Intergeneration and intrageneration social mobility in Britain

Analyses of social mobility remains divided between structuralist (e.g. class structural) and individualist (e.g. status attainment) perspectives. Primarily adopted by sociologists, the former focus on the opportunity structure in which social mobility operates, while the latter, adopted by economists, on the individual attributes associated with mobility. It is becoming increasingly clear however that it is vital to draw from both perspectives to understand social mobility. I model two British cohorts using latent class growth model to uncover the heterogeneous paths of social mobility within these two cohorts. The National Child Development Study 1958 (NCDS) and the British Cohort Survey 1970 (BCS) cohorts are followed over the period up to 2004. By inter-relating the patterns of their class career mobility with individual and class attributes this study empirically assess the importance of social determinants and individual attributes in unprecedented detail. I find four distinct trajectories of male mobility as the 1958 NCDS cohort members go through 23 years of participation in the labour market between 1981 and 2004. Cohort members tracing different trajectories come from different social class of origin, thus opening up a new dimension of inter-generational social mobility. For the first time one sees the effects of social background to persist up to the ages of 40s, so contradicting the assumption in social mobility literature