Erzsébet Bukodi

CLASS ORIGINS, EDUCATION AND OCCUPATIONAL ATTAINMENT IN BRITAIN

ABSTRACT Studies of intergenerational class mobility and of intragenerational occupational mobility have of late tended to diverge in their concerns and methodology. This reflects assumptions regarding the increasing part played by education in intergenerational mobility and the decreasing part played by class origins in intragenerational mobility, once education is controlled. The paper contributes to the questioning of these assumptions on empirical grounds. Analyses are made of the occupational mobility of men in three British birth cohorts over the course of their earlier working lives. We find that while educational qualifications have a strong effect on occupational attainment, this effect does not increase across the three cohorts; that class origins also have a significant effect, and one that does not decrease across the cohorts; and that features of work-life experience, in particular the frequency of occupational changes, likewise have a persisting effect, independently of both education and class origins. Secular changes in mobility processes are thus scarcely in evidence, but the analyses do provide strong indications of a cohort effect. Men in the 1958 birth cohort, whose first years in the labour market coincided with a period of severe recession, de-industrialisation and high unemployment, would appear to have experienced various lasting disadvantages in their subsequent occupational histories.

The effects of social origins and cognitive ability on educational attainment Evidence from Britain and Sweden

In previous work we have shown that in Britain and Sweden alike parental class, parental status and parental education have independent effects on individuals’ educational attainment. In this paper we extend our analyses, first by also including measures of individuals’ early-life cognitive ability, and second by bringing our results for Britain and Sweden into direct comparative form. On the basis of extensive birth-cohort data for both countries, we find that when cognitive ability is introduced into our analyses, parental class, status and education continue to have significant, and in fact only moderately reduced and largely persisting, effects on the educational attainment of members of successive cohorts. There is some limited evidence for Britain, but not for Sweden, that cognitive ability has a declining effect on educational attainment, and a further cross-national difference is that in Britain, but not in Sweden, some positive interaction effects occur between advantaged social origins and high cognitive ability in relation to educational success. Overall, though, cross-national similarities are most apparent, and especially in the extent to which parental class, status and education, when taken together, create wide disparities in the eventual educational attainment of individuals who in early life were placed at similar levels of cognitive ability. Some wider implications of these findings are considered.

Union disruption in Hungary

Abstract: This article examines the impact of cultural background, human capital, and labor force participation on union disruption. To study these relationships, retrospective data are examined on the marital history of Hungarian residents taken from a national probability sample in 1992. The discrete time event history approach.is used to show the effects of different predictors on the odds of union disruption. Strong evidence was found for the positive effect of father’s education and the negative effect of religious affiliation on the odds of divorce. Individual’s education has no significant impact on the probability of separation. However, divorce risk is higher when the wife has greater labor force involvement, while husband’s stronger labor market participation decreases the odds of divorce. Lifetime occupational mobility has a positive effect on separation indicating that any deviation from the status-relation between spouses at the time of marriage increases the risk of union disruption.

Cumulative Inequalities over the Life-Course: Life-long Learning and Social Mobility in Britain

This paper examines the possibility that life-long learning promotes intergenerational class mobility. The following two research questions are asked. Is it the case that further education provides individuals coming from less advantaged origins with a second chance to improve on their educational attainment? Is it the case that the returns to further qualifications, in terms of chances of upward class career mobility, are greater for children from less advantaged backgrounds than for children from more advantaged backgrounds? The analyses – that are based on the complete educational and class histories of men and women in a British birth cohort – mainly produce negative findings. Children coming from managerial and professional backgrounds seem to benefit most from further education. More specifically, further education appears to be an effective means of career advancement for individuals of managerial and professional origins who start out in their working lives in relatively low-level class positions. Via further education they can increase or update their qualifications, and in turn enhance their chances of being counter-mobile back to their class of origin. Overall, based on the findings of this paper, we can conclude that qualifications attained through life-long learning primarily serve to maintain, rather than to narrow, inequalities attached to social origins in Britain.

Educational expansion and social class returns to tertiary qualifications in post-communist countries

Previous studies have consistently demonstrated the salient labour market advantages of tertiary educated individuals compared to those with lower attainment, and the strong linkage between the tertiary qualification and the type of job(s). Most European nations, and especially some former communist countries, had experienced strong expansion at tertiary level in the last two decades, and higher education systems have been differentiated via the introduction of new institutional forms. There is no doubt, that these changes might have significantly altered the relationship between the tertiary education system, the labour market outcomes and their social stratification consequences. As the empirical basis, the second wave of European Social Survey is used. As regards the occupational class, the newly developed European Socio-Economic Classification is applied. The level of qualification continues to exert a huge influence on class outcomes, just as it did under communism. However, there are differences across countries in the probabilities of individuals being found in the top classes, and these differences are especially apparent for those who entered the labour market in the post-communist era. As in the majority of Western European countries and in the United States, economics/business and law are the most lucrative fields of study, while teacher training, the humanities and the social sciences are poorly rewarded. However, there are rather modest field-of-study differences in the probabilities of individuals being found in the higher managerial and professional class in countries having experienced a huge rate of expansion chiefly promoted by market-based private financing.

Linking the Macro to the Micro: A Multidimensional Approach to Educational Inequalities in Four European Countries

ABSTRACT Recent research into educational inequalities has shown the importance of decomposing social origins into parental class, status and education, representing economic, socio-cultural and educational family resources, respectively. But we know little about how inequalities in educational attainment at the micro-level map onto institutional characteristics of educational systems at the macro-level, if we treat social origins in a multidimensional way. Drawing on the rich over-time variation in educational systems in four European countries – Britain, Sweden, Germany and Italy – this paper develops and tests a number of hypotheses regarding the effects of various components of social origins on individuals’ educational attainment in different institutional contexts. It is evident from our results that a great deal of similarity exists across nations with different educational systems in the persisting importance for individuals’ educational attainment of parental class, status and education. But our findings also indicate that changes in the institutional features of educational systems have, in some instances although not in others, served to reinforce or to offset the social processes generating educational inequalities at the micro level.

Why have relative rates of class mobility become more equal among women in Britain

In a previous paper it has been shown that across three cohorts of men and women born in Britain in 1946, 1958 and 1970 a gender difference exists in regard to relative rates of class mobility. For men these rates display an essential stability but for women they become more equal. The aim of the present paper is to shed light on the causes of this trend-or, that is, of increasing social fluidity-among women. We begin by considering a refined version of the perverse fluidity hypothesis: that is, one that proposes that part-time work leads to increasing downward worklife mobility among women that also entails downward intergenerational mobility and thus promotes greater fluidity. We do in fact find that the increase in fluidity is very largely, if not entirely, confined to women who have had at least one period of part-time work. However, a more direct test of the hypothesis is not supportive. We are then led to investigate whether it is not that part-time working itself is the crucial factor but rather that women who subsequently work part-time already differ from those who do not at entry into employment. We find that eventual full- and part-timers do not differ in their class origins nor, in any systematic way, in their educational qualifications. But there is a marked and increasing difference in the levels of employment at which they make their labour market entry. Eventual part-timers are more likely than eventual full-timers to enter in working-class positions, regardless of their class origins and qualifications. Insofar as these women are from more advantaged origins, they would appear not to seek to exploit their advantages to the same extent as do full-timers in order to advance their own work careers. And it is, then, in the downward mobility accepted by these women-who increase in number across the cohorts-that we would locate the main source of the weakening association between class origins and destinations that is revealed among women at large.

Institutional change and social class inequalities in educational attainment: the British experience since 1945

The British case is chiefly of interest in the present context on account of the two following facts. First, since 1945, the state educational system has been substantially expanded, while, at the same time, extensive institutional changes have been made, a leading aim of which has been to create a greater equality of educational opportunity.

Who Marries Whom In Hungary

Marriage between members of different social groups has long been viewed as a crucial indicator of the strength of the boundaries to group membership. According to Duncan, assortative mating is a “special instance of different association” (1968, p. 683–85) which makes the intergenerational transmission of status symbols possible. If the choice of marriage partner occurred at random, social boundaries would become irrelevant, and family status would be transmitted less to the next generation. Thus, marriage homogamy can be viewed as an integral part of the stratification processes. The theoretical concern of a large body of stratification literature lies in the way of how status boundaries in a society are formed. Scholars in this field argue that association between social position of spouses can be interpreted much in the same way as with the correlation between a father’s and son’s social traits (Sorokin, 1927, Lipset and Bendix, 1959, Hout, 1982). In his work on social mobility (1954, p. 321) claims: “One of the tests for the ‘openness’ of social structure is the extent of marriage between persons of different social origins.”