Social Mobility

Abstract

Since the first edition of this chapter in 1972, impressive development has occurred in the ‘state of the art’. We then noted the lack of authoritative data, and tried to assemble some fragments from a variety of sources: their deficiency has been largely remedied by the major study of England and Wales carried out from Nuffield College, Oxford in 1972 (Goldthorpe et al. 1980), extended in some respects to 1983 (Goldthorpe and Payne, 1986). The British Election studies, reworked by Heath et al. (1985), now provide a complementary source: in particular it allows comparison of the social mobility of women with that of men. The paradigm of analysis that we sketched in 1972 has been superseded by developments of log-linear modelling, which at that date was little known and less used by sociologists. As a result, the literature on social mobility has become even more complex technically: fortunately there is now an excellent substantive introduction and review (Heath, 1981), while the basic elements of log-linear models are covered by Gilbert (1981). In this chapter we summarise some of the main findings on trends in England and Wales, then discuss a related, but as yet unresolved, question — whether it is appropriate to treat industrial societies as homogeneous units.