ABSTRACT
Analyses of the social background of managers the (non-communist) world over, tend to demonstrate that the majority of managers have middle-class origins. Not only are they themselves middle-class in terms of the standing of their occupation, their income, and, certainly in West Germany, their educational level, but many of them have fathers who could also claim all this and the great majority have fathers who were at least non-manual workers. This is not to say that executive work, in West Germany and elsewhere, is not an avenue of upward social mobility. Most of the West German studies show that the executive sons have a higher average occupational standing than their fathers, but in most cases none is measuring transition across intra middle-class boundaries.
