Prevalence of discourses about the “Gap-widening society” is an important phenomenon for contemporary Japanese sociology, in so far as it has revealed the weakness and crisis of class studies and stratification studies. Current class and stratification studies cannot provide sharp and effective tools for understanding the widening economic disparities and so-called immobilization of unequal society. It means also current class and stratification studies cannot fulfill their central role to provide effective independent variables to other fields in sociology.
     Such a difficulties and stagnation have been brought by specific developmental process of class and stratification studies in post-war Japan. Class has be understood as certain political subject or pre-modern immobile groupings, in other hand social stratification has been understood as hierarchical continuum and can be operationalized artificially into some statistical categories. In this process, concepts of class and stratification have been regarded as conflicting viewpoints in sociology, and their validities and actualities have diminished to a large extent.
     In order to conquer such weakness and difficulty in class and stratification studies, we make two suggestions. (1)We need deny Marx's 2-class scheme explicitly and then adopt 4-class scheme of capitalist, new middle, working and old middle that is widely accepted in Europian sociology. (2)Social stratification can be understood as a system of social categories that is formed when class locations are mediated by some institutions such as industrial structures, labour market, family and the state. From this viewpoint, class and stratification are regarded not as antagonistic but as complementary to each other, and we can proceed to newly defined and fruitful field in sociology i.e. class-stratification studies. For one example, its application to 1965 SSM survey data is presented.

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     This paper studies trends in intergenerational social mobility using growth curve modeling. The main research questions are to describe the characteristics of early career trajectory among Japanese men, and also to examine the cohort change in association between career trajectory and class origin. With data from four national representing surveys, two-level hierarchical nested dataset consisted of the person-year work history data file and individual data file is set up. The author conducts multilevel logistic regression analysis which is well-adapted to hierarchical structured datasets. The results indicate that, the change in reproduction of upper non-manual class can not be shown, while reproduction of self employed class demonstrate an upward trend. These findings suggest that we should pay attention to local structure in social mobility as well as overall structure.

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     The study examines the trends in intergenerational mobility using the survival analysis. It focuses on the intergenerational inheritance of the upper white-collar class and of the non-skilled manual class, and uses four historical periods, rather than the survey years, as the unit of trend analysis in order to specify the effect of historical context. The study examines separately the entry into the upper white-collar class or into the non-skilled manual class at the time of the first entry into the labor market and the entry into the upper white-collar class or into the non-skilled manual class during the career history.
     The analysis reveals that the entry into both the upper white-collar class and the non-skilled manual class at the time of the first labor market entry is strongly affected by class origin. However, the effect of class origin does not vary by the historical context. The analysis predicting the hazard rate of entry into the upper white-collar class (or into the non-skilled manual class), given that the person has not entered the class, presents a different picture. The chances of these people for reaching the upper white-collar class (or the non-skilled manual class) through their occupational career are strongly affected by class origin. Furthermore, the effect of class origin appears to be stronger in the most recent period of 1996-2005. In other words, the inheritance of the upper white-collar class and of the non-skilled manual class seems to have increased in recent period.

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     Research of intergenerational mobility on Japanese females has not been exploited compared with research on males. In this paper, gender comparison was performed by examining whether opportunity disparities of origin-destination association in social mobility and these temporal changes according to calendar year are different between males and females, employing the modified EGP classification which covers the categories of non-regular employment and no-job. By hypothetical arguments, it is expected that disparity of origin-destination association of females is smaller than that of males and the three kinds of changes, constancy, expansion and reduction in disparity among females can be derived as predictions, though constant disparity among males has been reported by most past studies. The result of analysis utilizing career history data of 2005 SSM Survey in Japan showed that disparity of females was smaller than that of males as expected, particularly at more than 38 years old and at the maximum disparities, and that changes of immobility among females along with calendar year did not support any hypothetical prediction, though no significant change was confirmed among males.

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     This research aims to make clear the determinants of job shift patterns in Japan. Previous studies have highlighted the importance of both individual level of resource and reward, and labor market structures which affect job mobility patterns. However, previous research on job mobility in Japan did not incorporate individual level of attributes such as resource and reward into systematic theoretical points of view while the impact of labor market structure on job mobility drew distinctive attention in Japan. In addition, many previous studies did not take into account the context of job shift because of a lack of available source of information in survey data. The present research pays attention to the divergence between voluntary and involuntary job mobility. The result shows that firm-specific skills and occupational reward made it less likely for employees to quit a job. It corresponds to the model of reward and resource. However, there is no evidence that general human capital which is transferable across firm would increase the likelihood of quitting a job as is seen in the U.S labor market. In addition, the way in which labor market structure influences job shift patterns is almost identical to the model of segmented labor market. In contrast, the way in which macroeconomic conditions for labor market affects rates of job shift in Japan is deviant from the hypothesis for the U.S labor market. This paper highlights the differences between voluntary and involuntary job mobility in Japan. Compared to the previous studies in the U.S, the job mobility patterns in Japan appear to be roughly similar to the ones for the United States whereas it seems that the institutional arrangements specific to Japanese labor market could make the job mobility patterns substantially different from those for the other industrialized countries. Cross-national comparison of intragenerational mobility which has lacked empirical studies would be further needed so that we can make clear the underpinnings of job mobility structure and institutional arrangements of labor market which diverge job mobility across country.

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     With the use of behavioral genetics methodology, in which variance of an observed trait can be decomposed into the effect of three latent variables, that is, genetic, shared environmental, and nonshared environmental, factors contributing to the formation of authoritarian conservatism were examined. 4111 participants (1279 male twins and 1899 female twins between the ages of 12-26, as well as 83 fathers and 860 mothers of the twins) responded to the Authoritarian Conservatism Scale. The twin model analysis employing 912 pairs of identical and 630 pairs of fraternal twins accounted for 33% of the variance of authoritarian conservatism by genetics, and 67% by nonshared environment. The subsequent twin parent-offspring model analysis also produced a very similar result. Thus, it was revealed that what mediated the familial transmission of authoritarian conservatism was genetics, not cultural transmission. Theories explaining the formation of authoritarianism by parenting or social background of the family are not supported. Transmission models can be further elaborated by including genetics as a predictable variable.

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     Since 2005, response rates of social surveys in Japan have declined sharply. For the prompt improvement of response rates, it is essential to grasp survey interviewers' actions. This paper proposes a use of visiting records because consequences of visiting patterns can be identified by recording when interviewers visited respondents' home and whom the interviewers met at their initial contact and the following contact(s). An analysis of visiting records of JGSS-2005 and JGSS-2006 clearly showed benefits to grasp interviewers' visiting patterns. Three major findings were 1) respondents' cooperative attitudes and interviewers' persistent visits lead to the improvement of response rates in JGSS-2006 ; 2) an increase on the number of women who live in complex housing resulted in a failure to contact them, which in return lead to low response rates among them ; 3) respondents' family members were continued to be a barrier to contact the respondents, while respondents cooperation rates improved. We argue that the accumulation of visiting record analysis is a key to raise response rates in large-scale surveys.

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