Intergenerational Social Mobility: A Microclass Perspective

Introduction to Mobility Regimes

Sociological debates frequently revolve around the types of social groupings prevalent in contemporary industrial societies. Historically, sociologists have focused on big classes as primary determinants of life chances, often reducing occupations to gradational scores or using them merely as aggregates for big classes. This study investigates three main models of intergenerational social mobility:

• Gradational Model:

  • Concept: Focuses on the total amount of resources (economic, social, cultural) an individual has, forming a continuous hierarchy.

  • Privilege: Children born into privileged circumstances benefit from access to a vast array of resources.

  • Imagery: Depicted as two unidimensional hierarchies, one for each generation, smoothly connected by total resources.

  • Representation (Figure 55.1a): An ideal-typical gradational regime shows a characteristic falloff in mobility chances as the socioeconomic distance between origin and destination occupations increases.

• Big-Class Regime:

  • Concept: Inequality takes the form of mutually exclusive and exhaustive classes.

  • Class Package: These classes convey a package of conditions (e.g., employment relations), a structuring social environment, and a resultant culture (adaptation or maladaptation).

  • Mobility: All children born into the same big class are assumed to have largely the same mobility chances, regardless of specific parental occupations within that class.

  • Overriding Logic: The class situation is considered overriding in determining life chances.

  • Nonstatus Dimensions: Big classes of similar socioeconomic status may not offer identical mobility chances if they differ on nonstatus dimensions relevant to mobility.

  • Examples:

    • Children of proprietors tend to become proprietors, while children of routine nonmanuals tend to become routine nonmanuals, even with similar socioeconomic status.

    • Specific tastes and aspirations develop: proprietors' children develop a taste for autonomy, routine nonmanuals' children for stability.

    • Human capital is cultivated class-specifically: proprietors' children develop entrepreneurial skills, routine nonmanuals' children develop bureaucratic skills.

    • Social capital is distributed class-specifically: proprietors' children learn about entrepreneurial opportunities, routine nonmanuals' children about routine nonmanual opportunities.

    • Tangible physical capital: A shop or business passed on to proprietors' children motivates them to remain proprietors.

  • Conclusion: Children are specifically positioned for occupations aligning with their class origins (culture, training, contacts, capital), not generic access to all comparable occupations as gradationalists suggest.

  • Representation (Figure 55.1b): An ideal-typical class regime assumes all off-diagonal cells have the same density (excluding random noise) when focusing on reproduction.

• Microclass Regime (Occupational Approach):

  • Concept: Shares the balkanized labor market presumption with the big-class model, but balkanization occurs at the level of institutionalized occupations (e.g., doctor, plumber, postal clerk), not big classes.

  • Heterogeneity: Occupations within big classes have differing propensities for mobility and immobility.

  • Consequences: Distinctive occupational worlds influence children's aspirations, valued skills, access to skills, and social networks (Table 55.1).

  • Examples:

    • Children of carpenters are likely to become carpenters due to exposure to carpentry skills at home, socialization appreciating carpentry as a vocation, and social networks providing information on becoming carpenters and securing jobs.

  • Lumpiness: Assumes a lumpy class form, but much finer-grained than big-class analysts allow (Figure 55.1c).

  • Reinterpretation of Big-Class Reproduction: Strong big-class reproduction observed in mobility tables may be artifactual, merely reflecting reproduction at the detailed occupational level.

Mechanisms of Intergenerational Reproduction (Table 55.1)

The study highlights how different types of resources contribute to intergenerational reproduction, distinguishing between big-class and microclass dimensions:

• Human Capital:

  • Big-class: General or abstract skills (e.g., cognitive or verbal abilities).

  • Microclass: Occupation-specific skills (e.g., acting skills, carpentry skills).

• Cultural Capital:

  • Big-class: Abstract culture and tastes (e.g., "culture of critical discourse").

  • Microclass: Occupation-specific culture and tastes (e.g., aspirations to become a medical doctor).

• Social Networks:

  • Big-class: Classwide networks (typically developed through neighborhood- or job-related interactions).

  • Microclass: Occupation-specific networks (typically developed through on-the-job interactions).

• Economic Resources:

  • Big-class: Liquid resources (e.g., stocks, bonds, income).

  • Microclass: Fixed resources (e.g., business, farm).

Transmission of Occupational Human Capital:

• Conventional View: Ongoing separation of home and workplace makes it difficult for parents to transmit occupational human capital.

• Study's Stance: Transmission may be weakened but not precluded.

• Examples of Home Transmission:

  • Sociologist: Talks "shop" at dinner, fills home with sociological books/magazines, inculcates a sociological perspective in child-rearing.

    • Example Scenario (World Trade Center collapse): Sociologist's family discusses why there is terrorism.

  • Engineer: Brings home building toys, focuses conversations on "world of things," imparts interest in how things work.

    • Example Scenario (World Trade Center collapse): Engineer's family discusses why the building failed structurally.

  • Mechanic: Spends time at home on repairs, takes children to repair shop, encourages interest in taking things apart and fixing them (a "practical" engineer).

  • Seamstress: Talks about fashion, takes children to fashion shows, trains them in sewing and designing clothes.

• Conclusion: Parental occupational commitments influence home discussions, practices, time spent with children, and ultimately, the skills imparted to children.

Study Methodology

• Combined Model Approach: Instead of building purist models (gradational, big-class, or microclass), this study develops a model that combines all three forms to tease out the net contribution of each.

• Research Questions:

  1. Does the mobility regime contain "pockets of extreme microclass rigidity" concealed when microclasses are aggregated into big classes?

  2. Is microclass reproduction the main mechanism through which big classes are reproduced?

• Cross-National Context: The study analyzes four countries (Germany, the United States, Sweden, and Japan) chosen for their differing mixes of institutional forms affecting big-class or microclass structuration.

  • Germany and United States: Often seen as the home ground of occupationalization.

  • Sweden: Has a long tradition of big-class organization (e.g., strong trade unions).

  • Japan: Typically stratified more by family and firm than by big class or occupation.

  • Goal: To explore the reach of microclass mechanisms into labor markets not historically regarded as microclass in form (e.g., Sweden, Japan). If microclass mechanisms emerge as fundamental in these countries, it strengthens the case for incorporating them into mobility models more systematically.

  • Note: The analysis focuses on shared features across countries rather than cross-national variation (discussed in Jonsson et al. 2009, 2011).

• Data Sources:

  • Information Collected: Father's occupation, child's occupation and age, and other variables (e.g., employment status, branch of industry) for occupational and big-class coding.

  • Data Requirement: Large datasets are needed due to the occupational level of analysis (many cells in mobility tables).

  • Country-Specific Data: All countries draw on multiple surveys except Sweden.

    • Sweden: Occupational data for children from the 1990 Census, linked to 1960 and 1970 Censuses for parental occupation (Erikson and Jonsson 1993). Sample size: $184,451$. Period: 1990. Ages: 30-47.

    • United States: Occupational Changes in a Generation I (OCG I, 1962, $17,544$), Occupational Changes in a Generation II (OCG II, 1973, $18,856$), General Social Survey (GSS, 1972-2003, $9,685$).

    • Japan: Survey of Social Stratification & Mobility (SSM, 1955-1995, $6,703$), Japan General Social Survey (JGSS, 2000-2002, $1,917$).

    • Germany: German Social Survey (ALLBUS, 1980-2002, $5,647$), German Socioeconomic Panel (GSOEP, 1986, 1999, 2000, $2,886$), German Life History Study (LV I-III, 1981-1989, $1,234$), ZUMA-Standarddemographie Survey (1976-1982, $2,929$).

  • Limitations:

    • Gender: Focused on the mobility of men due to more complex mobility processes for women not readily summarized (discussed in Jonsson et al. 2009).

    • Comparability: Despite efforts, compromises were made regarding period covered and age of respondents (e.g., US data disproportionately from earlier periods, Swedish data 30-47 years old vs. 30-64 for others). These differences, however, do not significantly affect results.

• Microclass Coding Scheme (Table 55.2):

  • Definition: A "grouping of technically similar jobs that is institutionalized in the labor market through means like: (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 Used: Includes 82 microclasses that capture socially recognized and defended boundaries in the division of labor.

  • Scaling: Microclasses are scaled in terms of the international socioeconomic scale (Ganzeboom, de Graaf, and Treiman 1992).

  • Mobility Table: An $82 imes 82$ mobility table is formed by cross-classifying the father's and offspring's occupation, pooling data from the four countries.

  • Distinctive Feature: Microclass effects, represented on the main diagonal of Figure 55.2, are layered over more conventional big-class effects.

• Big-Class Scheme (Table 55.2): Designed to capture varied big-class distinctions and avoid attributing shortfalls in explanatory power to poor operationalization.

  • Layers of Distinctions:

    1. Manual-Nonmanual: The most fundamental distinction.

    2. Macroclasses:

       • Nonmanual: Professional-managerial, Proprietors, Routine nonmanual.

       • Manual: Manual, Primary.

    3. Mesoclasses (within macroclasses):

       • Professional-managerial: Classical professions, Managers and officials, Other professions.

       • Routine nonmanual: Sales workers, Clerks.

       • Manual: Craft, Lower manual, Service workers.

  • Hybrid Scheme: This scheme combines many contrasts historically emphasized by big-class scholars.

  • Modeling: These distinctions are introduced as a nested set of contrasts in mobility models (Jonsson et al. 2009), allowing for patterns of exchange more complicated than conventionally allowed (Figure 55.2).

  • Gradational Term: Even cells in the white zones of Figure 55.2 (mobility with respect to all class levels) are modeled with a gradational term to estimate the extent to which short-distance moves occur more frequently than long-distance ones.

    • Purpose: To capture the tendency of children to assume occupations socioeconomically close to their origins. If clustering at microclass, mesoclass, macroclass, or manual-nonmanual levels is only this gradational tendency, then inheritance parameters become insignificant when the gradational parameter is included.

  • Implication: Big-class and microclass parameters indicate if the mobility regime is lumpy vs. gradational; their relative sizes indicate if conventional big-class analyses correctly represent the main type of lumpiness.

• manual-nonmanual, macroclass, mesoclass, and microclass immobility effects, respectively. These parameters are fitted simultaneously to capture net effects.

  • Example: The manual-nonmanual parameter indexes the average density across cells pertaining to manual or nonmanual inheritance after purging additional inheritance residue at macroclass, mesoclass, and microclass levels.

The Structure of Mobility (Findings)

When the model is applied to the pooled four-nation sample, microclass and big-class parameters reveal distinctive patterns, representing cross-nationally shared features of mobility (Figure 55.3).

Is Big-Class Reproduction a Myth?

• Hypothesis: The study questions whether big-class inheritance observed in conventional mobility studies is largely microclass inheritance in disguise.

• Re-estimation of Model (without microclass inheritance terms - Figure 55.4):

  • Conventional View: Mesoclass effects under this trimmed model are strong and consistent with conventional analyses.

    • Example: Children born into the managerial class are $e^{0.48} \approx 1.62$ times more likely to remain in that class.

    • Corresponding coefficients for other groups: craft workers ($1.40$), lower manual workers ($1.63$), and service workers ($1.93$). These