The History of the Research Committee on Social Stratification and Social Mobility of the ISA

I. From 1950 to 1970

The beginnings of cross-national research collaboration on social stratification and mobility under the sponsorship of the International Sociological Association, go back to the beginnings of the Association itself. At the First World congress held in Zurich in 1950 the Executive Committee authorized the Research Committee, then a single unspecialized body, to prepare and execute a program of cross-national research on social stratification and social mobility.

In order to understand why the international Sociological Association as such identified itself so closely with investigations of social stratification and mobility in its early years, one must recall that the task of the-association at that time was to establish its structure and purpose and to make these known to such sponsoring organizations as UNESCO and the Economic and Social Council of the united Nations. Both the first president of the Association, Louis Mirth, and others developing policy for the association, were professionally interested in social stratification and mobility and, just as important, there were the beginnings of a paradigm and of experience demonstrating that large-scale investigations, covering whole societies, could be successfully carried out enabling sociologists to compare one society with another on major aspects of social structure. Finally, the study of social stratification and mobility exemplified that sociologists were able to investigate problems of far-reaching social and political consequence both within and between nations. In brief, the Association found it opportune to identify itself with activities that seemed rather certain to be successful and that were of more than academic interest.

By August 1951, the Association was able to publish a collection of working documents describing this research program under the title of First International Working Conference on Social Stratification and Mobility: Preliminary Papers and. Proposals (Rinde and Rokkan 1951). The next paragraphs give a brief summary of that document.

The Research Committee, chaired by Theodor Geiger of the University of Aarhus, Denmark, delegated responsibility for drawing-up plans and proposals for the program of research to David Glass of the London School of Economics and Geiger. Working in collaboration with sociologists representing about a dozen countries, Glass and Geiger settled on a program of investigations in two major parts. First, for each country, a review of what was already known about social stratification and mobility was to be prepared, going back in time. Perhaps to as early as 1800. Extensive analytic bibliographies were to be prepared, so that any new studies could build on work done in the past. No hard and fast line was dram between full-scale research investigations, statistical sources, and what we would today call data sources for sectors of the population, such as lists of university graduates with information on their social origins, members of parliaments, membership lists of elite occupations with bibliographic information, and the like.

The second part of the program, designed primarily by Glass, was clearly inspired by his own research on stratification and mobility in Britain, then nearing completion. As he pointed out, nothing was known about the stratification order or about mobility for total populations or societies, but only for local communities or special social categories of the population. Nor could one hope, at that early date, for questions on such topics to be included in decennial population censuses. The appropriate research design, which he had successfully used, was to apply the then developing techniques of surveying representative samples of national populations and interviewing these so as to collect data necessary to an understanding of the status order and the ways in which it might be changing.

More specifically, Glass proposed that data be collected in national surveys so that one could develop knowledge about the following two major sets of considerations:

1. The criteria and components of social status and status groups in different societies; the amount of agreement among members of the society as to the relative status of diverse occupational and educational groups; the relationships between accorded and subjective status. Such data were meant to cast light on the nature of the status order itself.

2. The distribution of status groups in society, as to size and composition according to various criteria; how the status position of families affects the educational attainment of their children and more generally, rates of social mobility; to what extent status is perpetuated through inter-marriage; how differential fertility affects the relative size of status groups. The focus under this heading was the collection of data necessary to investigate the mechanisms by which the status hierarchy is maintained or reshaped over time both as to the size of its components groups and the recruitment of persons into these.

In June 1951, at a conference in Paris, first reactions to these proposals were discussed. In response to solicitations, written replies had been received from Denmark, Belgium, France, Holland, Norway, Sweden, England, and the United States. Many of these contain extensive analytic bibliographies. The country reports also responded to the request for information on research facilities and resources for mounting large national sample surveys, and are of considerable historic interest for their descriptions of the organization and funding of social research in the early 1950's.

Neither Geiger nor the representatives of some of the participating countries were in full agreement with the specific research methods proposed by Glass. But the basic design of national surveys, the core of the ISA-initiated program, was without doubt the most important and positive achievement of the committee in its first phase.

The full series of national surveys was not carried out on the scale and with the degree of coordination and comparability from country to country which its designers had envisaged. But this matters less than the interest and the great amount of attention generated by the proposals for cross-national research. The work done by Glass, Geiger and their colleagues in 1950-52 set a standard for research under the auspices of the International Sociological Association of far-reaching consequences for later developments. With Geiger's untimely death in 1952, Glass took over the chairmanship of the Committee on Social Stratification and Mobility, and continued in that role until 1972.

By the time of the Second World Congress in Liege in 1953, so much momentum had been built up that the topics of social stratification and social mobility dominated the congress. Over 50 papers were presented at four different sessions, most of the papers being published in Vol. II of the Transactions of the Second World Congress of Sociology (ISA 1954). In his Introduction and summary of the discussions, David Glass could mention reports given on studies in process or being planned in four different countries as a result of the initiative taken by the Research Committee of the ISA. In Japan (Odaka), Denmark (Svalastoga) and the Netherlands (van Heek) national surveys combined with more special studies were carried out very much along the lines proposed by Glass on behalf of the ISA.

The further diffusion of interest in research on stratification and mobility and a marked increase in the capacity of sociologists to carry out empirical studies in this field was made evident at the Third World Congress, held in Amsterdam in 1956. By this time, the work of the Association had begun to take on its far more differentiated and specialized character, as groups had formed to build up international collaboration in other fields. Now functioning as the Committee on Social Stratification and Mobility, the initial group continued to expand both as to the number of countries represented and the range of problems analyzed in papers presented to the Congress (See Volumes III and V of the Transactions).

In connection with the Fourth World Congress, held in Stresa in 1959, the Committee began a practice which has taken on increasing importance in the ensuing years, namely to hold a separate committee meeting outside the organizational framework of the congress itself. The number of empirical studies of social stratification and mobility had grown so rapidly during the 1950's, thanks in large part to the leadership provided by the Committee, that a major international comparative investigation could be carried out. The author, S.M. Miller of the United States, presented his findings to the committee at its meeting in Perugia and it was published under the title of "Comparative Social Mobility" in Current Sociology, Vol. IV, No. 1, 1960.

The second inter-congress meeting of the Committee was held in Cologne in December 1961, and the papers were published in special issue Nr. 5 of the Kölner Zeitschrift fur Soziologie. The third such meeting took place in Lund (Sweden) and Copenhagen in May, 1964, and the proceedings appeared in Acta Sociologica, Vol. 9, Nos. 1 and 2.

Because the Committee on Social Stratification and Mobility was organized so early in the history of the International Sociological Association, it tended to function as a "parent" to a number of other committees which later split off and took over the work on certain subjects originally analyzed for their implications for stratification and mobility. At least three examples of this process of differentiation can be mentioned. From the start, education had been considered a crucial factor in investigations of social mobility, and many papers at the early congresses were devoted to the bearing of education [on mobility]. There is of course now a separate committee on the sociology of education.

The professions, both with respect to recruitment patterns, to their place in the status order, and their institutional features, had been included in the early reports on the nature of social stratification. For example, at the meeting in Cologne, Joseph Ben David had reported on his studies of the professions in the class system. Again, there is now a separate committee on the sociology of the professions. Finally, the study of social stratification has a common borderline with a more problem- and policy-oriented interest in the study of social inequality and poverty. This topic too is now the basis for a separate committee within the International Sociological Association.

It would be misleading to confine the bibliographical references given here to publications directly under the aegis of the ISA. There is not a major study of social stratification or mobility in the decades since the ISA Committee was organized, which has not in some ways been influenced by the work of the Committee. Here is testimony from the authors of one of the most influential studies of social stratification and mobility of the 1960's, Peter M. Blau and Otis D. Duncan:

"A number of local studies of occupational mobility in one community were pioneering endeavors that provided important insights into the problem. But the tendency to use their results--as the only ones available--to draw inferences about social mobility in the society at large soon called attention to their evident limitations for such a purpose. It became increasingly apparent that nationwide studies based on representative samples are needed to clarify the process of social mobility, particularly in modern society where occupational mobility is often accompanied by geographical moves that take individuals from one local community to another. A number of such national mobility surveys in different countries were initiated shortly after the end of World War II by a group of scholars who formed an international committee on social stratification and mobility under the auspices of the International Sociological Association. Outstanding illustrations are the studies of mobility in Britain by Glass and his colleagues, in Denmark by Svalastoga, and in Sweden by Carlsson. National studies in numerous other countries have also been carried out, but there is no need to review them here since a comprehensive bibliography of these and a few local studies, together with some comparative analysis of their results, has been presented by Miller.

Our research on the American occupational structure is in the tradition of these national surveys of occupational mobility."

(Natalie Rogoff-Ramsøy)

II. From 1970 to 1981

The 'American Occupational Structure', which appeared in 1967, certainly marked a cornerstone in influencing research and debate in Social Stratification and mobility in the 1970's. Once again, the Research Committee served as an indispensable vehicle in the exchange and international cooperation in the second wave of large scale stratification and mobility studies.

The turn of the decade from the 1960's to the 1970's also brought a change in the organizational life of the Committee. Probably in part because of the differentiation into, and the creation of, several Committees concentrating on more narrowly defined substantive areas, concerned with inequality, the Committee's activities in the second half of the 1960's had slowed. Following the VARNA-World Congress (1970) the Committee was even eliminated from the list of Research Committee's of the International Sociological Association. It seems fair to say that a new stage of the Committee's history then started with the International Workshop on Career Mobility, held at the University of Konstanz in 1971. This meeting, initiated and coordinated by Walter Müller and Karl Ulrich Mayer, served as a basis for the reconstitution of the Committee by the ISA Research Council in 1972. Kaare Svalastoga worked effectively for the Committee's reconstitution and took the necessary steps in the negotiations with the ISA research Council. He functioned as provisional coordinator of the Committee until he became elected President in 1972. The composition of the Committee's leadership and its Board since 1972 may be seen in Table 1.

Table 1: Research Committee Social Stratification: Members of the Board since 1972.

Although the Committee in the 1970's did not pursue an explicit policy of coordinating the collection of data, the cooperation and frequent contacts [among] scholars in the Committee was instrumental in creating this extraordinary [data-base] which, under the auspices of the Committee , has been documented [in two special] publications (Broom an McDonnell, 1977; Featherman et al., 197 [4]).

The Committee's main impact on the development of the field, however, has [been achieved] by serving as a forum for continuous conceptual, theoretical and [methodological] debate. Looking back at the various meetings, one sees these debates centered upon, and developing along, several partly concurrent, partly complementary approaches of the study of the process of stratification and class formation --in a wide range of theoretical conceptions, extending at the […] from Treiman's view and measure of the prestige order to Bertaux's understanding of the deep structure of class relations.

More concretely, the study of status attainment was one of these approaches. Certainly, it has been criticized for its individualistic, voluntaristic, and partly functionalist bias as well as for its conception of the stratification order as a continuous gradation of a status hierarchy. By introducing a number of socio-psychological, cognitive, aspirational and motivational variables, and by investigating the impact of selected life cycle variables such as marriage, parentage or migration, the relevance of many of the individual behavioral correlates of the stratification process could be demonstrated. This is certainly best exemplified by Sewell and associates in the longitudinal Wisconsin study.

It has often been argued that path models are deficient because they do not adequately take into account the changes in the distributions of occupational or class positions available to members of a given generation. The more traditional mobility tables were expected to be superior in this regard, assuming it is possible to separate two factors influencing the mobility opportunities; namely those which can be considered as the result of the distributional changes over time and those which characterize the mobility regime of a given society irrespective of the distribution of occupational or class positions and their changes over time. With the development of log-linear analysis of frequency tables, impressive progress has been made during the last years in attempting to reach solutions to a problem which has long troubled the students of social mobility. The work of Leo A. Goodman and Robert M. Hauser has been very influential.

A third topic of major concern to the work of the stratification Committee has been the concentration on cohort models of social change , in contrast to focusing on the changes from a parental to a filial generation in the total cross-section of a population. sees change mainly occurring in the succession of cohorts which follow their life course at different points in historical time. The greater social change is and the more historical circumstances differ, the more successive cohorts are differentiated from each other. If this argument is valid, any study of total population cross-sections in a changing society is suspect of producing false averages.

In this light, for a proper study of stratification processes it became inevitable to proceed to the analysis of patterns of the life histories of successive birth cohorts. In contrast to other subfields of sociology, where the life history approach has similarly emerged in the last decade, this Committee was mainly concerned with developing conceptual and methodological tools for a quantitative-analysis of life-course contingencies of relevance to stratification processes. (see particularly the Oslo-workshop, 1980,where the discussion of the pioneering work of, among others, Sørenson and Featherman in the US, Rogoff-Ramsøy in Norway, Pchoski in Poland or Andorka in Hungary, has shown the grounds on which future work can be built).

The need for an approach centering on the whole life course of an individual was also emphasized by questions relating to the subjective response to class experience in terms of class consciousness and by questions concerning conditions of class formation and class action. This has been a further focus of the Committee's interests in several of its meetings. Besides institutional factors such as the historical organization of interest formations such as trade unions, professional associations, or employer associations, the experience of mobility between classes in the past and the mobility prospects for the future were considered as primary factors in processes of class formation.

Finally, the relationship of education to social stratification has been a central topic of the Committee's work from its very beginning. However, the aspects of interest have changed over time. In earlier years, education was mainly conceived of as a resource in status attainment and as means of securing the transfer of privileges and advantages from generation to generation. Initiated mainly by Roger Girod in several recent conferences, the Committee was recently concerned more generally with the social distribution of knowledge and skills as an important domain of inequality which can only partly be traced to the distribution of educational opportunities.

In all of these substantive interests, the Committee has offered opportunities for the study of cross-national variations and similarities. However, compared with its earlier history, a more skeptical view of the feasibility and meaningfulness of comparisons of stratification and mobility patterns among large numbers of societies has prevailed. The more differentiated the available data became, the more it became evident that comparisons had to pay much-more attention to the comparability of classifications and measurement. This generally was not possible by comparing results from single national studies, but meant going back to the original data sources and redoing the analysis in a strictly comparative way. Rather than aiming at comparisons for the largest number of countries, it became practice to study a small number of strategically selected countries. Relying on an intensive rather than an extensive comparative strategy also seemed to be preferred because of the felt need of a case study – like account of institutional and historical particularities in order to understand or explain national differences.

An important step necessary to lay a foundation on which a comparative analysis of stratification and mobility processes could be built was achieved in a conference on "Classes and Social Structure in Industrial Advanced Societies", convened by the Fondazione Giovanny Agnelli, Turin in 1975. At This conference, for each of a number of countries represented, a report was prepared with a summary essay of the state of national research findings and including documentation of the available literature in an extended bibliography. The Agnelli foundation has published these reports in a series of books in Italian.

It is impossible to bring to light in a short report the wealth of exchange and collaborative effort which has been induced by the opportunities created by the Research Committee in the 1970's. A statement drawn from an eminent colleague would, I am sure, be affirmed by many Committee members:

"I wish to record the enormous benefit that I have derived from 1972 onwards from my membership of the Research Committee on Social Stratification and Mobility of the International Sociological Association. The meetings of the Committee that I have been able to attend – in Rome in 1972, in Warsaw in 1974, in Geneva in 1975, in Dublin in 1977, and in Uppsala in 1978 – were major sources of intellectual stimulus. Further, they were occasions on which I was fortunate enough to be able to form highly rewarding working relationships, and Indeed often close personal friendships, with sociologists drawn from a wide range of countries and academic traditions. "(John H. Goldthorpe, Social Mobility & Class Structure in Modern Britain. Oxford 1980, Clarendon Press, p. VII).

This atmosphere of intellectual stimulation and personal friendship has led to steadily raising membership. At the present the Committee has 212 members in 44 countries.

(Walter Müller)