Social Mobility in Europe.
Social Mobility in Europe is the most comprehensive study to date of trends in intergenerational social mobility. Leading scholars from across Europe come together in this major new book, using data from 11 European countries over the past 30 years, to call into question long-standing views and beli...
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| Format: | eBook |
| Language: | English |
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Oxford Scholarship Online
2004.
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| Series: | Oxford scholarship online.
Oxford scholarship online. Political Science module. |
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| Online Access: | Connect to the full text of this electronic book |
| Summary: | Social Mobility in Europe is the most comprehensive study to date of trends in intergenerational social mobility. Leading scholars from across Europe come together in this major new book, using data from 11 European countries over the past 30 years, to call into question long-standing views and beliefs. - ;Social Mobility in Europe is the most comprehensive study to date of trends in intergenerational social mobility. It uses data from 11 European countries covering the last 30 years of the twentieth century to analyze differences between countries and changes through time. The findings call into question several long-standing views about social mobility. We find a growing similarity between countries in their class structures and rates of absolute mobility: in other words, the countries of Europe are now more alike in their flows between class origins and destinations than they were thirty years ago. However, differences between countries in social fluidity (that is, the relative chances, between people of different class origins, of being found in given class destinations) show no reduction and so there is no evidence supporting theories of modernization which predict such convergence. Our results also contradict the long-standing Featherman Jones Hauser hypothesis of a basic similarity in social fluidity in all industrial societies 'with a market economy and a nuclear family system'. There are considerable differences between countries like Israel and Sweden, where societal openness is very marked, and Italy, France, and Germany, where social fluidity rates are low. Similarly, there is a substantial difference between, for example, the Netherlands in the 1970s (which was quite closed) and in the 1990s, when it ranks among the most open societies. Mobility tables reflect many underlying processes and this makes it difficult to explain mobility and fluidity or to provide policy prescriptions. Nevertheless, those countries in which fluidity increased over the last decades of the twentieth century had not only succeeded in reducing class inequalities in educational attainment but had also restricted the degree to which, among people with the same level of education, class background affected their chances of gaining access to better class destinations. |
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| Physical Description: | 1 online resource (468 pages) |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| ISBN: | 1282052772 9781282052772 0199258457 9780199258451 |