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People act in the light of their beliefs, yet sociological theories of action have been weak in explaining why people hold the beliefs they do. I propose a means of integrating beliefs into rational choice theory using a Bayesian learning model in which people act in accordance with the beliefs they hold about the world. By observing the outcomes of their actions they modify their beliefs. This approach, in contrast with many others, recognizes that beliefs evolve in the light of experience. The approach is applied to show how the evolution of beliefs about the returns to effort in education can give rise to observed patterns of class differences in educational expectations and so to class differences in mobility chances, at least as these are mediated through educational attainment. I discuss the general issue of learning in the Bayesian approach and outline some limitations and areas of further research.

In this paper I use three concepts - the hedging of risk, the transfer of risk and recommodification - to examine recent changes in the distribution of market risk. Mechanisms that formerly hedged risk - such as the welfare state and the nuclear family - have declined in effectiveness and popularity and the result has been the recommodification of individuals and their life chances. These themes are illustrated by an examination of change in the nature of employment relationships and its likely impact on the service class. The future of the service class remains linked to the informational asymmetry problem that underlies the service relationship, and this limits the degree to which employers can claim an option over the labour supply of service class workers. The paper ends by discussing some more general issues in the relationship between risk, stratification and recommodification.

In recent years a number of methods have been developed for introducing continuous covariates into mobility analyses and into the study of cross-classified data more generally. Drawing on the work of Logan, this article shows how McFadden's Conditional Logit Model can be used to fit existing log-linear models and can incorporate into them the effects of continuous covariates. The method is illustrated using a simple example.

This paper presents a reanalysis of the British, French and Swedish mobility data first presented by Erikson et al. (1979). A descriptive model is specified and used to identify precisely where the differences in the relative openness of the three societies are located. In doing this the paper seeks both to synthesize previous findings and to extend our knowledge of the mobility processes at work in the three societies.

School leavers looking for work often complain that employers refuse to hire them because of their lack of work experience. In this paper, using data on three recent cohorts of school leavers in Ireland, an attempt is made to assess the advantages in obtaining a job of having work experience. It is found that job seekers with work experience are at an advantage over those seeking a first job at times when the labour market is poorest. Some explanations are advanced to account for this finding, and some consequences for government sponsored work experience programmes are discussed.

Criticisms of the analysis of social mobility using the structural mobility/exchange mobility distinction are discussed, and its replacement by an absolute/relative mobility perspective, following Goldthorpe (1980), is advocated. Based on this perspective a framework for cross-population analyses of mobility is developed and illustrated using well-known English/Welsh and Danish data. This framework leads to a definition of the total mobility variance in the populations under study, which may, in turn, be separated into shared and unique components of mobility variance within each of which the importance of absolute and relative mobility may be assessed. It is argued that the absolute/relative approach avoids the problems which have beset the more ambitious structure/exchange distinction and that the framework developed here permits the straightforward testing of the Lipset-Zetterberg (1959) and Featherman, Lancaster-Jones and Hauser (1975) theses.

In this article methods are presented for fitting nonhierarchical log-linear models as discussed in Magidson et al. (1981) and mobility table models presented by Duncan (1979a) and Goodman (1979b). These methods, which use the GLIM computer package, are considerably simpler than those advocated by any of these authors.

In this essay I propose to examine an hypothesis about dowry payments in the light of certain evidence from Ireland. The sources of this evidence are, first, my own data collected during fieldwork in the small community of Beaufort, County Kerry, Ireland, and, second, the work of writers who have studied the question of dowry payment in Ireland, notably Conrad M. Arensberg, Solon T. Kimball, and K. H. Connell. The intent here is to draw attention to some of the deficiencies in Jack Goody's definition and discussion of dowry payments, and to offer alternatives to them. In particular I shall argue that Goody's discussion of dowry is centrally flawed by a discrepancy between the generality of the variables he uses to explain the geographical distribution of the practice, and the specificity of his definition of it. It is the unwarranted detail involved in the latter that leads him to obscure certain crucial variations within dowry systems more broadly defined, and to confuse the issue of the relationship between dowry and bride wealth.