ABSTRACT
Scholars have recently begun taking a multigenerational approach to the study of social mobility, going beyond a traditional two-generation focus on the relationship between origins and destinations. This shift brings grandparents, great-grandparents, and sometimes even more distant ancestors into the picture when considering the link between the socio-economic positions of parents and children (Clark and Cummins 2014; Mare and Song 2014; Pfeffer 2014; Lindahl et al. 2015). The new development has been driven by the recognition that the implicit assumption behind two-generation mobility models of a Markovian relationship between origins and destinations is implausible and that there is good reason to believe that a person’s socio-economic fortunes are likely to depend not just on the social position of their parents but also on that of family members in earlier generations (Mare 2011). It has also been motivated by the realisation that mainstream two-generation models of intergenerational social mobility are likely to provide a misleading picture of the extent of social fluidity, for example by rendering invisible long-standing class immobility extending over multiple generations and making it impossible to establish the extent to which intergenerational class mobility between parents and children constitutes a reversal of mobility fortunes in the previous generation.
