The Constant Flux - Study of Class Mobility in Industrial Societies (Hardcover)

This is a study of social mobility within the developing class structures of modern industrial societies based on a data-set constructed by John Goldthorpe and Robert Erikson. The focus is on the experience of European nations - western and eastern - in the period of the "long boom" following World War II; but the book also devotes separate chapters to examining the experience of the USA, Australia, and Japan.;The authors combine historical and statistical approaches in their analysis of both trends in mobility and of cross-national similarities and differences. They show that wide variation at the level of actually observed mobility co-exists with a surprising degree of constancy and commonality in underlying patterns of social fluidity.;The empirical results of their study serve as the basis for a critical re-examination of current theories of mobility and for raising more general issues of the proper concerns and methods of comparative macro-sociology.