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This study examines the intergenerational transmission of family resources (class, education and income) on people's educational and occupational attainment in their early career life. It asks whether parental resources remain effective or fall into insignificance. It also asks whether the resources operate in a similar way for the ethnic minorities as for the majority. Drawing on data from the Longitudinal Study of Young Persons in England, the study focuses on resource transmission in degree attainment, access to elite class position, unemployment rates, labour market earnings, and continuous income. In each aspect, we test not only the net effects of parental resources, but also the differential transmission between the majority and ethnic minority groups. The analysis shows strong effects of parental resources on educational and occupational attainment for whites but rather weak effects for the ethnic minorities. Ethnic minority children tend to grow up in poor families, yet even those whose parents manage to achieve socio-economic parity with whites do not enjoy similar benefits. Reducing inequality in family socio-economic conditions and inequality in labour market opportunities is key to achieving social justice.

Research in social stratification tends to focus on class differences in educational and occupational attainment, with particular attention to primary and secondary effects in the former, and class reproduction in the latter, domain. Research in ethnic studies tends to focus, however, on ethnic penalty or premium. Many studies have been conducted in each tradition on specific issues but little research is available that examines class, gender and ethnic effects simultaneously or in tandem with contextual effects, let alone on the whole trajectory from compulsory schooling, through further and higher education, to labor market position. Using data from the Longitudinal Study of Young People in England, this paper shows pronounced class differences but remarkable gender progress in each of the educational domains. With regard to ethnicity, people from minority ethnic heritages had lower GCSE scores due to poorer family conditions but achieved higher transition rates to A-Level study, higher university enrollment and, for some groups, greater attendance at elite universities, resulting in an overall higher rate of degree-level attainment than did whites. One might expect members of ethnic minority backgrounds to fare equally well in their earlier careers in the labor market, but only to find them more vulnerable to unemployment, less likely to have earnings, and more disadvantaged in terms of disposable incomes.

This article studies the processes of social mobility by the main ethno-generational groups in Britain. We compare the origin-education-destination (OED) links between the first- and second- generation ethnic minority groups with those of whites, with a particular focus on whether the second generation are getting closer to whites than do the first generation in the links, hence becoming increasingly integrated into the socio-economic lives of British society. Using data from the UK Household Longitudinal Study and adopting structural equation modelling (SEM) methods, we find strong evidence of first-generation setback, and some signs of second-generation catch-up. Indians and Chinese are making progress, but the two black groups and Pakistanis/Bangladeshis are lagging behind. The analysis shows persisting ethnic disadvantages in the labour market in spite of their high levels of educational achievement, and it also shows an emerging order of ethnic hierarchy, running from Indian, Chinese, black Caribbean, Pakistani/Bangladeshi to black African groups.

We use the China General Social Survey (2005) and the Home Office Citizenship Survey (2005) to study civic engagement and neighbourhood trust in China and Britain in this paper. We focus on class differences in participation in sports/recreation, religion, children's/adult education and public-welfare activities, and trust in the neighbours. We find higher levels of civic involvement in Britain but greater neighbourhood trust in China. This is mainly due to structural differences. China has a large proportion of peasants who have very low levels of civic involvement but very high levels of neighbourhood trust. Among the non-peasant population, the two countries have similar levels of class differences in civic (except religious) involvement. There are small class differences in China on neighbourhood trust, but marked effects in Britain. Overall, there is a greater similarity than difference in class effects in both civic engagement and social trust in the two countries. While differences in demographic attributes (and China's specific institutional arrangement, the household registration system, or hukou) account for some of the observed patterns, we also find more pronounced class than demographic effects in the two countries. Class plays a major role in the development of social capital.

The Samples of Anonymized Records (SARs) from the 1991 UK census have proved an outstanding achievement for social science research. Research based on the SARs has taken advantage of the large sample size, the detailed geography, the wide range of socio-demographic variables and the operational flexibility. A wide range of areas has been covered including sociology, human geography and public health. The new SARs from the 2001 UK census will provide an even richer source of information. The availability of the SARs from the two censuses will provide a unique opportunity for studying socio-economic cultural and demographic changes in the UK over the decade and for conducting international comparisons. This article reviews the data structure of the SARs, summarizes some of the most innovative and important findings using the 1991 SARs, and looks at the research potential of the 2001 SARs. The purpose of the article is to encourage even greater use of the SARs.

The Samples of Anonymized Records (SARs) from the 1991 UK census have proved an outstanding achievement for social science research. Research based on the SARs has taken advantage of the large sample size, the detailed geography, the wide range of socio-demographic variables and the operational flexibility. A wide range of areas has been covered including sociology, human geography and public health. The new SARs from the 2001 UK census will provide an even richer source of information. The availability of the SARs from the two censuses will provide a unique opportunity for studying socio-economic cultural and demographic changes in the UK over the decade and for conducting international comparisons. This article reviews the data structure of the SARs, summarizes some of the most innovative and important findings using the 1991 SARs, and looks at the research potential of the 2001 SARs. The purpose of the article is to encourage even greater use of the SARs.

Two highly influential theories are in debate over the class character of professional and managerial employees in their work-life mobility. The 'employment relationship theory' holds that these employees have a service employment relationship with their employers, which will guarantee their career stability as a distinctive service class with no major internal divisions. Challenging this is the 'assets theory' arguing that underlying professional and managerial careers are two fundamentally different assets. Cultural assets facilitate the formation of a cohesive and secure professional middle class, whereas organizational assets will result in an insecure and marginalized managerial middle class. Exponents of the theories have conducted empirical research to support their arguments but, owing to the limitation of data and methods used, no direct dialogue is available. This paper seeks to bring about such a dialogue by using more appropriate data and methods to test the theories simultaneously and rigorously.The analysis focuses on professional and managerial career flows derived from complete work histories and on the vulnerability to unemployment across two decades (1973-92). The results show that, overall, the challenge to the employment relationship theory is not substantiated.

"This book provides a comprehensive analysis of the patterns and trends of socio-economic development and social division in Chinese society. It discusses the determinants, manifestations and consequences of social inequality in the last 40 years with particular regard to social mobility, educational attainment, social capital, health, labour market position, including employment (opportunity), career advancement, and earnings, housing, wealth and assets, urbanisation, social integration of migrant peasant workers into urban life, social protest and civic engagement, subjective well-being and subjective social status"--

This study examines the parental socio-cultural and political effects on parenting practices in China. Based on the China Education Panel Survey, we construct a new typology of parenting styles – intensive, permissive, authoritarian and neglectful – and focus on intensive parenting as a particular mode in which the more privileged families in China use superior cultural and political resources to reinforce their advantages. We show that parents in higher class positions, with higher education and with membership in the leading Chinese Communist Party (CCP) tend to adopt intensive parenting as a means of securing all-round development and obtaining favourable academic achievement for their children. Parenting styles thus reflect a more complicated feature of social stratification in China than in Western societies.

This article examines the effects of China's household registration ( hukou) system, which divides the population into rural and urban sectors with differential benefits and entitlements, on the link between intergenerational social mobility and people's well-being. Using China General Social Surveys of 2005 and 2011, we find that upward mobility has a similarly positive effect in the urban and the rural sectors but downward mobility has a markedly negative effect chiefly in the rural sector. We propose a thesis of 'asymmetrical permeability' to account for the findings. In the context of rapid economic development and staggering institutional reform, the upwardly mobile in both sectors enjoy ample socio-economic resources as provided by the advantaged destination classes whereas the downwardly mobile depend very much on the hukou status they have. In the urban but not rural sector, families in advantaged positions are able to protect the downwardly mobile offspring in their well-being. It is therefore the differences in the hukou system that explain the differential acculturation.

One of the most striking features of the contemporary world is the scale and complexity of international and internal migration and the rapidly increasing size of indigenous ethnic minorities in the national populations of many countries. International migration continues to be mainly from poor to rich nations but the more recent years have seen migration patterns becoming multidirectional, with migration flows moving between developed countries, amongst developing countries as well as from developing to developed countries. The scale of internal migration in some countries is dazzling. For instance, an estimated 260 million "peasant workers" have moved to cities in China. The number of indigenous ethnic minorities in the country has also grown substantially, now reaching 106 million. These and other features of population change pose a serious challenge to policy-makers and the general population in many counties, in terms of making and implementing policies of social inclusion for migrant and indigenous ethnic minorities, ensuring equal access to educational and occupational opportunities, and taking measures to facilitate societal acceptance of the ethnic minority groups. With this in mind, we have, in this thematic issue, collected papers that address issues of ethnic integration in both developed and developing countries.

This paper examines the ethnic and household registration system (hukou) effects on intergenerational social mobility for men in China. Using national representative surveys covering almost two decades (1996-2014), we assess both absolute and relative rates of mobility by ethnicity and hukou origin. With regard to absolute mobility, we find that minority men had significantly lower rates of total and upward mobility than Han men, and those from rural hukou origins faced more unfavourable chances. With regard to relative mobility, we find men of rural ethnic origins significantly less likely to inherit their parental positions. Even with parental and own educational qualifications and party memberships controlled for, we still find ethnic minority men of rural hukou origins behind others in access to professional-managerial positions. Overall, our findings suggest that the preferential policies have largely removed the ethnic differences in the urban sector but ethnic minority men from rural hukou origins are faced with double disadvantages: in addition to the inequality of opportunity rooted in the institutional divide which they share with the majority group from similar backgrounds, they face much greater inequalities in conditions, namely, in having poorer socio-economic and cultural resources.