CROSS-NATIONAL COMPARATIVE STATUS-ATTAINMENT RESEARCH.

The article presents a research on cross-national comparative studies of the process of occupational attainment conducted over the past 20 years. Some support is found for the claim that industrial societies are more open than developing societies, but substantive conclusions regarding societal similarities and differences in status-attainment processes are very limited and very tentative. This unhappy state is attributed to a failure by the research community to take issues of measurement comparability seriously. A proposal is made for a collective effort to produce standardized results from individual national studies, in order to facilitate future cross-national comparative research on status-attainment processes and patterns. A number of studies have compared the status-attainment process in two or more countries. First, the article reviews these studies from the point of view of measurement comparability, to substantiate the strong claims regarding the lack of established knowledge and the reasons for it. Second, the article attempts to extract from the corpus of comparative studies some generalizations that, if not unequivocally established, might at least be regarded as provisionally supported.