Analyzing Inequality: Life Chances and Social Mobility in Comparative Perspective (review)

For more than three decades, Robert Erikson has made important contributions to the study of social inequality, particularly the analysis of intergenerational mobility through a comparative lens. Analyzing Inequality: Life Chances and Social Mobility in Comparative Perspective is a collection of papers that were presented at a 2003 symposium held in his honor. The contributors include some prominent figures in stratification research and the scope of Erikson's work is intended to be a unifying theme for the volume. However, the end product is five good articles rather than one good book.

In the introduction, Stefan Svallfors briefly summarizes the progress that has been made in the study of social inequality in terms of data, methods, and theory. He comes to the uncontroversial conclusion that while social scientists have made substantial advances in analyzing stratification over the last few decades, significant challenges remain.

Karl Ulrich Mayer's chapter provides a useful overview of the development of life course inequality research on the way to discussing the options and challenges in studying how institutional arrangements affect life course trajectories. He recommends a comparative approach but warns against the oversimplification of the nation as an analytical unit. Classifying countries using an economic development scale or a welfare state typology fails to link specific institutional mechanisms with life course outcomes. Mayer concludes that the cross-national approach is most informative when combined with detailed analyses of each nation's specific institutional arrangements.

John Goldthorpe opens his chapter by challenging the skeptics who claim that the notion of "progress" in research is a false one. However, the postmodernists and other detractors he argues against are simply straw men set up for the purpose of providing an overview of the progress made in social mobility research. As with Svallfors's introduction, the advances in data, methods and theory over the past half-century are beyond question. More interesting is Goldthorpe's question as to why social mobility research has made more progress than most other areas of sociology. He credits the institutional support of the Research Committee on Social Stratification and Mobility (RC28) of the International Sociological Association with serving as a unique focusing lens for those working in the field.

Taking up a different dimension of Erikson's work, Tony Atkinson reflects on the interaction between social science and public policy in the development of international social indicators. (The symposium from which these papers are taken was in honor of Erikson's service as the Secretary General of the Swedish Council for Working Life and Social Research.) Reviewing the development of the European Union's Primary Indicators for Social Inclusion and the nearly contemporaneous Millennium Development Goals adopted by the United Nations, Atkinson raises a number of important questions and concerns about the interpretation and use of these measures.

The last two papers in the volume depart from the first three in that they are empirically grounded and do not employ a comparative approach. Annemette Sorenson asks whether changes in family structure observed in Western nations in the past 50 years have had an effect on the stratification systems of those nations. Drawing exclusively on research findings from the United States, she concludes that the decline of the traditional nuclear family has resulted in both increased inequality and increased mobility. The latter result is due to the fact that single (and remarried) parents are less able to confer advantages on their children and therefore, the decreasing proportion of two-parent families weakens the overall origin-destination association. However, she warns, the American pattern may not be found to the same extent in other nations, especially those with more supportive welfare systems.

While informative, Sara Arber's contribution is out of step with the remainder of the volume, as it reports new empirical results from a single...