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While sociologists emphasize the family as the basic theoretical unit of intergenerational transmission processes, the comparative literature on social class mobility has paid no attention to how and why siblings from the same family end up in the same or in different social class positions. We present results from a comprehensive analysis of harmonized data on the class positions of more than 400,000 brothers born in 1910–1979 in nine industrial nations. Fraternal resemblance in class positions provides a much more comprehensive picture of the overall impact of family background than conventional father-son comparisons, and thus facilitates a stronger empirical test of the Featherman-Jones-Hauser hypothesis, which predicts a basic commonality in relative class mobility in industrialized nations. In support of the hypothesis, we find a remarkably high degree of cross-national similarity in overall levels of fraternal resemblance in class positions. This cross-national similarity is even more pronounced than that based on conventional father-son comparisons. Additional analyses show that father’s class position accounts only for a moderate portion of the brother similarities in class positions. While this finding indicates that father-son comparisons provide an incomplete picture of overall levels of class mobility, maternal and family characteristics do not account for any additional similarities among brothers, implying that fraternal resemblance in class positions are rooted in generally unknown family characteristics. 

The Sociology Seminar Series for Trinity Term is convened by Richard Breen.  For more information about this or any of the seminars in the series, please contact sociology.secretary@nuffield.ox.ac.uk.