ABSTRACT
The conventional wisdom about how to measure mobility was codified a half century ago. The study of mobility bifurcated at that time into one camp that represented social structure in gradational terms and another that represented it in big-class terms. The gradational approach to studying mobility has inequality taking on a simple unidimensional form in which families are arrayed in terms of either income or occupational status. The big-class regime, by contrast, has inequality taking the form of mutually exclusive and exhaustive classes. The occupational, or "microclass," approach shares with the big-class model the presumption that contemporary labor markets are balkanized into discrete categories, but such balkanization is assumed to take principally the form of institutionalized occupations rather than institutionalized big classes. The transmission of occupation-specific human capital is likely to occur outside the professional sector as well. The foregoing results raise the possibility that big-class inheritance showing up in generations of mobility studies is largely micro-class inheritance in disguise.
