Rethinking Social Mobility: The Microclass Contribution to Inequality Reproduction
The Overlooked Role of Detailed Occupations in Intergenerational Social Mobility
Introduction: The Problem of Measuring Social Mobility
Core Question: Are children born into privilege or less privileged families fated to remain in their class of origin? This question is crucial for assessing the fairness of competition for money, power, and prestige.
Conventional View: Many believe that what truly matters is whether the competition for riches is fair, offering everyone an equal chance regardless of parental advantage.
Extensive Research: This commitment to fair competition has driven vast research on mobility rates, cross-national comparisons, and trends in opportunity.
Purpose of this Chapter: To critically assess the adequacy of conventional mobility monitoring methods, arguing that they often overlook crucial forms and sources of rigidity.
Limitations of Conventional Mobility Approaches
Long-Standing Convention: The field traditionally assumes intergenerational reproduction takes one of two forms:
Categorical Form (Big-Class Approach): Parents pass on broad class positions (e.g., manager, professional, craft worker) to their children.
Gradational Form (Socioeconomic Approach): Parents pass on their socioeconomic standing or occupational prestige to their children.
Ignored Role of Detailed Occupations: Both standard approaches traditionally overlook the significant role of specific, detailed occupations in reproducing inequality.
Historical Bifurcation: The study of mobility codified a half-century ago, separating into:
Gradational Camp: Representing social structure in terms of a continuous scale (e.g., Svalastoga 1959).
Big-Class Camp: Representing social structure in terms of discrete, large classes (e.g., Carlsson 1958; Glass 1954).
Simplifying Assumptions: While detailed occupations were often the starting point, they were transformed by either aggregating into big classes or scaling by socioeconomic status/prestige. These simplifying assumptions were adopted with limited evidence of their adequacy.
Incompleteness of Conventional Models: The authors contend that both class and gradational representations are incomplete, obscuring important rigidities within the mobility regime.
The Importance of Detailed Occupations (Microclasses)
Fundamental Conduits of Reproduction: Detailed occupations are proposed as a third, fundamental representation, crucial for revealing the underlying structure of inequality.*
Conduit for Resources: Social, cultural, and economic resources conveyed to children depend fundamentally on parents' detailed occupations.
Omnibus Indicator: Detailed occupations serve as a powerful indicator of individuals' social worlds, indexing:
Life Chances & Capacities: Skills, credentials, earnings potential, networks.
Honor & Esteem: Prestige, socioeconomic status.
Social & Cultural World: Consumption practices, politics, attitudes.
Information Richness: Asking "What do you do?" yields more useful information than asking about income because occupation is strongly correlated with many life variables (Weeden and Grusky 2005).
Footnote 1: Occupations are referred to as "microclasses" because they share many characteristics typically attributed to big classes.
Mechanisms of Intergenerational Reproduction
Though not exclusive, occupations are a major conduit, alongside big-class and socioeconomic mechanisms. A comprehensive mobility model should examine all three:
Gradational Regime (Socioeconomic Approach):
Nature of Inequality: Simple, unidimensional, with families arrayed by income or occupational status.
Life Chances: Children's life chances are a function of their standing in this unidimensional queue.
Mechanism: Children born high in the queue secure high-status/rewarded occupations due to:
(1) Economic Resources: Privileged access to wealth/income to purchase elite education or jobs (e.g., proprietorship).
(2) Social Networks: Privileged access to information and entry for desirable occupations.
(3) Cultural Resources: Socialization that motivates them, and provides cognitive/interactional skills (e.g., "culture of critical discourse").
Key Idea: The total amount of economic, social, and cultural resources matters. (Hout and Hauser 1992).
Ideal-Typical Depiction: Shown in Figure 55.1a, where mobility chances decrease as the distance between origin and destination socioeconomic scores increases.
Big-Class Regime:
Nature of Inequality: Mutually exclusive and exhaustive classes, conveying a package of conditions (e.g., employment relations), a structuring social environment, and an adapted culture.
Life Chances: All children in the same class have largely the same mobility chances, even if parental occupations differ in conditions or socioeconomic standing. The "logic of the class situation" is overriding.
Distinction from Gradational: Two big classes of similar status may not convey identical mobility chances if they differ on non-status dimensions impacting mobility (e.g., proprietors vs. routine nonmanuals).
Mechanism (Examples):
Tastes and Aspirations: Class-specific development (e.g., proprietors' children developing a taste for autonomy; routine nonmanuals' children for stability).
Human Capital: Cultivated in class-specific ways (e.g., entrepreneurial skills for proprietors' children; bureaucratic skills for routine nonmanuals' children).
Social Capital: Distributed in class-specific ways (e.g., entrepreneurial opportunities for proprietors' children; routine nonmanual opportunities for routine nonmanuals' children).
Physical Capital: Tangible assets passed on (e.g., a shop or business for proprietors' children).
Outcome: Children are specially positioned for occupations aligning with the culture, training, contacts, and capital of their class origins, not generic access to all comparable occupations.
Ideal-Typical Depiction: Represented in Figure 55.1b, where off-diagonal cells generally have similar density, indicating class-specific reproduction.
Microclass Regime (Occupational Approach):
Shared Presumption with Big-Class: Labor markets are balkanized into discrete categories.
Key Difference: Balkanization takes the form of institutionalized occupations (e.g., doctor, plumber, postal clerk) rather than institutionalized big classes.
Consequence: Occupations within big classes have differing propensities for mobility/immobility due to distinctive occupational worlds affecting aspirations, valued/accessible skills, and networks (see Table 55.1).
Mechanism (Example of Carpenters' Children): Exposure to carpentry skills at home, socialization appreciating carpentry as a vocation, and embeddedness in social networks providing information for becoming and securing jobs as carpenters.
"Lumpiness" of Class: Much finer in a microclass regime than a big-class regime (see Figure 55.1c).
Transmission of Skills: While the home-workplace separation may weaken transmission, it is not precluded. Parents transmit occupation-specific human capital:
Sociologist: Discusses sociology, litters home with related books, inculcates sociological perspective.
Engineer: Brings home building toys, focuses conversations on "how things work," discussing structural failure of buildings.
Mechanic: Repairs at home, takes children to repair shop, encourages interest in fixing things.
Seamstress: Talks fashion, takes children to fashion shows, trains them in sewing/design.
Parental Influence: Occupational commitments affect home discussions, parent-child time, and skills imparted.
Combining Mechanisms in a Comprehensive Model
Critique of Purist Models: The field has often built purist gradational or big-class models.
Proposed Model: Combines all three forms (big class, microclass, gradational) to tease out the net contribution of each.
Research Questions:
Does the mobility regime contain extreme microclass rigidity pockets concealed by big-class aggregation?
Is microclass reproduction the main mechanism for big-class reproduction?
Anticipated Outcome: An affirmative answer would imply more microclass rigidity than conventionally recognized and less big-class rigidity than conventionally assumed.
Cross-National Context and Data
Generic Feature of Late Industrialism: Microclass reproduction is likely a generic feature, with mechanisms present in all countries (see Table 55.1).
Institutional Influence: The relative strength of big-class vs. microclass reproduction depends on institutional forms (e.g., trade unions supporting big-class structuration; state-supported occupational closure supporting microclass structuration).
Countries Analyzed: Germany, United States (occupationalization), Sweden (big-class organization), Japan (stratified by family/firm) – chosen for their differing institutional mixes to explore the reach of microclass mechanisms.
Focus of Presentation: Presents shared cross-national features of mobility, referring to Jonsson et al. (2009, 2011) for cross-national variation.
Data Sets (Table 55.2): Information on father's occupation, child's occupation and age, and other coding variables. Large datasets are required, often pooled from multiple surveys (except Sweden).
Sweden: Children's occupational data from 1990 Census, parents' from 1960 and 1970 Censuses (Erikson and Jonsson 1993).
Focus on Men's Mobility: Due to the complexity of women's mobility processes, which are discussed in Jonsson et al. (2009).
Comparability Challenges: Compromises on period covered and respondent age (e.g., US data disproportionately from earlier periods, Swedish data for 30-47 year olds vs. 30-64 for others). Shown not to significantly affect results (Jonsson et al. 2009).
Microclass Coding Scheme and Big-Class Distinctions
Starting Point: Detailed microclass coding scheme (Table 55.2).
Microclass Definition: "A grouping of technically similar jobs that is institutionalized in the labor market through such means as (a) an association or union, (b) licensing or certification requirements, or (c) widely diffused understandings . . . regarding efficient or otherwise preferred ways of organizing production and dividing labor" (Grusky 2005, 66).
Scheme Details: Includes microclasses, capturing socially recognized and defended boundaries in the division of labor.
Socioeconomic Scaling: Microclasses scaled using the international socioeconomic scale (Ganzeboom, de Graaf, and Treiman 1992).
Mobility Table: An mobility table generated by cross-classifying father's and offspring's occupations from pooled data (US, Sweden, Germany, Japan).
Nested Big-Class Contrasts: A big-class scheme designed to fully capture big-class effects, with nested distinctions (Table 55.2):
Manual-Nonmanual: Primary distinction.
Macroclasses: Three in nonmanual (professional-managerial, proprietor, routine nonmanual) and two in manual (manual, primary).
Mesoclasses: Within professional-managerial (classical professions, managers/officials, other professions), routine nonmanual (sales workers, clerks), and manual (craft, lower manual, service workers).
Hybrid Scheme: Embodies three layers of big-class distinctions, assembling historically emphasized contrasts.
Model Approach: Introduces these distinctions as a nested set of contrasts (Jonsson et al. 2009) to tease out net residues of reproduction at mesoclass, macroclass, and manual-nonmanual levels. This allows for more complicated exchange patterns than conventional methods.
Overlapping Inheritance Terms (Figure 55.2): Depicts how these three sets of overlapping big-class parameters capture complex affinities off the microclass, mesoclass, and macroclass diagonals.
Gradational Term: Even cells indexing mobility at all class levels will be modeled with a gradational term to estimate the frequency of short-distance moves.
If clustering at microclass, mesoclass, macroclass, or manual-nonmanual levels only reflects gradational tendencies, inheritance parameters become insignificant when the gradational parameter is included.
Big-class and microclass parameters indicate lumpiness vs. gradational mobility; their relative size indicates the dominant type of lumpiness.
The Mobility Model Equation
The model used is:
These latter parameters are fitted simultaneously to capture net effects (e.g., manual-nonmanual parameter indexes average density for manual/nonmanual inheritance after purging additional residue from macroclass, mesoclass, and microclass levels).
Structure of Contemporary Mobility (Key Findings)
Pooled Four-Nation Sample: Analyses based on pooled data smoothing out cross-national variation (represented in Figure 55.3).
Striking Microdiagonal Clustering: A "palisade" protecting occupational positions from intruders, indicating substantial departures from equality of opportunity.
Children born into classical professions are, on average, times more likely to remain in their microclass of origin than to move elsewhere within their mesoclass.
Corresponding coefficients: Managers (), Craft (), Service ().
This indicates substantial microclass reproduction throughout the class structure, even among "middle classes," contrary to the view of interior regions as zones of fluidity (e.g., Featherman and Hauser 1978).
Comparison of Microclass and Big-Class Coefficients:
The two largest big-class coefficients (proprietors and primary-sector workers) are smaller than all but the very smallest microclass coefficients.
Caveat for Proprietors/Primary Sector: These are "big classes in name only" because:
The proprietor class primarily comprises shopkeepers, making it effectively a microclass.
The primary sector is dominated by farmers, thus not a true amalgam (see Table 55.2).
The remaining twelve big-class effects (true amalgams) are comparatively weak.
Strongest of these (classical professions, sales work, clerical work, manual-nonmanual strata) range in size from to (in multiplicative form).
Is Big-Class Reproduction a Myth?
Hypothesis: Big-class inheritance observed in conventional studies might largely be microclass inheritance in disguise.
Method: Re-estimated the model omitting microclass inheritance terms (representing a conventional big-class analysis), shown in Figure 55.4.
Findings (Trimmed Model - Conventional Big-Class Analysis): Mesoclass effects appear strong and consistent with conventional analyses.
Managers: Children are times more likely to remain in that class (i.e., ).
Craft Workers: times more likely.
Lower Manual Workers: times more likely.
Service Workers: times more likely.
These coefficients, net of gradational effects, have led generations of scholars to view big-class reproduction as powerful.
Findings (Full Model - With Microclass Effects):
Reduced Big-Class Effects: When microclass effects are included, some big-class effects are greatly reduced (classical professions, sales, clerical).
Disappearing/Small Effects: Others disappear or become very small (managers and officials, other professionals, craft workers, service workers, lower manual workers).
Conclusion: Conventional big-class analyses generated the appearance of strong big-class reproduction because it was confounded with microclass reproduction.
Caveat: Some big-class reproduction persists even with microclass controls (as seen in Figure 55.3).
Main Implication: Big-class reproduction found in conventional analyses is largely driven by the tendency for children to inherit their microclass.
Practical Implication: Reducing big-class reproduction may require interventions targeted at occupational-level inheritance.
Conclusion
Intellectual Backdrop: The long-standing sociological debate on social groupings in contemporary industrialism. Sociologists were traditionally fascinated with big classes, viewing occupations as mere technical positions.
Traditional Views on Occupations: Occupations were seen as the "backbone" of inequality but were then reduced to gradational scores (e.g., Hauser and Warren 1997) or aggregated into big classes (e.g., Erikson and Goldthorpe 1992).
Challenging Assumptions: The authors treat conventional representations of mobility (class, gradational) as hypotheses rather than unquestioned assumptions.
Main Discovery: Detailed occupations are an important conduit for reproduction, and their inclusion improves understanding of mobility.
Two Main Misrepresentations by Conventional Models:
Extreme pockets of rigidity are concealed when analysis is solely at the big-class level.
Main rigidities in big-class mobility tables have been misinterpreted as big-class reproduction, when microclass reproduction is the principal underlying mechanism.
Why are Occupations so Important?
Occupation-Specific Capital: Parents accumulate and transmit occupation-specific human capital, identify deeply with their occupations, and "bring home" their occupation.
Children's Development: Children develop a taste for occupational reproduction, are trained in occupation-specific skills by parents, gain access to occupational networks, and acquire more external occupation-specific training.
Risk Aversion: For risk-averse children seeking to avoid downward mobility, occupational reproduction might be the safest path.
Means to Big-Class Reproduction: Children may pursue occupation-specific reproduction even without intrinsic interest, as it can be the best route to big-class reproduction (Erikson and Jonsson 1996) (e.g., an embalmer's son exploiting in-house training for class standing).
Ethical and Philosophical Implications:
Ascriptive Constraints: All ascriptive constraints on choice, even purely horizontal inequalities, are inconsistent with a commitment to an open society.
Stripping Away Choice: Being "fated" to a particular occupation (e.g., truck driver or gardener) at birth represents a stripping away of choice, which an open society aims to expand.
Horizontal and Vertical Inequalities: While differences in lifestyle are horizontal inequalities, microclass immobility also directly perpetuates vertical inequalities (e.g., working class reproduces itself because children remain in microclasses like truck driver).
Policy Implications:
If microclass reproduction were eliminated, real declines in big-class reproduction would occur.
Microclass reproduction is deeply rooted in family dynamics and may require "unacceptably intrusive policy" to eradicate.
These results offer insight into why contemporary efforts to equalize opportunity have underperformed, without necessarily leading to a wholesale rethinking of those efforts. However, they highlight the micro-level rigidities requiring focus. Titles of references were excluded per prompt instructions. The table shows the types of resources passed on for both big-class and micro-class reproduction.
The chapter critically assesses conventional methods of monitoring social mobility, arguing they often overlook crucial forms of rigidity. Traditionally, research has focused on two forms of intergenerational reproduction:
Categorical Form (Big-Class Approach): Parents pass on broad class positions (e.g., manager, professional) to children.
Gradational Form (Socioeconomic Approach): Parents pass on their socioeconomic standing or occupational prestige.
The Importance of Detailed Occupations (Microclasses)
Both standard approaches traditionally ignore the significant role of specific, detailed occupations. Detailed occupations are proposed as a fundamental representation crucial for revealing the underlying structure of inequality, acting as "omnibus indicators" of individuals' social worlds (skills, credentials, earnings potential, networks, honor, and social/cultural world).
Mechanisms of Intergenerational Reproduction
A comprehensive mobility model should examine all three mechanisms:
Gradational Regime: Inequality is simple and unidimensional. Children secure high-status occupations through economic resources, social networks, and cultural resources.
Big-Class Regime: Inequality is defined by mutually exclusive classes conveying a package of conditions, a structuring environment, and adapted culture. Children are specifically positioned for occupations aligning with their class origins' culture, training, contacts, and capital.
Microclass Regime: Labor markets are balkanized into institutionalized occupations. Occupations within big classes have differing propensities for mobility/immobility because of distinctive occupational worlds affecting aspirations, valued skills, and networks. Parents transmit occupation-specific human capital (e.g., a sociologist discusses sociology, an engineer focuses on "how things work").
Key Findings
Analyses based on pooled data from Germany, the United States, Sweden, and Japan show striking microdiagonal clustering (e.g., children of classical professions are times more likely to remain in their microclass).
This indicates substantial microclass reproduction throughout the class structure, even within "middle classes."
Conventional big-class analyses have often misinterpreted strong big-class reproduction, which is largely microclass inheritance in disguise, meaning it's driven by children inheriting their specific detailed occupation.
Conclusion
Detailed occupations are a critical conduit for intergenerational reproduction. Conventional models obscure extreme pockets of rigidity and misinterpret the main rigidities in big-class mobility. Occupations are important because parents transmit occupation-specific capital, children develop a taste for occupational reproduction, and it can be the safest path to avoid downward mobility or even a means to big-class reproduction. This highlights the need for policies to address micro-level rigidities to truly equalize opportunities.