Vertical Mobility and Class Inheritance in the British Isles

Abstract

This paper compares vertical mobility in Dublin and England and Wales as displayed in mobility tables using the seven class categories developed by Goldthorpe (1980). A model is developed * which demonstrates the pattern of vertical mobility in each country and also allows us to measure the extent of class inheritance as distinct from class self-recruitment. The data are used to test the FJH thesis, and some differences between Dublin and England and Wales - in their degree of'openness' and in the relative standings of the different classes - are examined.. Patterns of relative mobility are found to differ quite strongly between the two with Dublin being considerably less open than England and Wales. In recent years two main approaches have been taken in testing the modification of the Lipset-Zetterberg thesis advanced by Featherman, Lancaster-Jones and Hauser.l The original Lipset-Zetterberg thesis stated that 'the overall pattern of social mobility appears to be much the same in the industrial societies of various western countries'2 while the revision of Featherman, Lancaster-Jones and Hauser, which we term the FJH thesis (following Erikson, Goldthorpe and Portocarero),3 claims that relative mobility chances are distributed in a crossnationally similar fashion, while allowing for the existence of crossnational differences in absolute mobility flows. In other words, the FJH thesis allows for cross-population variation in the marginal distribution of fathers' and sons' occupations (origins and destinations) but hypothesizes broadly similar patterns of association between * . . . Orlglns anc . c .estlnatlons. The two approaches commonly taken in examining the FJH thesis are, firstly, the comparative analysis of a large number of relatively small tables;4 and, secondly, the examination of a smaller number of somewhat larger tables, permitting more detailed investigation of mobility patterns.5 This paper presents an example of the latter kind