John H. Goldthorpe

Social mobility and class structure in modern Britain

This is the second edition of John Goldthorpes study of social mobility in relation to class structure. The author has updated and extended the original material to include an analysis of recent trends in intergenerational mobility, the class mobility of women, and views of social mobility in modern Britain from a cross-national perspective. The book should be of interest to first-degree students and graduates studying sociology, especially social stratification; professional sociologists interested in quantitative analyses, especially log-linear modelling; and economists and political scientists researching social stratification, mobility, or the sociology of modern Britain.

Class analysis and the reorientation of class theory: the case of persisting differentials in educational attainment†

In class analysis the main regularities that have been established by empirical research are not ones of long-term class formation or decomposition, as envisaged in Marxist or liberal theory, but rather ones that exhibit the powerful resistance to change of class relations and associated life-chances and patterns of social action. If these regularities are to be explained, theory needs to be correspondingly reoriented, and must abandon functionalist and teleological assumptions in favour of providing more secure micro-foundations. This argument is developed and illustrated in the course of an attempt to apply rational action theory to the explanation of persisting class differentials in educational attainment.

The affluent worker in the class structure

Preface 1. Introduction: the debate on the working class 2. The design of the research 3. The world of work 4. The pattern of sociability 5. Aspirations and social perspectives 6. Conclusion: the affluent worker in the class structure Appendixes References Index.

The social grading of occupations : a new approach and scale

The authors have obtained popular assessments of the social standing of several hundred occupations and, by a novel application of sampling procedures, constructed a scale upon which the position of any employed male can be determined with a known degree of precision.

Intergenerational Inequality: A Sociological Perspective

When economists are concerned with the inheritance of inequality, they typically focus on the intergenerational transmission of income or wealth. In contrast, sociologists are more likely to analyze intergenerational mobility between (and immobility in) different class positions.

The Promising Future of Class Analysis: A Response to Recent Critiques

Class analysis has recently been criticised from a variety of standpoints. In this paper we argue that much of this criticism is misplaced and that, as a research programme, the promise of class analysis is far from exhausted. The first part of the paper clarifies the nature and purpose of class analysis, as we would understand it, and in particular distinguishes it from the class analysis of Marxist sociology. The second part then makes the case for the continuing relevance of class analysis, in our conception of it, by reviewing findings from three central areas of current research.

Causation, Statistics, and Sociology

Three different understandings of causation, each importantly shaped by the work of statisticians, are examined from the point of view of their value to sociologists: causation as robust dependence, causation as consequential manipulation, and causation as generative process. The last is favoured as the basis for causal analysis in sociology. It allows the respective roles of statistics and theory to be clarified and is appropriate to sociology as a largely non-experimental social science in which the concept of action is central

Class and Status: The Conceptual Distinction and its Empirical Relevance

In this article, we return to Max Webers distinction between class and status as related but different forms of social stratification. We argue that this distinction is not only conceptually cogent, but empirically important as well. Indeed, class and status do have distinct explanatory power when it comes to studying varying areas of social life. Consistent with Webers assertions, we show that economic security and prospects are stratified more by class than by status, while the opposite is true for outcomes in the domain of cultural consumption. Within politics, class rather than status predicts Conservative versus Labour Party voting in British general elections and also Left-Right political attitudes. But it is status rather than class that predicts Libertarian-Authoritarian attitudes.

Rational action theory for sociology

Rational action theory (RAT) is not a highly unified intellectual entity. In the first part of the paper, varieties of RAT are distinguished in terms of three criteria : i.e. according to whether they (i) have strong rather than weak rationality requirements; (ii) focus on situational rather than procedural rationality; (iii) claim to provide a general rather than a special theory of action. In the second part, these same criteria are applied in a consideration of which version of RAT holds out most promise for use in sociology

Education, Employers and Class Mobility

Abstract In this paper, we start from certain propositions central to the liberal (or functionalist) theory of industrialism, which represent education as playing a crucial, and increasing, role in the mediation of intergenerational class mobility. We then note recent British findings that call the liberal theory into question: i.e. findings that indicate that the importance of education in mediating mobility is tending, if anything, to decline. We go on to suggest a possible explanation for this tendency in which employers are the central actors. More specifically, we suggest grounds for supposing that, under prevailing conditions of the demand for and supply of education, employers may find educational qualifications of decreasing value to them in making their personnel decisions, both as certifying relevant competencies and as signalling unobservable but desirable attributes on the part of potential employees. We then turn to empirical evidence and present, first, a detailed analysis of newspaper job advertisements, and second, relatively disaggregated analyses of the effects of education on intergenerational mobility. In both respects, the evidence from these sources is generally consistent with the theoretical arguments previously outlined.