The ‘Woman question’ in stratification research has become an increasing concern in the recent decades. The controversy between Goldthorpe and his opponents during the 80s reveals that the major issue there is not how women are incorporated in the conventional class analysis, but whether a new theoretical scheme can substitute the conventional scheme so that women's situation in contemporary industrial societies be able to be analysed adequately. Both the collectivist view and the individualist view on class concept have difficulties in dealing with women's situation without fundamentally revising the research program of class study. The social closure theory which intends to integrate the class theory with gender, racial, or other social cleavages also fails to fulfill the intention. This paper suggests a new way of analysing the women's situation in stratification research.

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     Recent comparative research in social mobility has emphasized a large degree of comonnality in the pattern of social fluidity between generations. However, they have only examined the joint occupational distributions of fathers and sons, and ignored the institutional context of the mobility process. The omission of education from such research may have lead to an incomplete picture of the mobility regime. The present study returns to the classic problem regarding how education intervenes between origin and destination. The analysis utilizes the four SSM data, collected in Japan from 1955 to 1985 in ten-year intervals. Major findings are the following. 1) The importance of education for transmission of social positions has increased. We can see this trend in the proportion of movers estimated by the ‘quasi-independence’ log-linear model. 2) The origin-education association is unchanged regardless of educational expansion. Furthermore the influence of origin permeates into the education-destination association. Indeed, we can devide the movers with the same educational degree into the upper latent calss and the lower latent class. Such duality denies the institutional autonomy of education. 3) Therefore, in Japan, educational upgrading or decline of occupational inheritance will not increase the openness of social mobility.

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     This paper tries to demonstrate a relevance of the issue of fairness to stratification studies, especially its bearings on the maintenance of the status quo. It is argued that sociological studies of fairness evaluation should aim at illustrating the “fair society” ideal common to most members of the society, in order to delineate the direction to which our society is, or should be, heading. To achieve this final goal, the process of fairness evaluation should be more closely looked at: how the stratification system is perceived and what is the fairness standard applied to judge it. The way that these perception and standard are shared should affect survival chance of the status quo. The relation between feeling of unfairness about a specific aspect of social life (“new” social inequalities) and the formation of an ideology for change is also discussed.

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     It looks like that the discrepancies between the stratification structure predicted by sociological or modernistic view and the actual Japanese society became wide. Among those, some arguments about equality of distribution and that of opportunity, toward which sociological view of stratification seems to have oriented overtly or covertly, are examined. As a result, an uneasy and unstable composition of social stratification in Japan today and tomorrow is delineated as follows. Many Japanese are sensitive to social status or stratification as before, and the level of employeezation in Japan is close to the highest, then the achievement-oriented and competitive society will be realized involving women with higher education. However, the goal of the competition may be some dimensions of social evaluation such as prestige, and the importance of income will be lessened. At the same time, the “de-stratification” group who are indifferent to social status and stratification from “middle” class will appear, although the number of the people is small yet and their behavior is apt to be misidentified as “distinction” by life style. And, protests with “fairness” as a common keyword against ascriptive inequalities is achievement society will be increased.

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     The analysis of intergenerational mobility often assumes two kinds of social mobility, “structural mobility/ pure mobility”, and regards structural mobility rate/ pure mobility rate and Yasuda Index as their indices. However, in this paradigm, especialy in Japan, the supplyside factors of social mobility (population change and preference for occupation have been substantially ignored.
     We show that: 1) In Japan, the differential reproduction occured in 1936-55 birth cohort, and influences SSM75 and 85 datum. On the mobility table regulated with it, Yasuda Index does not change between 1975 and 85. 2) Considering the preference for occupation, structural mobility rate mismatches “structural mobility”. There is no reason to see to the marginal distribution as indicator of social structure, or external constraints for individual. Anything causing the movement of individual can be the determinant of marginal distribution. The past or present rate of each occupation is determined not only by the social structure, but also by the preference or other internal factors of individuals.

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     In this paper, we discuss the relationships of personalities between students, aged from 12 to 23, and their important agents of socialization: their parents. We use Japanese family data in the 1980's. These data were collected by three independent surveys (father, mother and child) which were conducted as a part of the study of “Work and Personality”. The data were processed in one data set in order to analyze the triadic relationships.
     We focus on four social attitudes and the psychological functioning of each of the three jamily members. The linear structural equation models (LISREL) are applied to confirm our hypotheses and to measure the correlations between the same aspects of each member's personality. We various patterns in triadic relationships. Correlation is high between mother and child in “authoritarian conservatism” and between father and child in “ideational flexibility”. Correlation between father and mother is fairly high in “self-esteem” and in “ideational flexibility”. We find, though, little or no correlation among the three family members in other attitude: “anxiety”. This suggests, contrary to general assumptions, that the influences of parents vary according to personality domain.

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     The time has come when in constructing social models it is necessary to use the framework which is not to analyze social structure and to sketch its barren skeleton but to generate complexity and rich futures permanently endowed with society and to realize virtual society on computer display. In this research, first, we suggest the complex composition for social systems model which is composed of social entities and self-generating process. Second, in order to realize the society artificially, we advocate Artificial Society, the conceptual paradigm of “Generation and Emerent Integration”. So, we suggest the postulates of Artificial Society, in which sociality, generativity, emergency, com-plexity, visibility, unpredictability, and non-reappearancy are catalogued, and evaluate any of methods for Artificial Society. Last, we show computer simulation of prototype of our original model of Artificial Society.

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