ABSTRACT
There is extensive research on the causes and consequences of actual social mobility, but much less is known about subjective social mobility – about how people believe their adult social position compares to their parents’ position. The ISSP Inequality-III surveys of 1999–2000 asked respondents to compare the status of their most recent job with the status of their father's job when the respondent was a teenager (N = 31,691 in thirty nations). On average, people thought they had moved up a moderate amount compared to their fathers, although women thought they had moved up less than men had. The actual gain in occupational status between father and offspring is an important influence on this subjective mobility (beta = .27), but it is not the only influence. Two other changes also influenced subjective mobility: educational gains between parent and offspring, and countrywide gains in GDP between when the respondent was growing up and the present. Income and authority also matter. Subjective social mobility has important consequences, even controlling for actual social mobility, education, income, gender and authority. Those who think themselves mobile identify with a higher class subjectively, are more likely to think their pay is just, and believe they ought to earn high salaries. Thus, understanding subjective social mobility helps us to understand other aspects of society, especially attitudes towards inequality.
A vast literature on social mobility investigates what causes people to move up or down in society. Particularly important is intergenerational social mobility: the difference in occupational status between parents and their children – whether children have better jobs than their parents had, similar jobs, or worse jobs. Social mobility is interesting and important in its own right and, moreover, is also known to influence many other attitudes and behaviors, such as fertility and life satisfaction. Researchers suspect that many of these effects operate through people's perception of their mobility – that what matters is people's subjective belief that they are moving up or down in the world. Thus, understanding not only how much people have 107actually risen or fallen in status compared to their father but also how much they think their status has changed may help us understand more about attitudes and behaviors influenced by social mobility and why social mobility affects them.
In earlier years, there was much interest in the consequences of subjective social mobility for anomie, politics, prejudice and fertility. But this early research did not lead to reliable results, partly because of the difficulty of dealing with change scores (Blau and Duncan 1967: ch. 5; Kelley 1992). We suggest that there may be a second major difficulty. All these arguments assume that actual social mobility wholly determines people's subjective perceptions of mobility, which in turn shapes attitudes and behaviors. But we shall show that this is problematic: subjective social mobility does depend on actual occupation mobility, but it also depends on educational mobility, on the economic growth of the country (GDP mobility), and on other factors. As most mobility studies have been done in the second half of the twentieth century, a period of educational expansion and economic growth, these may have confounded the analysis of occupational mobility effects.
To help fill this gap, this chapter analyzes some of the causes and consequences of subjective social mobility. We first use regression methods to investigate how actual social mobility (measured using actual change in occupational status between parents and their children) influences subjective social mobility (measured using people's perception of intergenerational change in occupational status). Owing to limitations in the data, the reference point is father's occupational status, although it would have been theoretically preferable to use both mother's and father's. Second, we examine subjective social mobility's effects on three outcomes: subjective social class, whether or not people think their own pay is just, and how much people think they ought legitimately to earn. In each case we find that subjective social mobility has a real effect, even controlling for actual social mobility: whether or not people think that they have moved upward is important as well as their actual movements.
