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Der Beitrag untersucht mit dem Zusammenhang zwischen sozialer Ungleichheit und berufsstrukturellen Veränderungen die Folgen von Tertiarisierung und Dienstleistungsexpansion für die Sozialstruktur Deutschlands. Zunächst werden mit Entstrukturierung, Polarisierung und Entkopplung drei sozialstrukturelle Entwicklungspfade theoretisch hergeleitet. Während eine Entstrukturierung aufbrechende Klassenstrukturen impliziert, deutet Polarisierung auf eine zunehmende vertikale Ungleichheit zwischen oberen und unteren Positionen hin. Die Entkopplung hingegen beschreibt eine gleichzeitige vertikale und horizontale Veränderung der Klassenstruktur, in der eine Klassenlage sich vertikal von horizontal ähnlichen Lagen wegbewegt, und impliziert damit eine partielle Polarisierung. Diese alternativen Pfade werden mit Blick auf Veränderungen der Klassenstruktur, der Einkommensungleichheit sowie der intergenerationalen Mobilität deskriptiv für die letzten 40 Jahre anhand von repräsentativen Querschnittsbefragungen untersucht. In der Gesamtschau lassen sich erste Anzeichen für eine Entkopplung der Dienstleistungssegmente finden, die mit zunehmender Schließung ausgewählter oberer Klassenlagen zusammenfällt.

We study the relationship between inter-class inequality and intergenerational class mobility across 39 countries. Previous research on the relationship between economic inequality and class mobility remains inconclusive, as studies have confounded intra- with between-class economic inequalities. We propose that between-class inequality across multiple dimensions accounts for the inverse relationship between inequality and mobility: the larger the resource distance between classes, the less likely it is that mobility from one to the other will occur. We consider inequality in terms of between-class differences in three areas—education, wages, and income—and in a composite measure. Building on sociological mobility theory, we argue that cross-country variation in mobility results, in part, from families adapting to different levels of between-class inequality. Consistent with this hypothesis, we find a negative correlation between inter-class inequality and social fluidity, with between-class inequality being a better predictor of mobility chances than conventional distributional measures. We also find that the resource distance between classes is negatively related to the strength of their intergenerational association for some off-diagonal origin and destination (OD) class combinations.

Socioeconomic inequality and conflicts regarding distributional issues have resurfaced in many OECD countries over the past three decades. Whereas most research has focused on the objective determinants of perceived social conflicts, we contribute a new facet to this discussion by assessing the relevance of collective stratification beliefs as an independent driver of vertical conflict perceptions. After formulating theoretical positions that give precedence to two factors in explaining the perceptions of social conflicts – objective inequality and the collective stratification belief – we use individual-level data from the 2009 International Social Survey Programme, along with suitable country-level indicators to evaluate both hypotheses. Amid the diverse collective stratification beliefs, we focus on the role of an egalitarian (middle-) class imagery. We are particularly interested in the extent to which such a class imagery can mediate the relationship between socioeconomic inequality and individual conflict perceptions. The results of our multilevel analyses of 27 OECD countries indicate that an egalitarian (middle-) class imagery held by a certain share of a country’s population constitutes a distinct dimension of reality and clearly dominates country-level objective inequality in the explanation of individually perceived social conflicts.

This chapter investigates intergenerational class mobility in the U.S. during the twentieth century. It describes absolute and relative mobility trends and explores the role of educational expansion in shaping them. Analyses are based on data from several nationally representative surveys (GSS, OCG-II, SIPP, and PSID). As a consequence of massive occupational and educational upgrading, upward mobility increased over most of the century. The role of education in contributing to absolute class mobility changed across time: Class gaps in education as well as class returns to education equalized initially, but became more polarized among recent cohorts. Relative mobility trends differed by gender: After an initial surge in fluidity for both, mobility chances remained stable for women but increased further for men. Rising fluidity among men is mostly due to increasing college graduation rates (i.e., the compositional effect), whereas educational trends contribute little to understanding the stability of women’s mobility chances.

Der politische Erfolg rechter Parteien und Bewegungen in den letzten Jahren motivierte eine Vielzahl sozialwissenschaftlicher Studien zur näheren Bestimmung ihrer Wählerschaft und Sympathisanten. Dabei stehen sich unterschiedliche Erklärungszusammenhänge gegenüber, die entweder auf die objektive soziale Lage oder die subjektive Verunsicherung abzielen. Unser Beitrag bietet eine differenzierte sozialstrukturelle Standortbestimmung der politischen Rechten. Zudem untersuchen wir mit quer- und längsschnittlichen Verfahren die relative Erklärungskraft objektiver wie subjektiver Faktoren bei der Erklärung rechter politischer Parteiidentifikation und testen ob subjektive Verunsicherungen rechte Parteiidentifikation erklären kann. Wir zeigen, dass objektive Lage und subjektive Faktoren unabhängig voneinander die Wahrscheinlichkeit, sich mit rechten Parteien zu identifizieren, beeinflussen. Somit greifen Erklärungen, die nur auf objektiven oder subjektiven Einflussfaktoren basieren, zu kurz.

First published online: 26 September 2018 We study the evolution of intergenerational inequality of college attainment in the United States over the 20th century. For this purpose, we expand the Breen-Goldthorpe model of educational investment behaviour and show formally that a rise in the costs of college education and in inequality in economic resources by social origins lead to an increase in inequality in educational attainment. In our empirical analysis we use five different national representative surveys and focus on the chances of college attainment by parental college education for birth cohorts from 1900 to 1987. Our results confirm that relative inequality in college attainment, measured in terms of odds ratios, declined over most of the 20th century with equalization levelling off beginning with birth cohorts in the 1960s. At the same time, the absolute differences in the percentage of graduates among children of college-educated parents and children of non-graduates have remained remarkably stable across the century. Based on our formal model, we finally explore future scenarios for the trends in college attainment inequality. Given high resource inequality and rising costs for college education, our models point to a decline in college attainment of individuals with non-graduate backgrounds and consequently to a rise of relative inequality in college attainment by parental education. While not yet discernible, such a development might lead to a possible U-shape trend for recent and current birth cohorts in the near future.

This contribution provides a long-term assessment of intergenerational social mobility trends in the United States across the 20th and early 21st century and assesses the determinants of those trends. In particular, we study how educational expansion has contributed to the observed changes in mobility opportunities for men across cohorts. Drawing on recently developed decomposition methods, we empirically identify the contribution of each of the multiple channels through which changing rates of educational participation shape mobility trends. We find that a modest but gradual increase in social class mobility can nearly exclusively be ascribed to an interaction known as the compositional effect, according to which the direct influence of social class backgrounds on social class destinations is lower among the growing number of individuals attaining higher levels of education. This dominant role of the compositional effect is also due to the fact that, despite pronounced changes in the distribution of education, class inequality in education has remained stable while class returns to education have shown no consistent trend. Our analyses also provide a cautionary tale about mistaking increasing levels of social class mobility for a general trend towards more fluidity in the United States. The impact of parental education on son's educational and class attainment has grown or remained stable, respectively. Here, the compositional effect pertaining to the direct association between parental education and son's class attainment counteracts a long-term trend of increasing inequality in educational attainment tied to parents' education.

Based on data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and the Socio-economic Panel, we study the class mobility of three concurrent generations in the U.S. and Germany. We find that, in both countries, the grandfathers’ class is directly associated with their grandchildren's social position. We propose three possible mechanisms which could explain the observed multigenerational mobility patterns. First, we consider the role of class-specific resources for mobility strategies. Second, we suggest a more general explanation by integrating grandparents’ class into the reference frame for mobility decisions. Third, we argue that multigenerational class associations could be the result of categorical inequality based on race or ethnicity. We find that outflow mobility rates differ across grandfathers’ class positions. Three-generational immobility is most frequent in lower and higher class positions. Log-linear analyses show that, in both countries, significant grandfather effects foster immobility within most classes and limit mobility between the working and service classes in Germany specifically. These effects partially lose significance if we only study white Americans and native Germans. Combining the two national mobility tables, we find that the pattern of three-generational mobility is similar in both countries.

Before the analysis of social mobility in Germany commences, the utilized sample will be discussed in some detail to give the reader an overview of the studied population. Table 26 displays selected characteristics of the German sample for each cohort and, in the last column, for the full sample. The whole sample consists of 75,625 individuals, of whom 45% are women, 22% lived in East Germany at the time of the interview and around 10% were born outside Germany.

It is good practice to test the validity of a new tool or a new operationalization of an old tool before it is applied in actual research. Validating a measure consists of testing whether it reflects the underlying theoretical logic (criterion validity) and at the same time accounts for meaningful horizontal and vertical differences with regards to several socio-demographic outcomes (construct validity) in the United States and Germany (Evans & Mills, 1998). Despite what the testing language seemingly implies, validity cannot be proven once and for all in social sciences because, firstly, we work with one proxy for several latent properties and, secondly, both our measure and what should be measured may change over time or even through the very act of observation.

While none of the reviewed class schemes is fully adapted to the task at hand, each class scheme provides unique elements that are necessary to derive a conceptualization of the inequality space for the analysis of social mobility in post-industrial societies. Each scheme employs a distinct logic for the assignment of occupational positions to classes. While Goldthorpe argues that it is the employment relations which differentiate occupations appropriately with regards to asset endowment and career prospects, Oesch and Esping-Andersen favor work logic and individual credentials or occupational skill sets to delimit class locations.

This last chapter has two aims. First, it picks up the multiple threads that run through this work and tries to create a synopsis of the preceding chapters to provide a unified understanding of this work and its results. The remainder of this chapter tries to answer the one big final question that cannot remain unanswered in a comparative work: the question of differences between the intergenerational permeability in the United States and Germany.

Following from the social fluidity model presented in the preceding chapter, Table 43 summarizes the different effects which are expected to govern the intergenerational association between origins and destinations in Germany. By constraining the 13 empty cells to take an interaction parameter of zero, the sum of the values of the parameter effects within each cell can be interpreted in line with Erikson and Goldthorpe as the propensity to be mobile relative to a neutral fluidity level, i.e. the fluidity in cells without any parameter, net of the fitted margins. While this arbitrary reference level reduces the interpretability of the strength of each single parameter, the common reference group allows to compare the size of fluidity parameters against each other.

After studying social fluidity in Germany in the chapter before, the present chapter is dedicated to the analysis of social fluidity in the United States. In the following, the American variant of the social fluidity model will be explained. Initially, the model is applied to American data (Ch. 12.1).

One of the most noteworthy results of the foregoing study of absolute mobility was that the change in social origins, class destinations and absolute intergenerational mobility followed similar patterns in both countries under study. The unique possibility of studying social mobility from a comparative perspective over the longue duree revealed that although differences between the United States and Germany are observable, the trends in each country evolved in parallel. This is of course no historical accident but the outcome of similar economic, political and social developments that took place in Germany and the United States over most of the 20th century and similarly shaped the opportunity structure for mobility.

After studying absolute mobility patterns in Germany, we now turn to the United States. This chapter follows the analytic strategy developed for the German analysis. All the following analyses draw on the compiled dataset described in Ch. 6.

After introducing the IPICS scheme and testing its validity, this chapter will describe each class with regards to its socio-demographic composition and discuss the relationship between IPICS classes and social stratification. The latter discussion focuses on education and income positions, which are both rewards and entrance requirements for class attainment, as much as significant resources for intergenerational mobility strategies. Again, I am interested in horizontal and vertical class differences and end with the presentation of class profiles, including the information from both the current chapter and Ch. 5.

The foregoing introductory section singled out two curiously opposing societal developments that are hard to reconcile with each other. A massive occupational structural transformation coincided over the last century with a remarkable stability of relative mobility rates. As I have argued at the end, any finding of change but also stability in the relative openness might result from a changing composition of the class structure.

In the following analyses, we use data from several surveys in each country. The criteria for inclusion in this study are nationally representative sampling designs and detailed information on respondents and their parents’ occupations. Furthermore, surveys were selected as to cover information from the last 40 or more years in order to obtain data for as many birth cohorts as possible.

In the first part of this chapter, I will discuss selected social, economic and political evolutions that might have affected social mobility over the last century. Between the turn of the century and the demise of socialism, the world experienced not only some of the most gruesome catastrophes but also several technological and social revolutions. Following Hobsbawm (1994), one can describe this century as mainly made up of four decades of crises (the two World Wars and the Great Depression), nearly three golden decades of rising equality and living standards (Golden Age or Trente Glorieuse) and three decades of economic crises and global insecurity.

Mit dem von Bourdieu entlehnten Begriff der Laufbahnklassen entwickelt der Beitrag ein dynamisiertes Verständnis sozialer Klassenzugehörigkeit im Lebensverlauf, das neben der Existenz stabiler Klassenzugehörigkeiten auch typische Aufstiegs- und Abstiegsmobilitäten als eigenständige Klassen(fraktionen) zulässt. Empirisch wird das Konzept der Laufbahnklassen mithilfe von Sequenzmusteranalysen individueller Erwerbsverläufe umgesetzt. Auf Basis von Daten des Sozio-oekonomischen Panels werden individuelle Klassenzugehörigkeiten - operationalisiert über das EGP-Klassenschema - von Männern und Frauen über jeweils 15 Jahre hinweg und für vier separate Alterskohorten verfolgt. Neben einer beachtlichen Stabilität der Klassenzugehörigkeit finden wir bei den Männern auch typische auf- und abstiegsmobile Laufbahnklassen, die auf spezifische institutionelle Schließungsmechanismen, aber auch Karrierepfade verweisen. Bei den Frauen dominieren dagegen klassenspezifische Muster der Erwerbsein- und -ausstiege. Anhand von Indikatoren der Akkumulation ökonomischen, kulturellen und sozialen Kapitals lassen sich die Laufbahnklassen zugleich anhand spezifischer Strategien der sozialen Platzierung beschreiben.

Die Frage nach der sozialen und mentalen Verfassung der Mittelschichten bewegt seit einiger Zeit die Gemuter. Okonomische Analysen zeigen ein „Schrumpfen der Mittelschicht“ infolge einer Polarisierung der Einkommensverteilung (vgl. Grabka/Frick 2008), Umfragen zu den Angsten und Sorgen der Mittelschichten deuten auf eine Zunahme von Statusangsten und -unsicherheiten (vgl. Herbert-Quandt-Stiftung 2007; Lengfeld/Hirschle 2009 und in diesem Band), und Reportagen uber individuelle Abstiege von ehemaligen Angehorigen der Mittelschicht zu Hartz IV-Empfanger/innen bebildern dramatisch, wie schnell man nach dem Wegfall der Arbeitslosenhilfe, die ehemals als Pufferzone zwischen Arbeitslosengeld und Sozialhilfe fungierte, nach „ganz unten“ durchrutschen kann (vgl. Klinger/Konig 2006).