We are pleased to announce that on 9 October 2026, our BRISPO colleague Elias Herman Kruithof successfully defended his PhD.
His thesis, titled "Intergenerational Social Mobility in Context: Migration and the global expansion of education", was supervised by prof. dr. Pieter-Paul Verhaeghe.
Congratulations!
About the thesis:
Who holds power in our societies? In pre-modern times, the answer was often closely tied to family background. Most people followed in the footsteps of their parents where land, crafts, and access to public offices were passed down from one generation to the next. But who gets ahead today? Which social boundaries shape access to the advantages associated with an upper-class position? Which family resources matter for achieving a higher level of education? These are some of the central questions of sociology, and of the study on intergenerational social mobility. However, individuals occupy multiple positions within a range of stratification systems; including social classes, educational cleavages, income groups, wealth inequalities, gender disparities, and ethno-racial stratification. Which social positions should be considered?
This is the starting point of this dissertation. I do not treat social class origins merely as indicators of family background. Instead, I use them as analytical tools for understanding how social stratification itself is changing. More specifically, my conceptualization of social class is designed to capture how two transformations of contemporary societies (and their interaction) shape patterns of social mobility. The first is the global expansion of education. And the second is the growing share of families with a migration history in Western societies.
