Social Fluidity in Industrial Nations: England, France and Sweden

Abstract

In a paper recently published, we have compared rates of intergenerational class mobility among the adult male populations of England, France and Sweden.l The results we have reported stand in some opposition to the well-known thesis of Lipset and Zetterberg which claims that the mobility patterns of the industrial societies of the western world are 'much the same'.2 While our results could lend support to the idea of there being a 'family resemblance' among the class mobility patterns of England, France and Sweden, each of these countries was at the same time found to have a fairly distinctive 'rnobility profile' when intergenerational movements in class position were examined on the basis of a ninefold class schema. Inflow rates, or patterns of class recruitment, showed especially marked crossnational variation. A major factor creating such variation was evidently that of historically-determined differences in the class structures of the three societies, most notably ones associated with the relative sizes of their agricultural sectors and with differing rates of contraction of employment in agriculture in the course of economic development. Lipset and Zetterberg, it may be recalled, excluded from consideration all mobility either from or to agricultural classes and thus, in our view, biassed their data unduly in favour of the thesis that they proposed. The present paper follows on directly from our earlier publication. Basically, the question it treats is the following: can the variation that we have observed in class mobility rates for England, France and Sweden be in fact attributed entirely to differences in the evolution of the class structures of these societies or in other factors affecting the 'demand' and 'supply' conditions attending mobility; or is it rather the case that there are, in addition to such structural sources of variation, differences also among the three societies in the pattern of what we would term their 'social fluidity' or, in other words, in mobility considered independently of structural influences? To use