ABSTRACT
This chapter draws heavily upon recently available information from the Longitudinal Study for 1981–91 of the Office of Population Censuses and Surveys (OPCS). Its prime focus is to explore the nature of the “missing link” between social mobility and geographical mobility (Savage 1988) in the 1980s. More specifically, it examines the role that interregional migration plays in the intragenerational social mobilities of men and women in contemporary Britain. This has been a surprisingly difficult area to investigate in the past. The reasons for this include, first, the academic division of labour whereby sociologists have studied social mobility and geographers and demographers have studied geographical mobility, and, secondly, the lack of suitable data for the whole population at a national level. Empirical studies have been either very local, and have therefore raised doubts about the validity of the results for other places, or cohort-specific, and have therefore raised doubts about the validity of the results for other times and other generations.
