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Stratification in Hard Times
MARKUS GANGL
Abstract
This essay reviews current research on the relationship between economic inequality
and social stratification. Stratification, that is, the intergenerational reproduction of
the distribution of incomes and socioeconomic advantage, is likely to be related to
the level of economic inequality because parental incomes and wealth are important
resources in families’ investment in children’s earnings capacity. The relationship is
likely to be moderated, however, by the fact that monetary resources are not the sole
family resource of importance, and by counterbalancing effects of progressive policy, notably as far as educational policy is concerned. Also, the relationship between
inequality and stratification is likely to exhibit considerable time lags, and empirical
analyses of contemporaneous correlations are unlikely to be informative in consequence. Owing to the substantial data requirements, few convincing empirical studies on the inequality–stratification relationship are available at present. More reliable
evidence is available from studies of the relationship between inequality and educational attainment, arguably the key interim process in stratification. Here, empirical
results suggest rising inequality to cause rising inequality of educational achievement, notably because well-off families are able to increase children’s attainment in
the face of rising economic incentives, whereas lower income families are less able
to do so. The essay concludes by suggesting key areas of future research, likely to
be spurred by the increasing sophistication of analytical models and the increasing
quality of available intergenerational data on earnings, incomes and socioeconomic
standing.
INTRODUCTION
Social stratification refers to the degree of intergenerational reproduction in the distribution of welfare, status, and socioeconomic advantage.
Focusing on the transmission of status across generations, the study of
social stratification is complementary to more conventional analysis of
socioeconomic inequality. The distribution of income, broadly conceived,
is well known to exhibit considerable inequality in any modern, if not
indeed any human society, yet the character of society will fundamentally
depend on whether incumbency of economically advantageous locations
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.
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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
is mostly handed down from one generation to the next, or is mostly the
result of interindividual differences in scarce ability, talent, and effort.
While the level of income inequality might be equally pronounced within
the present generation in either case, the former society reflects a closed
system of persistent advantage and disadvantage, whereas the latter society is consistent with meritocracy, equal opportunity, and a considerable
degree of intergenerational openness in the distribution of income and
welfare.
Although conceptually distinct aspects of the income distribution, the
causal relationship between inequality and stratification constitutes one
of the most fundamental questions in the social sciences, and continues
to be a perennial concern in egalitarian philosophy and practical politics.
Intuitively, it seems natural to assume that greater inequality of financial
resources will be conducive to the social reproduction of welfare across
generations, and the expectation of some positive correlation between
inequality and stratification is a standard feature of current models of intergenerational mobility and attainment. However, as to be reviewed in more
detail later, the theoretical case for a positive correlation between inequality
and stratification may in fact not be fully compelling upon closer inspection.
Furthermore, robust empirical evidence on the inequality–stratification
relationship turns out to be hard to come by because of near-prohibitive
demands on the data, ideally required to span long observation windows to
adequately capture intergenerational mobility at the household level and to
sample historical variation in family behavior under varying macroeconomic
conditions.
Nevertheless, it is easy to predict rising academic and public interest in
the relationship between inequality and stratification: Income inequality has
been decidedly increasing in affluent countries over the past decades, starting
in the mid-1970s in the United States and followed by many European countries since the 1980s, the transition from socialism led to soaring inequality in
Eastern Europe during the 1990s, and sharply rising levels of income inequality have also become evident in many emerging economies more recently,
including China and India. The severe and worldwide financial recession
that started in 2007–2008 only adds to the picture as a source of further economic strain on households and governments. Compared to the postwar
“Golden Age” of Western capitalism that combined decades of economic
growth and declining inequality, the current era of rising inequality is likely
to challenge both households’ private capacity to invest in the next generation and established egalitarian institutions, notably public education. So if
rising inequality should be conducive to social closure, many societies may
be in for harder times indeed.
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FOUNDATIONAL RESEARCH
Social stratification represents a core area of sociological research, yet concerns for the degree of intergenerational persistence in the distribution of
income are also gaining increasing attention in economics in recent years.
Differences in disciplinary traditions notwithstanding, both fields are clearly
converging in the essentials of their analytical models of social stratification,
including their understanding of the relationship between income inequality
and intergenerational persistence of welfare. Incorporating key contributions
from sociology (notably Blau & Duncan, 1967; Boudon, 1974; Breen, 1997,
2004; Breen & Jonsson, 2007; Erikson & Goldthorpe, 1992; Hout, 2004; Jencks,
Smith, et al., 1972; Jencks, Bartlett, et al., 1979) and economics (e.g., Becker &
Tomes, 1979, 1986; Bénabou, 2000; Bowles & Gintis, 2002; Piketty, 2000; Solon,
2004), the standard model comprises three main elements to describe the
sources of intergenerational persistence in the income distribution, namely, a
model of income determination, a model of skill production, and a model of
family endowments. Most fundamentally, personal (lifetime) income is the
sum of (lifetime) earnings and (lifetime) capital income. In practice, studies
of stratification tend to ignore capital income, not the least due to the dearth
of social science data on parental and filial capital income or wealth, and also
tend to operate on measures of current incomes or occupations as imperfect approximations of personal socioeconomic standing. In the context of
the inequality–stratification nexus, however, it seems worthwhile to remind
oneself that direct bequests of increasingly unequal wealth holdings are an
obvious channel by which increasing income inequality in the parental generation may be directly contributing to increasing persistence of economic
status in the filial generation.
Importantly, however, the social science focus on intergenerational persistence in earnings and occupational status reflects the analytical insight that
direct wealth transfers are of minor importance relative to the intergenerational transmission of earnings potential in generating social stratification.
In fact, if families are successful in transmitting earnings capacity across generations, a certain degree of stratification will exist even in fully competitive labor markets, where (lifetime) earnings may solely be considered the
remuneration of scarce individual capabilities; with noncompetitive markets,
stratification is bound to be even more significant because economic rents
associated with geography, group membership, or tangible assets are also
transmitted across generations in that case. To understand the intergenerational persistence of earnings even in fully competitive labor markets, it is
useful to further distinguish between skills and endowments as components
of individual capabilities. More specifically, there are human capabilities that
are the result of conscious investment of time and financial resources, that
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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
is, skills as traditionally described by human capital theory in economics,
and there are capabilities that individuals are endowed with as a result of
genetic disposition, personality, upbringing, and cultural exposure. Because
job tasks typically require some combination of technical skills and more elusive qualities such as worker effort, diligence, and responsibility, both types
of individual capabilities will command economic rewards.
The distinction between skills and endowments is important because it
taps a fundamental difference in how families may transmit earnings capacity across generations, and this difference in transmission mechanism also
has implications for the relationship between inequality and stratification.
If economic success depends mostly on skills in the child generation, and if
skill acquisition presupposes access to private, that is, parental generation
financial resources, the relationship between inequality and stratification
will be tight, and any increase in economic inequality in the parental generation will imply greater inequality of opportunity and, eventually, economic
standing in the child generation. Yet, both conditions represent important
qualifications to naive intuition. The more labor markets deviate from the
standard economic model, that is, the more endowments transmitted by
exposure rather than investment constitute an important component of
human capabilities, the less relevant economic inequality between families
in the parental generation becomes for securing offspring’s economic
well-being. Families are still likely to play a decisive role in shaping relevant
preferences, habits, and ambitions in the process of socialization, yet such
endowments may correlate only mildly, if at all, with parents’ financial
resources. This reasoning applies, in particular, if endowments constitute a
substitute to formal skills in earnings determination, as is often implicitly
assumed.
The relationship between (rising) economic inequality and stratification
may also be less than straightforward with respect to skill acquisition proper.
According to economic theory, parental financial investment in children
represents a rational trade-off between parents’ own consumption and child
interests. Rising income inequality evidently results in larger inequality
of financial means in the parental generation, and, if seen as a permanent
change, also increases the economic incentive to invest in scarce skills in the
filial generation. But again the extent to which rising inequality will feed
through across generations is likely to be counterbalanced by other processes. At the family level, the issue is with the correlation between parental
income and parental altruism, which may be negative and becoming more
decidedly so as inequality rises. At the societal level, the fundamental issue
is the role of public education which represents the most evident form of
collective instead of private investment in children’s skills. To the extent that
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public education systems effectively redistribute opportunities for investment in skills, this will attenuate the relationship between the (increasing)
inequality of family resources and the inequality of earnings capacity in the
child generation. If anything, this role of public education is exacerbated
where schools and universities shape endowment-type capabilities over and
above pure skill acquisition, that is, where educational institutions provide
appropriate role models, peer groups, and information or foster individual
work ethics in a broad sense.
These various counterbalancing forces notwithstanding, rising inequality
in itself may also alter the process of skill acquisition in ways to further
increase the role of parental income, and hence social stratification. One
aspect is that the recent rise in income inequality has been accompanied
by a rise in income volatility. The distinction may be important insofar as
families may be expected to act on permanent as opposed to current incomes
when making decisions about children’s education, and because volatility
shocks to family income are likely to hit low-income households and their
children disproportionately, whether because of income volatility being
larger relative to long-run incomes in the lower tail of the distribution or due
to the increasing role of risk aversion in low-income families’ educational
decisions in the face of rising income volatility. Secondly, rising inequality
of incomes may contribute to increasing residential segregation, and if so,
to an increasing social segregation of learning environments, adolescent
networks and peer groups in local schools and beyond. Yet, because the
social composition of learning environments is a major factor in determining
children’s educational performance, any such inequality-induced segregation is likely to imply poorer educational outcomes among lower middle
class and low-income families in particular, who may increasingly lack
appropriate role models, peer groups or information on the economic value
of education. Finally, and perhaps most fundamentally, rising economic
inequality may also undermine the effectiveness and political economy of
public education systems, perhaps especially so at the tertiary level. With
rising private incentives to skill acquisition, affluent families are increasingly
likely to resort to private education as a means of exclusive investment in
scarce capabilities, and redistributive educational policy, whether through
income-related grant programs or income gradients in public infrastructure
investment and school budgets, may become a more politically divisive
issue.
CUTTING-EDGE RESEARCH
Analytically, standard sociological and economic models of intergenerational persistence in earnings, incomes, and socioeconomic status suggest
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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
the presence of some positive relationship between income inequality and
stratification. However, proper identification of this relationship in empirical
research, let alone arriving at a valid estimate of its magnitude, represents a
formidable challenge. The empirical study of social stratification generally
implies extensive demands on the empirical data as it requires multigeneration data on personal socioeconomic standing, ideally measured over a
period of several years in order to measure respondents’ long-run position
and at the right time biographically, that is, parental economic position during respondent’s childhood and adolescence, and respondent’s economic
position no earlier than at the point of career stabilization. To economists
working on income data, the ideal dataset would thus minimally include
several years of data on parental incomes during children’s early years
and several years of data on child incomes after ages 35 or 40, which may
require the use of longitudinal surveys and extensive observation windows
of 25 or more years because information about current income is unlikely
to be accurately recalled in retrospect; sociologists working with measures
of class, occupational, or socioeconomic status as effective approximations
of permanent incomes face a somewhat less daunting challenge because
information on parental occupation or education may typically be reliably
solicited from surveys in the child generation.
The increasing availability of respective intergenerational data from household surveys has spurred a rich empirical literature on the intergenerational
transmission of socioeconomic advantage, as evident, for example, in the
contributions of Erikson and Goldthorpe (1992), Breen (2004), Corak (2004,
2013), Bowles, Gintis, and Osborne (2005), Smeeding, Erikson, and Jäntti
(2011), or Ermisch, Jäntti, and Smeeding (2012). Yet, any attempt to understand how social stratification is affected by (rising) inequality imposes the
additional demand that empirical data on the intergenerational correlation
of economic standing be available for families exposed to varying economic
conditions, whether changing levels of inequality or changing business
cycles. To avoid the effective multiplication of the required observation
window—implied in the need to obtain multicohort multigeneration data
for any particular country—some scholars report cross-country differences
in income persistence across generations, which are suggestive of a clear,
although potentially nonlinear, relationship between the level of income
inequality in a country in the parental generation and the degree of intergenerational persistence (occasionally called the “Great Gatsby curve,”
cf. Björklund & Jäntti, 2009; Corak, 2013). The evidence from sociological
research on trends in class mobility is more mixed, with Erikson and
Goldthorpe (1992) reporting results that (falling) inequality may have
spurred social mobility in post-war Europe, yet the more recent analyses
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of Breen and Luijkx (2004) failing to show any clear relationship between
inequality and stratification between the 1970s and the 1990s.
Owing to the severe demands on the data, however, these and other studies often provide only quite limited leverage in ascertaining the empirical
relationship directly; with few country cases or short time-series of intergenerational data within any single country available, current research on
social mobility still lacks statistical power to effectively identify the empirical contribution of changing contextual factors on stratification, the impact of
rising inequality included. Owing both to shorter time spans involved and
the application of richer statistical modeling and research designs enabled
by better data, somewhat more conclusive evidence on the issue is available
with respect to the relationship between income inequality, parental income
and children’s educational attainment, which may be considered as one, if
not the key mediating process involved in generating social stratification.
Out of that literature, Susan Mayer’s (2001) study of the impact of rising
income inequality on children’s educational attainment in the United
States between the 1970s and 1990s probably provides the iconic example of
research on the relationship between inequality and stratification. Using data
on parental incomes and children’s educational attainment from the Panel
Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) combined with measures of state-level
income inequality drawn from the 1970, 1980, and 1990 censuses, Mayer
finds support for both the incentive and the resources effect of rising income
inequality. According to her analysis, rising income inequality has contributed to rising levels of education, yet also to an increasing polarization
of educational investment by family income. It is among affluent families in
the upper half of the income distribution where Mayer finds strong increases
in children’s educational attainment, whereas attainment, notably college
graduation, is declining considerably among children from the bottom half
of the income distribution. Furthermore, she observes declining educational
attainment among children from lower income families despite positive
counterbalancing impacts of raises in educational spending. Importantly,
these findings on the role of rising inequality obtain over and above controls
for parental income, that is, reflect changes in attainment processes other
than the direct effect of increasing differences between parents in terms of
economic resources; interestingly, many of Mayer’s conclusions resonate in a
more recent study by Ananat, Gassman-Pines, and Gibson-Davis (2011) who
find that area unemployment depresses children’s educational performance
also when their own parents have not been personally affected.
The multicountry analysis of Sieben and de Graaf (2003) is another study
that adds several important insights. Although not set up as any test of
the relationship between inequality and educational attainment directly
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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
(instead, Sieben and de Graaf focus on more secular trends of modernization and individualization), their multicohort data is unique in providing
information on parents and multiple children from the same family, whereas
standard household surveys would typically sample data on respondents
and their parents only. With the sibling data at hand, Sieben and de Graaf
are able to calculate the total family impact on educational achievement,
including effects of family resources other than education or income, say,
family relationships or work ethics, that are hard to measure otherwise.
In line with the general argument advanced here, their empirical results
show the impact of fathers’ occupational status—the nearest proxy to family
economic standing in their data—to decline with increasing modernization
(which roughly correlates with falling income inequality in the period under
study); interestingly, however, the overall impact of family resources for
educational attainment shows no such trend at all over time. Taking Sieben
and de Graaf’s results at face value, it hence may be the case that overall
stratification has remained relatively stable over time in many countries, not
the least because families may substitute intangible for tangible resources
even where the direct role of parental incomes in children’s educational
attainment has been declining for political or other reasons. If a similar
logic should apply in current times of rising inequality, intangible family
resources may provide sources of resilience that mitigate the stratification
impact of increases in income inequality, at least up to a point.
KEY ISSUES FOR FUTURE RESEARCH
With inequality rising in many affluent and emerging economies around
the world, academic and public interest in social science research on the
relationship between inequality and stratification is likely on the rise, too.
Fortunately, several considerations suggest that social science might be
in a reasonable position to meet this emerging interest in the issue with
new insights, in particular as far as empirical research is concerned. Most
fundamentally, data availability has improved tremendously in many
respects, allowing researchers to obtain more specific evidence on the
process of intergenerational transmission, and to conduct more sophisticated tests of theoretical models, including the analytical considerations
on the inequality–stratification nexus reviewed. New data source include
household panel surveys, some of which—for example, the American
PSID continuously fielded since 1968 or the German Socio-Economic Panel
(GSOEP) started in 1984—have matured up to a point where prospectively
recorded data now spans respondents’ whole biography from family conditions in childhood and adolescence to respondents’ own economic standing
in prime working age. In other cases, it has been possible to link social
Stratification in Hard Times
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security or similar register data across generations in order to construct
highly accurate intergenerational earnings or income data.
With respect to addressing overtime changes in stratification, however, it
would seem that the overall maturation of household surveys is a decisive
advantage. Begun as instruments of regular social reporting during the 1970s
and 1980s in many countries, omnibus social science surveys—such as the
US General Social Survey (GSS), the International Social Survey Program
(ISSP) and others—that combine representative cross-sectional samples and
broad questionnaire content, often including measures of respondents’ own
economic position and reported parental characteristics, are now available
as an impressive time series of data, especially once it is considered that
many of the representative samples of the early surveys include information on respondents born in or even before the first decade of the twentieth
century. Especially if working within the sociological tradition of class analysis or analyses of socioeconomic status, these surveys increasingly provide
researchers with the multicohort data and statistical power required to move
from mostly static analyses of intergenerational transmission to a description of trends in stratification and to testing analytical models of changing
patterns of stratification.
The increasing wealth of available data is accompanied by an increasing
interest in stratification research in both sociology and economics, the two
key disciplines involved in this field of research, but most importantly also by
an intellectual convergence, if not even an increasing collaboration between
the disciplines in terms of theoretical approaches and statistical methodology. Besides the obvious beneficial implications of collaboration with respect
to data production, the increasing intellectual exchange between the two disciplines is likely to increase interest in the testing and refinement of the basic
analytical frameworks, which is likely to result in a more integrated micro
model of intergenerational reproduction of economic advantage. In this context, the issue of whether and which specific measurable aspects of family
resources—that is, parental income, class, or education—should be studied
or whether the empirical focus should be on total family impact as measured
by sibling correlations or related quantities. In part, these questions refer to
appropriate measurement and adequate statistical methodology, in part, as
briefly indicated in the earlier review, the issue raises important theoretical
questions not only about the extent of substitution across alternative types
of family resources, and the question of adequately capturing family sources
of social reproduction but also resilience in the face of rising inequality. To
the extent substitution is feasible, empirical analyses based on any specific
measure run the risk of producing conflicting evidence on trends in stratification whenever the relative importance of specific resources—parental
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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
income, education, or work ethics—in transmitting earnings capacity across
generations is changing, but not the overall role of the family itself.
With the increasing theoretical sophistication and the increasing availability of data, it is also straightforward to predict a larger role for genuinely
causal analysis in the field. At the micro level, this interest is, for example,
visible in the collection of genetic data within household surveys in order
to improve on estimates of the causal impact of family socioeconomic conditions on children. At the macro level, an increasingly causal orientation of
empirical research is likely to spur the collection of multilevel data that merge
household and contextual information on economic or political conditions.
Especially as far as the impact of rising inequality is concerned, and because
observational designs are the natural mainstay of stratification research, the
collection of sufficiently rich contextual information to permit the inclusion
of appropriate controls for concomitant macro-level change other than rising inequality seems particularly important; occasionally, it may be possible
to exploit a clear natural experiment, for example, a specific major policy
change, but because stratification refers to an intergenerational, long-term
process it may ultimately be much harder to pin down any change to some
specific intervention than in other fields of inquiry.
A renewed focus on the causal relationship between inequality and
stratification will, finally, also reorient stratification research toward greater
analytical and methodological precision. Progress in the area will require
a careful distinction between the study of short-term (cyclical) and longer
term (secular) effects of rising inequality on stratification, and this also
raises the question of appropriate time lags and the appropriate contextual level in the relationship. Because intergenerational processes evolve
over considerable spans of time, it is entirely unsurprising that studies
on the contemporaneous correlation between inequality and stratification
remain inconclusive. Also, the answer to the question of the level at which
inequality matters will depend on and inform our theoretical frameworks:
if local networks are important in families’ expectation formation, then
residential area inequality might be the preferred measure, yet national
inequality may be more relevant if parents and children expect to be
geographically mobile. Similarly, the answers may depend on the national
political system and the funding of public education systems that may
provide important institutional antidotes to the impact of rising economic
inequality on stratification. Evidently, the search for any mediating factors in
the inequality–stratification nexus is an exceedingly important issue in itself,
ranging from the search for potential interactions between inequality and
educational policy or tax and transfer systems more generally, but also for
nonlinearities in the relationship between inequality and stratification that
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may suggest break-even points in family, community, or political resilience
favoring equal investment in children even in the face of rising inequality.
REFERENCES
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employment losses on children’s educational achievement. In G. J. Duncan & R.
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Becker, G. S., & Tomes, N. (1986). Human capital and the rise and fall of families.
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Björklund, A., & Jäntti, M. (2009). Intergenerational income mobility and the role of
family background. In W. Salverda, B. Nolan & T. Smeeding (Eds.), The Oxford
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Bowles, S., & Gintis, H. (2002). The inheritance of inequality. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 16(3), 3–30.
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Breen, R. (1997). Inequality, economic growth and social mobility. British Journal of
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Breen, R. (Ed.) (2004). Social mobility in Europe. Oxford, England: Oxford University
Press.
Breen, R., & Jonsson, J. O. (2005). Inequality of opportunity in comparative perspective: Recent research on educational attainment and social mobility. Annual Review
of Sociology, 31, 223–243.
Breen, R., & Jonsson, J. O. (2007). Explaining change in social fluidity: Educational
equalization and educational expansion in twentieth-century Sweden. American
Journal of Sociology, 112(6), 1775–1810.
Breen, R., & Luijkx, R. (2004). Conclusions. In R. Breen (Ed.), Social mobility in Europe
(pp. 383–410). Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
Corak, M. (2013). Income inequality, equality of opportunity, and intergenerational
mobility. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 27(3), 79–102.
Corak, M. (Ed.) (2004). Generational income mobility in North America and Europe. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
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Erikson, R. (1996). Explaining change in educational inequality: Economic security
and school reforms. In R. Erikson & J. O. Jonsson (Eds.), Can education be equalized? The Swedish case in comparative perspective (pp. 95–112). Boulder, CO: Westview
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Erikson, R., & Goldthorpe, J. H. (1992). The constant flux. A study of class mobility in
industrial societies. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press.
Ermisch, J., Jäntti, M., & Smeeding, T. (Eds.) (2012). From parents to children. The intergenerational transmission of advantage. New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation.
Hout, M. (2004). How inequality may affect intergenerational mobility. In K. Neckerman (Ed.), Social inequality (pp. 969–987). New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation.
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(1972). Inequality: A reassessment of the effect of family and schooling in America. New
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Mayer, S. E. (2001). How did the increase in economic inequality between 1970 and
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Piketty, T. (2000). Theories of persistent inequality and intergenerational mobility. In
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Sieben, I., & Graaf, P. M. d. (2003). The total impact of the family on educational
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Smeeding, T., Erikson, R., & Jäntti, M. (Eds.) (2011). Persistence, privilege, and parenting. The comparative study of intergenerational mobility. New York, NY: Russell Sage
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Solon, G. (2004). A model of intergenerational mobility variation over time and place.
In M. Corak (Ed.), Generational income mobility in North America and Europe (pp.
38–47). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
FURTHER READING
Bowles and Gintis (2002) concisely describe the analytical and empirical fundamentals of stratification research. Breen and Jonsson (2005)
provide a recent review of empirical research in sociology, including a
review of findings on trends in stratification; Björklund and Jäntti (2009)
as well as Corak (2013) give an overview of current economic research,
which is less developed in terms of trend analysis, however. Hout (2004)
and Solon (2004) are succinct statements of both disciplines’ analytical approach to the inequality-stratification relationship, the empirical
studies of Erikson (1996) and Mayer (2001) may be considered modern
classics.
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MARKUS GANGL SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Markus Gangl is a Professor of Sociology and Chair for Social Stratification and Social Policy at the Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, Germany, and a permanent Honorary Fellow of the Department of Sociology
at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research interests include social
stratification, labor markets, income inequality, poverty, unemployment, and
quantitative methods in the social sciences, notably problems of causal inference and methods for analyzing longitudinal data. Gangl has published on
scar effects of unemployment (American Journal of Sociology, 2004; American
Sociological Review 2006), labor market matching (European Sociological Review,
2004), poverty and income dynamics (Work & Occupations, 2005; Zeitschrift
für Soziologie , 1998), school-to-work-transitions (European Sociological Review,
2003; Transitions from Education to Work in Europe, Oxford University Press,
2003, with Walter Müller), the effects of motherhood on women’s wages and
employment (Demography, 2009; European Sociological Review, 2014, both with
Andrea Ziefle) and the methodology of causal inference in the social sciences
(Sociological Methodology, 2004, with Thomas A. DiPrete; Annual Review of
Sociology, 2010). In current projects, Gangl examines the role of recessions
for stratification outcomes, addresses trends in the distribution of wages,
incomes and poverty persistence, and contributes to the development of statistical methodology in these areas of research.
Personal webpage:
http://www2.uni-frankfurt.de/46138381/mgangl
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Emergence of Stratification in Small Groups (Sociology), Noah Askin et al.
A Social Psychological Approach to Racializing Wealth Inequality (Sociology), Joey Brown
Elites (Sociology), Johan S. G. Chu and Mark S. Mizruchi
Enduring Effects of Education (Sociology), Matthew Curry and Jennie E.
Brand
Intergenerational Mobility (Economics), Steve N. Durlauf and Irina
Shaorshadze
Global Income Inequality (Sociology), Glenn Firebaugh
Social Class and Parental Investment in Children (Sociology), Anne H.
Gauthier
The Emerging Psychology of Social Class (Psychology), Michael W. Kraus
Stratification and the Welfare State (Sociology), Stephanie Moller and Joya
Misra
Health and Social Inequality (Sociology), Bernice A. Pescosolido
14
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
Social Classification (Sociology), Elizabeth G. Pontikes
Class, Cognition, and Face-to-Face Interaction (Sociology), Lauren A. Rivera
Impact of Limited Education on Employment Prospects in Advanced
Economies (Sociology), Heike Solga
Public Opinion, The 1%, and Income Redistribution (Sociology), David L.
Weakliem
Gender and Work (Sociology), Christine L. Williams and Megan Tobias Neely
-
Stratification in Hard Times
MARKUS GANGL
Abstract
This essay reviews current research on the relationship between economic inequality
and social stratification. Stratification, that is, the intergenerational reproduction of
the distribution of incomes and socioeconomic advantage, is likely to be related to
the level of economic inequality because parental incomes and wealth are important
resources in families’ investment in children’s earnings capacity. The relationship is
likely to be moderated, however, by the fact that monetary resources are not the sole
family resource of importance, and by counterbalancing effects of progressive policy, notably as far as educational policy is concerned. Also, the relationship between
inequality and stratification is likely to exhibit considerable time lags, and empirical
analyses of contemporaneous correlations are unlikely to be informative in consequence. Owing to the substantial data requirements, few convincing empirical studies on the inequality–stratification relationship are available at present. More reliable
evidence is available from studies of the relationship between inequality and educational attainment, arguably the key interim process in stratification. Here, empirical
results suggest rising inequality to cause rising inequality of educational achievement, notably because well-off families are able to increase children’s attainment in
the face of rising economic incentives, whereas lower income families are less able
to do so. The essay concludes by suggesting key areas of future research, likely to
be spurred by the increasing sophistication of analytical models and the increasing
quality of available intergenerational data on earnings, incomes and socioeconomic
standing.
INTRODUCTION
Social stratification refers to the degree of intergenerational reproduction in the distribution of welfare, status, and socioeconomic advantage.
Focusing on the transmission of status across generations, the study of
social stratification is complementary to more conventional analysis of
socioeconomic inequality. The distribution of income, broadly conceived,
is well known to exhibit considerable inequality in any modern, if not
indeed any human society, yet the character of society will fundamentally
depend on whether incumbency of economically advantageous locations
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.
1
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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
is mostly handed down from one generation to the next, or is mostly the
result of interindividual differences in scarce ability, talent, and effort.
While the level of income inequality might be equally pronounced within
the present generation in either case, the former society reflects a closed
system of persistent advantage and disadvantage, whereas the latter society is consistent with meritocracy, equal opportunity, and a considerable
degree of intergenerational openness in the distribution of income and
welfare.
Although conceptually distinct aspects of the income distribution, the
causal relationship between inequality and stratification constitutes one
of the most fundamental questions in the social sciences, and continues
to be a perennial concern in egalitarian philosophy and practical politics.
Intuitively, it seems natural to assume that greater inequality of financial
resources will be conducive to the social reproduction of welfare across
generations, and the expectation of some positive correlation between
inequality and stratification is a standard feature of current models of intergenerational mobility and attainment. However, as to be reviewed in more
detail later, the theoretical case for a positive correlation between inequality
and stratification may in fact not be fully compelling upon closer inspection.
Furthermore, robust empirical evidence on the inequality–stratification
relationship turns out to be hard to come by because of near-prohibitive
demands on the data, ideally required to span long observation windows to
adequately capture intergenerational mobility at the household level and to
sample historical variation in family behavior under varying macroeconomic
conditions.
Nevertheless, it is easy to predict rising academic and public interest in
the relationship between inequality and stratification: Income inequality has
been decidedly increasing in affluent countries over the past decades, starting
in the mid-1970s in the United States and followed by many European countries since the 1980s, the transition from socialism led to soaring inequality in
Eastern Europe during the 1990s, and sharply rising levels of income inequality have also become evident in many emerging economies more recently,
including China and India. The severe and worldwide financial recession
that started in 2007–2008 only adds to the picture as a source of further economic strain on households and governments. Compared to the postwar
“Golden Age” of Western capitalism that combined decades of economic
growth and declining inequality, the current era of rising inequality is likely
to challenge both households’ private capacity to invest in the next generation and established egalitarian institutions, notably public education. So if
rising inequality should be conducive to social closure, many societies may
be in for harder times indeed.
Stratification in Hard Times
3
FOUNDATIONAL RESEARCH
Social stratification represents a core area of sociological research, yet concerns for the degree of intergenerational persistence in the distribution of
income are also gaining increasing attention in economics in recent years.
Differences in disciplinary traditions notwithstanding, both fields are clearly
converging in the essentials of their analytical models of social stratification,
including their understanding of the relationship between income inequality
and intergenerational persistence of welfare. Incorporating key contributions
from sociology (notably Blau & Duncan, 1967; Boudon, 1974; Breen, 1997,
2004; Breen & Jonsson, 2007; Erikson & Goldthorpe, 1992; Hout, 2004; Jencks,
Smith, et al., 1972; Jencks, Bartlett, et al., 1979) and economics (e.g., Becker &
Tomes, 1979, 1986; Bénabou, 2000; Bowles & Gintis, 2002; Piketty, 2000; Solon,
2004), the standard model comprises three main elements to describe the
sources of intergenerational persistence in the income distribution, namely, a
model of income determination, a model of skill production, and a model of
family endowments. Most fundamentally, personal (lifetime) income is the
sum of (lifetime) earnings and (lifetime) capital income. In practice, studies
of stratification tend to ignore capital income, not the least due to the dearth
of social science data on parental and filial capital income or wealth, and also
tend to operate on measures of current incomes or occupations as imperfect approximations of personal socioeconomic standing. In the context of
the inequality–stratification nexus, however, it seems worthwhile to remind
oneself that direct bequests of increasingly unequal wealth holdings are an
obvious channel by which increasing income inequality in the parental generation may be directly contributing to increasing persistence of economic
status in the filial generation.
Importantly, however, the social science focus on intergenerational persistence in earnings and occupational status reflects the analytical insight that
direct wealth transfers are of minor importance relative to the intergenerational transmission of earnings potential in generating social stratification.
In fact, if families are successful in transmitting earnings capacity across generations, a certain degree of stratification will exist even in fully competitive labor markets, where (lifetime) earnings may solely be considered the
remuneration of scarce individual capabilities; with noncompetitive markets,
stratification is bound to be even more significant because economic rents
associated with geography, group membership, or tangible assets are also
transmitted across generations in that case. To understand the intergenerational persistence of earnings even in fully competitive labor markets, it is
useful to further distinguish between skills and endowments as components
of individual capabilities. More specifically, there are human capabilities that
are the result of conscious investment of time and financial resources, that
4
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
is, skills as traditionally described by human capital theory in economics,
and there are capabilities that individuals are endowed with as a result of
genetic disposition, personality, upbringing, and cultural exposure. Because
job tasks typically require some combination of technical skills and more elusive qualities such as worker effort, diligence, and responsibility, both types
of individual capabilities will command economic rewards.
The distinction between skills and endowments is important because it
taps a fundamental difference in how families may transmit earnings capacity across generations, and this difference in transmission mechanism also
has implications for the relationship between inequality and stratification.
If economic success depends mostly on skills in the child generation, and if
skill acquisition presupposes access to private, that is, parental generation
financial resources, the relationship between inequality and stratification
will be tight, and any increase in economic inequality in the parental generation will imply greater inequality of opportunity and, eventually, economic
standing in the child generation. Yet, both conditions represent important
qualifications to naive intuition. The more labor markets deviate from the
standard economic model, that is, the more endowments transmitted by
exposure rather than investment constitute an important component of
human capabilities, the less relevant economic inequality between families
in the parental generation becomes for securing offspring’s economic
well-being. Families are still likely to play a decisive role in shaping relevant
preferences, habits, and ambitions in the process of socialization, yet such
endowments may correlate only mildly, if at all, with parents’ financial
resources. This reasoning applies, in particular, if endowments constitute a
substitute to formal skills in earnings determination, as is often implicitly
assumed.
The relationship between (rising) economic inequality and stratification
may also be less than straightforward with respect to skill acquisition proper.
According to economic theory, parental financial investment in children
represents a rational trade-off between parents’ own consumption and child
interests. Rising income inequality evidently results in larger inequality
of financial means in the parental generation, and, if seen as a permanent
change, also increases the economic incentive to invest in scarce skills in the
filial generation. But again the extent to which rising inequality will feed
through across generations is likely to be counterbalanced by other processes. At the family level, the issue is with the correlation between parental
income and parental altruism, which may be negative and becoming more
decidedly so as inequality rises. At the societal level, the fundamental issue
is the role of public education which represents the most evident form of
collective instead of private investment in children’s skills. To the extent that
Stratification in Hard Times
5
public education systems effectively redistribute opportunities for investment in skills, this will attenuate the relationship between the (increasing)
inequality of family resources and the inequality of earnings capacity in the
child generation. If anything, this role of public education is exacerbated
where schools and universities shape endowment-type capabilities over and
above pure skill acquisition, that is, where educational institutions provide
appropriate role models, peer groups, and information or foster individual
work ethics in a broad sense.
These various counterbalancing forces notwithstanding, rising inequality
in itself may also alter the process of skill acquisition in ways to further
increase the role of parental income, and hence social stratification. One
aspect is that the recent rise in income inequality has been accompanied
by a rise in income volatility. The distinction may be important insofar as
families may be expected to act on permanent as opposed to current incomes
when making decisions about children’s education, and because volatility
shocks to family income are likely to hit low-income households and their
children disproportionately, whether because of income volatility being
larger relative to long-run incomes in the lower tail of the distribution or due
to the increasing role of risk aversion in low-income families’ educational
decisions in the face of rising income volatility. Secondly, rising inequality
of incomes may contribute to increasing residential segregation, and if so,
to an increasing social segregation of learning environments, adolescent
networks and peer groups in local schools and beyond. Yet, because the
social composition of learning environments is a major factor in determining
children’s educational performance, any such inequality-induced segregation is likely to imply poorer educational outcomes among lower middle
class and low-income families in particular, who may increasingly lack
appropriate role models, peer groups or information on the economic value
of education. Finally, and perhaps most fundamentally, rising economic
inequality may also undermine the effectiveness and political economy of
public education systems, perhaps especially so at the tertiary level. With
rising private incentives to skill acquisition, affluent families are increasingly
likely to resort to private education as a means of exclusive investment in
scarce capabilities, and redistributive educational policy, whether through
income-related grant programs or income gradients in public infrastructure
investment and school budgets, may become a more politically divisive
issue.
CUTTING-EDGE RESEARCH
Analytically, standard sociological and economic models of intergenerational persistence in earnings, incomes, and socioeconomic status suggest
6
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
the presence of some positive relationship between income inequality and
stratification. However, proper identification of this relationship in empirical
research, let alone arriving at a valid estimate of its magnitude, represents a
formidable challenge. The empirical study of social stratification generally
implies extensive demands on the empirical data as it requires multigeneration data on personal socioeconomic standing, ideally measured over a
period of several years in order to measure respondents’ long-run position
and at the right time biographically, that is, parental economic position during respondent’s childhood and adolescence, and respondent’s economic
position no earlier than at the point of career stabilization. To economists
working on income data, the ideal dataset would thus minimally include
several years of data on parental incomes during children’s early years
and several years of data on child incomes after ages 35 or 40, which may
require the use of longitudinal surveys and extensive observation windows
of 25 or more years because information about current income is unlikely
to be accurately recalled in retrospect; sociologists working with measures
of class, occupational, or socioeconomic status as effective approximations
of permanent incomes face a somewhat less daunting challenge because
information on parental occupation or education may typically be reliably
solicited from surveys in the child generation.
The increasing availability of respective intergenerational data from household surveys has spurred a rich empirical literature on the intergenerational
transmission of socioeconomic advantage, as evident, for example, in the
contributions of Erikson and Goldthorpe (1992), Breen (2004), Corak (2004,
2013), Bowles, Gintis, and Osborne (2005), Smeeding, Erikson, and Jäntti
(2011), or Ermisch, Jäntti, and Smeeding (2012). Yet, any attempt to understand how social stratification is affected by (rising) inequality imposes the
additional demand that empirical data on the intergenerational correlation
of economic standing be available for families exposed to varying economic
conditions, whether changing levels of inequality or changing business
cycles. To avoid the effective multiplication of the required observation
window—implied in the need to obtain multicohort multigeneration data
for any particular country—some scholars report cross-country differences
in income persistence across generations, which are suggestive of a clear,
although potentially nonlinear, relationship between the level of income
inequality in a country in the parental generation and the degree of intergenerational persistence (occasionally called the “Great Gatsby curve,”
cf. Björklund & Jäntti, 2009; Corak, 2013). The evidence from sociological
research on trends in class mobility is more mixed, with Erikson and
Goldthorpe (1992) reporting results that (falling) inequality may have
spurred social mobility in post-war Europe, yet the more recent analyses
Stratification in Hard Times
7
of Breen and Luijkx (2004) failing to show any clear relationship between
inequality and stratification between the 1970s and the 1990s.
Owing to the severe demands on the data, however, these and other studies often provide only quite limited leverage in ascertaining the empirical
relationship directly; with few country cases or short time-series of intergenerational data within any single country available, current research on
social mobility still lacks statistical power to effectively identify the empirical contribution of changing contextual factors on stratification, the impact of
rising inequality included. Owing both to shorter time spans involved and
the application of richer statistical modeling and research designs enabled
by better data, somewhat more conclusive evidence on the issue is available
with respect to the relationship between income inequality, parental income
and children’s educational attainment, which may be considered as one, if
not the key mediating process involved in generating social stratification.
Out of that literature, Susan Mayer’s (2001) study of the impact of rising
income inequality on children’s educational attainment in the United
States between the 1970s and 1990s probably provides the iconic example of
research on the relationship between inequality and stratification. Using data
on parental incomes and children’s educational attainment from the Panel
Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) combined with measures of state-level
income inequality drawn from the 1970, 1980, and 1990 censuses, Mayer
finds support for both the incentive and the resources effect of rising income
inequality. According to her analysis, rising income inequality has contributed to rising levels of education, yet also to an increasing polarization
of educational investment by family income. It is among affluent families in
the upper half of the income distribution where Mayer finds strong increases
in children’s educational attainment, whereas attainment, notably college
graduation, is declining considerably among children from the bottom half
of the income distribution. Furthermore, she observes declining educational
attainment among children from lower income families despite positive
counterbalancing impacts of raises in educational spending. Importantly,
these findings on the role of rising inequality obtain over and above controls
for parental income, that is, reflect changes in attainment processes other
than the direct effect of increasing differences between parents in terms of
economic resources; interestingly, many of Mayer’s conclusions resonate in a
more recent study by Ananat, Gassman-Pines, and Gibson-Davis (2011) who
find that area unemployment depresses children’s educational performance
also when their own parents have not been personally affected.
The multicountry analysis of Sieben and de Graaf (2003) is another study
that adds several important insights. Although not set up as any test of
the relationship between inequality and educational attainment directly
8
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
(instead, Sieben and de Graaf focus on more secular trends of modernization and individualization), their multicohort data is unique in providing
information on parents and multiple children from the same family, whereas
standard household surveys would typically sample data on respondents
and their parents only. With the sibling data at hand, Sieben and de Graaf
are able to calculate the total family impact on educational achievement,
including effects of family resources other than education or income, say,
family relationships or work ethics, that are hard to measure otherwise.
In line with the general argument advanced here, their empirical results
show the impact of fathers’ occupational status—the nearest proxy to family
economic standing in their data—to decline with increasing modernization
(which roughly correlates with falling income inequality in the period under
study); interestingly, however, the overall impact of family resources for
educational attainment shows no such trend at all over time. Taking Sieben
and de Graaf’s results at face value, it hence may be the case that overall
stratification has remained relatively stable over time in many countries, not
the least because families may substitute intangible for tangible resources
even where the direct role of parental incomes in children’s educational
attainment has been declining for political or other reasons. If a similar
logic should apply in current times of rising inequality, intangible family
resources may provide sources of resilience that mitigate the stratification
impact of increases in income inequality, at least up to a point.
KEY ISSUES FOR FUTURE RESEARCH
With inequality rising in many affluent and emerging economies around
the world, academic and public interest in social science research on the
relationship between inequality and stratification is likely on the rise, too.
Fortunately, several considerations suggest that social science might be
in a reasonable position to meet this emerging interest in the issue with
new insights, in particular as far as empirical research is concerned. Most
fundamentally, data availability has improved tremendously in many
respects, allowing researchers to obtain more specific evidence on the
process of intergenerational transmission, and to conduct more sophisticated tests of theoretical models, including the analytical considerations
on the inequality–stratification nexus reviewed. New data source include
household panel surveys, some of which—for example, the American
PSID continuously fielded since 1968 or the German Socio-Economic Panel
(GSOEP) started in 1984—have matured up to a point where prospectively
recorded data now spans respondents’ whole biography from family conditions in childhood and adolescence to respondents’ own economic standing
in prime working age. In other cases, it has been possible to link social
Stratification in Hard Times
9
security or similar register data across generations in order to construct
highly accurate intergenerational earnings or income data.
With respect to addressing overtime changes in stratification, however, it
would seem that the overall maturation of household surveys is a decisive
advantage. Begun as instruments of regular social reporting during the 1970s
and 1980s in many countries, omnibus social science surveys—such as the
US General Social Survey (GSS), the International Social Survey Program
(ISSP) and others—that combine representative cross-sectional samples and
broad questionnaire content, often including measures of respondents’ own
economic position and reported parental characteristics, are now available
as an impressive time series of data, especially once it is considered that
many of the representative samples of the early surveys include information on respondents born in or even before the first decade of the twentieth
century. Especially if working within the sociological tradition of class analysis or analyses of socioeconomic status, these surveys increasingly provide
researchers with the multicohort data and statistical power required to move
from mostly static analyses of intergenerational transmission to a description of trends in stratification and to testing analytical models of changing
patterns of stratification.
The increasing wealth of available data is accompanied by an increasing
interest in stratification research in both sociology and economics, the two
key disciplines involved in this field of research, but most importantly also by
an intellectual convergence, if not even an increasing collaboration between
the disciplines in terms of theoretical approaches and statistical methodology. Besides the obvious beneficial implications of collaboration with respect
to data production, the increasing intellectual exchange between the two disciplines is likely to increase interest in the testing and refinement of the basic
analytical frameworks, which is likely to result in a more integrated micro
model of intergenerational reproduction of economic advantage. In this context, the issue of whether and which specific measurable aspects of family
resources—that is, parental income, class, or education—should be studied
or whether the empirical focus should be on total family impact as measured
by sibling correlations or related quantities. In part, these questions refer to
appropriate measurement and adequate statistical methodology, in part, as
briefly indicated in the earlier review, the issue raises important theoretical
questions not only about the extent of substitution across alternative types
of family resources, and the question of adequately capturing family sources
of social reproduction but also resilience in the face of rising inequality. To
the extent substitution is feasible, empirical analyses based on any specific
measure run the risk of producing conflicting evidence on trends in stratification whenever the relative importance of specific resources—parental
10
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
income, education, or work ethics—in transmitting earnings capacity across
generations is changing, but not the overall role of the family itself.
With the increasing theoretical sophistication and the increasing availability of data, it is also straightforward to predict a larger role for genuinely
causal analysis in the field. At the micro level, this interest is, for example,
visible in the collection of genetic data within household surveys in order
to improve on estimates of the causal impact of family socioeconomic conditions on children. At the macro level, an increasingly causal orientation of
empirical research is likely to spur the collection of multilevel data that merge
household and contextual information on economic or political conditions.
Especially as far as the impact of rising inequality is concerned, and because
observational designs are the natural mainstay of stratification research, the
collection of sufficiently rich contextual information to permit the inclusion
of appropriate controls for concomitant macro-level change other than rising inequality seems particularly important; occasionally, it may be possible
to exploit a clear natural experiment, for example, a specific major policy
change, but because stratification refers to an intergenerational, long-term
process it may ultimately be much harder to pin down any change to some
specific intervention than in other fields of inquiry.
A renewed focus on the causal relationship between inequality and
stratification will, finally, also reorient stratification research toward greater
analytical and methodological precision. Progress in the area will require
a careful distinction between the study of short-term (cyclical) and longer
term (secular) effects of rising inequality on stratification, and this also
raises the question of appropriate time lags and the appropriate contextual level in the relationship. Because intergenerational processes evolve
over considerable spans of time, it is entirely unsurprising that studies
on the contemporaneous correlation between inequality and stratification
remain inconclusive. Also, the answer to the question of the level at which
inequality matters will depend on and inform our theoretical frameworks:
if local networks are important in families’ expectation formation, then
residential area inequality might be the preferred measure, yet national
inequality may be more relevant if parents and children expect to be
geographically mobile. Similarly, the answers may depend on the national
political system and the funding of public education systems that may
provide important institutional antidotes to the impact of rising economic
inequality on stratification. Evidently, the search for any mediating factors in
the inequality–stratification nexus is an exceedingly important issue in itself,
ranging from the search for potential interactions between inequality and
educational policy or tax and transfer systems more generally, but also for
nonlinearities in the relationship between inequality and stratification that
Stratification in Hard Times
11
may suggest break-even points in family, community, or political resilience
favoring equal investment in children even in the face of rising inequality.
REFERENCES
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Becker, G. S., & Tomes, N. (1986). Human capital and the rise and fall of families.
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Björklund, A., & Jäntti, M. (2009). Intergenerational income mobility and the role of
family background. In W. Salverda, B. Nolan & T. Smeeding (Eds.), The Oxford
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Blau, P. M., & Duncan, O. D. (1967). The American occupational structure. New York,
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Boudon, R. (1974). Education, opportunity and social inequality. New York, NY: Wiley.
Bowles, S., & Gintis, H. (2002). The inheritance of inequality. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 16(3), 3–30.
Bowles, S., Gintis, H., & Osborne, M. O. (Eds.) (2005). Unequal chances: Family background and economic success. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Breen, R. (1997). Inequality, economic growth and social mobility. British Journal of
Sociology, 48(3), 429–449.
Breen, R. (Ed.) (2004). Social mobility in Europe. Oxford, England: Oxford University
Press.
Breen, R., & Jonsson, J. O. (2005). Inequality of opportunity in comparative perspective: Recent research on educational attainment and social mobility. Annual Review
of Sociology, 31, 223–243.
Breen, R., & Jonsson, J. O. (2007). Explaining change in social fluidity: Educational
equalization and educational expansion in twentieth-century Sweden. American
Journal of Sociology, 112(6), 1775–1810.
Breen, R., & Luijkx, R. (2004). Conclusions. In R. Breen (Ed.), Social mobility in Europe
(pp. 383–410). Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
Corak, M. (2013). Income inequality, equality of opportunity, and intergenerational
mobility. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 27(3), 79–102.
Corak, M. (Ed.) (2004). Generational income mobility in North America and Europe. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
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Erikson, R. (1996). Explaining change in educational inequality: Economic security
and school reforms. In R. Erikson & J. O. Jonsson (Eds.), Can education be equalized? The Swedish case in comparative perspective (pp. 95–112). Boulder, CO: Westview
Press.
Erikson, R., & Goldthorpe, J. H. (1992). The constant flux. A study of class mobility in
industrial societies. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press.
Ermisch, J., Jäntti, M., & Smeeding, T. (Eds.) (2012). From parents to children. The intergenerational transmission of advantage. New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation.
Hout, M. (2004). How inequality may affect intergenerational mobility. In K. Neckerman (Ed.), Social inequality (pp. 969–987). New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation.
Jencks, C., Bartlett, S., Corcoran, M., Crouse, J., Eaglesfield, D., Jackson, G., … ,
Williams, J. (1979). Who gets ahead? The determinants of economic success in America.
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(1972). Inequality: A reassessment of the effect of family and schooling in America. New
York, NY: Basic Books.
Mayer, S. E. (2001). How did the increase in economic inequality between 1970 and
1990 affect children’s educational attainment? American Journal of Sociology, 107(1),
1–32.
Piketty, T. (2000). Theories of persistent inequality and intergenerational mobility. In
A. B. Atkinson & F. Bourguignon (Eds.), Handbook of income distribution (Vol. 1, pp.
429–476). Amsterdam, Netherlands: Elsevier.
Sieben, I., & Graaf, P. M. d. (2003). The total impact of the family on educational
attainment. European Societies, 5(1), 33–68.
Smeeding, T., Erikson, R., & Jäntti, M. (Eds.) (2011). Persistence, privilege, and parenting. The comparative study of intergenerational mobility. New York, NY: Russell Sage
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Solon, G. (2004). A model of intergenerational mobility variation over time and place.
In M. Corak (Ed.), Generational income mobility in North America and Europe (pp.
38–47). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
FURTHER READING
Bowles and Gintis (2002) concisely describe the analytical and empirical fundamentals of stratification research. Breen and Jonsson (2005)
provide a recent review of empirical research in sociology, including a
review of findings on trends in stratification; Björklund and Jäntti (2009)
as well as Corak (2013) give an overview of current economic research,
which is less developed in terms of trend analysis, however. Hout (2004)
and Solon (2004) are succinct statements of both disciplines’ analytical approach to the inequality-stratification relationship, the empirical
studies of Erikson (1996) and Mayer (2001) may be considered modern
classics.
Stratification in Hard Times
13
MARKUS GANGL SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Markus Gangl is a Professor of Sociology and Chair for Social Stratification and Social Policy at the Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, Germany, and a permanent Honorary Fellow of the Department of Sociology
at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research interests include social
stratification, labor markets, income inequality, poverty, unemployment, and
quantitative methods in the social sciences, notably problems of causal inference and methods for analyzing longitudinal data. Gangl has published on
scar effects of unemployment (American Journal of Sociology, 2004; American
Sociological Review 2006), labor market matching (European Sociological Review,
2004), poverty and income dynamics (Work & Occupations, 2005; Zeitschrift
für Soziologie , 1998), school-to-work-transitions (European Sociological Review,
2003; Transitions from Education to Work in Europe, Oxford University Press,
2003, with Walter Müller), the effects of motherhood on women’s wages and
employment (Demography, 2009; European Sociological Review, 2014, both with
Andrea Ziefle) and the methodology of causal inference in the social sciences
(Sociological Methodology, 2004, with Thomas A. DiPrete; Annual Review of
Sociology, 2010). In current projects, Gangl examines the role of recessions
for stratification outcomes, addresses trends in the distribution of wages,
incomes and poverty persistence, and contributes to the development of statistical methodology in these areas of research.
Personal webpage:
http://www2.uni-frankfurt.de/46138381/mgangl
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