The Constant Flux: A Study of Class Mobility in Industrial Societies.

It required nearly two decades and several dozen books before the social mobility craze among American urban and social historians burned itself out. The Constant Flux may reignite the fire. The most comprehensive comparative study of its kind, the authors have reconstructed raw data from national mobility studies in fifteen nations to examine and challenge the generally accepted conclusions offered by these studies. The authors admit to certain curiosities about the rates and extent of social mobility in the nations under analysis. They raise questions about the relationships among such factors as a nation's level of industrialization, its cultural heritage, its political system, and the mobility experiences of its inhabitants. They are more interested, however, in determining why, "such a range of different and often contradictory theories [about mobility] exist and persist in regard to issues which are in large part empirical." The reconstructed data are used to evaluate theories which seek to establish connections between mobility and economic development. Liberal theory, for example, suggests that the structure and occupational needs of industrial societies provide sustained opportunities for upward mobility for a significant proportion of the society. The more advanced the nation, the greater the mobility one might expect to find. Marxist theory, the authors contend, has provided an exceptionally weak response to the empirical data which supposedly demonstrates that industrialism spawns occupational opportunity. Finally, the authors test theories which argue that one's cultural heritage and/or the presence or absence of a democratic political tradition influence the degree and rate of social mobility in a nation.

What they find through a comparative analysis of post World War II data from ten European nations, Australia, Japan, and the United States may send a generation of mobility scholars back to their computers and data sets. In general, their data show that a nation's level of economic growth, stage of industrialization, its cultural heritage, and/or its political orientation have little effect on the social mobility of its citizens. Equally interesting, while nearly all of the nations under analysis enjoyed significant economic expansion in the decades after World War II, none of them, including the U.S. and Japan, experienced an aggregate steady trend of upward social mobility. Better occupations gained by some were lost by others. Curiously, the least developed nations in the study, Hungary, Poland, and the Irish Republic, demonstrated greater mobility than did their more affluent Western European counterparts. Finally, while cultural variations and political orientation did appear to have some influence on mobility, in neither case did the differences suggest a trend toward "greater or less openness ... [but rather they presented patterns] of fluidity that simply differ from those of other nations in certain quite specific respects."

The data and analysis presented by Erickson and Goldthorpe appear to challenge everything we thought we knew about mobility in industrial societies. Liberal theory is found wanting as an explanation of national differences in mobility experiences. The authors conclude, "even if those processes seen by liberal theorists as making for increased social fluidity do indeed operate, they are none the less regularly opposed and offset by other processes also at work within industrial societies, so that, more often than not, the expected tendency towards greater openness actually fails to materialize." Marxist theory, on the other hand, has been unable to produce convincing empirical evidence that increasing industrialization led to greater downward rather than upward mobility. As regards to crossnational variations, the authors flatly state, "we are able firmly to reject theories of crossnational similarity; and our analysis provide little indication of crossnational variation of a systematic kind."

What then explains similarities and/or differences observed in mobility rates in fifteen nations? The authors do not attempt to provide a macrotheory to replace those which they have rejected. Instead, they argue that a number of new research lines must be pursued before a satisfactory explanation can be offered. They suggest several hypotheses but no conclusions. Students of mobility may find the above less than satisfying, but the authors have opened up new and interesting lines for additional research. One hopes that another two dozen mobility studies will not be the result.

Erickson and Goldthorpe have produced a valuable work which will certainly lead to additional research. The study itself is ponderous at times, and the statistical analysis is difficult going for all but the most accomplished cliometrician. One also wishes the authors had provided more information about the raw data used for the comparative study. The credibility of the entire work rests on the validity and comparability of these data. One would feel more comfortable about abandoning certain theoretical beliefs if one shared Erickson and Goldthorpe's confidence in the data source.

Michael P. Weber Duquesne University