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Despite the theoretical importance of intragenerational mobility and its connection to intergenerational mobility, no study since the 1970s has documented trends in intragenerational occupational mobility. The present article fills this intellectual gap by presenting evidence of an increasing trend in intragenerational mobility in the United States from 1969 to 2011. We decompose the trend using a nested occupational classification scheme that distinguishes between disaggregated micro-classes and progressively more aggregated meso-classes, macro-classes, and manual and nonmanual sectors. Log-linear analysis reveals that mobility increased across the occupational structure at nearly all levels of aggregation, especially after the early 1990s. Controlling for structural changes in occupational distributions modifies, but does not substantially alter, these findings. Trends are qualitatively similar for men and women. We connect increasing mobility to other macro-economic trends dating back to the 1970s, including changing labor force composition, technologies, employment relations, and industrial structures. We reassert the sociological significance of intragenerational mobility and discuss how increasing variability in occupational transitions within careers may counteract or mask trends in intergenerational mobility, across occupations and across more broadly construed social classes.

This paper first offers a simple \"proof of concept\" to demonstrate the tight empirical link between declines in an occupation's employment and increases in the mean age of its workforce. The balance of the paper then applies this tool to the study of local labor markets to assess how shifts in occupational structure have affected the job composition of young and old workers at different education levels between 1980 and 2005.

The idea that socioeconomic differences are a “fundamental cause” of health and well-being is the basis for large volumes of research. However, one of the challenges in this area is that of linking socioeconomic positions to etiological mechanisms in theoretically informative ways. The situation is doubly challenging because the expression and meaning of socioeconomic positions and the mechanisms they activate change over time. Focusing on depression and applying mediation analysis to data from a large multinational sample from European countries, we find strong support for a three-stage model where occupational differences are largely mediated by exposure to precarious work, which itself is mediated by social marginality. The model is largely robust across welfare state regimes. Ultimately, the research extends fundamental cause perspectives by highlighting connections between “old” and “new” dimensions of socioeconomic status and the social and social psychological sequelae that connect them to psychological well-being.

Using a set of user-generated data, we examine patterns in the careers of professional chefs. We argue that this is one of many cases in which careers must be understood as shaped by dual structures—the typical occupational structure within a firm, and the organization of firms in a larger field. We then demonstrate how career trajectories may be formalized as movement through a two-dimensional space defined by status in these structures. Building on previous ethnographic work finding that chefs understand the logic of their careers as involving repeated trade-offs between their occupational status (their rank within the kitchen) and organizational status (the status of the restaurant at which they work), we attempt to determine how different trajectories are associated with different outcomes. We find that, despite the somewhat random nature of entrance into the culinary profession, future top-tier chefs disproportionately begin their careers at high-status restaurants. Beyond their auspicious beginnings, these top-chefs-to-be also commonly devote their early careers to maximizing organizational status, forgoing promotions to higher kitchen ranks in favor of low-level jobs at more prestigious restaurants. By comparison, chefs destined to run lower-status restaurants tend to spend their early careers prioritizing rapid advancement within the kitchen, only pursuing jobs at more prestigious restaurants much later in their careers, with limited success.

Elite universities are credited as launch points for the widest variety of meaningful careers. Yet, year after year at the most selective universities, nearly half the graduating seniors head to a surprisingly narrow band of professional options. Over the past few decades, this has largely been into the finance and consulting sectors, but increasingly it also includes high-tech firms. This study uses a cultural-organizational lens to show how student cultures and campus structures steer large portions of anxious and uncertain students into high-wealth, high-status occupational sectors. Interviewing 56 students and recent alumni at Harvard and Stanford Universities, we found that the majority of our respondents experienced confusion about career paths when first arriving at college but quickly learned what were considered to be the most prestigious options. On-campus corporate recruitment for finance, consulting, and high-tech jobs functioned as a significant driver of student perceptions of status; career prestige systems built up among peers exacerbated the funneling effect into these jobs. From these processes, students learned to draw boundaries between \"high-status\" and \"ordinary\" jobs. Our findings demonstrate how status processes on college campuses are central in generating preferences for the uppermost positions in the occupational structure and that elite campus environments have a large, independent role in the production and reproduction of social inequality.

Many advanced economies have experienced significant job polarization in the last decades, with an increase in the employment share and relative wage of both low-wage and high-wage workers at the expense of middle-wage workers. This polarization has probably been spurred by the substitution of routine-intensive labour with automation and information and communication technologies. This paper explores whether the Italian labour market has experienced similar patterns and, if so, whether they are the consequence of a pure technology-driven shock. The evidence is mixed. While the share of low-wage manual occupations has increased markedly, that of high-wage professional occupations has fallen slightly. The share of middle-wage jobs has declined significantly but, unlike the case of the US, the wages have not. Regression analyses based on occupational task characteristics (Goos et al. in Am Econ Rev 104(8): 2509–2526, 2014) do not fully align with the routine-biased technical change hypothesis either, consistently with the limited adoption of automation technology in Italy. Among the most likely factors, cross-sector reallocation, which favoured the low value added service sector, and the rise of low skilled migrant and college graduate labour supply explain most of the observed occupational changes.

The ongoing pandemic is laying bare dramatic differences in the spread of COVID-19 across seemingly similar urban environments. Identifying the urban determinants that underlie these differences is an open research question, which can contribute to more epidemiologically resilient cities, optimized testing and detection strategies, and effective immunization efforts. Here, we perform a computational analysis of COVID-19 spread in three cities of similar size in New York State (Colonie, New Rochelle, and Utica) aiming to isolate urban determinants of infections and deaths. We develop detailed digital representations of the cities and simulate COVID-19 spread using a complex agent-based model, taking into account differences in spatial layout, mobility, demographics, and occupational structure of the population. By critically comparing pandemic outcomes across the three cities under equivalent initial conditions, we provide compelling evidence in favor of the central role of hospitals. Specifically, with highly efficacious testing and detection, the number and capacity of hospitals, as well as the extent of vaccination of hospital employees are key determinants of COVID-19 spread. The modulating role of these determinants is reduced at lower efficacy of testing and detection, so that the pandemic outcome becomes equivalent across the three cities.

Nghi Son Economic Zone, a central economic hub in Vietnam, has experienced significant growth in its industrial and service sectors. This growth has drawn a large workforce from surrounding regions. This research investigates how land acquisition within the zone has affected the social and occupational landscape for rural workers in Thanh Hoa Province. The study will analyze the vocational structure of rural workers before and after land acquisition and clarify their career transition process in this context. To achieve the research objectives, we use quantitative methods and qualitative policy analysis, including collecting and analyzing statistical data on the socio-economic situation, and labor structure in the research area, conducting survey interviews with representatives of 400 households whose land was acquired to learn about changes in their lives, work, and income; and analyzing relevant policies of the Party and State related to land acquisition, compensation, resettlement support, and job creation to inform potential solutions. From the analysis, evaluation, and research, it proposes solutions to minimize the negative impacts of land acquisition, ensure social security, and contribute to improving people’s lives and livelihoods. The research has scientific significance in supplementing land policies and labor restructuring studies. It is of practical importance in perfecting land policies and laws, contributing to the country’s sustainable development.

In this paper, we use multilevel growth-curve analysis to model occupational stratification across West German careers for cohorts born between 1919 and 1971. We argue that a life-course approach gives a more appropriate perspective into social stratification by focusing on the permanence of inequalities across human lives. With data from the German Life History Study (GLHS), our primary interest is in the amount and timing of career progression and the ways in which educational attainment, class background, and cohort context shape them. We confirm previous findings of limited career progression and permanence in occupational inequality. Thus, career mobility can correct for initial disadvantages only to a limited degree. We also confirm the strong role played by the standardized and stratified German educational system, which channels workers into specific occupations with strict boundaries. We find a substantial gross effect of class background, which is strongly mediated by educational attainment for women but not for men. We do not find any general indications of a trend in change across cohorts, although there are some weak indications that men who entered the labor market in the problematic 1970s had weaker career growth. We conclude by discussing the advantages of a life-course approach to occupational stratification and the possibilities of growth-curve analysis to answer pertinent questions in research on careers and occupational mobility.

This paper examines how heterogeneous lockdown policies can amplify pre-existing socioeconomic inequalities in well-being during public health crises. Using Chile’s municipality-level heterogeneous COVID-19 lockdown strategy as a case study, we assess whether local quarantines generated a double disadvantage for lower-socioeconomic-status populations: greater exposure to confinement and higher psychological costs when confined. We combine municipal-level lockdown records and socioeconomic data with a novel application of Google Trends to construct real-time indicators of population well-being. To address the geographical mismatch between nationally aggregated search data and local policy implementation, we exploit temporal variation in the socioeconomic composition of the confined population induced by staggered municipal lockdowns, which allows us to link changes in aggregate well-being indicators to shifts in confinement exposure across socioeconomic groups. Our results show that increases in the confined population are associated with significant rises in distress-related search activity, including boredom, loneliness, stress, worry, and self-care. These effects are substantially stronger when confinement disproportionately affects non-wealthy municipalities. We further show that, conditional on epidemiological risk, municipalities with lower income levels and higher concentrations of contact-intensive occupations faced systematically higher probabilities of being placed under lockdown. Taken together, these findings reveal a compounding mechanism through which local lockdown policies can exacerbate pre-existing inequalities: socioeconomically vulnerable populations were both more likely to be confined and more adversely affected by confinement. Methodologically, our study demonstrates how digital trace data can be combined with granular policy information to assess distributional well-being impacts in real time. Substantively, our results highlight the importance of incorporating equity considerations, and occupational structure into the design of non-pharmaceutical interventions.