Abstract
One of sociology’s long-standing aims is to understand the nature of inequality of occupational opportunity. This doctoral dissertation project contributes to this effort by studying intergenerational occupational class mobility in two historical transitional contexts, during the early modernization and industrialization period in Hungary (1860s-1950) and during the country’s political transformation
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to a market economy (1980s-2000s). To study the early modernization period, I collected a large-scale, nationally representative sample of marriage records containing sons’ and their fathers’ occupations from Hungarian parishes between 1850 and 1950 (the Hungarian Historical Social Mobility file). The results generally support theoretical claims that modernization has a positive impact on social openness. During the period of early modernization, the opportunities of occupational class mobility became gradually more equal in Hungary. I investigated the determinants of social openness using indicators of modernization. The increasingly industrial labor context and expanding educational opportunities promoted lower levels of intergenerational reproduction of class positions. Increasing internal migration facilitated the transition toward greater equality of class opportunity as migrants left their class origins more often than non-migrants did, but growing population size was not related to greater equality of opportunity. Occupational classes in Hungary benefitted unequally from the new opportunities. Modernization processes influenced mobility patterns of working class and lower skilled non-manual classes, and had smaller impact on agrarian class mobility. The openness of the higher class in Hungary did not increase by modernization, which supports theoretical claims that the most resourceful classes would be able to maintain their advantage even in the face of equalizing forces in the society. Previous mobility research on consequences of the transition towards a market economy investigated changes in the strength of association between occupational class origins and destinations. I propose a new theoretical model on how political-economic transition from communism to capitalism changed the mechanisms of intergenerational occupational mobility. I estimated the mobility model on data from Hungarian mobility surveys before, during, and following market transition, and found strong evidence that political power was one important dimension of intergenerational occupational mobility under state socialism that rapidly disappeared when Hungary made its transition to the market. Economic capital emerged as a strong determinant of inequality in occupational mobility chances. State socialism exhibited a distinctive, institutionally based mechanism of occupational transmission across generations in Hungary, which is not adequately captured by the mobility models previously developed for the study of market-based societies.
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