognitive ability mediates classorigin effects. Their analytical strategy of estimating the extent that cognitive ability mediates class origineffects is misleading because: it ignores the only moderate associations of socioeconomic origins with educational and occupational outcomes; the stronger direct effects of cognitive ability; the associations of parents' ability with their own socioeconomic attainments; and the genetic transmission of cognitive ability and other traits relevant to social stratification from parents to their children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While much attention has been devoted to measuring levels of social mobility over time, less attention has been given to the possibility of changing pathways to social mobility. This paper examines pathways from social origins to socio‐economic destinations in midlife for two British cohorts, born in 1958 and 1970 respectively, using Structural Equation Modelling (SEM). We address the roles of cognitive attainment, private schooling and educational attainment in mediating the link between social origins and destinations. Have these mechanisms become more or less important over time, in a context of structural change in the state schooling system and educational expansion? We find that private schools displayed greater academic selectivity and an increased link to high levels of educational attainment for the younger cohort. Essentially, private schools adapted to changing circumstances, becoming more academically selective and less socially selective, and more focused on educational credentials. Childhood social origins were less strongly linked to childhood cognitive scores in the younger cohort, but cognitive scores were also more weakly linked to educational attainment for this cohort. We also find a decreased association between social origins and educational attainment for the younger cohort. While the finding that educational inequalities weakened over this time period is positive, the lack of a corresponding reduction in the overall link between social origins and destinations suggests that reducing educational inequalities was not sufficient to increase social mobility when accompanied by countervailing changes in the role of private schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Several papers published in recent years have revived interest in Sorokin's dissociative thesis: the view that intergenerational social mobility has detrimental effects on the social relationships and wellbeing of individuals. In this paper, I test the dissociative thesis using data from the British Household Panel Survey and Understanding Society. On a wide range of indicators that measure participation in civic associations, contact with parents, close personal relationships, social support, subjective wellbeing, etc. individuals who have achieved long‐range upward mobility (i.e. those who move from working class origin to salariat destination) tend to fare better than those who are immobile in the working class. Those who have experienced long‐range downward mobility (moving from salariat origin to working class destination) do about as well as second‐generation members of the working class. Overall, there is no support for Sorokin's thesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a previous paper it has been shown that across three cohorts of men and women born in Britain in 1946, 1958 and 1970 a gender difference exists in regard to relative rates of class mobility. For men these rates display an essential stability but for women they become more equal. The aim of the present paper is to shed light on the causes of this trend-or, that is, of increasing social fluidity-among women. We begin by considering a refined version of the perverse fluidity hypothesis: that is, one that proposes that part-time work leads to increasing downward worklife mobility among women that also entails downward intergenerational mobility and thus promotes greater fluidity. We do in fact find that the increase in fluidity is very largely, if not entirely, confined to women who have had at least one period of part-time work. However, a more direct test of the hypothesis is not supportive. We are then led to investigate whether it is not that part-time working itself is the crucial factor but rather that women who subsequently work part-time already differ from those who do not at entry into employment. We find that eventual full- and part-timers do not differ in their class origins nor, in any systematic way, in their educational qualifications. But there is a marked and increasing difference in the levels of employment at which they make their labour market entry. Eventual part-timers are more likely than eventual full-timers to enter in working-class positions, regardless of their class origins and qualifications. Insofar as these women are from more advantaged origins, they would appear not to seek to exploit their advantages to the same extent as do full-timers in order to advance their own work careers. And it is, then, in the downward mobility accepted by these women-who increase in number across the cohorts-that we would locate the main source of the weakening association between class origins and destinations that is revealed among women at large. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A growing body of research has been focusing on the well‐being consequences of migration, yet most of this has overlooked the fact that many migrants experience intragenerational social mobility alongside geographical mobility. Without accounting for the effect of social mobility in working life, the impact of geographical mobility on well‐being cannot be clearly examined. This paper focuses on the most successful migrants, who have started from the bottom and have achieved upward social mobility in the course of their careers, and compares their well‐being with that of native non‐migrants who have experienced a similar intragenerational social mobility trajectory. The analysis is based on a recent national survey in China, which has a representative sample for both the overall population and migrants. Findings show that migrants, whether from an urban or rural origin, have better incomes but significantly lower levels of well‐being than natives, even with a similar career advancement trajectory and the same destination class position. Further exploration shows that the well‐being disadvantage of migrants is mainly due to institutional and sociocultural barriers, rather than to reward differentials in the labour market. This may have a wider implication for migrants across national borders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By employing a Bourdieu‐inspired class scheme that differentiates between classes' volume and composition of capital, and by analysing Norwegian administrative register data for birth cohorts between 1987 and 1992, this paper examines the relationship between social class background and gender‐(a)typical choices of higher education. Fields of study in higher education in much of the Western world remain segregated by gender despite the gender gap in educational attainment having been reversed. However, some changes have taken place due to the influx of women into male‐dominated, high‐status fields. Few recent studies have examined the relationship between social class background and gendered educational choices in light of these changes; furthermore, the focus of previous research has been limited to the vertical dimension of class. The results presented in this article suggest that men and women are more likely to make gender‐atypical choices when this leads to social mobility and that focusing solely on the vertical dimension of class may mask horizontal differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In British social mobility discourse, the rhetoric of fair access can obscure wider issues of social justice. While socio‐economic inequalities continue to shape young people's lives, sociological work on class dis‐identification suggests social class is less obviously meaningful as a source of individual and collective identity. This paper considers subjective understandings of the post‐16 education and employment landscape in this context, drawing on qualitative research exploring the aspirations of young men and women as they completed compulsory education in north‐west England, and the hopes their parents had for their future. It shows how unequal access to resources shaped the older generation's expectations for their children, although this was rarely articulated using the explicit language of class. Their children recognized they faced a difficult job market but embraced the idea that success was possible through hard work. Both generations drew moral boundaries and made judgments based on implicit classed discourses about undeserving others, while at the same time disavowing class identities. There was a more explicit recognition of gender inequality among the parents framed with reference to hopes for greater freedom for their daughters. Opportunities and inequalities were thus understood in complex and sometimes contradictory ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the rise of a new elite of 'super‐state' schools in London, revealing a growing divide within the state sector which problematizes claims that the capital is a 'hotspot' for social mobility (Social Mobility Commission). Although recent research has revealed a 'London effect' in which students in the capital on Free School Meals outperform their peers in other regions (Greaves, Macmillan and Sibieta), inequalities between London's schools in access to elite universities have been overlooked. Drawing on a case study of a suburban London grammar school, 'King Henry's School', I show how ethnic‐minority suburbanization has combined with an institutional strategy to compete with elite private schools. Strategies of selection have been mobilized alongside elements of elite 'gentlemanly' educational culture in order to reposition the school within the hierarchy of London's schools. The result is a hyper‐selective school which provides a conduit to elite universities for upwardly mobile British‐Asian students. I show that this strategy has strong parallels with the school's attempts in the early twentieth century to compete with London's fee‐paying 'public' schools. The continuing symbolic value of 'traditional' forms of elite educational culture to a school seeking to reposition itself within the field reflects deep structural patterns of inequality in English education. To understand how apparent improvements in social mobility can sit alongside deepening inequalities between state schools, there is a need for a historical sociological approach that takes account of long‐term processes of institutional change (Savage ; Inglis). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a comprehensive account of the way in which cognitive and educational attainment mediate the link between social origins and elite social class destinations in mid‐life. Using the 1970 British Cohort Study (BCS70), we assess the roles of a range of pathways through which educational advantage may lead to occupational attainment: cognitive development; private and selective secondary schools; school level qualifications; and higher education, including institution and field of study. Whereas past research has shown a residual direct effect of social origins on class destinations, we find that, once a sufficiently detailed picture of educational attainment is taken into account, education fully explains the link between social origins and top social class destinations. In contrast, the gap between men and women in achieving top social class positions is in no part accounted for by education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lay perceptions and experiences of social location have been commonly framed with reference to social class. However, complex responses to, and ambivalence over, class categories have raised interesting analytic questions relating to how sociological concepts are operationalized in empirical research. For example, prior researchers have argued that processes of class dis-identification signify moral unease with the nature of classed inequalities, yet dis-identification may also in part reflect a poor fit between 'social class' as a category and the ways in which people accord meaning to, and evaluate, their related experiences of socio-economic inequality. Differently framed questions about social comparison, aligned more closely with people's own terms of reference, offer an interesting alternative avenue for exploring subjective experiences of inequality. This paper explores some of these questions through an analysis of new empirical data, generated in the context of recession. In the analysis reported here, class identification was common. Nevertheless, whether or not people self identified in class terms, class relevant issues were perceived and described in highly diverse ways, and lay views on class revealed it to be a very aggregated as well as multifaceted construct. It is argued that it enables a particular, not general, perspective on social comparison. The paper therefore goes on to examine how study participants compared themselves with familiar others, identified by themselves. The evidence illuminates social positioning in terms of constraint, agency and (for some) movement, and offers insight into very diverse experiences of inequality, through the comparisons that people made. Their comparisons are situated, and pragmatic, accounts of the material contexts in which people live their lives. Linked evaluations are circumscribed and strongly tied to these proximate material contexts.The paper draws out implications for theorizing lay perspectives on class, and subjective experiences of inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the politics of mobility which surrounded the London 2012 Olympics. We provide a critical discussion of the mobility conflicts, problems and criticisms which emerged from our research with local people in the Stratford and wider Newham areas of London, where most Olympic events were located. The paper is divided into four broad parts. First, we identify and discuss the relevant components of the 'mobilities paradigm' in social science which underpin our analysis. Second, we briefly outline our research methods, centring particularly on fieldwork and interviews with different social groups. Third, we examine in detail the six main themes of mobility politics which were evident at London 2012, relating to social context, event construction, event mobility systems, commercial mobilities, the mobile politics of exclusion, and contested modes of mobility. In doing so, we seek to extend the mobilities paradigm by introducing various concepts and keywords - notably on the three-speed city, entryability, mobility panics, instrumental mobility, and corporate kettling - which may be utilized by social scientists to examine mobility systems in other social contexts. We conclude by reaffirming the significance of mobility-focused research at sport and other megaevents, and by indicating future lines of inquiry for social scientists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: In this paper we add to the existing evidence base on recent trends in inter‐generational social mobility in England and Wales. We analyse data from the Office for National Statistics Longitudinal Study (ONS‐LS), which links individual records from the five decennial censuses between 1971 and 2011. The ONS‐LS is an excellent data resource for the study of social mobility because it has a very large sample size, excellent population coverage and low rates of nonresponse and attrition across waves. Additionally, the structure of the study means that we can observe the occupations of LS‐members' parents when they were children and follow their own progress in the labour market at regular intervals into middle age. Counter to widespread prevailing beliefs, our results show evidence of a small but significant increase in social fluidity between 1950s and the 1980s for both men and women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The hidden barriers, or 'gender pay gap', preventing women from earning equivalent incomes to men is well documented. Yet recent research has uncovered that, in Britain, there is also a comparable class-origin pay gap in higher professional and managerial occupations. So far this analysis has only been conducted at the national level and it is not known whether there are regional differences within the UK. This paper uses pooled data from the 2014 and 2015 Labour Force Survey ( N = 7,534) to stage a more spatially sensitive analysis that examines regional variation in the class pay gap. We find that this 'class ceiling' is not evenly spatially distributed. Instead it is particularly marked in Central London, where those in high-status occupations who are from working-class backgrounds earn, on average, £10,660 less per year than those whose parents were in higher professional and managerial employment. Finally, we inspect the Capital further to reveal that the class pay gap is largest within Central London's banking and finance sector. Challenging policy conceptions of London as the 'engine room' of social mobility, these findings suggest that class disadvantage within high-status occupations is particularly acute in the Capital. The findings also underline the value of investigating regional differences in social mobility, and demonstrate how such analysis can unravel important and previously unrecognized spatial dimensions of class inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A paper by Breen and Goldthorpe recently claimed to have exposed 'fatal flaws' in my work on meritocracy in Britain. This paper responds to their criticisms. The results of their re-analysis of the NCDS data set are shown to be consistent with my earlier findings and arguments. Furthermore, re-running some of my earlier models using measures that they favour and a method designed to privilege their position, the results once again demonstrate that, while class origins have some effect on class destinations (in particular, for those born into the middle class), ability and effort exert a much greater effect. Based on these results, the paper identifies three core propositions about meritocracy in Britain on which all parties to this debate should now be able to agree. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Distinguishing between an explanatory and a normative interest in social stratification, this paper considers the relation between class analysis and the value of equality. Starting from the familiar distinction between (in) equality of position and (in) equality of opportunity, and noting the extent to which mobility research focuses on the latter, it suggests that class positions can themselves be characterized in terms of the opportunities they yield to those occupying them. This enables the clear identification of the kinds of inequality that are and are not addressed by research findings presented in terms of class categories and odds ratios. The significance of those findings from a normative perspective is then discussed, and their limitations are emphasized - though the paper also explains in what ways they are indeed of normative relevance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reforms which increase the stock of education in a society have long been held by policy-makers as key to improving rates of intergenerational social mobility. Yet, despite the intuitive plausibility of this idea, the empirical evidence in support of an effect of educational expansion on social fluidity is both indirect and weak. In this paper we use the raising of the minimum school leaving age from 15 to 16 years in England and Wales in 1972 to estimate the effect of educational participation and qualification attainment on rates of intergenerational social class mobility. Because, in expectation, children born immediately before and after the policy was implemented are statistically exchangeable, the difference in the amount of education they received may be treated as exogenously determined. The exogenous nature of the additional education gain means that differences in rates of social mobility between cohorts affected by the reform can be treated as having been caused by the additional education. The data for the analysis come from the ONS Longitudinal Study, which links individual records from successive decennial censuses between 1971 and 2001. Our findings show that, although the reform resulted in an increase in educational attainment in the population as a whole and a weakening of the association between attainment and class origin, there was no reliably discernible increase in the rate of intergenerational social mobility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using data from the National Child Development Study, the paper develops a complex path model predicting the occupational grade achieved by 4,298 employed British males at age 33. Most British social mobility research has been based in the 'class structurationist' tradition, and the paper begins by comparing this with the 'status attainment' tradition, which is more common in the USA. The class structurationist approach has rarely analysed the factors influencing individual occupational attainment, and those working in this tradition in Britain have often assumed that people from working-class origins fare worse on average than those from the middle class because of factors associated with their class disadvantage rather than any difference in individual characteristics such as ability or ambition. Status attainment research, however, has generally found that individual ability and motivation are the key factors influencing occupational attainment, and that class origins count for comparatively little. Using various measures of class origins, parental support, qualifications, and individual ability and ambition, the paper goes on to develop a linear structural equations model which achieves a good fit to the data. The model demonstrates that individual ability is by far the strongest influence on occupational achievement, that motivation is also important, and that factors like class background and parental support, while significant, are relatively much weaker. The paper concludes that occupational selection in Britain appears to take place largely on meritocratic principles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

This paper uses unique population-level matched employer-employee data on monthly wages to analyse class-origin wage gaps in the Swedish labour market. Education is the primary mediator of class origin advantages in the labour market, but mobility research often only considers the vertical dimension of education. When one uses an unusually detailed measure of education in a horizontal dimension, the wage gap between individuals of advantaged and disadvantaged class origin is found to be substantial (4-5 per cent), yet considerably smaller than when measures are used which only control for level of education and field of study. This is also the case for models with class or occupation as outcome. The class-origin wage gap varies considerably across labour market segments, such as those defined by educational levels, fields of education, industries and occupations in both seemingly unsystematic and conspicuous ways. The gap is small in the public sector, suggesting that bureaucracy may act as a leveller. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the claim that the shift from a selective to a comprehensive school system had a deleterious effect on social mobility in Great Britain. Using data from the National Child Development Study, we compare the chances, for both class and income mobility, of those who attended different kinds of school. Where media attention focuses exclusively on the chances for upward mobility of those children from lowly origins who were (or would have been) judged worthy of selection into a grammar school, we offer more rounded analyses. We match respondents in a way that helps us to distinguish those inequalities in mobility chances that are due to differences between children from those due to differences between the schools they attended; we look at the effects of the school system on the mobility chances of all children, not merely those from less advantaged origins; and we compare comprehensive- and selective-system schools, not merely comprehensive and grammar schools. After matching, we find, first, that going to a grammar school rather than a comprehensive does not make low-origin children more likely to be upwardly mobile but it helps them move further if they are; second, that grammar schools do not benefit working-class children, in terms of class mobility, more than they benefit service-class children, but, in terms of income mobility, such schools benefit low-income children somewhat more than they benefit higher-income children - that benefit relating only to rather modest and limited movements within the income distribution. Finally, however, the selective system as a whole yields no mobility advantage of any kind to children from any particular origins: any assistance to low-origin children provided by grammar schools is cancelled out by the hindrance suffered by those who attended secondary moderns. Overall, our findings suggest that comprehensive schools were as good for mobility as the selective schools they replaced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social mobility has become a topic of central political concern. In political and also media circles it is widely believed that in Britain today mobility is in decline. However, this belief appears to be based on a single piece of research by economists that is in fact concerned with intergenerational income mobility: specifically, with the relation between family income and children's later earnings. Research by sociologists using the same data sources – the British birth cohort studies of 1958 and 1970 – but focusing on intergenerational class mobility does not reveal a decline either in total mobility rates or in underlying relative rates. The paper investigates these divergent findings. We show that they do not result from the use of different subsets of the data or of different analytical techniques. Instead, given the more stable and generally less fluid class mobility regime, it is the high level of income mobility of the 1958 cohort, rather than the lower level of the 1970 cohort, that is chiefly in need of explanation. Further analyses – including ones of the relative influence of parental class and of family income on children's educational attainment – suggest that the economists' finding of declining mobility between the two cohorts may stem, in part at least, from the fact that the family income variable for the 1958 cohort provides a less adequate measure of ‘permanent income’ than does that for the 1970 cohort. But, in any event, it would appear that the class mobility regime more fully captures the continuity in economic advantage and disadvantage that persists across generations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to contribute to social capital research by linking measures of formal and informal forms of social capital to social mobility trajectories and assessing their impact on social trust. Drawing on data from a recent national survey – Cultural Capital and Social Exclusion (2003/2004 ) – we analyse formal civic engagement and informal social connections. The latter data are obtained using, for the first time in a study in Britain, Lin's (2001 ) ‘Position Generator’ approach as a means to identify the volume, range and position of individuals' informal social contacts. The pattern of contacts suggests that access to social ties is strongly conditioned by mobility trajectory. We also show that civic engagement in formal associations is especially high among second-generation members of the service class. It is also shown that both class trajectory and possession of two types of social capital have significant impacts on trust. Among the social groups disadvantaged in terms of bridging social ties are not only those in lower classes but also women and members of minority ethnic groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A debate over whether the ‘service class’ is a unitary middle class or is divided between professionals and managers remains unsettled. This qualitative mobility study seeks to elucidate mobility processes of how professional and managerial groups secure their advantages throughout their working lives and over generations. Using data on contemporary Hong Kong, this paper compares the career strategies and intergenerational mobility strategies of forty teachers and thirty managers. Despite employing somewhat different career strategies, managers do not seem less able than teachers to secure their advantages through their work-lives. Using the same intergenerational mobility strategies, teachers and managers exploit economic, cultural, and social resources in a similar way for their children's education. So far as demographic stability over generations is concerned a unified service class is in the making.

Recent research on social capital has explored trends in membership in voluntary organizations. However, there is currently little robust evidence on such trends in the UK since the 1970s, nor is there any analysis of whether participation bridges social divisions or accentuates them. This paper explores trends in participation in England and Wales since 1972 using data from the Social Mobility Inquiry of 1972 and the British Household Panel Survey of 1992 and 1999. We are concerned with social exclusion mechanisms in social capital generation in Britain over the three decades. Using binomial and multinomial models to 'unpack' the effects of socio-cultural factors on civic participation and on different types of associational membership, we test the thesis of across-the-board decline in social capital by Putnam (2000) and that of rising levels of middle-class social capital versus consistent low levels of working-class social capital by Hall (1999). The results show significant socio-cultural-gender differences, a relative stability of middle-class participation, and a rapid decline in the working-class access to social capital. We challenge the established accounts of both theses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the past thirty years Catholics in Northern Ireland have experienced unprecedented upward social mobility. Some commentators have suggested that this has led Catholics not merely to adopt the lifestyles of the middle class but also to modify their constitutional preferences, leading to a decline in nationalism. In this paper I examine the relationship between social mobility, on the one hand, and, on the other, both constitutional preferences and political (left or right wing) preferences among Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland, using survey data collected in 1996. There is no evidence that Catholics' constitutional preferences are related to their mobility experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the fact that in many societies ethnicity plays an important role in stratification processes, a common view held by students of stratification argues that the role of ascriptive criteria in stratification processes is diminishing, and that the main axis of the modern stratification system is rooted in the division of labour in the marketplace. Despite this, most Israeli sociologists have taken the ethnic and national cleavages to be the main axes of stratification in Israel. This paper utilizes the 1974 and 1991 mobility surveys in Israel to examine changes over time in the association between ethnicity/nationality (i.e., Ashkenazi-Jews, Sephardi-Jews and Israeli-Arabs) and class position in the Israeli stratification structure. It also examines the extent to which inequality of opportunity within the Israeli class structure is affected by ethnicity/nationality. Here it is found that the ethnic/national cleavage in Israel appears to have played a less important role over time in the allocation of Israeli men to class positions. It is shown that class crystallization processes that result from the differentiation of employment contracts in the marketplace produce a relatively common level of inequality of opportunity in Israel, across sub-populations and over time. Any difference in the level of inequality of opportunity between the various sub-populations would appear to result, in part, from different historical process of, and government policy towards, the three sub-populations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The consequences of major changes in employment, due to the decline of manufacturing and the growth of the service sector, have not been well-documented, nor theorized, in the sociology of ethnic relations, even in recent studies. For example, Blumer's classic argument that economic development adapts to 'race relations', rather than the reverse as predicted by the modernization school, has not been either empirically resolved or conceptually applied to the UK. By adapting data from the Labour Force Survey and the Census, the paper begins to fill this gap with a detailed account of three main minority ethnic groups, and a separate analysis of male and female employment. It is demonstrated that, contrary to assumptions that members of the minority ethnic groups suffered most from de-industrialization, they actually did rather well, and in some cases did better than the majority population. These findings are re-conceptualized as collective social mobility, as part of a review of a number of conceptual frameworks in the light of the data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines survey data relating class mobility to satisfaction and dissatisfaction with seven different domains of everyday life among nationally representative samples of men and women living in ten industrialized nations. The evidence is set against competing pessimistic and optimistic accounts of the mobility experience found in earlier literature. Results show that individuals who move from working-class origins to middle-class destinations are no more likely to be systematically satisfied or dissatisfied with life than are the socially immobile or even those downwardly mobile from advantaged backgrounds into the working class. Indeed, in all nations, the overall association between class experience and satisfaction with life is both weak and uneven across the different life-domains. The study also serves to illustrate an important principle of research methodology more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is a report of the main findings of a reliability study carried out in association with the 1972 Oxford Social Mobility inquiry. The original sample consisted of some 10,000 men interviewed in England and Wales. The reliability study involved re-interviewing a representative 10 per cent of the sample after a lapse of two years. After initially exploring the reliability of occupation (position on the Hope-Goldthorpe scale) and distinguishing this from its stability over a period of two years, the analysis proceeds to examine the basic set of stratification variables. The raw correlations tot the full 1972 sample are adjusted in the light of the reliability findings, and the adjusted values are employed in path analyses. The main substantive conclusion of the paper is that education is more a disrupter than a transmitter of the influence of paternal social standing on respondent's occupation. The main conclusion of the reliability analysis, apart from the estimates of the reliability coefficients, is that measurement errors are not entirely independent of one another. Finally, some comparisons with a comparable American inquiry are offered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops a model of intergenerational mobility and intragenerational inequality that allows us to explore the relationship between economic growth and social mobility. The model is used to analyse the neo-liberal theory of stratification and to assess the consequences of some of the criticisms that have been made of it. In particular, the intergenerational transmission of wealth and privilege, and the existence of ethnic, gender and other forms of ascriptive disadvantage, reduce economic efficiency, although they do not always diminish the extent of social mobility. Furthermore, excessive intragenerational inequality may inhibit, rather than encourage, economic growth. We show that there is no necessary link between rates of social mobility and levels of economic growth. This, we suggest, provides an explanation of why rates of social mobility show very little cross-national variation and display no very evident trend over time towards greater societal openness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a cross-national comparative analysis of social inequality in the former Federal and Democratic Republics of Germany. Social policy in the GDR reflected a conflict between egalitarian and meritocratic conceptions of justice. Against this background, I attempt to determine whether or not half a century of communism reduced class inequalities of opportunity in East Germany, relative to those in the Federal Republic. I argue that the study of social mobility suggests little progress was made towards achieving this goal. Attitudinal data indicate that the perceived failure of the East German authorities to create a more open society may have exacerbated the problem of regime legitimation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a comment on the article "The Attenuation of Class Analysis: Some Comments on G. Marshall, S. Roberts and C. Burgoyne, Social Class and the Underclass in Britain and in the USA'," by Lydia Morris and John Scott that appeared in the 1996 issue of the "British Journal of Sociology." Marshall et al's paper, Scott and Morris argue, may be located within the Nuffield programme of class analysis. They are critical of the departure of this programme from what they see as its Weberian origins. They argue that as a consequence Marshall et al fail to distinguish between individual class situations and Weberian social classes; the latter being demographically constituted collectivities that are formed through intra and inter-generational mobility, through relations of household formation and inter-marriage, and through a myriad of status-related social relations such as informal interaction and friendship. Scott and Morris conclude that, as a consequence of their failure to make this distinction, Marshall et al. do not address the really significant sociological question of whether the underclass can be said to exist as a real social class. Scott and Morris are also critical of a number of other features of the Nuffield programme, such as the seemingly arbitrary class labeling of the nominal categories of the different versions of the Goldthorpe scheme.

The history of social mobility has been a study of male mobility experiences. That is, not only have females been excluded by intention from these investigations, but, more importantly, it is argued that this omission is justifiable and legitimate. This is particularly so in relation to the British Isles where the heated defence of the traditional position, presently labelled the conventionalist approach, continues to rationalize and justify the exclusion of over one half of the British and Irish population. Drawing together recent North American, British and Australian research, this paper challenges both the theoretical and empirical assumptions of this conventionalist position. Arguing that a woman is neither simply a summation of domestic identities nor is her status one of complete dependency, national and international evidence on the unique and important contribution of women to the occupational attainments of husbands and children, as well as the class reproduction of families in general, is presented. [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.

Sociological writing on social mobility has neglected to consider whether upward social mobility is linked to an individual's geographical mobility. This paper argues that there is no necessary link, but that in post-war Britain, where much intra-generational social mobility has been linked to workers' being promoted through internal labor markets of bureaucratic organizations this frequently means that these workers have to be re-located to different sites of that organization. In these circumstances there is a significant -- though under-researched -- link between social and spatial mobility. I argue that this type of upward social mobility is however becoming less important as public and private sector organizations have retrenched in recent years. Hence the link between social and spatial mobility has declined. I speculate on the implications of this for patterns of class formation and political alignment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]