Intergenerational Occupational Reproduction in Comparative Perspective: Cross-sectional and Over-time Variations in 56 Societies

Time: 14:00 - 16:00
Venue: Department of Sociology and Social Research, via Verdi, 26 - Trento, Meeting Room - Third Floor

Brown bag seminars - Organized by the Center for Social Inequality Studies (CSIS) research unit

Speaker:

• Harry B.G. Ganzeboom, UV University Amsterdam

We extend a large scale comparison of intergenerational occupational mobility tables published nearly 30 years ago by Ganzeboom, Treiman & Luijkx (1989). In the new analysis we extend the coverage of societies from 35 to 56, extend the time period through 2014, and separately analyze men and women, whereas the earlier analysis was restricted to men. We analyze about five times as much data as previously, which permits us to get a fairly precise estimate of trends, separately for men and women and for formerly communist and never communist nations. We find that in never communist nations, the trend is consistently toward greater relative mobility (‘social fluidity’), although there is a suggestion of a reversal in very recent years for men. In communist nations there was a sharp increase in relative mobility over the course of the communist period but this trend was reversed during the first 10 years of post-communism, bring these nations in line with the rest of the world.