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Few sociological studies escape without some consideration of variables which involve the ranking of people or positions. The intent of this paper is to point out a serious problem in our measurement of status/mobility/stratification/class, a problem which is increasing in its seriousness with the growth of the underground economy. In this paper, we (1) define the underground economy, (2) survey research on its size and growth in the United States, (3) define the problems which the underground economy poses for sociology using stratification research as an example, and (4) point out the promise for sociology of including the underground economy in our research. [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]

The term 'social fluidity' is to be understood as intergenerational occupational mobility net of direct structural effects, i.e. effects of differences in the marginal distributions of the mobility tables. Though not entirely adequate in the case of women, the terminology of earlier studies of class mobility is retained to simplify the task at hand, namely to complement the picture of the stratification process in the occupational system obtained from intergenerational mobility data regarding men. In this paper, log-linear models are used to test possible outcomes to the questions: Do men and women in the same nation have the same pattern of social fluidity? Do women/or men have the same pattern of social fluidity cross-nationally? Is the relation of women's to men's patterns of social fluidity the same cross-nationally? On the basis of data from France and Sweden the first two questions are answered in the negative, though one may be impressed by how small differences are and how important structurally induced variation is. The last question may well be answered affirmatively. [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.

This paper corrects and extends the analysis in “Social Identity, Inequality, and Conflict” by James Robinson (Economics of Governance, 2(1), 2001). For conflict along class lines, Robinson finds the total impact of mobility on conflict to be ambiguous. Contrary to his result, I show that, under his assumptions, the effect of social mobility on class conflict is unambiguous. Higher mobility always decreases conflict. In my extension to Robinson’s model, I explore mobility’s impact on class conflict in a society where the tax rate is not fixed. I demonstrate that if the tax rate is proportional to the population of the group in power relative to the total population of the society, then the effects of social mobility on class conflict are indeed ambiguous. [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 paper presents detailed analyses of eight dimensions of objective distances among social classes in Hungary and Poland based on large-scale social surveys carried out during the 1980s. The data for both countries could be fitted well with a modified log-multiplicative model that included a single set of relative class distances and class-specific tendencies for homophily across all dimensions. Social distances were greatest with regard to the selection of friends, and endogamy with regard to class of spouse and career mobility. Distances were more moderate with regard to intergenerational social mobility, endogamy with regard to spouse's father, and similarities among siblings. They were smallest for residential segregation and two-generation intergenerational mobility. In Hungary, homophily was greatest for workers in agriculture, the self-employed, and higher professionals. The largest gaps in unidimensional class distances were between skilled and semiskilled workers and between higher professionals and managers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Canadian Journal of Sociology is the property of Canadian Journal of Sociology and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper studies trends in intergenerational social mobility using growth curve modeling. The main research questions are to describe the characteristics of early career trajectory among Japanese men, and also to examine the cohort change in association between career trajectory and class origin. With data from four national representing surveys, two-level hierarchical nested dataset consisted of the person-year work history data file and individual data file is set up. The author conducts multilevel logistic regression analysis which is well-adapted to hierarchical structured datasets. The results indicate that, the change in reproduction of upper non-manual class can not be shown, while reproduction of self employed class demonstrate an upward trend. These findings suggest that we should pay attention to local structure in social mobility as well as overall structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses about the issue of "Re-Placing Whiteness," which is an amalgam of two very different papers about immigrants' residential patterns. Assimilation theory anticipates progress toward the mainstream as immigrants and especially their children experience social mobility, including shifts in the kinds of neighborhoods where they live. Of course, assimilation is not the only possible trajectory. A longstanding counterclaim is that American society obstructs the mobility of some groups, and a more recent argument is that some groups may not value residential assimilation as a goal. But from any theoretical perspective, there are good reasons not to focus solely on residence in white suburban neighborhoods as indicators of advancement. It would be constructive to offer a theory to explain why some early arrivals turn out to be very highly concentrated.

The major objective of the research reported here is to investigate the significance and meaning of the contextual effects of communities on individuals' opportunities for socioeconomic attainment. A model which incorporates both individuals and their communities is proposed and tested. The empirical test was done by using samples of the Israeli labor force population. The findings demonstrate that community has significant effects on individuals' attainment. Community seems to be an additional factor that affects social mobility and as such an important dimension of the stratification system. Characteristics defining the social context of the community as an opportunity structure are identified and their significance discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Zeitschrift für Soziologie is the property of De Gruyter and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Many scholars have noted the disparity between Marxian approaches to macro societal issues and neo-Durkheimian sociologies of consciousness in micro settings. The first focuses on the real structures of society, the second on the social construction of reality. Theory of formal organizations, largely in the tradition of Weber, is a good place to attempt to link these major but divergent schools. Such linkage might occur from two directions: scaling Marxism down to the level of organizational practice, and scaling micro sociologies up to the level of organizational structure. For the first of these tasks, we can use special tools from the phenomenological tradition to reinterpret Marx's category of labor into that of the Lebenspraxis of everyday organizational life. For the second task, we may reinterpret ethnomethodological and symbolic interactionist studies. Though emerging from Durkheim's work on symbolism and ritual, and though ostensibly of discrete settings, these studies are in fact conducted within formal organizations. "Rationality," "legitimacy," or "authority" are structures of consciousness as well as features of face-to-face settings; as such, their construction can be reinterpreted phenomenologically as the praxiological foundations of organizational life, the organizing out of which organizations are constituted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores a much theorized but rarely empirically investigated temporal component to the structuring of life chances at the apex of the class structure. By following 21 complete birth cohorts, I utilize sequence analysis and systematically explore pathways that lead to the Norwegian upper class during 10 years of adulthood. Separate analyses of each cohort map these trajectories at different stages of adult life and cross-cohort similarities are found. The analysis reveals that durable access is differentiated from long-range vertical mobility and a stepping stone function of middle-class attachment. Trajectories are also shown to be highly capital specific, thereby indicating that capital conversion within social space rarely traverses horizontal divisions. I argue that elite research and class analysis would benefit from approaching questions of processes of group formation in a manner that entails a systematic account of temporality while acknowledging the class structure in a multidimensional way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article takes Shen Congwen’s early experiences as a set of historical materials, and uses them to analyze changes in the self-constructed identity of a young littérateur in the midst of Beijing’s transformations. These transformations include new modes of social mobility, the reconstruction of urban cultural structures, changes in interpersonal social networks, and restrictions to increases in social class. They represent social preconditions for much of the early history of New Literature. Accordingly, this essay attempts to create new narrative possibilities in the literary history of the period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present analyses of intergenerational social class mobility based on data from representative samples of the British population from 1972 to 2005. We distinguish throughout between absolute and relative rates of mobility. As regards absolute rates, we find little or no change in total mobility rates over the period covered. In the case of men, there is also little change in rates of upward and downward mobility - in contrast with the middle decades of the twentieth century when upward mobility steadily increased while downward mobility fell. This latter pattern does, however, prevail in the case of women. As regards relative rates, we again find, for men and women alike, an essential constancy over time. This, then, indicates that such changes as are apparent in absolute rates derive from shifts in class distributions rather than from any significant increase or decrease in social fluidity. Our results are contrary to the prevailing view in political and media circles that in Britain today the level of social mobility is in decline, although for men the pattern of mobility has become less favourable. We end with some remarks on policy implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Personal bankruptcy has long been assumed to be a mechanism through which indebted families could achieve a financial fresh start. In sociological terms, bankruptcy, because it allows for the discharge of debt and protection of some assets, insures upward social mobility. For the most part, however, the efficacy of bankruptcy to improve families' socioeconomic status remains untested. Based on interviews with more than 700 people who filed for personal bankruptcy in 2001, it appears that a second mechanism, the credit report, impedes the upward mobility that results from personal bankruptcy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses social mobility as it applies to opportunity. The author argues that the ability of descendents of poor families to become rich and the ability of descendents of rich families to become poor are both important characteristics of an efficient societal arrangement when incentives to work hard must be provided. Phelan and Townsend's model of general equilibrium economy with incentive constraints is used in the author's argument. He believes that a society using a societal ranking of allocations will always choose the distribution of dynastic utilities to be of an unequal opportunity nature.

This article examines flows (movements between origin and destination positions in the social structure) and relationships (dependencies of the destination positions on positions of origin) in terms of two conceptualizations of individuals' locations in the social structure: social class(SC) and socioeconomic index (SEI). Using Romanian data for 1970 (full-fledged communism), 1988 (late communism), and 2000 (early capitalism) demonstrates that: (1) social mobility increased from 1970 to 2000, mainly in the form of circulation mobility, while structural mobility actually decreased; (2) dependencies between SC of origin and SC of destination appeared to be much stronger in 1970 than in 2000; (3) in terms of the difference between respondents' SEI and that of their fathers, there is very little change between 1988 and 2000; (4) for the same period, 1988-2000, the relationship between respondents' SEI and that of their fathers strengthened considerably, even when controlling for respondents' education. Thus, the results for 1970-2000, expressed in terms of flows and relationships for SC, indicate the increasing openness of Romanian society, while the results for 1988-2000, expressed in terms of flows and relationships for SEI, indicate the opposite--less openness in the postcommunist era. An attempt to solve the problem of these seemingly contradictory results confirms that social class and socioeconomic status pertain to two different dimensions of social inequality, demonstrating the usefulness of the complex approach that includes both these dimensions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay reviews post-1980 research on class stratification, socio-economic inequalities, and social mobility in the People's Republic of China. Chinese class stratification has transformed from a rigid status hierarchy under Mao to an open, evolving class system in the post-Mao period. Socioeconomic inequalities have also been altered. State redistributive inequalities are giving way to patterns increasingly generated by how individuals and groups succeed in a growing market-oriented economy; rigorous empirical studies have been conducted on occupational prestige, income distribution, housing and consumption, and gender inequality. Finally, occupational mobility, a rare opportunity under Mao, is becoming a living experience for many Chinese in light of emerging labor markets. Scholarly works on status attainment, career mobility, and employment processes show both stability and change in the once politicized social mobility regime. There is relatively richer research output on urban than on rural China, despite the greater and more profound transformations that occurred in rural China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents findings about English, French, and Swedish mobility tables from the early 1970s. The reanalysis shows that the vertical dimension of mobility is stronger and more autonomous than one would conclude from earlier analyses. It is necessary to introduce several parameters for class inheritance in order to fit the data, and such parameters account for more of the association between class origins and destinations than does the vertical aspect of mobility, but income and occupational prestige do not help to explain it. The findings suggest complementarities between vertical and non-vertical models of class mobility. The data for England and Wales and Sweden were rendered comparable in terms of a nine-category class schema developed by the classification of English occupations. Social Fluidity in Industrial Nations developed models of class mobility that assumed nominal measurement, while Vertical and Nonvertical Class Mobility combined a model of vertical mobility. The constriction of the English, French, and Swedish classifications initiated a round of comparative mobility analysis, based upon national surveys of the early 1970s. Such tables were constructed from unit record data, yielding greater detail and stronger claims to comparability than many cross-national comparisons.

Four mobility and attainment propositions are extracted from a theoretical discussion relating class mobility and attainment processes to the development of capitalism. These propositions are evaluated empirically using United States Labor Statistics, General Social Survey data, and primary data collected from a SMSA. The first proposition maintains that paralleling the development of capitalism will be a structural decrease in the relative size of the capital-owning classes resulting in mobility. In the second proposition, it is asserted that with the development of capitalism, the likelihood of downward mobility will be significantly greater than the probability of upward mobility. The third proposition stated that in advanced capitalist societies, circulation class mobility will be substantially constrained by structural change. Lastly, it is proposed that in advanced capitalist societies, attained class positions will depend significantly on an unmediated (by educational attainment) origin class effect. Empirical support is uncovered for all propositions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Class theorists often argue against the use of unidimensional or hierarchical analyses in class mobility research. They assert that nonvertical effects are of paramount importance in understanding the structure and process of stratification. By explicitly incorporating both vertical and nonvertical effects into the structural model of class mobility, I demonstrate the importance of both effects for understanding the structure of mobility chances within and between countries. Although vertical and nonvertical effects are equally important in explaining association patterns in individual countries, nonvertical effects are the major source of cross-national variation. Two nonvertical effects are particularly important: economic sector of employment -- whether nonmanual, manual, or farm; and employment status-whether self-employed or not. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Career aspirations have assumed a central place in our understanding of the process of social mobility, yet aspirations themselves have been subject to remarkably little scrutiny. We conduct an empirical analysis of the dynamics of aspirations in a cohort using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Young Men. Our results indicate that (1) occupational aspirations decline with age; (2) the overwhelming majority of young men have high aspirations at some point; (3) occupational aspirations, highly unstable among teenagers, become more stable with age; and (4) differences by race and social origin grow with age, reflecting growing race and social class differences in educational attainment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents evidence related to exceptionally high social mobility rate of Americans. Arguments stressing American "exceptionalism" in the extent of social mobility must be traced back at least to Alexis de Tocqueville's De la démocratie en Amérique of 1835. For Tocqueville, the U.S. stood in significant contrast with the older nations of Europe on account not only of its democratic form of government but also of various features of the society out of which the new republic had grown. Some decades later, one finds claims remarkably similar to the foregoing being maintained on various occasions by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, even though of course out of political interests very different to those of Tocqueville. Again the contrast is drawn between the old world and the new: more specifically, in this case, between the established capitalist societies of Europe which possess "a developed formation of classes" and the nascent capitalist society of America in which classes "have not yet become fixed but continually change and interchange theft elements in constant flux."

A number of extensive cross-national comparisons of intergenerational social mobility have been carried out. Most comparisons to date have collapsed the mobility matrix to two categories, manual and non-manual, or three, if agricultural is included, and have used the odds ratio as the basis for mobility measures. However, this is based on only a small part of the mobility that has taken place, since most mobility is short-distance. The aim here is to propose a flexible framework within which social mobility measures can be defined which are insensitive to the margins, independent of the occupational categories used, and reflect all the mobility which has taken place. In the glissando case this is achieved by looking at the underlying distribution directly, which does not seem to have been done before. It is assumed that individuals can be ranked in descending order of occupational status (with ties allowed). The ranks are scaled so that the highest is 0 and the lowest 1. Researchers distinguished between societies whose social stratification system is a "glissando" and those in which social position is defined reasonably clearly along class lines, with a small number of discrete classes having fairly uniform economic rewards in each.