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Social Mobility in Japan: A New Approach to Modeling Trend in Mobility

In the sociological literature on social mobility, there has been much debate of late about whether opportunity and openness are increasing, with some scholars suggesting that mobility regimes are becoming more fluid and others suggesting that trendless fluctuation is the dominant pattern in most countries. These trend analyses have almost invariably been based on highly aggregate mobility tables that track flows between big social classes (e.g., professionals and managers, routine nonmanuals, craft workers). If the mobility table is instead disaggregated to the level of detailed occupations (e.g., lawyer, bookkeeper, carpenter), it becomes possible to monitor the propensity to remain within (a) the big class of origin (“big class reproduction”), (b) the micro-class of origin (“micro-class reproduction”), and (c) the band of detailed occupations that are socioeconomically close to the origin occupation (“gradational reproduction”). We carry out an analysis of this sort with a half-century of nationally representative mobility data from Japan. The results suggest that big-class reproduction is declining, micro-class reproduction is stable, and gradational reproduction is increasing. We conclude that analyses pitched exclusively at the big-class level tell at best a partial story about how social fluidity is evolving. If the discipline continues to monitor trend exclusively at the big-class level, there is accordingly a risk of conflating trends in the overall extent of opportunity with trends in the extent to which inequality takes on a big-class form.