RC28s Contributions to Knowledge

1
RC28s Contributions to Knowledge

• Comments on Mike Houts perspective on What We
  Have Learned
• Thomas A. DiPrete
• Duke University

2
Mikes 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.

3
Mikes 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.

4
My Characterization of Mikes 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.

5
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.

6
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.

7
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.

8
1983, p. 1
9
1983, p. 2
10
1983, p. 3
11
2001, p. 1
12
2001, p. 2
13
2001, p. 3
14
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 worlds inequality is between-nation.
  This component of total inequality experienced
  long-term growth, but is no longer growing.

15
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 mens 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.

16
Intergenerational Mobility beyond BD 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).

17
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.

18
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.

19
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.

20
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.

21
Postscript

• Trends in Educational Stratification Favor
  Women (Mike Houts 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 Buchmanns
  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.