Donald Treiman, born in St. Louis, Missouri, USA, in 1940. Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Fellow (1 September 1996 – 30 June 1997)
During my stay at NIAS, I had two major projects. The first was to write a monograph with Harry Ganzeboom comparing the process of status attainment across societies and over time. This project involves the re-analysis of some 250 national sample surveys from about forty nations, collected during the second half of the 20th century, in order to test a set of hypotheses about how educational and occupational attainment processes have changed through the course of the 20th century and how they vary across countries at different levels of economic development and with differing kinds of political systems. While we have not yet completed our monograph, we have shown that there has been a substantial increase in societal openness and a shift from ascription to achievement through the course of the 20th century in almost all nations. There are also substantial differences between developed and less developed nations and between communist and capitalist nations in the process of status attainment.
My second project was to finish editing a collection of papers on the consequences for stratification systems of the collapse of communism. These papers, based on a six-nation survey of former communist countries, document the ways the stratification system has changed since 1989 and the ways it has remained stable. The papers also address the question of who were the winners and who were the losers of the transition. The answers turn out to be fairly complex.