The Blackwell Companion to Sociology (72 page)

306

Donald J. Treiman

respect to socioeconomic status ± the greater the similarity in status between any two occupational classes, the greater the rate of mobility ± a point that Erikson and Goldthorpe somewhat underemphasize.

The major conclusion of The Constant Flux is that in industrial societies there

is a core mobility pattern common to all countries and that the small observed

differences between nations are due to idiosyncratic historical and political

circumstances. Erikson and Goldthorpe also claim that there is little evidence

that mobility has increased over time. Their first conclusion, that the pattern of mobility ± that is, the relative likelihood of mobility between occupational

classes (adjusting for variations in the size of occupational categories) ± is largely invariant across industrial societies, ranks as a major discovery, although there is rather less certainty that the amount of mobility is as cross-nationally invariant.

Other researchers have likewise demonstrated that the underlying pattern of

mobility is relatively invariant over time once shifts in the distribution of the labor force over occupations are taken into account. Thus, there is strong

evidence that the relative chance of ending up in specific occupational categories, given that one's father is in a particular category, was relatively invariant in industrial societies throughout the twentieth century. Erikson and Goldthorpe's

second conclusion is suspect, since they have data for only one point in time and hence must rely on the dubious assumption that there are no age effects on

mobility and hence that age differences may be interpreted as cohort effects. By contrast, Ganzeboom et al. (1989), in an analysis of 149 mobility tables from 35

countries, showed that the rate of intergenerational mobility has in general

increased over time: in 16 of the 18 nations for which they had replicate data

there was a significant increase in mobility chances, on the order of 1±2 percent per year over the second half of the twentieth century, which implies very

substantial change in mobility regimes from one generation to the next. It is

quite possible that the more-or-less universal trend toward greater societal openness is the consequence of processes posited by Treiman in a 1970 review that is still widely cited ± industrialization, urbanization, and the increasing pervasiveness of mass communications ± but these claims have yet to be put to an explicit test.

Educational

Educational Attainment

We have already noted that the highest level of education attained depends to

some degree upon the socioeconomic status of parents. The obvious question to

ask is, why is this so? Why should the children of men with high status occupa-

tions go further in school than men with low status occupations, and why should

the children of well educated people attain high levels of education themselves?

At least partial answers can be found in two theoretical developments, one an

analysis of the way forms of capital affect education and other aspects of status attainment, and the other a conceptualization of final educational attainment

as the culmination of a series of transitions between successive educational

levels.

Occupations, Stratification, and Mobility

307

Forms of Capital

We can think of families as controlling three forms of ``capital,'' all of which derive in part from the education and occupational status of parents:

. Cultural capital consists of information, knowledge, abilities, skills, and

motivations. Cultural capital is thus similar to, but broader than, ``human

capital'' as conceived by economists.

. Financial capital consists of permanent income, wealth, and property.

. Social capital consists of normative expectations and also of interpersonal

relationships of obligation, influence, aid, and trust.

Here is how each form of capital affects educational attainment.

Cultural Capital

The main impact of cultural capital is in creating the skills, values, habits, and motivations that enhance the probability that children will do well at school.

Since success at any level of schooling is the most important determinant of

advancement to the next level, the consequence is that those who come from

families with high cultural capital will tend to obtain more schooling than will others. Children from families with abundant cultural capital do better in school because in such families the attributes that facilitate school success ± literacy and numeracy, abstract reasoning, and oral discussion and argumentation ± are

valued and practiced. Children in such families become proficient at these

skills and are motivated to continue to improve them. Moreover, they usually

begin their schooling with a head start over other children; in particular, often they have learned to read and count before beginning school. They are thus

rewarded and encouraged by teachers, which reinforces their motivation to do

well.

Financial Capital

The effect of financial capital (specifically, income and wealth) on educational attainment is quite straightforward. It operates in three ways: first, through the ability of parents to pay for schooling, where there are fees, or for high quality schooling, where schools vary in quality, or to afford housing in locales with

superior schools; second, by enhancing access of children to facilities, products, and services that enhance learning, such as books, educational games, computers, and separate study rooms or desks; and, third, by enabling their children to forgo income ± staying in school rather than dropping out to help support the family.

Social Capital

Parental expectations exert a powerful influence on the aspirations and expecta-

tions of their children, by conveying a sense of both what is possible and what is 308

Donald J. Treiman

appropriate. Thus, rates of substance abuse, delinquency, and teenage preg-

nancy, all of which promote early school leaving, are strongly related to the

nature of the family environment. Wider societal expectations may also affect

school performance and subsequent achievement. In particular, oppressed ethnic

or other social groups may on average do poorly in school simply because they

are expected to do so, by their teachers and other influential societal actors.

Arguing along similar lines, Steele (1997) has shown that the mean test perform-

ance of different categories of students can be experimentally manipulated by

evoking ``stereotype anxiety''; that is, making salient stereotypes about group

differentials in ability. Finally, it has been widely observed, at least in the USA, that educational attainment is negatively associated with the number of siblings, net of other factors. In addition, children from non-intact families (that is, where they do not grow up in households with both natural parents) tend get less

education than children from intact families. Both outcomes are the result of

reduced parental attention.

The evidence is by now fairly strong that cultural capital has by far the most

powerful effect on educational attainment of the three forms of capital. This is hardly surprising, for two reasons. First, it is the most directly related to educational performance ± intellectual skills acquired at home are readily transferred to the classroom. Second, parental education, and the resulting cultural capital, is permanent ± once acquired it cannot be lost ± whereas social capital is fairly situationally specific and financial capital is subject to major variations over the life course.

The odds of Continuing from One Educational Level to the Next

In a series of papers around 1980, Mare showed that the effect of parental status on educational attainment depends on two factors: the effect of parental

status on the odds of moving from one educational level to the next (for

example, from middle school to upper secondary school) and the relative fre-

quency of various transitions. Since the effect of parental status on the odds of making a transition typically declines for successive transitions, it follows that the higher the level of educational attainment in the population, the lower will be the association between parental status and educational attainment. Thus, the

effect of parental status on educational attainment typically declined over the

course of the twentieth century even when the chances of making each transition

remained constant, simply because the average level of education increased in

most nations.

In sum, we now have a fairly clear idea both of the extent to which parental

socioeconomic status affects the level of education achieved by their offspring

(moderate) and of how this is accomplished (through family capital). But it is

important to recall that educational attainment is due largely to factors that

are uncorrelated with socioeconomic origins: individual differences in the intelligence, motivation, and tenacity of students; the influences of teachers

and peers; and simple luck, good or bad. Moreover, we also know that as

average educational levels have risen, the importance of socioeconomic origins

Occupations, Stratification, and Mobility

309

for the level of schooling people ultimate achieve has declined, even where

the effect of origins in making any given transition have remained constant.

Thus, systemic changes associated with societal development have had the

unintended but salutary consequence of increasing equality of educational

opportunity.

Methodological

Methodological Developments

Interestingly, progress over the past 30 years, reflected in the findings reviewed above, has not been importantly influenced by theoretical innovations, with the

partial exception of the theory of forms of capital discussed just above. Rather, the substantial increase in understanding of the structure and process of social stratification and social mobility in different societies has come about as a result of a series of related methodological advances: the introduction of new statistical techniques; improvements in measurement standardization (already discussed);

organizational innovations that have resulted in the creation of a systematic

body of comparative data; and design innovations, particularly multilevel

designs, that facilitate comparative analysis.

Statistical Techniques

Structural equation modeling, introduced mainly by Otis Dudley Duncan in his

monograph with Blau and in other work, and the introduction of log-linear

modeling as a way of carrying out statistical inference for cross-tabulations of categorical variables, such as intergenerational occupational mobility tables,

have already been mentioned. Another important innovation has been the adap-

tation of hazard rate models to the analysis of educational transitions. Such

models are also increasingly being used to study both historical variations in

mobility and status attainment processes and variations over the life course.

These models have a clear advantage over the structural equation models estim-

ated by Blau and Duncan in that they allow the representation of dynamic

processes ± that is, they permit researchers to adequately represent the way

change occurs over the life course, as a series of sequential decisions. It is

evident that when they first enter school, people do not know how much

schooling they will ultimately attain. Rather, they face a series of decisions

over the course of their educational careers: for example, in the USA, whether

to drop out of high school or graduate; for graduates, whether to continue on to tertiary education; if so, what sort of tertiary institution to attend; and so on.

Similarly, occupational mobility over the course of one's working life is the

consequence of a set of decisions made one-by-one, either by the employee

(whether to stay in a job or try to find something better or more suitable) or

by the employer (whether to retain or lay off or fire a worker). Hazard rate (or

`èvent history'') models provide a statistically adequate way of modeling such

sequences of events and, as such, are likely to be increasingly utilized in stratification research.

310

Donald J. Treiman

Standardized Data Sets for Cross-national Comparisons

Perhaps as a consequence of the increasing internationalization of quantitative

competence, together with increases in computing power that have made feasible

the analysis of large and complex data sets on desktop computers, there has been a shift in focus from the conduct of stand-alone cross-sectional surveys of

specific populations to an interest in joining forces to produce comparable

data over time or across nations. The initial model for this effort was the US

General Social Survey (GSS), which began in 1972 and has been repeated there-

after every year or two with careful attention to comparability over time. As the series grew longer, sociologists began to exploit it to do various kinds of trend analysis, including stratification analysis (for example, DiPrete and Grusky,

1990). The success of the GSS inspired two highly salutary developments: (a)

the launching of similar repeated cross-section surveys in other nations; and (b) the creation of the International Social Survey Program (ISSP), in which nations conducting annual social surveys on the GSS model collectively design a module

of some 15 minutes worth of questions on a particular topic, which is then

included in each national survey. From its inception in 1985 with five participating nations, the ISSP has grown to a 22±nation survey. Of particular interest to the stratification research community are the two social inequality modules