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This article continues research into social mobility in England in the nineteenth century by examining the links with different occupational structures, socio-economic and industry/occupation, for a specific location. This allows an examination of the impact of the characteristics of these structures on occupational and thence on social mobility. Occupational mobility has long been recognised as a major determinant of social mobility and has been the subject of a number of papers, usually to determine how much a specific variable affects the level and type of mobility observed. Rarely do these analyses consider the location’s occupational structure, and its changes, as a determinant of the level of mobility. This paper finds that much of the variability of occupational mobility of a locality is determined by the characteristics of the different industries and occupations in that location. Industries and occupations provide a context within which other factors, such as literacy, operate. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We present a new analysis of intergenerational mobility across three cohorts in England and Wales using linked decennial census microdata, focusing on occupation, homeownership, and education. Four main results emerge. First, area‐level differences in upward occupational mobility are highly persistent over time. Second, measures of absolute and relative mobility tend to be spatially positively correlated. Third, there is a robust relationship between upward educational and upward occupational mobility. Last, there is a small negative relationship between upward homeownership mobility and upward occupational mobility, revealing that social mobility comparisons based on different outcomes can have different trends. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines evidence on occupational movement in England using data from the New Earnings Panel Dataset. Although most occupations are characterized by a high degree of immobility, there is some evidence of an increase in occupational mobility between 1990 and 1994. Using a compound Poisson modelling approach for count data combined with a gravity model, the paper investigates the incentives and constraints upon aggregate movement between occupations over two time periods, 1985-90 and 1990-94. Results suggest that the responsiveness of movement into a wide range of occupations as a result of a rise in wages is relatively elastic for males and relatively inelastic for females. The paper also demonstrates that significant barriers to movement exist, which either prevent a response to market signals or inhibit the extent of that response. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The international mobility of professionals and graduates is one of the most dynamic transnational types of movement and represents an increasingly large component of global migration streams. The global competition for talent, the expansion of the knowledge economy and the increasing globalisation of markets and companies contribute to the increased importance of these mobility flows. Yet academic debates persist around who and what is meant by 'highly skilled'. This paper highlights the importance of social context and immigrant agency in the assessment of skills and human capital. It draws attention to the substantial difference between 'highly skilled' and 'highly qualified' immigrants. The analysis presents original empirical data collected in 2005 through an online survey (N=133) and 54 semi-structured interviews with East European professionals and graduates living and working in London. It argues that the social aspects of skills are essential components of skill construction, especially in the changing social contexts of migration. It concludes that being skilled is an outcome of negotiations around the value and the value-attached significance of employable human capital. The negotiators are, on the one hand, the highly qualified migrants themselves and their ways of self-representation of the value of their credentials, knowledge, skills and abilities; on the other hand, they are the employers and their ways of perception, assessment and judgement of employable human capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Addressing the issue of the embeddedness of labour markets, this paper compares the processes of finding employment in the film industry within two local labour markets. Drawing on studies of freelance film crews in London (UK) and Los Angeles (US), the paper concludes that the importance of social networks in job mobility in both contexts is a consequence of common production structures. However, common labour market practice varies in each geographical space as industry processes and structures are mediated by local institutional contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

London today hosts more than 200,000 Italian people. A traditional point of arrival for Italian migrants since the nineteenth century, London is a setting characterised by the presence of the ‘old’ classic economic migration – of those who left Italy mainly in the 1950s and 1960s, and the ‘new’ migration, made up mainly of highly-educated people in the professional, academic and arts sectors. These two groups differ as regards their time of arrival, socio-economic characteristics and educational background, and they rarely have the chance or find the need to interact. This paper is based on interviews with representatives of Italian institutions and associations, and with ‘old’ and ‘new’ Italian migrants; participant observation of Italian events happening in London; and some elements of discourse analysis. By means of this empirical material, I aim to show that, besides their well-known differences, the ‘old’ and ‘new’ communities present striking similarities in their migration narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Using data from the British Household Panel Survey for 1991-99 and the German Socio-Economic Panel for 1984-99, the authors investigate job mobility and estimate the returns to tenure and experience. Job mobility was higher in the United Kingdom than in Germany. Returns to experience also seem to have been substantially higher in the United Kingdom, where the wage gain associated with ten years of labor market experience was around 80%, compared to 35% in Germany. The low returns to labor market experience in Germany appear to have been accountable to one group of workers: those with apprenticeship training, who tended to receive fairly high starting wages but to experience relatively low wage growth thereafter. Wage growth due to labor market experience was similar between the two countries for the other skill groups. Returns to tenure were close to zero in both countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the nature of the working class community in London, England during the period between World Wars I and II. Constraints from within by strong kinship and community networks; Inter-generational occupational mobility and exogenous marriage; Social culture of the traditional working class; Entry of juveniles into the labor market; Preferred occupations.