•The direct social origin effect is stable over historical and biographical time.•Career mobility is stronger in the Netherlands compared to Italy.•The intragenerational stability of the direct ...effect is the result of contrasting mechanisms.•Social origin plays a role beyond the first job entry.•The direct effect would decrease without the role that social origin plays over the career.
The article examines the direct effect of social origin on occupational attainment over the early life course of Italian and Dutch men in the period 1946–2005. Based on cross-country and cross-cohort comparisons, we explore the role of the context in favouring the direct transmission of social advantages. Early employment careers are reconstructed using the ‘Italian Longitudinal Household Panel Study’ and the ‘Family Survey Dutch Population’. Multilevel growth curve analyses are used to understand whether the direct effect of social origin at labour market entry increases, decreases or remains stable over the first 10 years of occupational career. Empirical results show that, in both countries, the direct social origin effect is stable over historical and biographical time. Independently of structural and institutional conditions influencing the extent of career mobility, offspring hailing from advantaged social background enjoy a better occupational position at labour market entry, while experiencing similar rates of career progression compared to their counterparts from less-advantaged families. However, when entering the labour market in the same occupational position, offspring from the service class enjoy higher rates of progression compared to their working-class counterparts. Taken together, these pieces of evidence imply that the direct social origin effect would decrease over the early career without the additional role that social background plays beyond the labour market entry.
Although it is commonly believed that the volume, diversity, geographical scope, and overall complexity of international migration have increased as part of globalization processes, this idea has ...remained largely untested. This article analyzes shifts in global migration patterns between 1960 and 2000 using indices that simultaneously capture changes in the spread, distance, and intensity of migration. While the results challenge the idea that there has been a global increase in volume, diversity, and geographical scope of migration, main migratory shifts have been directional. Migration has globalized from a destination country perspective but hardly from an origin country perspective, with migrants from an increasingly diverse array of non-European-origin countries concentrating in a shrinking pool of prime destination countries. The global migration map has thus become more skewed. Rather than refuting the globalization of migration hypothesis, this seems to reflect the asymmetric nature of globalization processes in general.
Divergent findings on trends in inequalities in educational attainment associated with individuals' social origins have led to much discussion of how far these reflect real differences by place and ...time or, rather, differences in research procedures. But in this latter regard, one issue has received relatively little attention: i.e. that of the conceptualization and measurement of social origins. We propose decomposing social origins into parental class, parental status, and parental education. Following this approach, we analyse data from three British birth cohort studies. We show that these three components of social origins have independent and distinctive effects on educational attainment, and ones that persist or change in differing ways across the cohorts. We also make some assessment of their combined effects. We consider the methodological implications of our findings, in particular for analyses of trends in educational inequalities, and, further, how they might result from other, independently established, changes in social stratification in Britain over the historical period covered.
Higher education is considered an important dimension for building more egalitarian societies. However, despite the social value assigned to it, international evidence indicates that the social ...status of students’ families continues to prevent significant mobility in the social structure. In Chile, despite policies to increase access to higher education, the university system continues to reproduce inequalities of origin through selection, separating elite students from low-income students. In this context, little is known about the perception that university students have of the role that these institutions play in social mobility, especially for those of more disadvantaged social origins. This article explores and describes the persistence of the university dream among Chilean’s students at the Catholic University of Temuco, the Chilean educational institution with the highest percentage of poor students in the country, analyzing it on the understanding that aspirations represent idealist targets of the desired social class, while expectations represent realistic goals regarding the expected social class. Based on a statistical analysis of survey data from 209 students, results show that students’ family origin does not prevent them from projecting themselves as part of a higher class, with the university acting as an agent that dynamizes positions to favor greater homogeneity in the future social structure. In addition, postgraduate degrees are defined as a catalyst for future social mobility. Finally, the future tensions between the still-hegemonic meritocratic discourse and the reality of the social space that these students will occupy are discussed.
In recent years, the emotional experience of climate change has been studied extensively from fields like psychology, theology, sociology, and philosophy. It is crucial to analyze these results for ...possible vulnerability with regard to well-being. While climate justice research raises awareness of the current (social) situation of the participants in relation to the experience of climate change, the research on climate emotions seems to overlook the participant's former social situation - their family of origin. Previous studies on injustice have shown however that it is precisely the way people were educated on emotion work that has a significant impact on their experiences and sense of control in the situation. Given the importance of this sense of control for mental well-being, I argue consequently that social origin is a vulnerability for well-being in the (emotional) experience of climate change, perpetuating climate injustice, based on this combination of studies from different epochs. Therefore, in the interest to protect well-being on a warming planet, it is crucial to raise awareness of the impact of social origin.
In recent years, multidimensional conceptualizations of social origin have become increasingsly common in social stratification research. We provide evidence on the associations between four origin ...measures, parents' class, status, earnings and education on the one hand and the corresponding offspring measures on the other. We also extend previous research on differences in origin effects at different levels of the children's educational attainment and compare the predictive power of the social origin measures with regard to children's top and bottom attainments on all outcome variables. We use Norwegian administrative data for nearly 500,000 individuals born between 1961 and 1970. The analyses show that parents' education is a much stronger predictor for all outcomes than are their social class and status positions - both taken separately and together. Parental education also outperforms parents' earnings, except when the offspring variable is also earnings. Thus, parents' premarket characteristics seem to be more important than their labour market achievements for their children's outcomes. A second major finding is that the predictive power of social origins is often quite similar for advantaged and disadvantaged outcomes. However, bottom earnings are much less strongly associated with social origins than are top earnings.
In a business environment characterized by labor shortages, the under-utilization of existing potential is a problem for both companies and governments. Nevertheless, the development of people from ...disadvantaged social origin is limited. Research on the intergenerational transmission of social disadvantage consistently shows that access to higher education is still highly stratified. Less is known about whether origin-based inequalities persist or can be offset within the occupational context. Based on a systematic review of 59 studies, we identify the career success (CS) indicators that have been examined in this growing research literature, describe the various forms that the social origin–CS relationship can assume, and identify explanatory mechanisms for the discrepancies in the career trajectories of individuals from different social backgrounds. Based on a critical analysis of existing studies, we show that many areas of the above research themes remain underexplored, despite recent significant advancements, and provide directions for future research. This includes recommendations for the choice of indicators for measuring CS, including the determination of reference persons in future studies and for closing research gaps in previous research designs regarding the connection between social origin and CS. Moreover, we provide suggestions for taking into account further essential factors on an individual, organizational, and contextual level to explain the social origin−CS relationship.
