social mobility and personal satisfaction: evidence from ten countries*

Gordon Marshall and David Firth

Social mobility and personal satisfaction:evidence from ten countries*

ABSTRACT

This paper examines survey data relating class mobility to satisfaction and dis-satisfaction with seven different domains of everyday life among nationally rep-resentative samples of men and women living in ten industrialized nations. Theevidence is set against competing pessimistic and optimistic accounts of themobility experience found in earlier literature. Results show that individuals whomove from working-class origins to middle-class destinations are no more likelyto be systematically satis�ed or dissatis�ed with life than are the socially immobileor even those downwardly mobile from advantaged backgrounds into the workingclass. Indeed, in all nations, the overall association between class experience andsatisfaction with life is both weak and uneven across the different life-domains.The study also serves to illustrate an important principle of research methodol-ogy more generally.

KEYWORDS Social mobility; personal satisfaction; diagonal reference model;industrialized nations

I

For the past quarter of a century sociologists have been much involved withthe study of social mobility. As a result we now know the answers to suchquestions as whether or not societies tend to become more open over time,how mobility regimes are affected by industrialization, and what sorts ofmaterial advantage or disadvantage are likely to accompany movementbetween the social classes. For example, it has increasingly become appar-ent that the class-related pattern of unequal intergenerational mobilitychances (though not the total mobility rate) is both similar across nationsthroughout most of the industrialized world, and has remained basicallyunchanged for much of the twentieth century.1

These sorts of �ndings have been replicated many times over. The objec-tive dimensions of the mobility phenomenon have therefore beenthoroughly documented. However, it is much harder to �nd evidence thatbears upon the subjective aspects of social mobility; indeed, how people feel

Brit. Jnl. of Sociology Volume no. 50 Issue no. 1 March 1999 ISSN 0007–1315 © London School of Economics 1999

about or experience changes in their class standing is an issue that has beenalmost entirely overlooked by researchers working in this area.

This is not to say that we have no access to these sorts of materials. Fic-tional accounts, for example, are plentiful. The pain, pleasures, and some-times absurd or amusing consequences of dramatic class mobility haveregularly been explored both in literature and on � lm. Many of these enter-tainments are also sociologically perceptive.

Notable literary illustrations that come to mind include classical workslike Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, George Eliot’s Middlemarch, andGeorge Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, as well as more recent best-sellers suchas John Braine’s Room at the Top, the Rabbit trilogy (culminating in Rabbitis Rich) by John Updike, and David Storey’s Booker Prize-winning and semi-autobiographical masterpiece Saville. The last of these, for example, chartsthe growing alienation of a young boy coming to manhood in an Englishcoal-mining community during the 1940s and 1950s. He transcends theintellectual constraints of his proletarian upbringing by means of edu-cational success, but at the cost of becoming an outsider, not only in hisworking-class family of origin, but also among the middle-class professionalswhose life-style he adopts, yet cannot emotionally embrace.

Cinematically, one might mention the numerous opportunities for con-fusion (notably in the presentation of self and negotiation of the statusorder in everyday life) that are thrust by sudden and unexpected wealthinto the path of the hitherto impoverished character played by GregoryPeck, the recipient of The Million Pound Note. Alternatively, there is RyanO’Neal’s portrayal of the newly ennobled and normatively disorientedBarry Lyndon, around which Stanley Kubrick constructs his interpretationof Thackeray’s novel for a modern audience. Relevant also would be recentcommentaries on the class mores of contemporary America, as offered forexample in John Landis’s Trading Places, a comedy about role-reversalbetween the ultra-rich and down-and-out, or Tom Wolfe’s satirical novel TheBon�re of the Vanities – later a very unfunny � lm about the consequences forpsychological well-being of rapid downward social mobility.

Similarly, but from the realms of real life rather than imagination, manyindividuals whose personal experience has involved them in signi�cantsocial mobility have subsequently offered autobiographical accounts con-taining sometimes sociologically insightful re� ections upon their lifetimeof moving up or (less frequently) sinking down through the class structure.Indeed, well-known sociologists have been prominent contributors to thisgenre, a fact which is itself perhaps not without some sociological signi� -cance.

Thus, for example, the effects of rapid upward and then downward socialmobility on the physical and mental health of the black American sociolo-gist Horace Cayton are recorded poignantly in his Long Old Road (1965).Bennett Berger’s (1990) Authors of Their Own Lives, a compendium ofautobiographies by twenty American sociologists, contains a section speci� -cally entitled ‘mobility stories’. All tell a tale of upward shifts across the

Social mobility and personal satisfaction 29

generations. Donald Cressey and Barbara Rosenblum are con�dent of, andcontent with, their private and professional achievements; John Gagnonseems ambivalent and speaks of personal and academic drift; while GaryMarx concludes that ‘success is not all it is cracked up to be’ since it lefthim at least profoundly dissatis�ed with both his career and life more gener-ally. British sociologists whose self-penned life-histories span the sameemotional range include Dennis Marsden (1968), A. H. Halsey (1996), andRichard Hoggart (1988–1992).

Some sociologists have made the move from writing about themselves towriting about others. For example, there are scattered case-studies that lookat the consequences of intergenerational (or sometimes career) mobilityfor such things as personality formation, or the closeness of social ties. Afew social survey investigators have also addressed these and similar issues,although only in passing, and as incidental to the wider concerns of anotherinquiry.

In the former category we might mention Fred Goldner’s (1965) obser-vations of the way in which �rms attempt to manage the psychological con-sequences of mobility among employees who experience demotion inindustrial management; Harold Wilenski and Hugh Edwards’s (1959) studyof how ‘skidding’ down the class structure may induce variations in classideology among factory workers; and Earl Hopper’s (1981) investigation ofthe possible effects of intergenerational and career mobility on ‘insatiabil-ity’ (feelings of despair, anxiety, relative deprivation and guilt) among 187young adult English males whom he interviewed in the 1960s. The socialsurvey material is well illustrated by the extensive cross-national inquiry intothe relationship between social structure and personality (values, orien-tations, and cognitions) undertaken over many years by Melvin Kohn andhis associates. For example, there are some oblique hints here as to the in-direct effects that social mobility may have for psychological functioning, asthese are mediated through the family’s role in value-transmission betweenthe generations (see, for example, Kohn and Slomczynski, 1993).

Regrettably, from a sociological point of view, these diverse and undoubt-edly interesting materials are unlikely to constitute a reliable source of data.Fiction is, after all, merely �ction. Writers of autobiography are almost byde�nition truly exceptional individuals – perhaps especially when they aresociologists. Case-studies of small groups among the socially mobile may ormay not be representative and might well therefore point to misleadingconclusions. Moreover, the usual coding and measurement problemsalmost everywhere undermine the �ndings: social class has been con� atedwith educational achievement (as for example by Hopper); it is sometimesnot clear that social mobility has to any meaningful extent actually takenplace (see the studies by Goldner and Wilenski and Edwards); and much ofeven the better data is now rather old (Kohn, for example, uses Americansurveys mainly conducted in the mid 1960s).

Nevertheless, despite the absence of hard evidence showing that socialmobility has any systematic effects whatsoever on what might generally be

30 Gordon Marshall and David Firth

termed ‘satisfaction with life’, no little intellectual effort has been devotedto speculation about the causal mechanisms that might engender such con-sequences. Indeed, the idea that social mobility is an important determi-nant of an individual’s basic orientation to life, the quality of his or herinterpersonal relationships, and of feelings of general psychological well-being, has a considerable pedigree in social theory. Durkheim (1952:242–54) and Sorokin (1959: 522–6), to mention but two examples, wereconvinced that class mobility had repercussions for all of these because itdisrupted the social ties that bind people into families and other groups.Even today, there is a remarkably widespread belief among social scientiststhat social mobility must be associated with some form of personal or socialdisequilibrium, because of the stress it supposedly induces. The hypothe-sized correlates of movement between classes (whether upward or down-ward) that can be found in the sociological literature alone include statusanxiety, alienation, social isolation, feelings of insecurity, identity con-fusion, and various psychological and personality disorders.2

The mobility experience has therefore prompted a good deal ofcomment and controversy, but this is mainly rooted in unsubstantiatedspeculation, and so fails to advance discussion much beyond the theoreti-cal reasoning spelled out in the works of Durkheim and Sorokin.3 However,leaving all methodological reservations aside, it is clear that current opinionis divided between two contrasting interpretations of the likely conse-quences of social mobility for individual well-being and personal satis-faction. These emerge from �ction, the autobiographies, and earliersociological works alike. For the sake of convenience we will label them thepessimistic and optimistic positions respectively.

The pessimistic picture can be seen clearly in Anselm Strauss’s analysis ofThe Contexts of Social Mobility (1971). Strauss’s book starts from the samepremise as does the present paper; namely, that mobility research is skewedtowards issues relating to ‘who gets what chances to rise or to fall, and underwhat conditions’, so ‘rarely tells much about any individual’s experience ashe moves up or down the social ladder’ (op. cit.: xi, 2). Strauss’s subsequentattempt to rectify this omission by documenting that experience drawsupon the limited sociological evidence available to him but also reliesheavily on (mainly American) �ction and autobiography. To some extent,as he demonstrates convincingly, the imagery of class mobility that emergesis dif�cult to disentangle from other prominent themes in American liter-ary life. For example, one of these concerns the dehumanizing effects ofurbanization in general, and city life in particular.

The novels and autobiographies have portrayed families breaking up,classes disintegrating, second generation children leaving their immi-grant communities . . . the dispersal of kin, the discontinuance of friend-ships, the dissolution of ceremonies and institutions. A consequence . . .of all this is numbers of alienated or marginal persons. Marginals have leftgroups or groups have disappeared under them, and these persons are


in transit to a new world – one which they may not �nd. The sense of per-sonal discontinuity may be acute. Hence those who describe such personsuse an expressive lexicon stressing rootlessness, drift, aimlessness, searchwithout �nding, movement without clear direction. The marginalitytheme is especially linked with class mobility (with pain of passage andthe question of how much of self to slough off and how much to retain).(op. cit.: 74)

According to Strauss (op. cit.: 153–96), similar negative images of theanomie and many dissatisfactions associated with class mobility tend also toemerge from the literatures on af�uence, status passage, entrepreneurship,mass culture and the mass society.

Two problems of upward mobility in particular are identi�ed by Straussand serve as exemplars of the overall tone of his description. One of thesehe terms ‘disappointment on arrival’. This happens when

the novelty of the higher position and its rewards (possessions, excitingevents, deference) wears off; worse yet, the new style of life never reallyproves enjoyable but is restricted or actually runs against the grain. And,worse still, the new position corrupts one, or forces violations of thedeepest sense of self. (op. cit.: 188–9)

The only solutions to this problem (other than ‘cynical conversion’) lie inreverse-mobility, the building of surreptitious dual-identities and life-styles,and in suicide; or, alternatively, in striving for

a yet higher place on the social ladder, on the assumption that if satis-faction is not found at a lower level, surely it must be because one has notyet arrived where satisfaction truly is.

The second problematic consequence of upward social mobility, accord-ing to Strauss’s (op. cit.: 189–92) reading of his evidence (which at thispoint is taken almost exclusively from novels), is a ‘possible sense of dis-continuity with one’s past and one’s enduring identity’. Those affected feeluneasy with their new roles and circumstances. Moving up between classesis said to induce restlessness, disjunctures of self, feelings of uprootedness,discontentment and nostalgia. Few who experience this can reconcile theirpast and present. In the social-science literature these are the marginal menand women who, having escaped the slums and the factories, somehownever become reconciled to their own achievements or the advantages oftheir new class surroundings.

This, then, is the sociology of social mobility as trauma. The contrasting,essentially positive, picture emerges from, for example, John Goldthorpe’sstudy of class mobility among adult men in England and Wales in 1974.Goldthorpe (1980: 217–50) collected self-completed life-history notes from247 respondents having a range of different intergenerational mobilityexperiences. His is one of the few systematic sociological investigations ofhow people actually feel about having moved between classes. Its con-clusions point in almost the opposite direction to those reached by Strauss.


Thus Goldthorpe (op. cit.: 199) �nds ‘little support for the idea thatmobility leads to social marginality and isolation . . . in present-day Britain’.One reason for this is simply that the upwardly mobile are suf�cientlynumerous so as to be able to provide each other with ample opportunitiesfor relations of sociability. Instead of anomie there is a gradual process ofadaptation, whereby arrivistes come to accept either the social normsregarding associational membership and sociability that are characteristicof the class of destination, or a satisfyingly mixed version of those pertain-ing to the different social levels that have been spanned. To some extentthis is true also of downwardly mobile people – although the relatively smallnumbers included within his sample (n = 25) make it dif�cult here to gen-eralize. Goldthorpe’s data in fact suggest that there is considerable diver-sity of outlook among skidders (for example, some respondents talked ofvoluntary or temporary downward mobility), and he can �nd no evidenceof a generalized sense of disillusionment or dissatisfaction among thoseinvolved.

The quotations that Goldthorpe cites from his life-history material under-line these conclusions. Men who have been mobile are keenly aware of theirsituations. Those on an upward trajectory, for example,

see themselves for the most part as differing from their fathers not onlyin enjoying higher incomes and greater consumer power . . . but also inbeing engaged in higher-level occupations – ones affording greaterautonomy, authority, and opportunity for direct satisfactions.(Goldthorpe 1980: 247)

These men attached great importance to the economic and psychologicalrewards of their work. True, career advancement sometimes imposeddemands upon an individual’s time and energy, and this could have adverseconsequences for his home or family life. But upwardly mobile respondentsseemed to be no more troubled by this than were those who remainedintergenerationally stable in the most privileged class locations. In short,according to Goldthorpe (op. cit.: 248)

the life-history notes of . . . upwardly mobile respondents . . . suggestedthat they had not for the most part experienced their mobility as sociallystressful and, in particular, problems of managing status discrepancies orof translating occupational into status ascent received very little mention.

Two conclusions therefore emerge clearly from this brief overview ofearlier commentaries on the felt experience of social mobility. One is thatmost judgments about this matter seem to have been reached indepen-dently of any hard evidence; or, at best, on the basis of incidental data thatcan only be described as thin. The other is that, in so far as systematicinvestigations have been pursued, their results can be and are used tosupport contrasting pessimistic and optimistic mobility scenarios. Theformer paints a picture of social and personal malaise while the latteremphasises contentedness and satisfaction. But which of these in fact offers


the more accurate description of how class mobility is actually experiencedin the late-twentieth century?

II

We will attempt to answer this question using new data recently made avail-able by the International Social Justice Project. Based on surveys using acommon research design and interview schedule, developed and �elded bya network of social scientists working in thirteen democratic-capitalist andformer state-socialist societies, the project investigates attitudes towardsjustice issues among nationally representative samples of adult men andwomen. The countries involved are Bulgaria, (former) Czechoslovakia,Estonia, the Federal and Democratic Republics of Germany (initially as sep-arate nations), Holland, Hungary, Japan, Poland, Russia, Slovenia, GB, andthe USA. The surveys have an average sample size of approximately 1,500.Fieldwork was carried out mainly in the summer of 1991 by establishedresearch organizations. Interviews were face-to-face, except in the case ofthe USA, where (as is usual in national inquiries) they were conducted bytelephone. Response rates were acceptable and ranged between 71 per cent(Federal Republic of Germany) and 93 per cent (Estonia). For technicalreasons the analysis reported below omits the Dutch, Hungarian, andJapanese studies.4

Although the study was principally concerned with the topic of attitudesto social justice, respondents were (among other things) also asked tore� ect upon and indicate their degree of satisfaction or dissatisfaction withvarious aspects of their lives, using a standard seven-point Likert scaleranging from completely dissatis�ed (code 1) through a neutral mid-point(code 4) to completely satis�ed (code 7). They were questioned in turnabout their community as a place to live, their family life, the politicalsystem in their country of residence, their income, job, standard of living,and ‘life as a whole’.

The teams involved in the project also agreed to collect occupationalinformation in a uniform way, and to code this both to the InternationalStandard Classi�cation of Occupations for 1968, and a modi�ed version ofthe German employment status (Berufsstellungen) categories. A speciallydesigned algorithm was then developed and applied to these data in orderto generate cross-nationally comparable Goldthorpe class variables havinga satisfactory degree of reliability. A full description of how this was accom-plished has been provided elsewhere (see Marshall, Swift and Roberts 1997:Appendix C). In this way, information was made available for each respon-dent’s class of origin (based on his or her father’s occupation when theinterviewee was aged about 15) and class of destination (indicated byemployment at the time of interview), with the sexes distinguished.5

The fact that we have this information available, not only in a strictly com-parable fashion but also for such a wide range of societies, adds a valuable


comparative dimension to the analysis. The data-set embraces quite differ-ent societal types – or, more accurately perhaps, stereotypes.

Britain, of course, is usually thought of as a rather old-fashioned and self-consciously class-based society, while the USA (at the other extreme) ispopularly seen to be a land of individual opportunity, a place where thedream of making it all the way from Log Cabin to White House still seemscredible. Former West Germany is a frequently cited example of a ‘semi-corporatist’ state, in which the key interest groups (employers, tradesunions, and the government) successfully managed a consensus aboutwages, prices, training and occupational advancement that was suf�cient tosustain the postwar economic miracle. On the face of things, therefore, theexperience of social mobility ought typically to be different in the threesocieties: least traumatic (if we may use that shorthand term) in the USA,but most disruptive of social relationships and psychological functioning inBritain, with West Germany (presumably) occupying an intermediate posi-tion between these two extremes.

The socio-economic structures of the countries comprising the formerSoviet Empire are no less diverse. At one extreme there is the authoritarianand highly centralized command economy, policed by a rigid bureaucraticstate apparatus and Party hierarchy, as was found for example in theGerman Democratic Republic. Social mobility and personal well-being herewould seem to have less to do with class than it does sponsorship within thenomenklaturasystem and staying on the right side of the secret police. At theother end of the spectrum we have the Slovenian postwar history of ‘marketsocialism’, which maintained the appearance of a proletarian state,although in practice the class relationship between management andworkers took the same form as in many western capitalist societies.

In short, the countries under review embrace a variety of institutionalarrangements for managing the inequalities associated with membership ofparticular social classes, so if mobility between them is indeed consequen-tial for an individual’s feelings of satisfaction with his or her life then thisshould be evident somewhere in the range of societies under consideration.

III

These, then, are the data to be used in constructing the argument of thispaper. What does analysis of this new evidence reveal about the conse-quences of class mobility for personal satisfaction across the differentdomains of everyday life – especially when the experience of the sociallymobile is compared with that of respondents whose class position hasremained unchanged across the generations?

Table I reveals the basic contours of the �ndings. Four groups of respon-dents are identi�ed in each society; namely, those intergenerationally stablein either the Goldthorpe service (salariat) or working classes, and thoseintergenerationally mobile upwards or downwards between these two


locations. The various ‘intermediate’ groupings have been omitted in orderto focus attention squarely upon people whose class mobility (or immobil-ity) experience has been relatively unambiguous.6


TABLE I: Average satisfaction scores, for four class trajectories in ten countries

Country Sex Mobility com fam pol inc job sol lif (N)

Great Britain Male S to S 5.0 5.9 4.3 4.8 5.6 5.3 5.6 50W to S 5.0 6.1 3.7 4.6 5.7 5.1 5.7 57S to W 4.9 6.1 4.4 4.0 5.6 4.8 5.7 12W to W 4.8 6.2 3.4 3.9 4.7 5.0 5.6 84

Female S to S 5.0 6.3 3.1 4.3 5.1 5.0 5.5 37W to S 5.3 6.2 3.2 4.4 5.5 5.4 5.9 31S to W 4.4 5.6 3.3 4.0 4.8 5.0 6.0 13W to W 4.9 6.0 3.0 3.8 4.8 4.6 5.6 69

USA Male S to S 5.6 5.8 4.5 4.9 5.3 5.4 5.6 74W to S 5.4 6.0 4.5 4.6 5.3 5.1 5.7 56S to W 5.5 5.8 4.2 4.1 4.5 4.8 5.5 37W to W 5.3 6.0 4.0 4.2 5.0 4.9 5.6 94


West Germany Male S to S 4.5 5.9 4.6 4.9 5.7 5.5 5.9 80W to S 4.7 5.7 4.2 4.5 5.3 5.0 5.6 62S to W 4.5 5.6 3.3 4.1 5.5 4.9 5.6 25W to W 4.9 6.0 3.7 4.3 5.0 5.1 5.6 108


Bulgaria Male S to S 4.9 5.0 2.8 2.6 4.6 3.3 3.6 27W to S 5.3 5.8 2.7 2.9 5.0 3.7 4.3 61S to W 5.2 5.5 2.4 2.9 3.2 3.3 3.8 22W to W 5.4 6.0 2.8 2.9 5.1 3.7 4.4 152


Russia Male S to S 4.5 5.0 2.4 2.5 4.3 3.0 3.8 62W to S 4.8 5.6 2.4 2.9 4.6 3.1 3.9 88S to W 4.7 5.2 2.7 2.2 4.6 2.8 3.7 33W to W 5.0 5.5 2.3 2.6 4.5 3.0 3.7 159


For each of the four class trajectories of interest – salariat to salariat,working to salariat, salariat to working, and working to working – the tableshows the mean satisfaction score on the seven items about which we haveinformation. These �gures have been calculated as simple averages of the


TABLE I: continued

Country Sex Mobility com fam pol inc job sol lif (N)

Poland Male S to S 5.6 5.9 3.8 3.3 4.6 4.3 4.8 26W to S 5.1 6.2 3.9 2.9 4.6 3.8 4.8 38S to W 5.0 5.3 3.0 2.7 5.6 3.2 4.6 17W to W 5.1 5.8 3.2 2.6 4.6 3.8 4.6 219


Czechoslovakia Male S to S 4.4 5.5 4.2 3.6 4.4 3.8 4.9 29W to S 4.1 5.9 4.1 3.6 5.1 3.7 4.8 52S to W 4.4 5.8 3.3 3.7 4.9 3.8 4.3 20W to W 4.3 5.6 3.3 3.3 4.8 3.8 4.6 142


Slovenia Male S to S 4.1 4.8 4.1 3.9 4.6 4.3 4.9 16W to S 4.3 5.8 3.8 4.2 5.6 4.5 5.3 42S to W 4.1 5.8 3.6 2.2 4.4 2.9 5.3 9W to W 4.2 5.6 3.4 3.0 4.8 3.8 5.0 154


East Germany Male S to S 3.8 5.9 3.8 3.2 5.2 4.9 5.6 23W to S 3.9 6.0 4.0 3.1 5.3 4.4 4.8 27S to W 3.8 6.2 3.6 2.7 4.5 4.6 5.5 20W to W 3.8 6.3 3.4 2.8 5.1 4.2 4.9 65


Estonia Male S to S 5.2 5.8 2.8 3.3 5.2 3.7 4.5 28W to S 5.4 5.8 3.1 3.0 4.7 3.2 4.4 47S to W 5.2 5.0 3.2 3.8 5.0 3.8 4.6 22W to W 5.0 5.8 3.0 2.7 4.9 3.1 4.2 101


total distribution of responses within each category. The results are shownseparately for the sexes across the ten nations in question.

A number of patterns are obvious in the results. It is clear that there is agood deal of variation across domains within nations. Typically, the meansatisfaction scores for family life (fam) are highest, with those for com-munity of residence (com) some way behind. Job satisfaction scores (job),together with those for satisfaction in relation to life as a whole (lif) andoverall standard of living (sol), are usually found in the middle of the distri-bution within any nation. Satisfaction with income (inc) and with the politi-cal system (pol) almost always return the lowest average scores. In the caseof (say) Poland, for example, among both men and women the averagescore in relation to family life comes close to 6 for individuals having anyof the class trajectories of interest. For satisfaction with community of resi-dence the average is closer to 5. The scores for both life as a whole and jobsatisfaction tend to cluster around 4.7. Averaged across all classes the stan-dard of living scores are approximately 4.0. However, satisfaction with thePolish political system and with income are lower still: scores for the indi-vidual class trajectories rarely exceed 4, are mostly grouped around 3, andsometimes dip as low as 2.6, resulting in overall means of 3.5 and 2.9 respec-tively for these two domains.

Across nations, we �nd this same general pattern of variation betweendomains, although the absolute differences tend to be less extreme in thewestern democracies than in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe.For example, if we compare the results for the USA with those for Poland,family life again records the highest overall degree of satisfaction (5.9).Similarly, the scores for community of residence and life as a whole aresome way behind, but still relatively high (with overall means of 5.4 and 5.6respectively). The averages for job satisfaction and standard of living are alittle lower (in both cases being around 5.0). However, although satisfac-tion with income and with the political system are (as in Poland) revealedto be among the lowest of all scores across the various domains, they arenot dramatically so (having averages of 4.4 and 4.2 respectively). Thus,although income satisfaction is (relative to other kinds of satisfaction) lowacross all mobility classes and both sexes in the USA and Poland alike, thereis more than a full-point difference between the two – with averages clus-tering around 4.4 in the former society but only 2.9 in the latter.

This tendency is apparent throughout the other countries includedwithin the sample. Mean satisfaction scores are arranged in broadly thesame order across domains within nations (family life is the most reward-ing aspect of life, while either income or the political system is least satisfy-ing), although the range of satisfaction and dissatisfaction is greater in thepost-communist states than in the western democracies (mainly becausecontentment with income and politics is lower overall in the former thanin the latter).

Crucially, however, from the point of view of arguments about socialmobility and its consequences for life-satisfaction, within nations and


domains there seems to be no great variation across the different class tra-jectories. Distinctive social mobility (and immobility) experiences appearto have little (or sometimes no) association with the average degree of per-sonal satisfaction expressed about the various domains of life across thedifferent societies included within the study.

For example, if one considers the results for (let us say) West Germanmales, again we �nd that satisfaction with family life is uniformly high(average scores are between 5.6 and 6.0) across all four intergenerationalmobility trajectories. Perhaps more surprisingly, however, satisfaction withincome is uniformly lower (mean scores lie in the range 4.1 to 4.9), as is satis-faction with standard of living (4.9 to 5.5), while the averages for satisfac-tion with the political system tend – again for all mobility classes – to belower still (3.3 to 4.6). It is just as dif�cult to detect possible mobility effectsin the countries now emerging from state socialism. In the former Czecho-slovakia, for example, the average satisfaction scores among males are allhigh in relation to family life (averages range from 5.5 to 5.9). Similarly,they are all somewhat lower with regard to community of residence (4.1 to4.4), and lower still in relation to the political system (3.3 to 4.2). Less pre-dictably, however, and irrespective of whether respondents have been inter-generationally stable or mobile up or down through the class structure, theaverage scores are similar for income satisfaction (3.3 to 3.7), satisfactionwith standard of living (3.7 or 3.8), and life as a whole (4.3 to 4.9).

This general pattern can also be found in the satisfaction indicesreported elsewhere in the table. There are differences in the mean scoresacross the seven domains, and these are larger for the post-communistsocieties than the western democracies, but the differences between thefour mobility (and immobility) classes seem small in relation to those acrossthe domains and nations. Moreover, the results for men and women looksimilar if not identical, again across all countries and classes. In the case ofBritain, for example, the average scores for the seven domains move up anddown for the sexes almost exactly in tandem (and with little or no variationbetween the mobility classes).

IV

These data can be modelled using a variety of statistical techniques. In prac-tice, however, the results merely con�rm what is more or less evident fromthe descriptive material summarized above.

To identify the statistically signi�cant sources of variation in Table I, we�rst carried out an analysis of variance, separately for each of the sevendomains of interest. The results are summarized in Table II. The sum ofsquares for each effect is calculated as the ‘sum of squares to enter’ into alinear model for the satisfaction scores on each domain, with variablesentered in the order shown in the table (although different orders of entryfor the variables were found to give very similar results). Thus, for example,



TA

BLE

II:

Ana

lysi

s of

var

ianc

e fo

r th

e se

ven

satis

fact

ion

scor

es

Sour

ce o

fco

mfa

mpo

lin

cjo

bso

llif

vari

atio

nd.

f.M

S%

MS

%M

S%

MS

%M

S%

MS

%M

S%

Cou

ntry

Eas

t vW

est

1**

*90.

40.

6**

*189

.51.

5**

*751

.85.

7**

*207

5.1

14.1

***1

29.5

0.9

***2

094.

814

.7**

*150

0.3

14.1

Rem

aind

er8

***1

04.7

5.8

***3

7.7

2.4

***1

33.5

8.1

***3

8.7

2.1

***2

0.4

1.2

***9

3.1

5.2

***1

03.5

7.8

Sex

10.

00.

0**

*85.

20.

7**

*45.

30.

3**

*32.

30.

21.

10.

02.

70.

01.

80.

0C

lass

traj

ecto

ry3

2.1

0.0

*6.5

0.2

***3

4.7

0.8

***6

0.1

1.2

***5

5.5

1.2

**11

.40.

2*5

.00.

1

Cou

ntry

. Sex

EW

. Sex

14.

60.

0**

25.0

0.2

*15.

60.

11.

40.

02.

10.

00.

10.

01.

50.

0R

emai

nder

84.

80.

3**

*9.5

0.6

**6.

40.

43.

70.

2*6

.30.

44.

10.

22.

80.

2C

ount

ry. T

raj

EW

. Tra

j3

1.6

0.0

2.2

0.1

6.0

0.1

*6.7

0.1

7.1

0.2

4.8

0.1

0.1

0.0

Rem

aind

er24

2.7

0.5

*3.8

0.7

2.9

0.5

*3.9

0.6

*5.5

1.0

3.0

0.5

2.6

0.6

Sex.

Tra

j3

0.9

0.0

*8.3

0.2

*6.8

0.2

*6.9

0.1

**12

.60.

33.

10.

10.

40.

0

Cou

ntry

. Sex

. Tra

j27

2.1

0.4

2.1

0.5

2.5

0.5

2.6

0.5

3.8

0.7

2.3

0.4

1.2

0.3

Res

idua

l<

4600

2.9

92.4

2.5

92.9

2.4

83.3

2.5

80.1

2.9

94.1

2.4

78.4

1.8

76.9

Not

es: M

S: m

ean

squa

re, t

he s

um o

f squ

ares

div

ided

by

degr

ees

of fr

eedo

m%

: pro

port

ion

of th

e to

tal s

um o

f sq

uare

s ex

plai

ned

(tot

al is

100

% in

eac

h co

lum

n)*s

igni

�can

t at 5

% le

vel *

*sig

ni�c

ant a

t 1%

leve

l ***

sign

i�ca

nt a

t 0.1

% le

vel

the sum of squares for class-trajectory differences is calculated as the reduc-tion in residual sum of squares offered by the model

y(country,sex,orig,dest) = a(country) + b(sex) + c(orig,dest) + residual (1)

relative to the same model but with the class trajectory effect c(orig,dest)restricted to be zero; here, y represents the satisfaction score for any one ofthe seven domains, and (orig,dest) indexes the four possible class trajec-tories (salariat, salariat), (working, salariat) and so on. The residual degreesof freedom in Table II are very large (approximately 4,600 for each domainwith only small variations due to missing data), so that approximate sig-ni�cance levels based on standard F tests are valid, despite the fact that theindividual responses y, being scores on a seven-point scale, are not them-selves normally distributed.

Most obviously, Table II con�rms that differences between countriesprovide the largest source of variation in the data. There is, of course, con-siderable unevenness across domains. For example, considered as twobroad regime types (East v West), the differences between levels of report-ed personal satisfaction in East European post-communist and westerndemocratic-capitalist societies are larger in relation to income, standard ofliving, and life as a whole, than they are to (say) job satisfaction and familylife. Furthermore, in all domains except that of community of residence,East versus West differences are greater than those between nations withinthese broad regime types, and are especially so (as might be expected) inrelation to satisfaction with material aspects of life (income and standardof living).

By comparison, differences between the sexes are negligible, except inthe four domains of satisfaction with family life, job, the political system,and income. For the last two of these, men report higher satisfaction thanwomen, and the overall sex difference is almost identical in both cases. Thiscan be seen clearly in the �rst section of the table of means (Table III).There is also some evidence of an interaction between sex and country con-cerning satisfaction with the political system. This is summarized in thesecond section of Table III. It will be seen that in most cases men reportgreater satisfaction than do women, but in two countries (Slovenia and theformer GDR) the difference is close to zero, while in Czechoslovakia theassociation is in the opposite direction (the mean score for women is higherthan that for men). Sex differences in relation to satisfaction with familylife also vary signi�cantly across countries, although the pattern here isdifferent, as can be seen from the means shown in the third section of TableIII. On average, men again report higher satisfaction than women,although in several countries (including all three western democracies) thedifference between the sexes is close to zero.

What of disparity between the four class mobility trajectories themselves?Table II reveals that signi�cant differences were found in several lifedomains. The patterns for three of these – satisfaction with the politicalsystem, income, and standard of living – are very similar; that is to say, the


established salariat report highest satisfaction, those newly arrived in thisclass indicate somewhat less, the downwardly mobile declare less still, whilethose intergenerationally stable in the working class record the lowest levelsof all (again the relevant means are shown in Table III). Curiously, TableIII also suggests that, in the case of family life, those with working-classorigins report higher satisfaction, whether mobile or not. Since this is asmall and not especially signi�cant result, we think it unwise to exercise toomuch sociological imagination upon its interpretation, and so will resist thetemptation to refer readers to the classical literature on the close familial-ism of so-called traditional working-class communities. The domain of jobsatisfaction is perhaps more puzzling. Here we �nd a signi�cant sex differ-ence in the pattern over the four class trajectories. The relevant table of


TABLE III: Selected mean satisfaction scores

pol inc

Men 3.43 3.43Women 3.19 3.19(standard errors all 0.03)

polGB USA FRG BUL RUS POL CZE SLO GDR EST

Men 3.8 4.3 4.0 2.7 2.4 3.4 3.6 3.6 3.6 3.0Women 3.2 4.1 3.3 2.4 2.1 3.3 3.8 3.6 3.7 2.7(standard errors all approximately 0.1)

famGB USA FRG BUL RUS POL CZE SLO GDR EST

Men 6.1 6.0 5.8 5.8 5.4 5.8 5.7 5.7 6.1 5.7Women 6.1 6.0 5.7 5.3 4.6 5.6 5.4 5.8 6.0 5.2(standard errors all approximately 0.1)

fam pol inc sol (st. err)

S to S 5.56 3.51 3.67 4.29 (0.05)W to S 5.67 3.41 3.49 4.06 (0.05)S to W 5.58 3.35 3.41 4.01 (0.08)W to W 5.70 3.20 3.08 3.95 (0.03)

jobS to S W to S S to W W to W

Men 5.10 (.07) 5.11 (.06) 4.83 (.11) 4.82 (.05)Women 5.04 (.08) 5.21 (.07) 4.75 (.12) 4.58 (.05)

means (with approximate standard errors shown in parentheses) forms the�nal section of Table III. This shows that, among women, job satisfaction isgreater for those mobile – whether upward or downward – than for othersin their current class. At this point our sociological imaginations (not to sayour data) are simply exhausted.

It now becomes pertinent to pursue the issue of how much of the classtrajectory variation in satisfaction comes from the differences between thesalariat and working classes, and how much from mobility itself. Consider�rst of all the three life domains relating to the political system, income,and standard of living. For each of these we found highly signi�cant differ-ences between the four class trajectories, and the pattern of differences wassimilar for all three domains: salariat to salariat scores are highest, workingto salariat and salariat to working are intermediate, and working to workingare lowest. Are these differences attributable to class alone, or does mobil-ity have its own effect? One way to address this question in the context ofan additive model such as (1) is through a ‘diagonal reference’ type ofrestriction on the class trajectory effect, of the form

c(orig,dest) = pc(orig,orig) + (1–p) c(dest,dest) (2)

where 0 £ p £ 1. (For general explanation and illustration of diagonal refer-ence models for mobility effects, see for example Sobel 1981, 1985, or Clif-ford and Heath 1993.) This is a three-parameter restriction {p,c(s,s),c(w,w)}of the full four-level class-trajectory effect {c(s,s),c(w,s),c(s,w),c(w,w)}.Taking into account the usual constraint needed for identi� ability, whichcould for example set c(s,s) = 0, the diagonal reference structure thusreduces the between-trajectories degrees of freedom from three to two. In(2), the socially mobile have a mean satisfaction score which lies betweenthose of stable members of their origin and destination classes, with pdetermining the relative weight of origin and destination. Under (2),therefore, the class-trajectory differences noted above are attributedentirely to a weighted combination of the effects of class of origin and classdestination. Whether or not mobility itself has some additional effect canbe assessed by decomposing our earlier sum of squares for differencesbetween class trajectories (on three degrees of freedom) into two com-ponents. The �rst of these (on two degrees of freedom) deals with differ-ences within the restricted framework of (2); that is, differences due onlyto the combined effect of origin and destination classes. Any effect ofmobility itself is then contained in the remainder (on one degree offreedom).

Table IV shows the decomposition for each of the three domains in ques-tion. (The numbers in parentheses are taken from Table II.) It is clear that,in each case, almost all of the variation between class trajectories is due tosatisfaction differences between the salariat and the working class. There isno evidence of any effect of mobility itself: the F statistics on (1,4600)degrees of freedom are respectively 1.00 (pol), 1.84 (inc), and 1.04 (sol). Inother words the differences in satisfaction between the four class trajectories


are well explained by the diagonal reference structure (2). The leastsquares estimates of p are quite similar for all three of pol, inc and sol, beingrespectively 0.17 (se 0.12), 0.25 (se 0.09), and 0.18 (se 0.22). In each casethe class of origin is estimated to contribute about 20 per cent and the classof destination approximately 80 per cent to the effect of class trajectory onsatisfaction.

For two other domains – those of the family and life as a whole – the evi-dence of differences between class trajectories is weak (see Table II). Sig-ni�cance in each case is only just at the 5 per cent level, which is far fromconvincing, in view of the large sample sizes involved. Moreover, the esti-mated effects – even if accepted as real – are very small, and do not meritfurther investigation.

The pattern of means for job satisfaction is rather different and involves(as we have seen) the added complexity of interaction with sex. For thisreason it cannot so readily be decomposed into class and mobility effects.The diagonal reference model would in any case fail to � t since, amongwomen, the upwardly mobile have mean job satisfaction outside the rangeof satisfaction for those stable in either the salariat or working class. This isreally the only evidence of a strong mobility effect that we have been ableto �nd in the data. The relevant table of means (not here shown) con�rmsthat cross-national differences shed no particular light on this �nding.Women upwardly mobile from working-class origins express greater jobsatisfaction than those intergenerationally stable in the salariat in all coun-tries except Poland and the USA. Those downwardly mobile into theworking class express greater job satisfaction than their second-generationworking-class sisters in all countries except Bulgaria, Estonia, GB, and theformer GDR. It is hard to think of any plausible sociological explanationfor these particular cross-national groupings.

V

This paper examines survey data relating class mobility and immobility tolevels of personal satisfaction and dissatisfaction with seven differentdomains of everyday life across ten industrialized nations. The evidence can


TABLE IV: Decomposition of the between-trajectories sum of squares for satisfactionscores on selected domains

Source of pol inc solvariation df SS MS SS MS SS MS

(Class trajectory 3 104.1 34.7 180.4 60.1 34.1 11.4)= Orig and Dest classes 2 101.6 50.8 175.8 87.9 31.6 15.8+Mobility 1 2.5 2.5 4.6 4.6 2.5 2.5

(Residual < 4600 2.4 2.5 2.5)

now be set against the contrasting pessimistic and optimistic accounts of themobility experience that were distilled from the earlier literature. Is inter-generational social mobility from the working class into the salariat likelyto enhance life satisfaction, as is suggested by John Goldthorpe; or, as isclaimed by Anselm Strauss, does it increase the probability of dissatisfaction,at least in some if not all spheres of life?

The answer appears to be that variations in personal satisfaction whichcan be attributed to class trajectory effects in general are weak, especiallywhen compared with the differences found across domains within nations,and within domains across the different nations themselves. As regardsupward social mobility in particular, individuals who move from proletar-ian origins to salariat destinations are (perhaps surprisingly) no more likelyto be satis�ed or dissatis�ed with life, either across the board or in relationto particular domains, than are the socially immobile or even those whoskid from advantaged origins down into the working class. The associationbetween class mobility or immobility and life satisfaction is negligible,uneven across the different domains of everyday experience, and not sys-tematically variable between distinctive western capitalist and East Euro-pean post-communist societal types. These limited and particularisticassociations between class trajectories and personal satisfaction are (withone noticeable exception in relation to jobs) found among men andwomen in more or less equal measure. But in all cases they are, as it were,hardly the stuff of a systematic sociology of the pleasures or pain of themobility experience.

Of course, the life-satisfaction data from the International Social JusticeProject have their limitations, the most obvious of which is probably therestricted understanding of everyday experience that is operationalized bythe attitudinal items themselves. Likert-scaled indicators of satisfaction lookcrude, especially when set against the rich detail and emotional intensityexpressed in a good autobiographical account, such as David Storey’s life-history of Saville. However, it is not necessary to be overly defensive here,because this newer social survey material also represents, in several respects,a marked improvement on much of the evidence that has informed thedebate thus far.

For example, the basic concept of ‘personal satisfaction’ examined in thesurveys seems to hold (if only sometimes implicitly) a central position inmost of the earlier discussions and models of the supposed individual con-sequences of class mobility for feelings of disappointment, uprootedness,discontentment, or whatever. The terminology of satisfaction is, as we haveseen, prominent in the accounts offered by (say) both Strauss and Gold-thorpe. In other words, by investigating personal satisfaction across differ-ent domains of life we are addressing the variable that has the widestcurrency in earlier accounts, yet which has received to date almost no directinspection by researchers interested in the experience of class mobility.

The satisfaction ratings themselves have been assembled in astandardized fashion for each of seven major domains of everyday life. The


basic questions were validated in earlier research and are widely used inQuality of Life studies elsewhere (see for example Harding 1985). For thisparticular project they were thoroughly piloted, and subjected to a system-atic process of iterative translation and back-translation, to guarantee cross-national comparability. Moreover, class trajectories have here beenmeasured with a high degree of accuracy, such that the social mobility andimmobility shown in the tables is likely to be real rather than artefactual.We know from research elsewhere (see for example Marshall et al. 1988:240–2; Marshall 1997: 169–75) that mobility does affect such things asvoting behaviour and class identi�cation. In principle, the fact that itappears to have little or no effect upon personal satisfaction may of coursemean that the latter concept is being measured poorly, but in practice thisseems unlikely, given that our particular techniques for rating satisfactionhave been well-tested in a range of other studies. Finally, of course, a nation-ally representative sample of respondents has been consulted across avariety of modern industrialized states. In short, these survey materials maylack the nuances that are found in �ction or in a detailed case-history, butthis is more than compensated for by their apparent reliability.

Precisely because these survey data would seem to be more reliable thanthe evidence adduced by most earlier investigators, they also serve to illus-trate the veracity of an elementary principle of sound research methodol-ogy, and one to which contributors to this particular debate could usefullyhave paid more heed at the outset. The more general lesson to be learnedhere is simply that, to paraphrase Robert Merton (1987), it is always a goodidea, while conducting sociological research, to establish �rst that there isindeed a phenomenon to be explained – before devising an elaboratetheory or causal narrative appropriate to the supposed explanandum inquestion.

Generations of social theorists from Durkheim and Sorokin onwardshave assumed that social mobility would tend to disrupt normal psycho-logical functioning and to fragment identities. They have then set aboutclarifying the processes behind the personal disequilibrium that it was imag-ined would be involved, and speculating further about the longer-term con-sequences of the resulting social disequilibrium for societal and systemintegration, with an enthusiasm which has rendered them oblivious to thefact that there might not actually be a public issue requiring explanation ateither level. Our new data have their limitations, but they are neverthelesssuf�ciently robust to suggest that it is at least worth posing the question ofwhether or not the private troubles reported in some prominent case-histories of class mobility are to any signi�cant degree indicative of publicissues, especially in the sense that they are conceived to be a peculiar charac-teristic of social climbers or skidders. The autobiographies and case-studiesto which the novelists and social theorists have been drawn are not repre-sentative, and so offer a quite misleading picture of the impact of classmobility on personal satisfaction, the sources of which surely lie in otherlife experiences. The evidence from the Social Justice Surveys points to the


possibility – even probability – that there is simply nothing much of socio-logical interest here to explain.

(Date accepted: September 1998) Gordon Marshalland

David FirthNuf�eld College

Oxford

NOTES


* The authors wish to thank GeoffEvans, John H. Goldthorpe, and two anony-mous referees for helpful comments on anearlier version of this paper. The surveysused were supported in whole or in part bythe National Council for Soviet and EastEuropean Research, National ScienceFoundation, and Institute for SocialResearch, University of Michigan (USA);Economic and Social Research Counciland a British Academy/Leverhulme TrustFellowship (Britain); Deutsche Forschung-sgemeinschaft (Germany); the BulgarianAcademy of Sciences; the Grant Agency ofthe Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences;Saar Poll Limited (Estonia); the Ministry ofScience and Technology of the Republic ofSlovenia; the State Committee for Scienti�cResearch (Poland); and the Russian Feder-ation Ministry of Labour. The researchersinvolved in collecting the data were GalinGornev and Pepka Boyadjieva (Bulgaria);Petr Mateju and Jan Hartl (Czech Repub-lic); Andrus Saar (Estonia); BerndWegener and Stefan Liebig (Germany);Witold Morawski, Bogdan Cichomski andAleksander Borkowski (Poland); LudmillaKhakulina and Svetlana Sydorenko(Russia); Vojko Antoncic (Slovenia); DavidMason, Duane Alwin and James Kluegel(United States); Gordon Marshall, AdamSwift and Carole Burgoyne (UK).

1. An overview of the extensive cross-national literature on social mobility willbe found in Marshall (1997).

2. For examples and references seeGoldthorpe (1980: 175–7). See also Mullan(1987), who interviewed eleven (mainlyBritish) sociologists about their work andtheir assessment of the discipline as itlooked in the mid 1980s, but began by

inviting each to say ‘a little bit about them-selves’ in order to contextualize theirremarks. No fewer than six spontaneouslyoffered descriptions that commenced witha precise mapping of their own class mobil-ity trajectories, together with an assess-ment of how they felt these had affectedtheir world-view and values, and in turntheir sociological analyses.

3. For example, see Luckmann andBerger’s (1964) summary of the (largelytheoretical) literature relating class mobil-ity to identity formation in modernsocieties, or Lopreato and Hazelrigg’s(1970) review of the dispute about the rela-tive importance of intergenerationalversus career mobility effects for inducingsocial and individual strains. Of course,there are empirical sociological literaturesabout the consequences of social mobilityfor such things as fertility (see Sobel 1985)and voting behaviour (Weakliem 1992),but the implications of the �ndings forarguments about feelings of personal satis-faction or individual well-being are farfrom obvious.

4. The �rst two of these lack suf�cientinformation to create class variables thatare strictly comparable cross-nationally.The Japanese sample is too small to yieldreliable results in this particular investi-gation. Full technical details of the variousnational studies are available in theMethodological Appendix to Kluegel,Mason and Wegener (1995).

5. The same occupational informationwas also collected from respondents not informal employment at the time of thesurveys, but in relation to their ‘last regularjob’, although the analysis in this paper isrestricted to those working for pay because

only they were asked the question aboutjob satisfaction. Of course, the analyses canbe carried out on the larger sample inrespect of the non-job dimensions of satis-faction, and this has been done. However,no signi�cant differences are revealed inthe results reported below if respondentswithout paid employment (the retired,unemployed, disabled, and those involvedin domestic labour) are then included, onthe basis of their last full-time job.

6. The theory, de�nition, and opera-tionalization of the Goldthorpe classes isexplained fully in Erikson and Goldthorpe(1992: ch. 2). In the present paper, thesalariat in all nations comprises Gold-thorpe classes I and II, while the workingclass always includes Goldthorpe classes VI,VIIa and IIIb – although, in the formercommunist countries, rank-and-� le workersin the agricultural sector (classes IVc andVIIb) have also been included here.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Berger, B.M. 1990 Authors of Their OwnLives, Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress.Cayton, H. 1965 Long Old Road: An Auto-biography, New York: Trident Press.Clifford, P. and Heath, A. F. 1993 ‘ThePolitical Consequences of Social Mobility’,Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series A156: 51–61.Durkheim, E. 1952 [1897] Suicide, London:Routledge and Kegan Paul. Erikson, R. and Goldthorpe, J. H. 1992 TheConstant Flux, Oxford: Clarendon Press.Goldner, F. H. 1965 ‘Demotion in Indus-trial Management’, American SociologicalReview 30: 714–24.Goldthorpe, J. H. 1980 Social Mobility andClass Structure in Modern Britain, Oxford:Clarendon Press.Halsey, A. H. 1996 No Discouragement: AnAutobiography, London: Macmillan.Harding, S. 1985 ‘Values and the Nature ofPsychological Well-being’, in M. Abrams,D. Gerard and N. Timms (eds) Values andSocial Change in Britain, London: Mac-millan, 227–52.Hoggart, R. 1988–92 Life and Times (3Volumes), Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hopper, E. 1981 Social Mobility, Oxford:Blackwell.Kluegel, J. R., Mason, D. S., and Wegener,B. (eds) 1995 Social Justice and PoliticalChange, New York: Aldine de Gruyter.Kohn, M. L. and Slomczynski, K. M. 1993Social Structure and Self-Direction, Oxford:Blackwell.Lopreato, J. and Hazelrigg, L. E. 1970‘Intragenerational Versus Intergenera-tional Mobility in Relation to SociopoliticalAttitudes’, Social Forces 49: 200–10.Luckmann, T. and Berger, P. 1964 ‘SocialMobility and Personal Identity’, EuropeanJournal of Sociology 5: 331–43.Marsden, D. 1968 ‘Dennis Marsden’, in R.Goldman (ed.) Breakthrough, London:Routledge and Kegan Paul, 106–23.Marshall, G. 1997 Repositioning Class,London: Sage.Marshall, G., Rose, D., Newby, H. andVogler, C. 1988 Social Class in ModernBritain, London: Hutchinson.Marshall, G., Swift, A. and Roberts, S. 1997Against the Odds? Social Class and SocialJustice in Industrial Societies, Oxford: Claren-don Press.Merton, R. K. 1987 ‘Three Fragments froma Sociologist’s Notebook: Establishing thePhenomenon, Specified Ignorance andStrategic Research Materials’, AnnualReview of Sociology 13: 1–28.Mullan, B. 1987 Sociologists on Sociology,London: Croom Helm.Sobel, M. E. 1981 ‘Diagonal MobilityModels: A Substantively Motivated Class ofDesigns for the Analysis of MobilityEffects’, American Sociological Review 46:893–906.—— 1985 ‘Social Mobility and FertilityRevisited: Some New Models for the Analy-sis of the Mobility Effects Hypothesis’,American Sociological Review 50: 699–712.Sorokin, P. A. 1959 [1927] Social and Cul-tural Mobility, Glencoe: Free Press.Strauss, A. L. 1971 The Contexts of SocialMobility, Chicago: Aldine.Weakliem, D. L. 1992 ‘Does Social MobilityAffect Political Behaviour?’, European Socio-logical Review 8: 153–65.Wilenski, H. L. and Edwards, H. 1959 ‘TheSkidder: Ideological Adjustments of Down-ward Mobile Workers’, American SociologicalReview 24: 215–31.


social mobility and personal satisfaction: evidence from ten countries*

Documents