Intergenerational mobility of class and occupation in modern England: Analysis of a four-way mobility table

Abstract Rather than focusing on the intergenerational association of status, this article chooses to focus on its generative components rooted in the organization of production. Adopting Wright's distinction between class (property and authority) and occupation (the technical division of labor), I construct a four-way mobility table with strictly defined class and occupation categories. Analyses of a large British data set (1972) show that: (1) while property-based class system is more rigid than skill-based occupational hierarchy, the latter has become the dominant dimension in the intergenerational reproduction of inequality; (2) large owners tend to professionalize their offspring, confirming Bourdieu's observation of the conversion of material capital into human capital as a class reproduction strategy; (3) authority does not seem inheritable. Methodologically, I demonstrate that: (1) a four-way mobility table that separates class and occupation achieves conceptual clarity, analytical rigor, empirical parsimony; (2) the analysis of such a four-way mobility table is particularly useful for examining the convertibility of different socioeconomic advantages; and (3) loglinear models of intergenerational class and occupational associations explain data better than log-multiplicative RC association models.