Intergenerational Class Mobility Research Articles

Educational Status as a Mediator of Intergenerational Social Mobility in Europe: A Positional Analysis Approach

This paper investigates the transmission of educational attainment from parents to offspring as a mediator of intergenerational class mobility in Europe. The study covers the last two decades with data drawn from a cross-national large-scale sample survey, namely the European Social Survey (ESS), for the years 2002–2018. Interest has focused on the question of the persistence of inequality of educational opportunities by examining the attainment of nominal levels of education and the association between the educational attainment of the parent with the highest level of education and their descendants. The study also covers new trends in social mobility that consider education as a “positional good”, and a novel method of incorporating educational expansion into the transition probabilities is proposed, providing answers to whether the rising accessibility of educational qualifications attenuates the association between social origin and educational attainment. Therefore, the concept of positionality is taken into account in the estimation of intergenerational transition probabilities, and to complement the analysis, mobility measures are provided for both methods, nominal and positional. The proposed positional method is validated through a correlation analysis between the upward mobility scores (nominal and positional) with the Education Expansion Index (EEI) for the respective years. The upward mobility scores estimated via the positional method are more highly correlated with the EEI for all years, indicating a better alignment with the broader trends in educational participation and achievement.

The same social elevator? Intergenerational class mobility of second-generation immigrants across Europe

Abstract Ethnicity and social class are two of the main axes stratifying life chances in developed societies. Nevertheless, knowledge of the integration of ethnic minorities into the pattern of class reproduction remains incipient as evidence stems mostly from studies concentrating on specific ethnicities or single host countries. This article advances this knowledge by providing a comparative perspective on the intergenerational occupational mobility of second-generation immigrants and the majority population across 26 European countries. Drawing on pooled data from the European Social Survey (2004–2018), the article demonstrates that ethnic penalties arise for employment and occupational mobility in many countries, however, with crucial differences across and—to a smaller extent—within major country groups. Across countries, ethnic barriers for the second generation are connected to their social integration in the host society and the composition of the first migrant generation, emphasizing the importance of familial and social support for social advancement. By contrast, I detect no link between anti-immigration norms and ethnic penalties, and only mixed evidence for the role of integration policy. The article concludes that ‘ethnicity matters’ in many European societies, even if ethnic cleavages vary according to the composition of migrant populations and the context in the host society.

Historical evolution of intergenerational class mobility and educational effects in urban Argentina: 1960–2017

The Argentinean case –given an early modernization and the singularity of its reversal of development- is instructive about the role of education on intergenerational class mobility. We propose a wide historical analysis of time variations in intergenerational class mobility and the role of education over different periods in urban Argentina –specifically in the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Area, from 1960 to 2017. This is the first time a long-term social mobility study has been conducted in Argentina. We analyse intergenerational social mobility according to EGP class scheme, using absolute rates, log-linear models, and long-term counterfactual analysis. Results show a social fluidity process for men but not for women. The counterfactual analysis exhibits that most social fluidity among men was due to a reduction in the direct class origin-class destination effect. No evidence of effects of educational expansion or educational equalization is observed. This presence of moderate social fluidity has not been linked to a modernization process which expands vertical upward mobility. Instead, it took place in a context of deindustrialization and the decline of the skilled working class.

Resistance to Change: Intergenerational Class Mobility in Hungary, 1973–2018

The aim of this study is to describe long-term changes in intergenerational social mobility in Hungary between 1973 and 2018 and to provide an overview of the current situation that has not been examined previously. Our main questions are whether trends of the earlier periods continued and whether previous gender differences persisted at the end of the 2010s. According to our results total mobility continued to decline and it hit its lowest point in decades at the end of the 2010s. In addition, decreasing proportion of the population move upwards compared with their fathers and an increasing proportion experience the deterioration of their social position. While earlier research found that structural changes in society triggered upward mobility the polarising class structure after 1990 set into motion contrary trends. In this period, structural mobility increasingly typically meant downward mobility. As regards relative mobility chances associated with working in high and low occupational positions, we concluded that the ceiling seems to be stickier than the floor as a rule, that is, the role of origin is more decisive in keeping a favourable social position than in the transmission of a disadvantaged position across generations. The odds for someone born into unfavourable circumstances to rise are greater than for those of someone who was brought up in privileged circumstances to slide down.

Intergenerational class mobility in industrial and post-industrial societies: Towards a general theory

A large body of often rather complex findings on intergenerational social mobility has by now come into existence but theoretical development has not kept pace. In this paper, focusing specifically on class mobility in European nations and the US, we aim, first of all, to identify the main empirical regularities that have emerged from research, making the now standard distinction between absolute and relative mobility. Next, we review previous theories of mobility, leading up to what we label as the liberal theory, and we note the difficulties now evident with the latter, associated with its functionalist basis. We then set out our own theory of intergenerational class mobility, grounded in the subjectively rational courses of action followed by the various actors involved. We seek to show how the empirical regularities described can in this way be accounted for, while pointing to additional evidence that supports the theory but also to ways in which it is open to further empirical test. Finally, we consider some more general implications of the theory and, on this basis, venture a number of – conditional – predictions on the future of class mobility in more advanced societies.

Where Does Ascribed Privilege Get You in? Structural and Net Effects of Caste and Religious Belonging in India

Socio-economically advantaged upper castes tend to claim that Indian society is ‘post-caste’, suggesting that individuals from historically marginalized castes and religious groups do not face specific social barriers when attempting to move into white-collar positions. Alleged intergenerational mobility and the emergence of a ‘new middle class’ related to the growth of the private sector is widely used to counter affirmative action initiatives in higher education and public-sector recruitment. In this article, I test these claims by examining Brahmin, lower caste Dalit and Muslim patterns of intergenerational class and educational mobility of father–child pairs. I point to the strong role of caste and religion in shaping one’s destination, particularly when accessing top occupational positions in the private sector. These results question the meritocratic and casteless claims of the Indian ‘new middle class’ in post-liberalization India, and they call for more encompassing policies reducing origin-based inequality.

Mediation analysis for associations of categorical variables: The role of education in social class mobility in Britain

We analyse levels and trends of intergenerational social class mobility among three postwar birth cohorts in Britain and examine how much of the observed mobility or immobility in them could be accounted for by existing differences in educational attainment between people from different class backgrounds. We propose for this purpose a method which quantifies associations between categorical variables when we compare groups which differ only in the distribution of a mediating variable, such as education. This is analogous to estimation of indirect effects in causal mediation analysis but is here developed to define and estimate population associations of variables. We propose estimators for these associations which depend only on fitted values from models for the mediator and outcome variables, and propose variance estimators for them. The analysis shows that the part that differences in education play in intergenerational class mobility is by no means so dominant as has been supposed and that, while it varies with gender and with particular mobility transitions, it shows no tendency to change over time.

Corrigendum to: Intergenerational Class Mobility of Labour Market Entrants in Germany and the UK since the 1950s

Corrigendum to: Intergenerational Class Mobility of Labour Market Entrants in Germany and the UK since the 1950s

Intergenerational Class Mobility of Labour Market Entrants in Germany and the UK since the 1950s

Abstract This study examines over-time trends in intergenerational class mobility based on cohorts of labour market entrants in Germany and the UK since the 1950s. We calculate absolute and relative mobility rates, separately for men and women, using the German Socio-Economic Panel (1984–2016), the UK Household Longitudinal Study (2009–2016), and the UK Labour Force Survey (2014–2017). Regarding absolute mobility, we find marked country differences in upward and downward rates. In Germany, downward mobility decreased, while upward mobility rose. In the UK, downward mobility increased, while upward mobility declined. We provide evidence that these differences can be linked to contrasting changes in the distribution of origin and destination classes. Regarding relative mobility, striking country similarities appear. For both countries, we observe increases in social fluidity for respondents entering the labour market during the 1950s and 1960s that cease to continue for cohorts thereafter. Comparisons between adjacent cohorts do not provide evidence that social fluidity follows cyclical developments of the economy or shorter-term volatilities in the labour market.

Intergenerational class mobility over birth cohorts in Argentina and Spain

The focus of this paper is on an initial comparative analysis of intergenerational social (class) mobility over birth cohorts in Argentina and Spain. Our objective is to determine the extent to which these two cases of late industrialized countries share similar features of social mobility. Two central questions guide our work: 1) What have been the changes in absolute mobility rates in Argentina and Spain? 2) What has been the comparative evolution over time of the strength of class association? We are guided by two working hypotheses: 1) Given intergenerational changes in labor movements from rural to urban environments, plus the growth of the service class we expect to find a high degree of absolute mobility in both countries; and 2) following international literature, we expect to find a stable net association –controlling for structural changes– of class origins and destinations across birth cohorts in men, and social fluidity in the case of Spanish women.

Positional, Mobility, and Reference Effects: How Does Social Class Affect Life Satisfaction in Europe?

Abstract In this study, we analyse the effects of social class on life satisfaction. We develop a theoretical framework that shows how social class affects life satisfaction through five different pathways. Informed by this framework, we estimate the direct effects of class destination and class origin, the effect of own intergenerational class mobility, as well as the effects of others’ class position and mobility. To do so, we utilize European Social Survey waves 1 to 5 (2002–2010) and obtain information on life satisfaction as well as destination and origin class for about 80,000 respondents in 32 European countries. We find (i) class destination consistently and strongly structures life satisfaction across Europe, (ii) own class mobility has a significant impact on life satisfaction in Eastern Europe, as does (iii) the class mobility of others. The last finding points to the hitherto neglected importance of reference effects when considering the impact of social class on life satisfaction.

‘Primary’ Factors in Intergenerational Class Mobility in Europe: Results from the Application of a Topological Model

Abstract There is little consensus in past research regarding the sources of cross-national variation in relative rates of intergenerational class mobility. We argue for the importance of distinguishing between ‘primary’ factors that explain why inequalities in relative chances of mobility exist in the first place, and ‘secondary’ factors that explain variation in these chances. Our main aim is to identify primary factors. We follow Erikson and Goldthorpe in developing a topological model of the endogenous mobility regime which we then apply to class mobility tables for 30 European nations. The model claims that inequalities in relative class mobility chances derive from three kinds of effect: those of class hierarchy, class inheritance and status affinity. When applied to all nations together, the model accounts for the very large part of the total association between class origins and destinations. Clear differences, however, show up between the mobility regimes of men and of women: gender is a secondary factor. When the model is applied separately to nations in the high fluidity and low fluidity sets that we distinguish, we find that the effects of the primary factors identified by our model strengthen in a consistent way from the former set to the latter, although it seems likely that different secondary factors may operate in offsetting ways. Finally, when the model is applied to the groups of nations that we distinguish within the high and low fluidity sets, few differences in the strengths of the various effects show up, but those that do are highly concentrated in post-socialist nations and can be related to secondary factors of a specific kind associated with particular features of their transitions to some form of capitalist democracy.

Mobility Divergence in China? Complete Comparisons of Social Class Mobility and Income Mobility

Intergenerational social mobility has been of interest to economists and sociologists in recent years. However, with the development of methodologies and applications, it has been found that studying income mobility and class mobility separately often led to some conflicting findings. The class mobility and income mobility of China, a major developing country, has attracted the widespread interest of economists and sociologists from around the world. In this article, we attempt to answer the following questions: Should these divergent findings of intergenerational income and class mobility be regarded as a result of the differing data problems faced by researchers seeking to investigate income and class mobility or as a result of their differing analytical approaches? Is there a significant difference between intergenerational class mobility and income mobility in China? Our own comparative analysis involves measuring the magnitudes and temporal trends of intergenerational class mobility and income mobility. By using China Health and Nutrition Survey data, this paper explicitly tests the differences in the intergenerational associations of the income table and the class table from the “local”, “global”, and “comprehensive” perspectives, and provides smooth estimates of trends of both social class mobility and income mobility. This empirical study demonstrates that there is strong evidence showing that China’s class mobility and income mobility are not consistent in both fluidity levels and trend changes using the same data and same analytical approaches. Furthermore, there is a stronger association between fathers’ class and children’s class than between fathers’ income and children’s income, and the temporal trend of class mobility is more volatile than that of income mobility. This leads us to suggest that, in China, class may in general be a better indicator of socioeconomic status than one-shot measures of current income.

Intergenerational Class Mobility among Men and Women in Europe: Gender Differences or Gender Similarities?

AbstractIn this article, we address two inter-related questions. Are there gender differences in the level and the pattern of intergenerational class mobility? If so, do these differences show up in a uniform fashion in Europe? To answer these questions, we use a newly constructed comparative data set that allows us to examine how far differences between men and women in absolute and relative mobility can still be characterized in the same way as in the last decades of the 20th century. We also examine the effects of women’s heterogeneity in terms of labour market attachment on their class mobility. Our results show that in most countries, women are more likely than men to be found in different class positions to those of their parents’. But we point out that the reasons for this might be quite different in the West and in the East. As regards relative mobility chances, we are able to underwrite the dominant finding of past research that women display greater social fluidity than men only in a certain group of countries. In most countries, we do not find any systematic and uniform gender difference between men and women in the level of their relative mobility rates. But, we do find significant and systematic gender differences in the pattern of relative rates: women’s class mobility appears to be more impeded by hierarchical barriers than by the propensity for class inheritance. And, in this regard, our findings point to a large degree of commonality across European countries.

The Relation between Inequality and Intergenerational Class Mobility in 39 Countries

We study the relationship between inter-class inequality and intergenerational class mobility across 39 countries. Previous research on the relationship between economic inequality and class mobility remains inconclusive, as studies have confounded intra- with between-class economic inequalities. We propose that between-class inequality across multiple dimensions accounts for the inverse relationship between inequality and mobility: the larger the resource distance between classes, the less likely it is that mobility from one to the other will occur. We consider inequality in terms of between-class differences in three areas—education, wages, and income—and in a composite measure. Building on sociological mobility theory, we argue that cross-country variation in mobility results, in part, from families adapting to different levels of between-class inequality. Consistent with this hypothesis, we find a negative correlation between inter-class inequality and social fluidity, with between-class inequality being a better predictor of mobility chances than conventional distributional measures. We also find that the resource distance between classes is negatively related to the strength of their intergenerational association for some off-diagonal origin and destination (OD) class combinations.

Intergenerational Class Mobility in Europe: A New Account

Comparative research into intergenerational social mobility has been typically restricted to a relatively small number of countries. The aim of this paper is to widen the perspective, and to provide an up-to-date account of rates of intergenerational class mobility across 30 European countries, using a newly-constructed comparative data-set based on the European Social Survey. Absolute mobility rates are found to vary quite widely with national differences in the extent and pattern of class structural change. As regards relative rates, countries are best seen as falling into groups within comparatively high and low fluidity sets, within which groups a high degree of cross-national commonality prevails. Further results indicate that country differences in relative rates play only a very limited part in accounting for country differences in absolute rates, confirming that the latter are primarily determined by class structural change. Based on our findings, we suggest a restatement of the FJH-hypothesis to the effect that in societies with a capitalist market economy, a nuclear family system and a liberal-democratic polity, a limit exists to the extent to which relative rates of class mobility can be equalized, which countries may move closer to or, in the case of post-socialist societies, recede from.

La pesada mochila del origen de clase. Escolaridad y movilidad intergeneracional de clase en Argentina, Chile y México

Analizamos el papel de la escolaridad en la movilidad intergeneracional de clase en Argentina, Chile y México. Para entender el papel de la escolaridad es importante identificar sus efectos como mediadora, ecualizadora y atenuante. Especificamos conceptual y metodológicamente estos efectos y generamos indicadores empíricos para ellos, usando datos de encuestas nacionales de movilidad social. Nuestros resultados indican que la escolaridad es un fuerte mediador en los tres países. Sin embargo, su papel como ecualizador varía entre países y no existe de un papel significativo como atenuante de la asociación entre orígenes y destinos de clase. Por tanto, cualquier interpretación simplista del efecto de la escolaridad en la movilidad de clase en América Latina se confrontará con una realidad más compleja, en la que la escolaridad es claramente una variable interviniente importante, pero tiene una contribución limitada en la neutralización de los efectos de los orígenes en los destinos de clase.

Family Structure and Intergenerational Class Mobility in Japan:

Family Structure and Intergenerational Class Mobility in Japan:

Reply to James McFarland's review of "Red Kant: Aesthetics, Marxism and the Third Critique" German Studies Review

Reviewed by: Reply to James McFarland's review of "Red Kant: Aesthetics, Marxism and the Third Critique" German Studies Review Mike Wayne Reply to James McFarland's review of "Red Kant: Aesthetics, Marxism and the Third Critique" German Studies Review40, no. 3(2017): 632– 634. In his highly problematic assessment of Siegfried Kracauer's work, Theodor Adorno adopted the rather disreputable method of building a psychological profile of Kracauer and then reading his work off from that. It was not Adorno's finest hour and perhaps it is not too generous to say the same of James McFarland's review of my book Red Kant: Aesthetics, Marxism and the Third Critique. At least Adorno could claim to have [End Page 452]had a long friendship with Kracauer, although no doubt one that got a lot cooler after Adorno's published assessment. Imagine my surprise then when at the end of a disappointingly superficial engagement and apparently willfully misleading presentation of my arguments, I find this piercing psychological insight, camouflaged by a rather, how shall I say it, "underdeveloped" sociological framework? A reader gets the feeling that Wayne's anticapitalist rhetoric reflects a sociological function played by research universities in modern capitalist societies, as sites of potential intergenerational class mobility, with all the psychological ambivalence such transplantations engender. The drama of Red Kantis thus primarily a personal drama; Wayne's demonstration that despite his immersion in a world of academic debate and conceptual reflection far removed from any directly practical effects on the material conditions of social existence, he has not lost his sympathy for ordinary hardworking people. Wayne's search for an "antibourgeois" Kant is an apology for the appearance of class abandonment in the adoption of academic forms of production. (634) I know this is only a book review, but is it too much to ask from the editors of the journal a little more attention to such scholarly protocols as actually engaging with the substance of a text even if the author disagrees with it? Admittedly I did use the terms "bourgeois" and "antibourgeois" as something of a provocation, and it seems I was perhaps overly successful. Someone seems to have taken the hook, line, and sinker. I was not however silly enough to use such terms without defining and contextualizing them. On the first page of the first chapter I note that we may define "bourgeois scholarship on Kant as constitutionally unable to interrogate the historical and class-conditioned nature of Kant's work or its own interpretations" (7). As for "antibourgeois" the term is used in relation to a carefully prepared and extended discussion of the work of Bourdieu and Rancière on the aesthetic and is meant to indicate a reading of Kant that avoids the twin philosophical traps of crude materialism and wild idealism, which, in part, these two thinkers, respectively, can be faulted on. Of course the notion that history and class inscribes itself into the innermost workings of philosophical traditions in a set of complex antinomies derives from Lukács's work. I am fairly sure that this was not motivated by a guilt-ridden psychodrama on his part and I can say the same for my own work as well. Red Kantgoes further than Lukács in elaborating lines of thought and potentialities in Kant's work that may be helpful for our own historical moment and in suggesting that it is Kant's aesthetic turn, as it were, that allows Kant to start to push beyond those bourgeois antinomies. In this I take a cue from Lucien Goldmann who was more receptive than Lukács in thinking about Kant as a protodialectical thinker. If the term bourgeois indicates a horizon beyond which thought cannot go, it does not [End Page 453]of course say anything about the respective merits of the content of a philosophy or theory. What it does suggest however is that it works as a diagnostic tool and a premise for immanent critique. Assuming that we cannot do without much of what we have inherited from the past, immanent critique explores the internal tensions and contradictions of a work, in order to equip ourselves...

Educational Attainment and Intergenerational Class Mobility of the Second-Generation Immigrant in Japan: Analyzing High School Enrollment

Educational Attainment and Intergenerational Class Mobility of the Second-Generation Immigrant in Japan: Analyzing High School Enrollment