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This paper proposes a new method to distinguish structural from exchange mobility in status attainment models with interval endogenous variables. In order to measure structural mobility, the paper proposes to trace occupational and educational changes across generations using information provided by children about their fathers. The validity of the method is assessed by comparing the effects of father’s socio-economic status and education on son’s status and educational attainments, net of occupational upgrading and educational expansion, in five European countries: Britain, Denmark, Germany, Norway, and Spain, using data from the 2005 EU-SILC survey. The results show that the effect of father’s on son’s ISEI weakens greatly in all countries after considering occupational upgrading, and that much of father’s influence over sons occurs by directing them towards occupations with good economic prospects. Useful extensions to the method are discussed in the conclusions.

This paper analyzes US geographic differences over nine regions in patterns of occupational mobility between 1880 and 1900 among the National Panel Study (NPS) of white men in the age cohorts 5–14 and 25–34. Comparisons focus on father-to-son mobility for the younger age cohort as it reached adulthood, and on intra-generational movement in midlife for the older cohort. Levels of upward mobility vary positively in both cohorts with levels of regional urbanization, while, contrary to the “frontier thesis” of American historians, location in the most recently settled parts of the United States has little relationship to occupational mobility. Using log linear models, the paper analyzes the higher mobility of the urban regions. Inheritance of occupation across and within generations is relatively constant across urban regions. Most of the geographic variation is explained by differential occupational structure, especially the growth of a clerical/sales workforce in the urban regions.

Dominant gender and ethnic groups do have more social capital than their less dominant counterparts, but there are variations in the types of social capital to which they have access. This study of Singapore finds that men have greater access than women to forms of social capital such as ties to men, weak ties, and non-kin. By contrast, Chinese Singaporeans have greater access to forms of social capital such as ties to university graduates, private housing dwellers, Chinese, and weak ties, than do other ethnicities. These distinctive patterns of network inequalities are bound up with distinctive patterns of access to organizations such as schools, workplaces, and voluntary associations. The paper finds that network inequalities among gender and ethnic groups have more to do with barriers of entry to those organizations and less to do with social capital being added more efficaciously for some members. The paper underscores a need to better understand the complex intersections between ascriptive social categories, organizations, and social capital.

This paper examines why Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) fields are becoming “immigrant” fields of study as native students shift from STEM fields to law, medicine and business. Using data from the 2010 National Survey of College Graduates, the analyses find that foreign college-educated immigrants with STEM degrees tend to remain in STEM fields, while natives are more likely to shift from STEM fields to law, medicine and business in graduate school. Among those who moved into law, medicine and business, the gains in earnings are larger for natives than for foreign educated immigrants. These results have important implications for the social mobility of highly educated natives and immigrants.

This paper argues that, despite a great deal of research on the topic, we have almost no firm knowledge about societal differences in the rates, patterns, and processes of occupational mobility. Insufficient attention has been paid by previous researchers to the problem of standardizing the measurement of occupational status. As a result, the paper demonstrates, existing cross-national comparisons of mobility are virtually invalid. A Standard International Occupational Prestige Scale developed by the author is proposed as a basis for valid cross-national comparison. Properties of the scale are discussed and results achieved with the scale are compared to those based on other occupational scaling procedures.

The traditional approach to class voting has largely ignored the question whether material class positions coincide with subjective class identification. Following Sosnaud et al. (2013), this study evaluates party preferences when Europeans’ material and subjective social class do not coincide. Seminal studies on voting behavior have suggested that members of lower classes are more likely to vote for the economic left and cultural right and that higher classes demonstrate the opposite pattern. Yet, these studies have on the one hand overlooked the possibility that there is a mismatch between the material class people can be classified in and the class they think they are part of, and on the other hand the consequences of this discordant class identification on voting behavior. Analyzing the 2009 wave of the European Elections Study, we find that the majority of the Europeans discordantly identify with the middle class, whereas only a minority of the lower and higher classes concordantly identify with their material social class. Further, material class only seems to predict economic voting behavior when it coincides with subjective class; for instance, individuals who have an inflated class identification are more likely to vote for the economic left, even when they materially can be classified as middle or high class. We conclude this paper with a discussion on scholarly debates concerning class and politics.

It has often been proposed that new cleavages have emerged within the middle class. In this paper, we examine the distinction between social and cultural specialists and technocrats, and investigate whether these new and old middle class fractions are differentiated by their patterns of intergenerational mobility. To what extent do these newly distinguished middle class fractions have specific external and internal intergenerational mobility patterns? And. to what extent have mobility boundaries between them been rising over time? To answer these questions, we use 47 Dutch national population sample surveys with detailed occupation codes collected between 1970 and 2006 (N=60,978). Our analyses of internal and external homogeneity show that the middle class fractions each have characteristic mobility and immobility patterns and therefore a necessary condition is satisfied to declare them as separate classes. Furthermore, in the early periods, the social and cultural specialists were differentiated by a high level of immobility but in the later periods, the distance between the old and new middle classes has decreased significantly. © 2011.

This paper analyzes how much of the effect of social class on children’s choice of secondary education in Denmark can be decomposed into the influence of parental economic, cultural, and social capital. Following mobility regime theory, we propose that in the Scandinavian mobility regime to which Denmark belongs, the effect of social class on educational attainment should be explained primarily by non-economic forms of capital. We use an extremely rich Danish longitudinal survey to construct empirical measures of economic, cultural, and social capital and an extended random effect framework for the statistical analysis. Our results are, first, that controlling for the three types of capital we explain a considerable part of the social class effect on educational attainment, and, second, that cultural and social capital are the key predictors of educational attainment.

This study investigates how the intergenerational transmission of low- and high-income status has changed over time among sons. Comparing two cohorts (sons who were 11–15 years old in 1969 vs. sons who were at the same age in 1979) from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, this paper shows that the transmission of high-income status significantly increased while the transmission of low-income status remained stable. These results suggest that it has now become easier for high-income sons to maintain their economically advantaged status than in the past. In contrast, low-income sons’ chances of escaping from their economic disadvantage have not increased to the same extent. This study also has a methodological implication: we need more attention to the non-linearity issue when studying changes in intergenerational economic mobility. Findings from this study demonstrate the need for public investments to promote intergenerational mobility in order to prevent economic polarization across income groups.

Sociologists have long been interested in the impact of social, economic, and political changes on societal openness. Among other questions, they have asked whether the transition from a preindustrial agrarian society to an industrial socialist state creates more opportunity and equality. Using recent developments in loglinear modeling, this paper tests competing theories about temporal change in social mobility in Hungary in the past half-century. While occupational persistence declined significantly between older cohorts of men and women, the decline slowed or halted in recent cohorts. This suggests that a process of restratification occurred after the socialist revolution. Gender differences in mobility are also prominent. On the one hand, women are less likely than men to enter their fathers' occupational class. On the other hand, women's occupational destinations are more strongly determined by occupational origins. Furthermore, there are significant gender differences in occupational opportunities.

This paper demonstrates the consequences to the researcher of choosing to analyze social mobility data with a prestige scale rather than with a socioeconomic index. First, the low intergenerational correlations reported for the International Prestige Scale are rejected when they are shown to be compatible with inadequate models of the processes of status inheritance. Second, the Duncan socioeconomic index is shown to be the preferred measure of status transmission in that it suffers from less random error than does the International Prestige Scale, particularly among men. Third, the occupational attainment processes of American men and women are described with socioeconomic scoring, and these findings are contrasted with those which obtain with prestige coding.

Mobility analysis has traditionally concentrated on the task of charting flows in the two-way contingency table which relates occupational origin to occupational destination. It has not yet undertaken a unified analysis of intergenerational and intragenerational aspects of mobility. And only rarely does it incorporate terms which represent ordered concepts such as inequality or vertical movement. In contrast, path analysis has typically imposed strong orderings on the data, and it has been employed to tease out the relations among several occupational variables. Its main defect is that it entirely abstracts from shifts in mean occupational position, and also from change in the shape of the occupational distribution. Yet both of these are important sources of mobility. The present paper shows how two innovations in mobility analysis may be generalized to constitute a technique which unites the strengths of path analysis with those of log-linear analysis. The two innovations are (a) the conceptual disaggregation of perfect and exchange mobility, and (b) the imposition of an ordered component within each ( K. Hope, 1981 , Sociology 15 , 19–55). The outcome of this generalization is a simple yet powerful account of mobility in Britain.

This paper examines the theoretical and empirical basis for common rank-orderings of occupational roles by raters throughout the world. From an illustrative comparison of occupational stratification in Australia and the United States we conclude tentatively that (1) commonalities in the socioeconomic characteristics of occupational roles provide the basis for interplace consistencies in “prestige” scores, (2) the structure of occupational mobility in the U.S. and Australia is largely similar, (3) this similar structure of occupational stratification manifests a common socioeconomic process which defines a (the?) major component of occupational mobility in capitalist, industrial (only?) societies. We infer that “prestige” scores for occupations are fallible estimates of the socioeconomic statuses of occupation, within the context of mobility processes in (at least) the U.S. and Australia.

This paper presents the method used to develop the ANU II status scores for all Australian occupations. For some purposes it supersedes ANU I, a 16-point scale ( Broom, Jones, and Zubrzycki, 1965 , Australian and New Zealand Journal of Sociology (Suppl.) 1; Broom and Jones, 1969 , American Sociological Review 34, 650–658). The two scales correlate at .83. The new scale was calculated using a broad range of data applied to a prestige score criterion to estimate an equation used to predict status scores for all occupations. These scores are available in Broom, Duncan-Jones, Jones, and McDonnell (1977 , Investigating Social Mobility) along with further details of the method and results. The new scale is currently being used in the analysis of the ANU 1973 survey of social mobility in Australia, and in the reanalysis of data from the ANU 1965 survey. Preliminary results (also presented in Broom et al., 1977 ) indicate that the scale will be comparable both across time in Australia and across space when comparisons with the “second generation” of mobility studies is undertaken.