Coordinamento:
Gabriele Ballarino
Università di Milano
gabriele.ballarino@unimi.it
Fabrizio Bernardi
Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, Madrid
fbernardi@poli.uned.es
Floriane Bolazzi
Università di Milano
floriane.bolazzi@unimi.it
Call for papers
Social stratification research is about to enter its second century of existence: Sorokin’s pioneering book on Social Mobility was in fact published in 1927. As a cumulative international research endeavor, it has made huge advancements over the decades and has achieved wide prestige among sociologists and social scientists in general. Today we know quite well the structure of the relationships between family background, education and occupational achievement in industrial and post-industrial societies, that is the OED triangle (Origin-Education-Destination), and we also know how such relationships change over genders, ancestry and migratory background.
However, much remains to be done. Actually, despite such long-term success, the paradigm of social stratification research is currently being challenged by many points of view. On one side, the diffusion of the potential outcomes framework from economics towards the other social sciences pushes stratification scholars to ask questions about the causality of the relationships included in the OED triangle. To what extent parental occupation actually “causes” school achievement? And, in turn, how much occupational achievement is actually “caused” by education? Does parental occupation actually “cause” some advantage even when education is accounted for?
On the other side, the increase of income inequality within countries is hardly matched in occupational terms, since scholars observe a general upgrading of occupations, stronger in Western Europe but to be seen also in the US. There is then an increase in income heterogeneity within occupations, which has prompted some researchers to critically challenge the relevance of occupation-based measures for the study of stratification. The upsurging interest in intergenerational mobility among economists, who favor income and wealth to measure the fluidity of a society, shows how intergenerational transmission within the economic dimension is crucial for the understanding of increasing income inequality in contemporary societies.
In order to respond to both strands of criticism and to consolidate our research endeavor, we feel stratification researchers should put more effort into the study of the mechanisms underlying the (probabilistic) regularities they have been able to describe until now. A way to go in this direction is comparison, both over time (longitudinal studies of the life course and/or occupational careers) and over space (not only the standard cross-country comparison but also within-country comparisons of smaller geographic units, such as regions, provinces or even neighborhoods).
This session, then, particularly seeks papers that look at social stratification and mobility in comparison, over time and space, and that are able to use comparison as a means to gain understanding of the socio-economic and political mechanisms producing social stratification and reproducing it over generations. However, also traditional papers that look cross-sectionally at aspects of social mobility and stratification in a single country are welcome. Moreover, papers that include measures of income and/or wealth in the analysis and papers reasoning about new criteria of social classification are most welcomed.