Canadian Journal of Sociology Online July-August 2006
This volume is a Festschrift in honour of Robert Erikson on the occasion of his retirement as Secretary General of the Swedish Council for Working Life and Social Research. Erikson is perhaps best known for his collaboration with John Goldthorpe on an important international comparative study of social mobility under the auspices of the CASMIN (Comparative Analysis of Social Mobility in Industrial Nations) project, with results reported in their monograph, The Constant Flux (1993). This collection, edited by prominent Swedish sociologist Stefan Svalfors, includes essays by five sociologists who both worked with Erikson at some point in their careers and are leading researchers in the areas of social mobility and life chances. It is difficult to generalize about the contribution of the volume, since, like many edited books of this kind, the chapters vary considerably in quality and relevance to the overall theme of cross-national comparative research. Since the number of chapters is small, I will attempt to provide a brief sense of their contributions.
Karl Ulrich Mayer does a superb job of reviewing comparative life course research from its origins in concepts of development and the life cycle to the emergence of a life course sociology that takes account of differences between both historical periods and countries. He persuasively advocates an approach to understanding the relationship between institutional structures and life course patterns and outcomes that is based on highly detailed country-specific comparative analyses, though such an approach does not offer the promise of generalization possible with a design that includes a large sample of countries coupled with a multilevel approach to analysis.
In his chapter, John Goldthorpe argues that progress in sociology is indeed possible, using the case of social mobility research as an exemplar. He points to advances in data, analytic methods, and theory, and identifies the International Sociological Association Research Committee on Social Stratification and Mobility (RC28) as providing an institutional context for these advances. While his argument is largely convincing to me, as a long-time member of RC28, it is not clear to me that there is as much agreement on the empirical regularities he identifies as he would like to think, particularly the claim of Erikson and Goldthorpe in The Constant Flux that relative mobility rates are stable both over time and across countries. This finding is far too dependent on their use of a set of class categories that ignore hierarchy and analytic methods that chew up a large number of degrees of freedom.
Of the remaining three chapters, Annemette Sørenson's review of the literature on the impact of change in family structure and women's economic roles on trends in inequality is perhaps the most useful to researchers. Although her concentration on U.S. research is inconsistent with the book's focus on comparative approaches, she does an excellent job of marshalling the existing literature to support Mayer's contention that for a full understanding of socioeconomic outcomes, they must be linked to a society's institutional features. Although both are well done, I found the chapters by Tony Atkinson and Sara Arber to be somewhat tangential to the theme of the book. Atkinson's treatment of the use of social indicators in policy development in the European Union and the United Nations, while having a cross-national perspective, is concerned with describing social inequality rather than explaining it. Arber's treatment of the role of gender and family status in influencing inequality among older persons uses inequality measures as independent variables in explaining health-related behaviours in the UK. While I agree with her contention that more effort must be devoted to studying inequality after retirement as part of a life course approach, a portion of that research must be devoted to understanding the role of such institutions as public and private pensions and health care systems in generating that inequality. Such understanding can only come from applying a cross-national comparative design.
While it is heartening to see the appearance of a book demonstrating the vibrancy and potential of quantitative research on social inequality internationally, it is unfortunate that a declining number of sociologists continue to make contributions to this field, leaving large parts of it to the economists, as John Myles (2003) pointed out. This is particularly true in Canadian sociology, where cultural studies and related theoretical debates have eroded a great deal of the base of sociology in empirical research, whether quantitative or qualitative. A voice like that of John Goldthorpe trumpeting progress in social mobility research within sociology is drowned out, on the one hand, by post-modern doubters who deny the possibility of any form of scientific progress and, on the other, by the emergence of a strong interest in the study of intergenerational mobility among economists (see, for example, Corak 2004). What might preserve a role for the sociological approach to inequality is the study of its institutional underpinnings, as exemplified in the chapters by Mayer and Sørenson. However, what this assumes is that we can convince the generation of younger sociologists that it is worthwhile acquiring the theoretical and analytical tools to compete with the economists on an equal footing.
Richard A. Wanner
Department of Sociology
University of Calgary
http://www.cjsonline.ca/reviews/analyzinginequality.html
August 2006
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