Date created: | Last Updated:

Category: Project

Description: Building on the Weberian approach to status competition, we propose a hybrid model of intergenerational educational mobility that integrates nominal and positional mobility, examine its theoretical and empirical implications, and derive a dual test of the prevalence of positional mobility. Results based on survey data for 40 post-war birth cohorts in 35 advanced economies show clear-cut evidence for strong intergenerational transmission of educational ranks and the surprising absence of any nominal mobility. Moreover, the strength of positional transmission in most societies is much more resilient to change than one may expect from the scale of educational expansion. We label this striking persistence as Positionally Maintained Inequality (PMI). The few exceptions to PMI are cases of predominantly increased positional mobility and lower levels of income inequality. Our theoretical and empirical analysis provides a synthesis of four decades of related research while the methodology offers new ways to study positional advantages in other social contexts.