Change Over Time in Father-Son Mobility in Australia

Abstract

Studies of changes in the Australian stratification order over time have been inhibited by the lack of adequate data sources. With the release of recent data from the National Social Science Survey, we can examine change over three decades: the 1960s, the 1970s, and the 1980s. Our data come from mobility studies conducted in 1965,1973 and 1984-7. We take as our point of departure a mobility model deployed in a cross-national study of Australia and Japan in 1965, which identifies moderate self-recruitment across occupational stra ta, barriers against entry into farming, barriers restricting mobility from farm backgrounds to non-manual and skilled manual destina tions, social closure restricting downward mobility from non-man ual origins, and barriers to mobility from manual origins to non- manual destinations. We apply this model to mobility tables for the two later periods. Detailed comparison of specific parameters shows weaker self-recruitment in the professional, sales and manual groups and a weakening over time of the stronger barrier to mobility. On this basis, we conclude that the Australian occupational structure be came marginally more open in the 1980s, compared with the 1960s. However, change is small relative to constancy. Our findings are therefore consistent with the Featherman-Jones-Hauser hypothesis about relative constancy in genotypical mobility, with theories that posit increasing openness about the relationship between economic growth and social mobility, but not with those that predict increasing rigidity in the stratification order.