Occupational Mobility in Industrial Societies: A Comparative Analysis of Differential Access to Occupational Ranks in Seventeen Countries

Abstract

Using a set of national-sample data on occupational status change in a cross-section of 17 countries, we examined the hypothesized relationship between level of industrialization (measured by per capita energy consumption) and the circulatory rate of occupational mobility (defined in terms of the nonmanual-manual-farm classification). Results of the analysis indicated that cross-sectional variations in the rate of circulatory mobility per se were unrelated to the energy-consumption measure. Insofar as the rate of observed mobility covaried with energy consumption, it was because of historical features of the structure of production in the several countries-specifically, the extent to which productivity involved a large labor-intensive agricultural sector during the time of the fathers and the extent to which the structure of production (as represented in the distribution of occupational ranks) changed during the interval of the father-son comparisons.