CLASS ORIGINS, EDUCATION AND OCCUPATIONAL ATTAINMENT IN BRITAIN

Abstract

ABSTRACT Studies of intergenerational class mobility and of intragenerational occupational mobility have of late tended to diverge in their concerns and methodology. This reflects assumptions regarding the increasing part played by education in intergenerational mobility and the decreasing part played by class origins in intragenerational mobility, once education is controlled. The paper contributes to the questioning of these assumptions on empirical grounds. Analyses are made of the occupational mobility of men in three British birth cohorts over the course of their earlier working lives. We find that while educational qualifications have a strong effect on occupational attainment, this effect does not increase across the three cohorts; that class origins also have a significant effect, and one that does not decrease across the cohorts; and that features of work-life experience, in particular the frequency of occupational changes, likewise have a persisting effect, independently of both education and class origins. Secular changes in mobility processes are thus scarcely in evidence, but the analyses do provide strong indications of a cohort effect. Men in the 1958 birth cohort, whose first years in the labour market coincided with a period of severe recession, de-industrialisation and high unemployment, would appear to have experienced various lasting disadvantages in their subsequent occupational histories.