Glass, David V.

(1911-78)

A British sociologist who is justly famous for his pioneering work on demography and social mobility . His landmark study ofSocial Mobility in Britain (1954) was based on a sample of men and women interviewed in 1949. He and his colleagues found a fairly stable social structure showing a high degree of association between the status of fathers and sons; mobility concentrated at intermediate levels, where it tended to be both short-range, and rather transitory; and no evidence of an increase in social mobility in the first half of the century. Glass called for an egalitarian opportunity structure to create a more just society than he observed, although he recognized that equal opportunities policies in education and employment did not necessarily undermine differential access to privilege, where distributional inequalities in resources persisted. His many other publications include Population Policies and Movements in Europe (1940), The Trend and Pattern of Fertility in Britain (1954), and Numbering the People (1973).