OCCUPATIONAL MOBILITY IN BRITAIN
| Author | Bridget Rosewell,Ken Mayhew |
| Date | 01 August 1981 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0084.1981.mp43003001.x |
| Published date | 01 August 1981 |
OXFORD BULLETIN
of
ECONOMICS and STATISTICS
OCCUPATIONAL MOBILITY IN BRITAIN
Ken Mayhew and Bridget Rosewell
I INTRODUCTION
Recent work on segmented or dual labour markets, particularly in the
United States, has attracted considerable interest.1 It has been suggested
that the jobs available in an economy can be divided into two or more
well-defined groups, between which lifetime mobility is very restricted.
This may mean that an individual can be 'trapped' in low-status, low-
paying occupations. Government training schemes or the personal
acquisition of skills or qualifications are, it is argued, insufficient to
break down such barriers.
In an earlier article (Mayhew and Rosewell (1979)) we investigated
the relevance of such views for the British labour market. We tested
the possibility of defining a limited set of specific criteria which would
assign individuals to segments between which lifetime mobility was
very rare. No such well-defined dividing lines existed. Nevertheless
there was substantial immobility. Over a third of our sample experienced
no movement along the Hope-Goldthorpe scale of occupational desir-
ability2 in the first ten years of their working life, whilst most of those
whose position on the scale did change moved up or down the scale
only by a limited amount. But this relative immobility was found
at every point on the scale and was not concentrated on a limited
number of them, as the segmented labour market theorists would
suggest. We conducted a very preliminary analysis of the nature and
For a survey of work in this area see Cain (1976) and Loveridge and Mok (1979).
2The l-lope-Goldthorpe scale ranges from 18 (self-employed workers, (street vendors,
jobbing gardeners)) to 82 (self-employed professionals, (doctors, lawyers, accountants)) and
is a measure of the desirability of occupation/status combinations. (Status refers to whether
a person is a manager, employee, self-employed etc.) Respondents to a survey were asked to
rank occupational titles and the results were employed to construct the scale. We have used
it extensively because it provides a continuous, numerical ranking based on detailed job classifi-
cations. The scale also correlates quite well with earnings rankings (Phelps Brown (1977),
pp. 107-11). For a more detailed description see Goldthorpe and Hope (1974).
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determinants of mobility. There was more upward movement than
down. Educational attainment, qualifications and parental background,
whilst important in determining an individual's starting point in the
labour market, provided a poor explanation of movement thereafter.
The aim of the present paper is to extend this analysis. Our data
were provided by the Oxford Social Mobility Study3 and consist of
a sample of over 10,000 men, who were aged between 18 and 64 in
1972, the year of the survey. Respondents were asked about the
jobs they had held at various points in their working lives: their first
job, their job ten years later, their job in 1969 and their job in 1972.
In our earlier analysis we worked largely with all those who were
in the labour market before 1959. This involves two major problems.
The first is that whilst the first and third job changes refer to the
same period of time for all individuals (ten and three years respectively),
the second job change could refer to a period of anything from one
to forty years. The second problem is that any mobility which occurs
might be the result simply of structural changethat as time went
by there were more 'good' jobs and fewer 'bad' ones. An increase in
the number of good jobs will increase absolute mobility, as individuals
are able to move upwards into these new jobs. It may not increase
relative mobility: the ability of individuals to escape the job categories
to which they were originally assigned. This is an issue of great im-
portance to sociologists concerned about the determinants of, and
changes in, the class structure of society, and Goldthorpe, Payne and
Llewellyn4 have paid attention to the issue in their analysis of these
data. Examining different birth cohorts and comparing movement
from father's class to the son's at entry to work, ten years later and
in 1972, they showed that although absolute mobility had increased,
relative mobility had not. The relative chances of men with back-
grounds outside white-collar and professional jobs of obtaining such
jobs had not improved once the increase in the proportion of men
in such jobs had been allowed for.
In order to meet these two difficulties, we have conducted a more
detailed cohort analysis. We have defined the cohorts by year of entry5
into the labour market, excluding those who entered in wartime.
We analyse the following seven cohorts: first job in (1) 1924-28;
(2) 1929-33; (3) 1934-38; (4) 1948-52; (5) 1953-57; (6) 1958-62;
(7) 1963-67. For the first five groups three moves can be identified,
between first job and job ten years later, between job ten years later
3We are grateful to the Oxford Social Mobility Group for making the data available to us.
A full report of their work is now published in Halsey et al. (1980) and Goldthorpe et al.
(1980).See Goldthorpe et. al. (1980), Ch. 3.
Year of entry is defined as the year in which a first job was taken. It does not include
any period of search prior to taking the job.
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