Abstract

at the 2001 spring meetings of the Research Committee 28 of the International Sociological Association, and in Rostock, Germany at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research. I would like to thank Michael Tåhlin for providing me with unpublished tabulations concerning intragenerational occupational mobility in Sweden. I would also like to thank Karl Ulrich Mayer, Patricia McManus, Michael Tåhlin, Martin Seeleib-Kaiser, Yu Xie, and participants at the abovementioned workshops for their Intragenerational mobility has been a central concern in sociology, especially in the latter half of the 20 th century. Most of this analysis has proceeded using measures of social position that are functions of an individual’s occupation. This approach has been based on two primary justifications. First, occupational mobility is a key attribute of labor market structure, and the labor market, along with the educational system, is the principal institution responsible for a country’s structure of inequality. Second, occupation is an income producing asset that provides an approximate measure of “permanent income” and standard of living. Occupation-based models of social mobility, however, have

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