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RC28’s Contributions to Knowledge. Comment’s on Mike Hout’s perspective on “What We Have Learned” Thomas A. DiPrete Duke University. Mike’s List of Findings . Findings Re “2 nd” & “3 rd” Generation of Intergenerational Mobility Research The Treiman constant: invariance of prestige.
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RC28’s Contributions to Knowledge Comment’s on Mike Hout’s perspective on “What We Have Learned” Thomas A. DiPrete Duke University
Mike’s List of Findings • Findings Re “2nd” & “3rd” Generation of Intergenerational Mobility Research • The Treiman constant: invariance of prestige. • Common Social Fluidity, with some variancein strength of association. • Education is the Main Factor in Intergenerational Mobility. • Trends in IGM refute convergence prediction of modernization theory • Class Effects on Education vary across Educational Transitions.
Mike’s List of Findings, continued • Gender. • Occupational Distributions are Gendered. • Trends in Educational Stratification Favor Women. • Educational Process. • Tracking increases the variance of educational outcomes. • School-to-Work Transitions are Conditioned by Institutions.
My Characterization of Mike’s List • Very Good Stuff. • Heavy on Intergenerational Mobility. • Light on “4th Generation” Work (Kerckhoff, Ganzeboom & Treiman). • Heavy on research that dominated the RC28 agenda in the 1970s and 1980s. Light on research that has become an increasingly important part of the RC28 agenda in the 1990s and post-2000.
Awareness of this Trend? An Anecdote • Aage Sørensen, (AJS, 2000), argued that • “class as life conditions” is the dominant conception in empirical sociology • “class as life conditions” and “class as exploitation” are the two dominant conceptions of class in theoretical work. • My 2001 RC28 paper (AJS, forthcoming), which called for a broader approach to social mobility based on household instead of individual measures of “life conditions,” used life course mobility as the primarily illustration for this critique. • An offshoot of this work is forthcoming in a jointly published issue of Current Sociology and Sociologie et Societé. • Noteworthy: one reviewer from CS/SS asserted that “the vast majority of sociological research on social mobility is devoted to intergenerational mobility” and urged a statement at the start of the paper as to why the sociological reader should be concerned about life course/career mobility.
So….New Footnote in My Paper • Footnote: A search of indexed items in Sociological Abstracts since 1990 • found 245 items with keywords/words in Abstract/Title that included {“occupational” or “class”} and {“mobility”} and {“intergenerational”}…. • In contrast, there were 295 items with keywords/words {“occupational” or “class”} and {“mobility”} and {“career” or “intragenerational” or “life course”} and {NOT “intergenerational”} • The count rises to 332 if the {NOT “intergenerational”} condition is removed from the search.
Trends in the Research of RC28 • My student, Yunus Kaya, is creating a database of RC28 research from 1983 (or earlier: HELP if you have earlier data!) to the present (1579 entries to date) • We are coding the kind of work done by RC28 members to study trends. • Simple Illustration: Highlight references to • The Life Course • Labor Markets & School to Work • Welfare States • Income/Wages/Earnings • Inequality/Povertyd • Gender • Compare presentations in 1983 (3 pages worth) with the first three pages of presentations from 2001.
4th Generation Generalizations: Some Examples • Inequality • The long-term trend in within-nation income inequality is not monotonic. Inequality rises with urbanization and then falls, though in recent years this decline has been reversed in liberal market-oriented societies. • Inequality and poverty rates are greater in liberal welfare states than in social democratic welfare states, with conservative and Mediterranean welfare states in the middle. • Inequality is growing faster in liberal market-oriented industrial societies than in societies with strong unions, and centralized/coordinated wage-setting mechanisms. • Most of the world’s inequality is between-nation. This component of total inequality experienced long-term growth, but is no longer growing.
Life Course Mobility • The level of career occupational mobility is an inverse function of state licensing and credentialing of occupations. • The life course earnings turbulence of women is lower in societies whose institutional arrangements facilitate the combining of work and childbearing. • Turbulence in the life conditions of women is positively related to institutional arrangements that facilitate divorce. • The impact of divorce on men’s life course income turbulence depends on male-female earnings differences, national institutions that facilitate the combining of work and childbearing, national-level fertility rates, and social institutions that enforce legal obligations on men to pay child support. • Turbulence in life conditions is lower in societies with more extensive social insurance programs, more progressive tax systems, and more compressed wage distributions.
Intergenerational Mobility – beyond B&D or the 3rd generation • Poverty has independent effects on status attainment, affecting educational achievement and the income and poverty chances of the next generation. • At least in some societies, wealth appears to have an independent effect on mobility, after controlling for SES and education. The extent to which wealth effects are distinct from poverty effects are not yet well understood. • Social capital has universally positive effects on mobility. The extent to which social capital is a mediator (and thus reproducer) of origin class or an independent factor (and thus an engine of social mobility is not yet known. Partial evidence suggests that the effects of social capital on attainment varies with societal institutions (cf. Treiman and Yip).
Intergenerational Mobility, cont. • Household structure affects status attainment, primarily through its impacts on the amount of family socioeconomic resources available to any particular child. HH structure effects have been confirmed in many countries, though the direction of their effects is not uniform • E.g., in African countries, female headship appears to be associated with greater, not fewer educational opportunities for children. • E.g., the negative effect of siblings on attainment is not present many developing countries.
Intergenerational Mobility, 4th generation, continued • Neighborhood context, school context, and labor market context have been shown in innumerable studies to affect mobility, both intergenerationally and over the life course. • The size of these contextual effects on intergenerational mobility are generally smaller than are the effects of family of origin. • Welfare state structures and national wage-setting mechanisms affect the occupational distribution; Nation-specific changes in these institutions will therefore affect absolute rates of mobility, though the distribution of these effects between intergenerational and career mobility are unclear.
Concept and Measurement • Increases in the labor force participation, and increased heterogeneity and instability of family forms, are undermining one of the principal justifications for our traditional, individual-level occupation-based measures, namely that they accurately and adequately (and comparably across societies) measure the “life conditions” and changes in life conditions of individuals. • Because educational systems are more variable across nations than is the division of labor, metrics for comparative educational research are more problematic than metrics for comparative research on occupational or class mobility.
Conclusions • 2nd & 3rd generation intergenerational mobility research were virtually “owned” by the RC28. • The broader stratification agenda, including questions about inequality, poverty, & life course mobility, and especially including the “4th generation” agenda as applied to these issues, is not “owned” by the RC28, even though we make substantial contributions to these topics. This creates both competition and opportunities for growth. May both of these facts contribute positively to the quality and quantity of RC28 research on these topics.
Postscript • “Trends in Educational Stratification Favor Women” (Mike Hout’s Empirical Generalization #5) • “The descriptive result is widely appreciated. The RC has not kept up with this trend however, and few members have endeavored to explain it.” (Hout 2003, p. 12) • Attend “Educational Stratification II” (Mon, 3-5pm) and listen to Claudia Buchmann’s presentation on “Do Rises in Parental Resources Affect the Growing Female Advantage in U.S. Higher Education?” for evidence that RC28 members are indeed endeavoring to explain this trend.
