Intergenerational Transmission of Occupational Class and Status Attainment at Entry into the Labour Market: Argentina, Cohorts 1924-1994. Estimated with a Conditional Multinomial Logistic Regression Model Harry BG Ganzeboom, Department of Sociology, VU University Amsterdam. E-mail: harry.ganzeboom@gmail.com

Jorge Raul Jorrat, Gino Germani Institute, University of Buenos Aires. E-mail: rjorrat@gmail.com

Paper to be presented at the European Consortium for Sociological Research, Barcelona (ES), September 12-14, 2024.

Earlier presentations:

• July 18 2024, Gino Germani Institute, Buenos Aires AR.,
• August 28-29 2024, Cambridge Stratification Seminar, Stirling Summary

Argentina is a particularly interesting case for the comparative study of social reproduction and social mobility (Jorrat & Marques-Perales, 2022). The country is almost unique in being on a steady downward slope from riches to rags. In the early 20^th century Argentina was among the top-10 wealthiest countries in the world, due to its immense agricultural exports and early industrial development, which at the time made the country a major attraction to immigrants from then impoverished Southern Europe. Since that time Argentina has been in a steady downward development, punctuated by eight national bankruptcies between 1930 and 2002, and the country finds itself now in the middle ranks of developing economies, with a per capita national income of about 25% of the wealthy OECD countries.

Standard modernization theory would lead to the expectation that the permanent economic crisis has produced a rigidification of the social class structure. Despite the pioneering early work of Gino Germani (early 1960’s) and its obvious relevance, Argentina is at present largely absent from international comparisons of social stratification and social reproduction (but see Jorrat et al., 2024). In this paper we aim to mend this gap by investigating trends in intergenerational occupational class reproduction and status attainment in first jobs for cohorts born between 1924 and 1994.

We have brought together eight surveys (among them the 1960 Germani survey) with data on first and father’s occupation, that allow us to compare cohorts that entered the labour market between 1930 and 2020. The eight surveys are heterogeneous by sample coverage and measurement strategies, but we overcome this by employing survey quality controls. We distinguish 10 occupational class categories, based in 11 major group of the International Classification of Occupations ISCO-88/08, and alternatively the widely used EGP7 typology of social class, and study the pattern of association with the Hauser-Goodman [HG] multiplicative scaled-association model, that we incorporate in a conditional logistic regression model, that makes it possible to add individual level covariates and address indirect effects (FOCC à EDUC à OCC1) as well as confounding by the survey controls (Hendrickx & Ganzeboom, 1998; Dessens et al., 1996).

The HG model compresses the association pattern into two sociologically meaningful parameters: IMM, the excess density on the diagonal of the mobility tables, and U, the scaled uniform association parameter that models the transmission of social class among the intergenerationally mobile. We study these parameters by entry cohort for men and women separately and jointly, and with and

without correction for survey effects. By applying the scaling both to ISCOCAT and EGP7, we can judge the relative effectiveness of the two class schemes.

Our preliminary results rebut the expectation of a growing rigidification of Argentina: in fact, there is a trend towards more (relative) mobility and this trend become more pronounced when the appropriate survey controls are taken into account. The trend towards more relative mobility is most pronounced on the diagonal (IMM) but is also visible off-diagonal. When examined in an indirect effects model, the primary channel of increased relative mobility is the indirect one, via education.

References

Dessens, Jos AG, Wim Jansen, Harry BG Ganzeboom, and Peter GM Van der Heijden. 2003. “Patterns and Trends in Occupational Attainment of First Jobs in the Netherlands, 1930-1995: Ordinary Least Squares Regression versus Conditional Multinomial Logistic Regression.” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series A (Statistics in Society) 166

(1): 63–84. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-985X.00259.

Hendrickx, John, and Harry BG Ganzeboom. 1998. “Occupational Status Attainment in the Netherlands, 1920-1990 A Multinomial Logistic Analysis.” European Sociological Review 14 (4): 387–403. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordjournals.esr.a018246.

Jorrat, Jorge Raúl, Pablo Dalle, Sandra Fachelli, and Manuel Riveiro. 2024. “Historical Evolution of Intergenerational Class Mobility and Educational Effects in Urban Argentina: 1960–2017.” Research in Social Stratification and Mobility 89 (February): 100868. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rssm.2023.100868.

Jorrat, Jorge Raúl, and Ildefonso Marqués-Perales. 2022. “Argentina Exceptionalism: Social Mobility and the Reversal of Development in Argentina.” International Journal of Sociology 52 (4): 284–307. https://doi.org/10.1080/00207659.2022.2089805.

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