Author Description

This study of social mobility within the developing class structures of modern industrial societies is based on a unique data-set constructed by the authors. It focuses on the Western and Eastern European experience of social and economic growth after the Second World War, but also examines the experiences of the United States, Australia, and Japan. In combining historical and statistical analyses both of trends in mobility and of cross-national similarities and differences, the authors show that wide variation at the level of observed mobility coexists with a surprising degree of constancy and commonality in underlying patterns of social fluidity.