The Variability of Occupational Attainment: How Prestige Trajectories Diversified within Birth Cohorts over the Twentieth Century

Abstract

This study develops and applies a framework for analyzing variability in individuals’ occupational prestige trajectories and changes in average variability between birth cohorts. It extends previous literature focused on typical patterns of intragenerational mobility over the life course to more fully examine intracohort differentiation. Analyses are based on rich life course data for men and women in West Germany born between 1919 and 1979 from the German Life History Study and the German National Educational Panel Study ( N = 16,854 individuals). Mixed-effects growth-curve models with heterogeneous variance components are applied. Results show that birth cohorts systematically differ in their variability; cohorts who entered the labor market in the late 1950s and 1960s and experienced mostly closed employment relations have exceptionally homogenous trajectories. Earlier and later cohorts, who experienced more open employment relations, are more heterogeneous in their trajectories. Cohorts with higher variability at labor market entry are characterized by persistently strong intracohort differentiation. Women’s variability within employment is similar to men’s but markedly increases once employment interruptions are considered.

Change in Personal Culture over the Life Course

“…Thus, personal culture may change more at younger ages (Bardi et al 2009; Kratz 2021). With ongoing demographic changes, such as increases in gray divorce in older age and less stable labor market trajectories (Brown et al 2019; Lersch, Schulz, and Leckie 2020), transitions in social environments may become increasingly common even at older ages, which may lead to continuing change in personal culture.…”

“…Consequently, life courses are generally more varied in the family domain in younger cohorts (McMunn et al 2015; van Winkle 2018). In addition, life course variability in the work domain has increased in younger cohorts (Lersch et al 2020; van Winkle and Fasang 2021). All of this suggests the direction and magnitude of change in personal culture may become less uniform in younger birth cohorts as transition experiences are increasingly varied between individuals (Perales et al 2019).…”

Is the Recession a ‘Shecession’? Gender Inequality in the Employment Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic in Germany

“…Especially during the economic upturn in the immediate post-war decades, wage levels of industrial workers were sufficient to provide a livelihood for a family without the necessity of a second earner (Schäfer & Gottschall, 2015). Men's employment careers of the post-war decades were characterized by an exceptional homogeneity and stability (Lersch, Schulz, & Leckie, 2020;Möhring, 2016).…”

Rising Patriarchy and Declining Economic Opportunity: Life Courses and Social Change in Egypt between 1965 and 2018

“…Open employment relationships grant easy access to positions without formal certification and weak employment protection typically leads to eventful and interrupted work lives. Closed employment relationships denote the opposite—restricted access to positions through high employment protection leading to stable employment lives for protected insiders, but durable labor market exclusion for outsiders, typically women (Lersch, Schulz, and Leckie 2020). In Europe and North America in the 1950s and 1960s, Fordist industrial mass production and closed employment relationships shaped a “Fordist” life course regime (Mayer 2005), in which major life transitions were regulated, secured by the state, and strongly center around work for men, and the family for women.…”