Scaling the Intergenerational Continuity of Occupation: Is Occupational Inheritance Ascriptive After All?

A new scaling for detailed occupational categories is prepared by extracting a symmetric scaling of intergenerational continuity (SSIC) from a 308 X 308 mobility table derived from the NORC General Social Survey. The resulting SSIC scores are based solely on observed mobility among detailed occupational categories. These scores are quite similar to socioeconomic index (SEI) scores. and somewhat less similar to NORC occupational prestige scores. The SSIC values closely match average offspring's SEIs and average father's SEIs for each category, although no information about SEI or its components is employed in their calculation. This fundamentalist approach to measuring inheritance without a priori scaling reveals that mediation of occupational inheritance by education is outweighed by direct "ascriptive" transmission.