INTERGENERATIONAL MOBILITY AND INSTITUTIONAL AUTONOMY OF EDUCATION

Recent comparative research in social mobility has emphasized a large degree of comonnality in the pattern of social fluidity between generations. However, they have only examined the joint occupational distributions of fathers and sons, and ignored the institutional context of the mobility process. The omission of education from such research may have lead to an incomplete picture of the mobility regime. The present study returns to the classic problem regarding how education intervenes between origin and destination. The analysis utilizes the four SSM data, collected in Japan from 1955 to 1985 in ten-year intervals. Major findings are the following. 1) The importance of education for transmission of social positions has increased. We can see this trend in the proportion of movers estimated by the 'quasi-independence' log-linear model. 2) The origin-education association is unchanged regardless of educational expansion. Furthermore the influence of origin permeates into the education-destination association Indeed, we can devide the movers with the same educational degree into the upper latent class and the lower latent class. Such duality denies the institutional autonomy of education. 3) Therefore, in Japan, educational upgrading or decline of occupational inheritance will not increase the openness of social mobility.