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IUSSP Scientific Panel on Historical Demography
Call for papers
International seminar on Social Mobility and Demographic Behaviour: A Long Term Perspective
Los Angeles, USA
11-13 December 2008
Organized by the IUSSP Scientific Panel on Historical Demography and hosted by the California Center for Population Research (CCPR) at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)
This conference will examine the bidirectional relationships between demography and social mobility, offering a historical perspective on an issue of contemporary relevance. We invite papers that consider such relationships at the individual level, the population level, or at both levels simultaneously. At the individual level, we seek papers that examine how demographic characteristics, especially family and household circumstances, affect social and economic outcomes. At the population level, we seek papers that examine the interaction of population composition and socioeconomic differentials in demographic behaviour.
Demography and social mobility interact in numerous and complex ways. At the micro-level, classic approaches to the study of individual social mobility that only consider the influence of education and social origins may be incomplete because they neglect the importance of demographic characteristics. Living arrangements such as presence of parents and family characteristics such as number of siblings also influence socioeconomic attainment. Recently, recognition has also grown of the potential role of health in childhood, not only as a determinant of socioeconomic attainment, but even as a pathway for the intergenerational transmission of inequality (Palloni 2006).
At the macro-level, processes of social mobility and socioeconomic differentials in demographic behaviour interact to shape patterns of inequality. Recognition has grown that the evolution of inequality across generations depends not only on macro-level changes in the economy and the micro-level relationship between parent’s and children’s socioeconomic outcomes, but also on socioeconomic differences in marriage, reproduction and mortality. Patterns of upward and downward mobility, for example, may depend not only on the correlations of parent’s and child’s characteristics, but socioeconomic differences in marriage and fertility that determine the composition of the population competing for opportunities.
A historical perspective has much to offer in the analysis of such contemporary questions. Processes of social mobility interact with socioeconomic and other differentials in demographic behavior. The demographic and mobility processes of interest unfold across the life course and between generations, thus multi-generational historical population data are especially suited to their analysis. Contemporary data with the requisite life course data and generational span are rare. Analysis of historical data will not only advance our understanding of such contemporary phenomena, but illuminate how demographic and social mobility interacted during key periods of demographic and economic change such as the Industrial Revolution and the Demographic Transition.
The relationship between family size and socioeconomic attainment is one example of an interaction between demography and social mobility of historical and contemporary interest. Many accounts of the fertility decline hypothesize that parents limited family size to enhance their children’s chances of upward social mobility, or minimize their chances of downward mobility. While results from contemporary developed countries consistently suggest that children from large families face reduced attainment chances, the relationship of family size to attainment chances before and during the Demographic Transition is unclear. The problem is that until recently appropriate data have been scarce (Van Bavel, 2006).
The interaction of marriage and social mobility is not only of contemporary and historical interest, but of comparative interest as well. Depending on the setting, marriage could be a cause or a consequence of social mobility: social mobility could improve marriage prospects, and marriage could improve the chances of upward social mobility. Marriage and mobility chances might be jointly determined by other demographic circumstances such as numbers of siblings, or the survival or death in the senior generation. In pre-industrial Europe, the death of a father could raise the socioeconomic prospects and marriage chances of a son by opening the way for independence and marriage (Hajnal, 1965, 1982; Ohlin 1961). Conversely, in Asian societies where parents arranged the marriages of their children and influenced them well into adulthood, the death of a parent could lower marriage and attainment chances. The potentially strong interrelationship between mortality, marriage, and social mobility has only rarely been studied empirically, Alter (1988) being a notable exception.
Social mobility and mate choice are also intertwined. In most contemporary societies, socioeconomic and educational homogamy is becoming prevalent, but in the past, patterns were diverse. In some Asian societies, hypergamy was a deliberate strategy. Even in European societies where socioeconomic homogamy was the norm, it contended with preferences for ethnic or religious homogamy. In such situations, socioeconomic hypogamy could be acceptable if it preserved ethnic or religious homogamy. Historical population databases offer an opportunity to study the interplay of mate choice and social mobility, not only examining patterns and determinants of mate choice, but also the consequences (Mueller and Pope 1980).
Results of such micro-level analyses of relationships between demography and social mobility may be integrated into simulations to investigate the implications of such relationships for population composition. Recent work by Robert Mare (Mare 1997; Musick and Mare 2004; Mare and Maralani 2006), Michael Hout (Hout et al. 2001, Hout and Goldstein 1994), Joshua Goldstein, their collaborators, and others has shown that results on demographic differentials according to education, ethnicity, religion, and socioeconomic status can be incorporated into demographic models of population renewal to gain insight into how demographic, economic, and social processes interact to produce changes in the population.
Submission procedure:
The IUSSP Scientific Panel on Historical Demography invites researchers in the field to submit a 200-word abstract (and if the author(s) wish, a complete manuscript, which must be unpublished) before 1 April 2008.
Abstracts and papers must be submitted in English only and the working language at the meeting is English.
For co-authored papers, make sure to include the names of co-authors in the abstract. The submission should be made by the co-author who will attend the meeting. Please note that we will only consider unpublished work that is not intended for publication elsewhere.
The seminar will be limited to approximately 12-15 papers.
Applicants will be notified whether their paper has been accepted by 1
May 2008.
In the case of acceptance on the basis of an abstract, the completed paper
must be uploaded on the IUSSP website 15 November 2008.
We intend to publish a selection of the papers as an edited volume or special issue of a journal. Papers to be included in the resulting publication will be selected after the meeting, and authors may be asked to carry out revisions, by the meeting organizers, the press or the journal. Papers will also be made accessible to the membership of the IUSSP at a restricted site.
Thanks to support from the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population, the California Center for Population Research at the University of California, Los Angeles, and other sources, we will be able to cover the local expenses for one author per paper. Additional co-authors who would like to attend to will be responsible for their own local expenses. All participants are responsible for their own travel expenses.
For further information, please contact Cameron Campbell (camcam@ucla.edu).
Organizing Committee:
Cameron Campbell, UCLA, Department of Sociology (chair)
Jan Van Bavel, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Department of Social Research
Michel Oris, Université de Genève, Department of Economic
History
Alain Gagnon, University of Western Ontario, Department of Sociology
REFERENCES
Alter, G. 1988. Family and the female life course. The women of Verviers, Belgium, 1849-1880. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Hajnal, J. 1965. 'European marriage patterns in perspective', in: D.V. Glass and D.E.C. Eversley (eds), Population in History: Essays in historical demography, pp. 101-143.
Hajnal, J. 1982. 'Two kinds of preindustrial household formation system', Population and Development Review, 8:449-494.
Hout, Michael, and Joshua R. Goldstein. 1994. “How 4.5 Million Irish Immigrants Came to Be 41 Million Irish Americans: Demographic, Social, and Subjective Components of the Ethnic Composition of the White Population of the United States.” American Sociological Review. 59: 64-82.
Hout, M., A.M. Greeley, and M.J. Wilde. 2001. “The Demographic Imperative in Religious Change.” American Journal of Sociology 107: 468-500.
Mare, R. D. 1997. "Differential Fertility, Intergenerational Educational Mobility, and Racial Inequality." Social Science Research. 26: 263-91.
Mare, R. D., and V. Maralani. 2006. “The Intergenerational Effects of Changes in Women’s Educational Attainments.” American Sociological Review. 71:542-564.
Mueller, C.W. and Pope, H. 1980. 'Divorce and Female Remarriage Mobility: Data on Marriage Matches After Divorce for White Women', Social Forces, 58:726-738.
Musick, K., and R. D. Mare. 2004. “Family Structure, Intergenerational Mobility, and the Reproduction of Poverty: Evidence for Increasing Polarization?” Demography. 41: 629-48.
Nystrom Peck AM. 1992. ‘Childhood environment, intergenerational mobility, and adult health, evidence from Swedish data’, J Epidemiol Community Health. 46(1):71-4
Ohlin, G., 1961 'Mortality, marriage, and growth in Pre-Industrial Populations', Population Studies. 14:190-197.
Palloni, Alberto. 2006. Reproducing inequalities: Luck, wallets, and the enduring effects of childhood health. Demography 43(4): 587-615.
Stern, J. 1983., ‘Social mobility and the interpretation of social class mortality differentials’, Soc Policy. 12(1):27-49
Van Bavel, Jan. 2006. The effect of fertility limitation on intergenerational
social mobility: the quality-quantity trade-off during the demographic
transition. Journal of Biosocial Science. 38(4):553-569