Intergenerational class mobility and the convergence thesis: England, France and Sweden 1

In two papers previously published, we have compared rates of intergenerational class mobility among the adult male populations of England, France and Sweden (Erikson, Goldthorpe and Portocarero 1979, 1982). The empirical results reported in these papers have been taken as a basis for evaluating current arguments concerning mobility patterns within western industrial societies and, in particular, for testing two different versions of the thesis which claims that these patterns display an essential similarity. The earliest and simplest version of this thesis is that due to Lipset and Zetterberg, which holds that the actually observed – or, as we would wish to say, the absolute – rates of mobility between broadly defined classes tend to be ‘much the same’ from one western industrial society to another (Lipset and Zetterberg 1959). The data presented in the first of our two papers stood in some opposition to this claim. While our results could lend support to the idea of there being a ‘family resemblance’ among the class mobility patterns of England, France and Sweden, each of these countries was at the same time found to have a fairly distinctive ‘mobility profile’ when intergenerational movements in class position were examined on the basis of a ninefold class schema. Inflow rates, or patterns of class recruitment, showed especially marked cross-national variation. A major factor creating such variation was evidently that of historically-determined differences in the class structures of the three societies, most notably ones associated with the relative sizes of their agricultural sectors and with differing rates of contraction of employment in agriculture in the course of economic development. It is, however, awareness of precisely this possibility of structurally induced variations in absolute mobility rates which distinguishes the subsequent reformulation of the Lipset-Zetterberg thesis undertaken by Featherman,