ABSTRACT
The reproduction of social class across generations has been a salient topic for Japanese sociologists for many decades, much as it has been for sociologists in Western industrial societies. The optimistic “thesis of industrialism” popularized by modernization theorists in the 1960s predicted that with increasing industrialization, universalistic criteria such as education would come to outweigh social class origins in determining a person’s social class position and economic fate (Kerr et al 1960; Levy 1966; Treiman 1970). But as empirical analyses of intergenerational class mobility accumulated in the 1970s and 1980s, it became clear that people’s social class origins remain an important influence in their adult lives. While the inheritance of social class may diminish as societies industrialize, eventually a plateau seems to be reached (Erikson and Goldthorpe 2008; Grusky and Hauser 1984). Studies comparing intergenerational class mobility in various industrial countries have demonstrated that the idea of an everevolving trend towards greater intergenerational mobility across class boundaries is (unfortunately) not borne out.
