Industrialization and Property Differentials

Abstract

Studies of social stratification and social mobility, especially those aiming at empirical examination of the industrialization theses, have largely employed variable-oriented strategy. The emphasis of variable-oriented strategy has resulted in a mass of inconsistent empirical findings and a paucity of theoretical consideration to hypotheses. The widening of property differentials in late 1980's Japan owing to the sharp rise of land prices has renewed two important (yet unsolved) questions : how much have property differentials expanded and how do we explain the differentials. These substantive and theoretical questions are indeed testimony to the failure of variable-oriented strategy.This paper proposes a new approach to analyse property differentials. First, we shift our analytical priority from the occupational prestige dimension to that of substantive differentials. Second, keeping the existence of other important factors in scope, we allocate our effort to producing theoretical hypotheses concerning mechanisms of the widening property differentials.