Abstract
The aim of the chapter is to provide a European perspective on stratification and social mobility including converging and diverging trends within the societies in Europe. Empirical information is provided based on statistical sources for as many European nations as possible.
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Notes
- 1.
This handbook devotes a whole chapter to education; school system is typically regarded (e.g. by Bourdieu) as an institution which plays a large role in legitimating the reproduction of social inequalities.
- 2.
A very good insight on both the theoretical and the empirical issues is provided by the Reader edited by Grusky (2008) including excerpts from original texts of various authors.
- 3.
This does not mean necessarily that one can speak about a Weberian vs. Marxian theoretical distinction appearing from the European vs. American perspective of social stratification. The European class approach of stratification and mobility is strongly based on the Weberian class concept, while the American class-based analysis by Erik Olin Wright is connected to a (neo)-Marxist theory (though this is somewhat exceptional and less characteristic to the US research in the field of stratification and mobility).
- 4.
Therborn (1995: 236−237) refers also to the celebration of Mayday which seems to exist all over in Europe (even if with an uneven political importance), as a sign of certain persistence of worker class traditions and identities, while the same phenomenon is not present in the USA.
- 5.
Employees working in service relationship are also labelled as salariat. It is important to note that service relations are not restricted to the service sector; the service class appears in other economic sectors as well.
- 6.
6The calculations were made on European Social Survey data from 2004 to 2005 using Harry Ganzeboom’s recode program (Ganzeboom and Treiman 1996). The distribution is based on the following countries: Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Iceland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, Ukraine, United Kingdom.
- 7.
The distribution in Table 17.1 refers to everybody who has ever been in the labour force. Part of this population is not in the labour force anymore, e.g. those in pension. The proportion of the service class for the present labour force (a younger population) is 40 percent.
- 8.
When looking at occupational gender gap, the differences in the level of qualification between men and women should also be taken into account. Another chapter of the Handbook deals with education but women tend to have higher level of schooling in comparison to men as recent statistics reveal.
- 9.
The share of self-employed is a bit larger for the (younger) population in the labour force, while that of the agricultural labourers is even smaller for them.
- 10.
10The calculations were made on European Social Survey data from 2004 to 2005 using the recode program developed and presented in Leiulfsrud et al. (2005). with some modifications because of the different measure for work autonomy in ESS Round2. The distribution is based on the following countries: Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Iceland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, Ukraine, United Kingdom.
- 11.
The distribution in Table 17.2 refers again to everybody who has ever been in the labour force. For the actual labour force this percentage is lower, only 28 percent. The proportion of men drops to one-fifth, that of women to one-third approximately.
- 12.
12The calculations were made on European Social Survey data from 2004 to 2005 using the recode program developed and presented in Leiulfsrud et al. (2005). The distribution is based on the following countries: Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Iceland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, Ukraine, United Kingdom.
- 13.
The distribution in Table 17.3 refers again to everybody who has ever been in the labour force.
- 14.
14The calculations were made on European Social Survey data from 2004 to 2005 using the ESEC ‘derivation matrix’ developed for that purpose. The distribution is based on the following countries: Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Iceland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, Ukraine, United Kingdom.
- 15.
Rose and Harrison (2007) provide examples on the level of occupations, e.g. lawyers, scientists, university professors, chief executive officers are in Class 1. But school teachers, managers with less than 10 employees are in Class 2. Typical intermediate occupations in Class 3 are mostly clerical and administrative ones. Shop workers, retails assistants, care workers can be found in Class 7. The typical occupations for Class 8 are toolmakers, fitters, plumbers, while cleaners, assemblers, machine operators are put into Class 9.
- 16.
The distribution in Table 17.4 refers again to everybody who has ever been in the labour force.
- 17.
The percentage of firms with less than 10 employees is over 40 percent in Greece, Portugal and Spain, while it is below 20 percent in the UK where ESeC has been developed.
- 18.
For example, economists do not put large emphasis on class in this respect. They suppose that earnings tend to depend on education. Thus, they prefer to investigate the income returns to human capital investments, the wage premium individuals get when having higher level of schooling.
- 19.
19Out of the 25 nations, formally the liberal countries are only represented by the United Kingdom and Ireland; the conservative regime consists of Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Austria, Switzerland, Germany and France; the social-democratic regime involves Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Iceland and Finland; the Mediterranean type includes Spain, Greece, Portugal and Turkey; and post-socialist countries are the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Poland, Slovenia, Slovakia and Ukraine.
- 20.
A more detailed picture on the EGP-like class structure in the EU25 nations with a similar approach of welfare regime typology can be found in Bukodi and Róbert (2007).
- 21.
The figures in this table are from calculations on all countries. The same source contains a larger table as well which separates the countries (Table 3A.1. p. 74).
- 22.
In the two former communist countries, political transformation, privatisation and transition to market economy have obviously contributed to the changes in the class distribution.
- 23.
Like earlier, the distribution in the table refers to everybody having ever been in the labour force. In this case this has particular consequences because the cohort analysis displays the consequences of changes over time (period effects) and of getting older individually (ageing effects). It is taken into account when the results are discussed.
- 24.
For being accurate, a disadvantage of the EUROBAROMETER data should be mentioned: it has no information on number of subordinates/employees and, consequently, the computation of the class variable is somewhat less precise.
- 25.
The country typology is based again on the welfare state concept by Esping-Andersen. However, the countries covered by the EUROBAROMETER survey allow to making a distinction within the group of former socialist countries and to separate the Baltic ones which are of more liberal character and the Central Eastern European ones which are of more conservative character (Bukodi and Róbert 2007). Thus in this case the country clusters were constructed as follows: Social-democratic regime: Denmark, Finland, Sweden; Liberal regime: Ireland, United Kingdom; Conservative regime: Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands; Mediterranean regime: Cyprus, Greece, Italy, Malta, Portugal, Spain; Post-socialist liberal regime: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania; Post-socialist conservative regime: Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia.
- 26.
Apparently there are examples of continuous measures in social stratification in Europe as well, e.g. in the British context the Hope-Goldthorpe scale and more recently the Cambridge scale (Prandy) or the prestige scale by Wegener in Germany.
- 27.
For more details on calculating SIOPS, see Ganzeboom and Treiman (1996).
- 28.
For more details on calculating ISEI, see Ganzeboom and Treiman (1996).
- 29.
This is the particular reason that this chapter does not deal with status attainment models in more detailed manner because elaborating more on this process would lead to a large overlap with educational attainment, inequalities in educational inheritance discussed elsewhere in the volume.
- 30.
The example of the former communist countries where administrative and discriminative measures were applied to support upward mobility strongly supports this claim, see, e.g. Szelényi (1998).
- 31.
I cannot go into technical details of the statistical procedures in this regard but see, e.g. Breen (2004, pp. 20–25).
- 32.
The same structural and political reasons explain why social mobility seemed to be bigger under communism than before, though the communist political propaganda liked to interpret this as a proof of stronger democracy and social openness of the communist political order in comparison to the pre-communist era.
- 33.
This kind of outlook is unfortunately missing from the more recent work by Breen (2004).
- 34.
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Róbert, P. (2010). Stratification and Social Mobility. In: Immerfall, S., Therborn, G. (eds) Handbook of European Societies. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-88199-7_17
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