CAREER MOBILITY IN ITALY

ABSTRACT

This article examines the role of social origins and education for career mobility in contemporary Italy by means of growth curves models. We find that opportunities for career advancement are rather limited and that risks of downward mobility are virtually negligible. Although this picture displays a noticeable degree of stability over time, a moderate increase of career fluidity across cohorts can be detected. Moreover, social origins and education exert a marked influence on the first occupation, while the subsequent career-adjustment of these initial social inequalities is rather limited. Furthermore, the small influence of origins and education on career opportunities does not display any systematic trend across cohorts.

Keywords:

• career mobility
• intragenerational mobility
• returns to education
• growth curves
• intergenerational reproduction

Notes

¹Hence, this reform may have affected the careers of individuals who entered the labour market since the late 1990s. However, these individuals will not be considered in this work due to data constraints (see section 4).

²These replicated observations will also be denoted as occasions. The important point is that they are not to be confused with job events. For instance, if an individual remains in the same job for 7 years, we have built seven occasions in our longitudinal data-set.

³Appendices are avaliable as supplementary content to the online version of this article.

⁴A three-fold hierarchical division within this class schema may be identified: the service class (I–II) ranks above all other social classes and manual workers (classes V–VIIb) rank below all other classes.

⁵Growth curves models that include both parental education and parental occupation, together with their two- and three-way interactions with cohort and career duration, failed to converge.

⁶The raw cross-tabulation of birth cohort by first class by class after 10 years is reported in Appendix 2. The comments and estimates presented in the rest of this section rely on this table. Preliminary analyses suggest that information on career mobility is less reliable for the oldest cohorts of the Multi-purpose data; hence we have excluded individuals older than 70, and we have identified three 10-year cohorts.

⁷These conclusions remain unchanged if we carry out separate analyses for men and women (see also section 5.2).

⁸Of course, one could ask whether at some point of the career, the social standing of occupations begins to decline, as in the case of old workers facing downward mobility. Given that our observation window is limited to 20 years, we cannot formally test this hypothesis. However, we maintain that it can hardly be applied to Italy (Reyneri 2007).

⁹We have checked that using the actual number of years spent at school, rather than the number of years equivalent to the highest educational qualification achieved, leads to the same results. A recent paper has shown that in the case of Italy, using educational qualifications, rather than years of education, ensures minor improvements in the model fit and does not affect the substantive conclusions concerning the role of education for occupational attainment (Schneider et al. 2009).

¹⁰All parameters presented in Table 4 have been also estimated in the models presented in Table 5, but they are not presented for reasons of space and because they hold little relevance for our research questions. Furthermore, they remain basically unchanged relative to the estimates presented in Table 4 (output available upon request).