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and while it has given rise to rich debates (especially with respect to vocational training)
over the last six decades, our examination of affect the transition between school and work,
articles published in the main journal in the and in particular the status of the first job.
field since 1981 has shown that a pattern of DiPrete and Grusky (1990) constructed
normal science has set in. There also appears macro-variables to characterize year to year
an increasing sense of a mismatch between changes in employment and personnel poli-
this mainstream approach and the contempo- cies and in government job training budgets
rary reality of the reproduction and transmis- in order to systematically compare levels of
sion of social inequality over time. This is occupational attainment. DiPrete and his col-
why a new paradigm is emerging. leagues (1997) also characterized the career
mobility regimes stemming from the organi-
zation of labour markets in four societies
The emergence of the lifecourse with different political traditions, Germany,
the Netherlands, Sweden, and the US. These
approach
efforts testify to a much finer grained atten-
As we saw earlier, the 1991 review of the tion to the variation of institutional arrange-
succession of three generations of mobility ments between countries. And while
studies by Ganzeboom, Treiman, and Ultee educational institutions still receive the bulk
was very optimistic: methodological issues of this attention, variations in the organiza-
had been tackled, improved answers to clas- tion of labour markets are also considered.
sical questions had been provided, the field This extends Sorokin’s intuitions about the
was moving on. The very same first two key role played by a broad variety of institu-
authors are more tentative in talking about tions in the reproduction, transmission, and
the fourth generation of studies in 2000. changes of social privilege.
There were major advances in comparative Treiman and Ganzeboom (2000) also rec-
projects, the survey designs and the data ognize other new avenues. In the Marxist tra-
were better, the methods ever more sophisti- dition, Wright (1989) has led an ambitious
cated. But the changes, while largely posi- comparative project on class structure and
tive, were less easily characterized. There class consciousness, paying attention to
was a return to ‘the central question of how national variations in the distribution of indi-
the stratification outcomes of individuals are viduals, male and female, into positions of
affected by their social environment’, but the authority and control over enterprises; he and
ways in which it was tackled became much his colleagues also broached the issue of the
more diversified, suggesting that a number of permeability of class boundaries, and of its
researchers had identified anomalies, aspects influence on class consciousness. Kelley and
of social mobility that were not adequately Evans (1993) led an effort to explore percep-
accounted for through the usual approaches. tions regarding social position, and their con-
Treiman and Ganzeboom (2000) thus nection to political attitudes. Szelényi,
praise the completion of the classical Treiman and their colleagues (1995) sparked a
CASMIN project (Erikson and Goldthorpe, number of research projects, using retrospec-
1992), which definitively established that tive life-history data, about how individual tra-
there is a core mobility pattern common to all jectories were transformed in post-communist
industrialized nations. But they then cite a Eastern European societies; attention was paid
number of new avenues being explored. For especially to whether the logic of stratification
instance, Shavit and Blossfeld (1993) exam- was radically altered with these societal
ine the effects of various factors on the odds changes, or whether, on the contrary, those
of making the transition from each educa- who held privileged positions beforehand were
tional level to the next, while Shavit and able to put these advantages to use afterwards.
Müller (1998) focus on how variations in the Mayer also compared different birth
educational systems of various countries cohorts interviewed in the German Life