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Long-term social mobility: Research agenda and a case study (Berlin, 1825-1957)
Abstract
A review of sociological and historical research into long-term social mobility shows a common research agenda linking total mobility, relative mobility, and stratification to industrialization, as well as powerful methods to test hypotheses on widely available historical data. To demonstrate the viability of such a historical approach, social mobility and stratification in Berlin between 1825 and 1957 are analyzed. Intergenerational as well as marital total mobility rates show no correlation with industrialization. However, with respect to relative intergenerational mobility, the Berlin data corroborate the hypothesis of a gradual growth in 'openness' more than the hypotheses of no change, or of a one-time increase during early industrialization. For marital mobility no trend in relative mobility is evident.
... The 'logic of industrialism' thesis has served as the starting point for a considerable number of sociological and historical studies on intergenerational social mobility. Van Leeuwen and Maas (1996) and Maas and Van Leeuwen (2002) offer overviews of the results of these studies. These studies have not yet reached a consensus on whether or not industrialisation has led to more openness in societies. ...
... Apart from the transformations in the socio-occupational distribution which it will require and the structural mobility which is associated with it, industrialization will make individual destinations less dependent on social origins and thereby lead to a gradual increase in the openness of the mobility regimes in societies. This theory has not only attracted the attention of sociologists, but also stimulated research by social historians during the last two decades (see in particular Kaelble, 1981;Miles and Vincent, 1993;Van Leeuwen and Maas, 1996). ...
The aim of this paper is to examine whether a long-term trend can be identified in the mobility regime of French society from the middle of the century. It begins with a review of the international literature on temporal trends in social fluidity within modern societies. Analysing recent French research which has concluded that inequality of opportunity has remained unchanged in France during the last two decades, the paper argues that such a conclusion can only have resulted from the use of insufficiently powerful statistical techniques. The second part of the paper analyses father-son and father-daughter mobility tables drawn from national representative surveys carried out in 1953, 1970, 1977, 1985 and 1993 (N=35,741 for males and 18,484 for females). The use of log-linear and log-multiplicative models reveals that the statistical association (as measured with the logarithm of the odds ratio) between social origin and destination has declined steadily by 0.5% a year over a period of forty years. This finding highlights a slow but continuous trend towards a reduction in inequality of opportunity from the middle of the century. Of the twelve million French men and women between the ages of 35 and 59 who were in employment in 1993, nearly half a million would have belonged to different classes without this forty year increase in social fluidity. The paper concludes that the thesis of temporal invariance in the intergenerational mobility regime cannot be maintained for France, but that the reasons of this change still remain to be ascertained.
... De conclusie van dit onderzoek was dat intergenerationele mobiliteit niet was toegenomen in de dertig jaar tussen beide meetmomenten. Hierop volgden studies naar de provincie Utrecht (Van Leeuwen & Maas, 1995), de stad Berlijn (Van Leeuwen & Maas, 1996In de loop van de tijd zijn er steeds meer huwelijksakten ter beschikking gekomen. En we hebben veel tijd en moeite geïnvesteerd om alle beroepen uit die databestanden op dezelfde manier in klassen in te delen en de gegevens op precies dezelfde manier te analyseren (Lambert e.a., 2013; Van Leeuwen & Maas, 2011; Van Leeuwen, Maas & Miles, 2002). ...
Changes in social openness and social exclusion: a view on the past and the future
In contemporary societies, the likelihood to obtain attractive positions differs between men and women, between natives and migrant groups, and between people from different social backgrounds. Societies are not completely ?open?. It is often thought that this was even more the case one or two centuries ago. Research on long term changes in social openness and social exclusion is however relatively scarce. This article gives an overview of recent studies on this topic and presents new questions that the results of these studies trigger off.
A class scheme for historical occupational data : the analysis of marital mobility in industrial cities in 19th century Flanders and England
The authors introduce a new directly comparative approach to the coding and classification of occupational data for the purposes of social analysis. The lack of an explicit way of translating historical occupational titles into a meaningful class or social scheme, which can also be applied across national boundaries, has hindered studies of both past and present societies. The authors present a possible solution-the Social Power (SOCPO) scheme-to the problem. To illustrate how it works empirically, they apply the scheme to a comparison of marital mobility in the industrial districts of two northern European countries over the course of the nineteenth century.
This article studies class attainment and mobility in a long-term perspective, covering the entire transition from a preindustrial to a mature industrial society. Using longitudinal individual-level data for men in a community of southern Sweden we test different hypotheses linking changing social mobility and status attainment to the industrialization process. The data allows an analysis of Sweden's complete transition from an agrarian to an industrialized society, and thus to comprehensively address core hypotheses in the stratification literature. Both absolute and relative mobility increased, mainly explained by upward mobility becoming more prevalent. By looking at status attainment into different segments of the middle class and elite, we also clearly see the increasing role played by formal education and meritocracy for the opportunities of people from low-class origin to advance socially. However, this development is more connected with the maturing of industrial society than with industrialization as such.
Au début du 19e siècle, la société rurale pèse beaucoup plus lourd que la société urbaine, mais son fonctionnement, encore dominé par le système du mariage établissement, a reçu un premier ébranlement avec la Révolution française. Cette société rurale reste, en 1902, bien vivante et même démographiquement dominante, mais elle a perdu beaucoup de sa puissance relative : dans son terreau, une autre société, en pleine expansion, la société urbaine et industrielle, puise sa sève, en attendant de pouvoir l'étouffer. Au recensement de 1806, la France, dans ses limites actuelles, compte 24 millions et demi de ruraux et 5 150 000 citadins, à celui de 1901, elle compte 23 900 000 ruraux et 16 780 000 citadins. Ce changement spectaculaire des rapports de poids n'est nullement le résultat d'une croissance naturelle différentielle mais, bien plutôt, celui de l'exode rural qui a alimenté, pour l'essentiel, la formidable croissance urbaine du 19e siècle. Cet exceptionnel bouleversement de l'équilibre général de la société s'est traduit par une mobilité sociale accrue, un changement radical de l'équilibre des métiers. Les auteurs tentent donc d'explorer les structures de la société française et de reconnaître les processus majeurs de la mobilité professionnelle, pour la période 1803-1902, à l'aide du corpus de 47 100 actes de mariage collectés par des correspondants bénévoles, informatisés par les services de l'INED et exploités à l'INRA.
Concern about the implications of social mobility, or the lack of it, has a long pedigree in political and social theory. As Anthony Heath has written, the two enduring themes which have sponsored this interest are order and efficiency:1 in other words, how does the pattern of mobility affect the way in which societies cohere and function? Most have argued that too little mobility can, by encouraging the formation of antagonistic groups or classes, lead to social upheaval, while mobile societies individualise success and failure, and weaken the bonds of group solidarity. Marx, for example, wrote famously in the third volume of Capital that, ‘the more a ruling class is able to assimilate the foremost minds of a ruled class, the more stable and dangerous becomes its rule’, and elsewhere pointed to the exceptional degree of social flux then popularly perceived to pertain in the New World as an explanation for the immaturity of the American labour movement.2 However, some have argued that too much mobility can be just as dangerous as too little because it generates rootlessness, uncertainty and insecurity,3 while others have shown that mobile societies can give rise to processes of group formation as well as disaggregation.4
151 complete genealogies were constructed from genealogical data from the TRA survey and a reconstitution of the careers of workers at Renault factories between the two World Wars. While at any given moment no significant differences between the workers of various origins are found, an examination of family histories in terms of generations brings out significantly different types of behaviour. Whereas among the older generations most workers came to Paris from provincial concentrations of industrial workers, more recently they have tended to come directly from the country or from the Parisian petty bourgeoisie. These different life courses indicate a major change in the relations between town and country. -English summary