Florian R. Hertel

The derivation of the IPICS class scheme

While none of the reviewed class schemes is fully adapted to the task at hand, each class scheme provides unique elements that are necessary to derive a conceptualization of the inequality space for the analysis of social mobility in post-industrial societies. Each scheme employs a distinct logic for the assignment of occupational positions to classes. While Goldthorpe argues that it is the employment relations which differentiate occupations appropriately with regards to asset endowment and career prospects, Oesch and Esping-Andersen favor work logic and individual credentials or occupational skill sets to delimit class locations.

Social mobility in two post-industrial societies

This last chapter has two aims. First, it picks up the multiple threads that run through this work and tries to create a synopsis of the preceding chapters to provide a unified understanding of this work and its results. The remainder of this chapter tries to answer the one big final question that cannot remain unanswered in a comparative work: the question of differences between the intergenerational permeability in the United States and Germany.

Class and intergenerational mobility in contemporary societies

The foregoing introductory section singled out two curiously opposing societal developments that are hard to reconcile with each other. A massive occupational structural transformation coincided over the last century with a remarkable stability of relative mobility rates. As I have argued at the end, any finding of change but also stability in the relative openness might result from a changing composition of the class structure.

Relative mobility in Germany and the U.S.

One of the most noteworthy results of the foregoing study of absolute mobility was that the change in social origins, class destinations and absolute intergenerational mobility followed similar patterns in both countries under study. The unique possibility of studying social mobility from a comparative perspective over the longue duree revealed that although differences between the United States and Germany are observable, the trends in each country evolved in parallel. This is of course no historical accident but the outcome of similar economic, political and social developments that took place in Germany and the United States over most of the 20th century and similarly shaped the opportunity structure for mobility.

Horizontal and vertical stratification of occupational positions

It is good practice to test the validity of a new tool or a new operationalization of an old tool before it is applied in actual research. Validating a measure consists of testing whether it reflects the underlying theoretical logic (criterion validity) and at the same time accounts for meaningful horizontal and vertical differences with regards to several socio-demographic outcomes (construct validity) in the United States and Germany (Evans & Mills, 1998). Despite what the testing language seemingly implies, validity cannot be proven once and for all in social sciences because, firstly, we work with one proxy for several latent properties and, secondly, both our measure and what should be measured may change over time or even through the very act of observation.

Datasets, Operationalization and conceptual issues

In the following analyses, we use data from several surveys in each country. The criteria for inclusion in this study are nationally representative sampling designs and detailed information on respondents and their parents’ occupations. Furthermore, surveys were selected as to cover information from the last 40 or more years in order to obtain data for as many birth cohorts as possible.

Social change and social mobility

In the first part of this chapter, I will discuss selected social, economic and political evolutions that might have affected social mobility over the last century. Between the turn of the century and the demise of socialism, the world experienced not only some of the most gruesome catastrophes but also several technological and social revolutions. Following Hobsbawm (1994), one can describe this century as mainly made up of four decades of crises (the two World Wars and the Great Depression), nearly three golden decades of rising equality and living standards (Golden Age or Trente Glorieuse) and three decades of economic crises and global insecurity.

Social fluidity in Germany

Following from the social fluidity model presented in the preceding chapter, Table 43 summarizes the different effects which are expected to govern the intergenerational association between origins and destinations in Germany. By constraining the 13 empty cells to take an interaction parameter of zero, the sum of the values of the parameter effects within each cell can be interpreted in line with Erikson and Goldthorpe as the propensity to be mobile relative to a neutral fluidity level, i.e. the fluidity in cells without any parameter, net of the fitted margins. While this arbitrary reference level reduces the interpretability of the strength of each single parameter, the common reference group allows to compare the size of fluidity parameters against each other.

Absolute Mobility in Germany over the 20 th century

Before the analysis of social mobility in Germany commences, the utilized sample will be discussed in some detail to give the reader an overview of the studied population. Table 26 displays selected characteristics of the German sample for each cohort and, in the last column, for the full sample. The whole sample consists of 75,625 individuals, of whom 45% are women, 22% lived in East Germany at the time of the interview and around 10% were born outside Germany.

Social fluidity in the United States of America

After studying social fluidity in Germany in the chapter before, the present chapter is dedicated to the analysis of social fluidity in the United States. In the following, the American variant of the social fluidity model will be explained. Initially, the model is applied to American data (Ch. 12.1).