There is no subject more central to sociology than social mobility.1 The degree to which modern industrialized societies enable talented, ambitious or lucky individuals to move up in status, or conversely the extent to which they reproduce inherited inequalities or social hierarchies from one generation to the next, are questions that still dominate much of the empirical mainstream of the discipline under the general rubric of stratification. Some of the most longstanding and detailed debates in the mainstream have centred on attempts to measure and distinguish the patterns of social mobility of European societies in comparison with others (Ganzeboom et al. 1989; Erikson and Goldthorpe 1992; Treiman and Ganzeboom 2000; Breen 2004) (...).