Vertical and Nonvertical Class Mobility in Three Countries

Classes are held to have specific relations to labor and commodity markets, and these relations are thought to constrain the mobility chances of their members. Classes are also held to be unequal, though not necessarily strictly ordered in a hierarchy of advantage. The theorist of class mobility should distinguish between movement attributable to closeness on a vertical dimension and movement (or lack of it) attributable to specific class relations. This paper looks at all four combinations of vertical vs class-specific, and distributional vs exchange mobility, for men in three countries. While there is evidence of some inter-societal differences in both aspects of class-specific mobility, differences in vertical mobility are minute. The outstanding result of the analysis, however, is that 88% of all differences must be attributed to differences between occupational distributions. The analysis employs a "structured' approach to modeling which reflects the traditional concerns of mobility analysis.