Studies of how characteristics of the family of origin are associated with educational and labor market outcomes indicate the degree of openness of societies and have a long tradition in sociology. We review research published since 1990 into educational stratification and social (occupational or class) mobility, focusing on the importance of parental socioeconomic circumstances, and with particular emphasis on comparative studies. Large-scale data now available from many countries and several time points have led to more and better descriptions of inequality of opportunity across countries and over time. However, partly owing to problems of comparability of measurement, unambiguous conclusions about trends and ranking of countries have proven elusive. In addition, no strong evidence exists that explains intercountry differences. We conclude that the 1990s witnessed a resurgence of microlevel models, mostly of a rational choice type, that signals an increased interest in moving beyond description in stratification research. INTRODUCTION-DEFINING THE AREA Research in social stratification is a very lively area within sociology, being so near the heart of the discipline itself. A common distinction within this area is between inequality of opportunity and inequality of condition. The former has its origin in the liberal goal that a person's chances to get ahead (attain an education, get a good job) should be unrelated to ascribed characteristics such as race, sex, or class (or socioeconomic) origin. The latter, inequality of condition, is concerned with the distribution of differential rewards and living conditions, either in the simple form of distributions of scarce goods or in relation to different inputs (such as effort and time) or rights (such as citizenship or employment). Of course, the distinction

In the sociological literature on social mobility, the long-standing convention has been to assume that intergenerational reproduction takes one of two forms, either a categorical form that has parents passing on a big-class position to their children, or a gradational form that has parents passing on their socioeconomic standing to their children. These conventional approaches ignore in their own ways the important role that occupations play in transferring advantage and disadvantage from one generation to the next. In log-linear analyses of nationally representative data from the United States, Sweden, Germany, and Japan, we show that (a) occupations are an important conduit for reproduction, (b) the most extreme rigidities in the mobility regime are only revealed when analyses are carried out at the detailed occupational level, and (c) much of what shows up as big-class reproduction in conventional mobility analyses is in fact occupational reproduction in disguise. Although the four countries studied here differ in the extent to which the occupational form has been institutionalized, we show that it is too prominent to ignore in any of these countries. Even in Japan, which has long been regarded as distinctively "deoccupationalized," we find evidence of extreme occupational rigidities. These results suggest that an occupational mechanism for reproduction may be a fundamental feature of all contemporary mobility regimes.

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