Summary

Historical developments of social reproduction in Germany

Questions of social mobility and social reproduction are central to sociological research. Social mobility is commonly defined as the movement of individuals (or social units) among social positions within a society, which form a structure of social inequality. Hence, social mobility can be regarded to be an indicator of the individual- or group-level persistence of social advantage and disadvantage. In conceptual terms, most analyses of inter-generational social mobility start from the children’s generation, and they are conditional on both the formation of the origin context and the existence of the children. This perspective is well compatible with references to individual life chances. If one is interested in the question of inter-generational social reproduction, however, an immediate interpretation of these results is often misleading. In this case, one looks at inter-generational links from the perspective of the parents’ generation and asks about the consequences for the following generation(s). This includes questions of how the origin context is formed, whether there are any children at all and when they were born as well as the aspect of these children’s relative chances of education and of attaining particular social positions. A special intention of this project is therefore to model the micro-level process of inter-generational social reproduction in a life-course perspective. Hence, partial processes of social selectivity can be distinguished, such as union formation, fertility, and children’s educational attainment. In doing so, the project combines a traditional concept of social mobility with a demographic research perspective. In empirical terms, the project describes historical developments concerning inter-generational social reproduction in Germany during the mid- and late 20th century.