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There has been a progressive opening up in the mobility regime in France from the start of the seventies. It is apparent in both men’s mobility and women’s mobility, is also revealed by an analysis of ‘complete’ mobility tables, and is scarcely sensitive to the treatment of unemployed and retired persons in the analysis, or to the detail of the class schema. This opening up resulted from a decline in the hierarchical divisions within the class structure and from a reduced distance between the agricultural classes and the others. Finally, introducing education between class origin and class destination reveals that the opening up of the mobility regime resulted from three components: a decrease in inequality of educational opportunity, a weakening in the relative occupational advantage afforded by education, and a compositional effect (educational expansion increased the size of more qualified groups in which the direct effect of origin on destination is generally weaker).

This chapter, based on four surveys covering the period from 1973 to 1995, focuses on changes in the Norwegian class structure, and on trends in absolute as well as in relative social mobility. The access to rewarded positions in Norway has become easier for all due to the expansion of the service class in the period studied. The pervasive sex segregation in work does, however, show few signs of weakening: women are still concentrated in the lower service class and in routine non-manual work. The analysis of both absolute and relative social mobility shows that, despite educational expansion, privileged social background is still important in Norway, although this study points to a weakening of the vertical barriers to social mobility between 1973 and 1995.

Sociological analysis has not made a significant contribution to the study of European integration, compared to political science or economics. This chapter examines the reasons for the discipline's neglect of integration processes, which is attributable largely to its failure to question some of its own assumptions about units of analysis, particularly with respect to the emergence of a European class structure.

This chapter assesses whether the class structure of the South changed in the postbellum era and whether different individual and locational attributes predicted who would come to occupy preferred social positions. It suggests another source of categorical uncertainty during Reconstruction and beyond. While many Southern journalists and politicians celebrated the expansion of an entrepreneurial middle class at the time, this class actually declined numerically in the proverbial New South. Moreover, the “decaying” planter class was remarkably persistent, both in its dominance of the top of the wealth distribution and its involvement in the postwar industrialization of the region. The social categories of planters and middling Southerners that were deployed in popular discourse—and within the “New South Creed”—thus had little in common with the reality of class structure following the Civil War.

This chapter establishes a comparative framework for evaluating possible explanations for the striking discrepancy in conflict intensity between Ulster and Upper Silesia. It surveys the historical background and development of both conflicts. It considers the relative importance of factors such as the impact of the World War, militarism, class tensions, and international intervention, but these are not convincing as explanations for contrasts in conflict intensity. Finally, the chapter examines the importance of demographic structure: the balance of Irish nationalists and unionists in Ulster and of ‘Germans’ and ‘Poles’ in Upper Silesia. This approach inevitably raises the question of the nature of the boundaries separating these communal categories. It is argued that the ethno-linguistic boundary worked far less effectively to differentiate rival national movements in Upper Silesia, than did its ethno-religious equivalent in the north of Ireland.

The class structure provides an important context for the study of social mobility. The evolution of the class structure is the all-important factor determining individuals’ changing experience of mobility, as expressed in absolute rates. The total mobility rate shows long-term stability; but, because of structural change, trends of rising upward and falling downward mobility in the mid-20th century are now being reversed. Relative mobility rates, comparing the chances of individuals of different class origins arriving at different class destinations, also show long-term stability. All this is evident over a period of more or less continuous educational expansion and reform—thus calling into question the belief that educational policy is key to promoting mobility. Education is best considered as a ‘positional’ good; and the motivation, and capacity, of parents in more advantaged class positions to help their children maintain their competitive edge in the educational system, and in turn in labour markets, underlies the resistance to change that the mobility regime displays.

“Who Dealt?” is a story about a game of auction bridge, evidently, given the year of its writing. Lardner's work is usually full of games, of course—it is one of the things he is popular for. But importantly, as he shifts from his work as a sports column writer in the first decade of this century to columns and short stories in the teens and twenties, he becomes less interested in games as games, as a rule-governed technique or as quasi-aesthetic play. Games come increasingly to serve an orientational function for Lardner, a way of positioning and building the human interactions that interest him the most. One of the ways Lardner uses games in his stories is as class structure. There are the lower-class games that he doesn't play himself or that he reports on as a sportswriter.

This book has examined the genesis, the logic, and the generality of social evolution theory. In particular, it has presented evolutionary explanations of the many social behaviors we observe in the natural world by showing that William D. Hamilton's inclusive fitness theory provides the necessary generalization of classical Darwin–Wallace–Fisher fitness. This concluding chapter discusses the limitations of the analyses presented in this book and assesses the empirical support for inclusive fitness theory, focusing on microbial altruism, help in cooperative breeders, reproductive restraint in eusocial species, and the evolution of eusociality and cooperative breeding. It also considers more advanced topics in social evolution theory, including sex allocation, genetic kin recognition, spite, and the evolution of organismality. Finally, it reviews theoretical approaches to studying social evolution other than replicator dynamics and the Price equation, such as population genetics, class-structured populations, and maximization approaches.

This chapter examines class structure and class mobility in East Germany before and after 1989, paying special attention to the changing role of political capital. It follows two analytical perspectives: social mobility as a process of transformation of the class structure; and the life course as a process of continuity or discontinuity in class membership. The GDR started with some opening of the class structure and ended with a quite closed mobility regime. The gap between the top and the bottom increased over the generations as the social structure became politically entrenched. Access to the upper service class was increasingly restricted to university graduates, and educational opportunities in general were differentially distributed according to social origin and political loyalty.

This epilogue discusses two issues and how to deal with them: the indiscriminate use of income for personal consumption and the use of wealth for maintaining a class structure. Robert Frank suggests that the way to deal with indiscriminate use of income for personal consumption is to institute a progressive consumption tax. A progressive consumption tax has been supported by both the Right and the Left. Even Milton Friedman suggested in a 1943 article that a progressive consumption tax is the best way to reduce conspicuous consumption and encourage investment. With respect to the use of wealth to maintain a class structure, the epilogue explains why we need an estate tax. It argues that the estate tax is important for sustaining philanthropy, which has been wedded to promoting opportunity creation and innovation throughout American history.

This chapter addresses the following questions: Do we need an art class structure? Is there a continuing dialectic between low-brow and high-brow? Has middle-class art passed from the theater to the interactive domain of club culture? Does a serious popular music theater still exist?

To move from the retrospective and nostalgic view of the Restoration that is Balzac's to the world leading to the Second World War that is Sartre's is to cover a bit over a century of tumultuous change, industrial and economic revolution, and social evolution in mores, class structure, and demographics to an extent that the West had never before seen. While verisimilitude remains the anchor of all of these works, analyses of each of them show disruptions strengthen and deepen the narrative. Though all of these authors transform evolutions, still there are no authors the same.

This chapter explores the nature of South African society at the onset of the apartheid era and discusses the ways social and economic changes were affecting inequalities. It focuses on the relation between class structure and income distribution during this period. With regard to income distribution, society is divided into three classes: rich white households occupying the higher position, coloured and Indian people in the middle and African people at the bottom. The chapter concludes with an analysis of the apartheid distributional regime that the National Party government inherited in 1948.

The conclusion sums up the combined influence and significance of all three versions of Love on the Dole (novel, play, film) and summarises just how much it was referred to in public debates about class, unemployment, poverty and the need for a Welfare State not in just in the later thirties, but also in the nineteen-forties, nineteen-fifties and nineteen-sixties. There is discussion of the neglected radio profile of Greenwood’s work, with frequent BBC radio and later television adaptations of Love on the Dole and others of his works. There is an account of how his later works often referred back to Love on the Dole and to the changing situation of British society and of working-class people. Finally, there is an analysis of what models of class-structure and class conflict underpin Love of the Dole and of why these might have been especially acceptable and persuasive and Britain in the nineteen thirties and since.

This chapter discusses concepts of marriage, brides, and wives in the Mid-Qing period. Marriage was the ladder of success for women in late imperial China. But a lavish dowry often became a burden: it testified the bride's family status, and it was likely to complement generous betrothal gifts, one gauge of the groom's ability to provide for a daughter's long-term security. However, that produced an unusual series of conversations about wives and brides in the writings of mid-Qing intellectuals. Marriage in mid-Qing China was a contract that aimed above all at reproducing class structures. State law, and the system of moral beliefs sanctioned norms governing marriage, and thereby protected the existing class hierarchy. However, those sanctions cut two ways: they could protect class-endogamous marriage markets, or they could undermine them. The discourse on marriage that emerged during the mid-Qing period points to the ways in which the boundaries around sacrosanct marriage markets were being challenged.