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Project

Social and ethnic inequalities in intergenerational social mobility: the role of the educational macro context. (FWOTM1136)

Over the past decades, economic and social inequalities are
widening across the Western world. Simultaneously, mass-education
transformed societies in “schooled societies”, where educational
systems became central institutions with a primary role in cultural
beliefs, social stratification and mobility. However, comparative
research into intergenerational social mobility has been restricted to
an assessment of the impact of education on an individual level. This
falls short because education has gradually grown into a central
institution. I will assess education on a macrolevel: are opportunities
for climbing the social ladder more equal in societies with an
influential educational system? I will assess the correlation between
the rate of schooled society and social mobility across 30 European
countries, using five waves of the European Social Survey, one of the
European Value Survey and two of the International Social Survey
Programme. Next, I will also examine social mobility of a group that
is particularly disadvantaged at school: ethnic minorities. This study
will be the first to describe their intergenerational social mobility
patterns in Europe, based on the same data. Finally, I will contribute
to the debate on the conceptualisation of class. Decades of mass
education gives rise to doubt the capacity of paradigmatically applied
EGP class schemes to capture class divides. We verify the suitability
of EGP class schemes by contrasting with an alternative class
scheme
Date:1 Nov 2022 →  Today
Keywords:Social differentiation
Disciplines:Education, culture and society not elsewhere classified, Race and ethnic relations, Social differentiation, stratification and social mobility, Sociology of social class