Class Origins, Education and Occupational Attainment: Cross-cohort Changes among Men in Britain

Studies of intergenerational class mobility and of intragenerational occupational mobility have of late tended to diverge in their concerns and methodology. This reflects assumptions regarding the increasing part played by education in intergenerational mobility and the decreasing part played by class origins in intragenerational mobility, once educational attainment is controlled. The paper contributes to the questioning of these assumptions on empirical grounds. Analyses are made of the occupational mobility of men in three British birth cohorts over the course of their earlier working lives :i.e. men born in 1946, 1958 and 1970. It is found that while the most important effect on mobility chances is that of educational qualifications, the importance of education does not increase across the three cohorts; that class origins also have a significant effect on mobility chances, and one that does not decrease across the cohorts; and that features of worklife experience, in particular the frequency of occupational changes, likewise have a persisting effect on mobility chances, independently of both education and class origins. However, while secular changes in mobility processes are scarcely in evidence, the analyses do provide strong indications of a cohort effect. Men in the 1958 birth cohort, whose first years in the labour market coincided with a period of severe recession, de-industrialisation and high unemployment, would appear to have experienced various lasting disadvantages in their subsequent occupational histories

The Economic Basis of Social Class

In this paper we adopt a theory of class positions based on employment relations to assess what implications individuals¿ class positions have for their economic life. In particular we consider economic security (the risk of unemployment), economic stability (the variability component in earnings) and economic prospects (lifetime earnings profiles). Our findings provide empirical support for the theory itself and little evidence for the currently fashionable claims of the decline, or even death, of class in today¿s society.social class, relations and conditions of employment, lifetime earnings, employment stability, employment security

McIntosh and Munk's Supposed Test of the Validity of the E-G Class Schema: A Comment

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Sociologiens nutidige krise: Hvordan undgår vi falsk pluralisme?

The present crisis in sociology: a way beyond spurious pluralism? At the end of the 20th century the state of sociology gives cause for serious con¬cern. The main reasons for this concern can be stated in three features of contem¬porary sociology: First, there is a manifest lack of integration of research and theory. This is a long-standing difficulty, but what makes it worse today than pre¬viously is, that it is now less often seen as a serious problem. Second, there is an evident collective failure among sociolo¬gists to decide just what kind of discip¬line sociology is or ought to be. For some sociology should aim to be a social scien¬ce and to have therefore well-defined links with other social sciences, such as economics and political science, and al¬so human sciences. For others such aspi¬rations represent an outmoded ”posi¬tivsm”. If sociology is to be thought of as a social science at all then it must be one of a distinctive kind; and the crucial inter¬disciplinary links should be with cer¬tains kinds of philosophy and with cul¬tural studies. Third and finally, there is disagreement about how the disagree¬ments on the nature of sociology should itself be viewed. Despite the state of intellectual disar¬ray today´s sociology has some signifi¬cant achievements which can be charac¬terised as success stories and two are mentioned in the article. The first suc¬cess story is about the quantitative soci¬al research: more specifically, research that involves both data collection and da¬ta analysis that are based on statistical methods and on the theory of probability. Through statistical modelling know¬ledge about important social regularities has been established and these social re¬gularities are of major theoretical signi¬ficance. The modelling has typically ena¬bled sociologists to separate out more clearly than before what are the probabi¬litic regularities inherent in complex da¬ta-sets. The second success story of sociology is that of the theory of social action. Today, if we want to have an effective kind of sociological theory then it will be a theory of social action of some kind or other. Two developments lead to this conclu¬sion. The first is the evident collapse of functionalist theory over the last two to three decades. For functionalism to have explanatory power it is necessary that the systems which are taken as the units of analysis should exists in a selective environment; i. e. there must be the possi¬bility that the systems will in some sense fail to survive. Then it becomes possible to explain their constituent feature by re¬ference to their ”survival value”. This ap¬proach underlines the need for sociologi¬cal explannation to have a ”micro-foun¬dation”: i.e. to comprise not only ”macro¬-to-micro” link but a ”micro-to-macro” link as well. We need to return to the in¬dividualistic tradition in sociology. The second argument goes as following: Wi¬thin the individualistic tradition, theory based on the concept of action has in fact shown much greater promise than the main alternative has: i. e. theory based on the concept of behaviour. The attempts to revitalise the individualistic tradition via the theory of social action has proved rewarding and it seems to be around rational action theory that we may best try to build up a more general theory of social action. Through the statistical modelling ba¬sed on data collection and the theory of probability on the one hand and through developing a theory of rational social ac¬tion within the individualistic tradition on the other hand we might be able to overcome the present difficulties of socio¬logy as a science

The pattern of social fluidity within the British class structure: a topological model

It has previously been shown that across three British birth cohorts, relative rates of intergenerational social class mobility have remained at an essentially constant level among men and also among women who have worked only full-time. We aim now to establish the pattern of this prevailing level of social fluidity and its sources and to determine whether it too persists over time, and to bring out its implications for inequalities in relative mobility chances. We develop a parsimonious model for the log odds ratios which express the associations between individuals’ class origins and destinations. This model is derived from a topological model that comprises three kinds of readily interpretable binary characteristics and eight effects in all, each of which does, or does not, apply to particular cells of the mobility table: i.e. effects of class hierarchy, class inheritance and status affinity. Results show that the pattern as well as the level of social fluidity is essentially unchanged across the cohorts; that gender differences in this prevailing pattern are limited; and that marked differences in the degree of inequality in relative mobility chances arise with long-range transitions where inheritance effects are reinforced by hierarchy effects that are not offset by status affinity effects

Continuing complexity: the university careers of a scientific elite in relation to their class origins and schooling

We report on continuing research on the UK scientific elite, intended to illustrate a proposed new approach to elite studies and based on a prosopography of Fellows of the Royal Society born from 1900. We extend analyses previously reported of Fellows' social origins and secondary schooling to take in their university careers as under- and postgraduates. The composite term ‘Oxbridge’, as often applied in elite studies, is called into question, as members of the scientific elite prove to have been recruited more from Cambridge than from Oxford. Particular interest then attaches to the relation between Fellows' social origins and schooling and their attendance at Cambridge. Among Fellows whose university careers were made at Cambridge, those of more advantaged class origins and those with private schooling are over-represented, although in this, as in various other respects, including Fellows' field of study, family influences persist independently of schooling. One suggestive interaction effect exists in that being privately educated increases the probability of having been at Cambridge more for Fellows from managerial than from professional families. Private schooling leading on to both undergraduate and postgraduate study at Cambridge can be identified as the educational ‘royal road’ into the scientific elite; and Fellows coming from higher professional and managerial families alike have the highest probability of having entered the elite in this way. But the most common route turns out in fact to be via state schooling and attendance at universities outside of ‘the golden triangle’ of Cambridge, Oxford and London; and this route is far more likely to have been followed by Fellows of all other class origins than higher professional. The relation between the degree of social skew in the recruitment of an elite and the degree of social homogeneity among its members can be more complex than has often been supposed

The mobility problem in Britain: new findings from the analysis of birth cohort data

Social mobility is now a matter of greater political concern in Britain than at any time previously. However, the data available for the determination of mobility trends are less adequate today than two or three decades ago. It is widely believed in political and in media circles that social mobility is in decline. But the evidence so far available from sociological research, focused on intergenerational class mobility, is not supportive of this view. We present results based on a newly-constructed dataset covering four birth cohorts that provides improved data for the study of trends in class mobility and that also allows analyses to move from the twentieth into the twenty-first century. These results confirm that there has been no decline in mobility, whether considered in absolute or relative terms. In the case of women, there is in fact evidence of mobility increasing. However, the better quality and extended range of our data enable us to identify other ‘mobility problems’ than the supposed decline. Among the members of successive cohorts, the experience of absolute upward mobility is becoming less common and that of absolute downward mobility more common; and class-linked inequalities in relative chances of mobility and immobility appear wider than previously thought

The economic benefits of volunteering and social class

A theory that the economic benefits of volunteering are contingent on social class (as defined by similarities in labour market situation) is tested using seven waves of longitudinal data from the British Household Panel Study gathered between 1996 and 2008 and fixed-effects models. Volunteering has a positive effect on earnings, but it is confined to people in professional and managerial occupations. Employees in white and blue collar jobs do not benefit. The study suggests that inconsistent results from previous studies might be due to failure to consider occupational heterogeneity among volunteers

Intergenerational social mobility and mid-life status attainment: influences of childhood intelligence, childhood social factors, and education

We examined the influences of childhood social background, childhood cognitive ability, and education on intergenerational social mobility and social status attainment at midlife. The subjects were men born in 1921 and who participated in the Scottish Mental Survey of 1932 and thereafter in the Midspan Collaborative study in Scotland between 1970 and 1973. In logistic regression analyses, childhood cognitive ability and height were associated with upward and downward change from father's social class to participant's social class at mid-life. Education significantly influenced upward social mobility. Number of siblings had no significant effect on social mobility. These effects were also examined after adjusting for the other variables. In structural equation modelling analyses, father's social class and childhood cognitive ability influenced social status attainment at midlife, with education and occupational status in young adulthood as partially mediating factors. It was noteworthy that childhood cognitive ability related more strongly to occupation in midlife than to first occupation. These data add to the relatively few studies that track the process of status attainment in adulthood, they provide information from a new geographical setting, and they contain information from a greater proportion of the lifecourse than do most existing studies

Civic republican social justice and the case of state grammar schools in England

The aim of this paper is to consider the ways in which civic republican theory can provide a meaningful and useful account of social justice, one that is which holds resonance for educational debates. Recognising the need for educationalists interested in civic republicanism to pay greater attention to ideas of justice – and in particular social justice as it concerns relationships between citizens (citizen to citizen, group to group or citizen to group) – it is argued that a form of civic republicanism committed to freedom as non-domination is capable of providing a substantive model for analysing social (in)justice within educational arenas. After positioning the contribution offered here within existing educational literature on civic republicanism, salient elements of social justice as freedom as non-domination are identified. On this basis, debates concerning the existence and potential expansion of state (public) grammar schools in England are considered in relation to the account of republican social justice as non-domination. It is argued that from this republican position grammar schools (1) represent an arbitrary domination of the interests of those less well off by those with greater material and cultural capital and (2) in doing so lead to advantages for some at the expense of others. Though the focus of the paper is on grammar schools in England, it is suggested that republican justice may be a useful frame for considering similar educational cases in England and elsewhere