Locating class cleavages in inter-generational mobility: cross-national commonalities and variations in mobility patterns

Patterns of relative inter-generational mobility among men in 23 industrialized nations are studied, particularly with reference to the Featherman, Jones, and Hauser (1975) hypothesis, which claims that underlying relative rates of mobility in industrialized nations are basically similar. The reigning model of cross-national similarities in the structure of mobility (Erikson and Goldthorpe, 1987<it>a</it>, 1987<it>b</it>) leaves a significant portion of the association between origins and destinations unexplained. This suggests that the model does not adequately tap the location of major class cleavages in some nations. A more inductive approach is adopted by fitting a scaled association model which does not make a priori assumptions about category scalings. The scale values generated by this model allow the comparison, across nations, of relative inter-class distances. Major mobility profiles are identified and shown to account for a substantial portion of the cross-national variation in the structure of association