The Contexts of Social Mobility

Ideology and Theory

Anselm L. Strauss

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138534841
• eBook ISBN: 9781351484473
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Classes & Economic Disparity
• Index: Social Sciences

This book contains a major statement by one of America's most preeminent sociologists on what remains an important problem in American history and social analysis: the nature and extent of movement within American society from one status to another. The most important images of mobility involve self-improvement by changing location (going to the frontier, coming to the big city), and by changing social class (second-generation immigrants). Almost all sociological and historical analysis has been limited to these themes.

Strauss extends the concept to a wide range of ideologies, institutional contexts, and social movements; his analysis is based on a formal theory of status passage and develops a partial theory of mobility. Strauss addresses a theme that underscores much of one strand of his work: the changing articulation of individuals with their social structure and institutions.

The book follows on from the theoretical presuppositions of Discovery of Grounded Theory and the formal theory presented in Status Passage. Strauss was continually concerned with American social and intellectual life in its historical and contemporary manifestations. No one else has looked at the important phenomenon of mobility in this broad a context and from this point of view. The book remains important to those concerned with the social history of America and with problems of social change.

PART ONE

Limitations of
Research and Theory

Some limitations of contemporary scholarly writing, mostly by sociologists, about American mobility will be suggested in this chapter. My critical commentary is directed first at dominant trends in sociological and historical research and then at the writings of social theorists. In general, my conclusions are that sociological theory is shot through with rhetoric and ideological commitment; while research perspectives are limited, reflecting a selective vision of possible issues to research.

As a touchstone to my critique of this literature, readers might keep in mind the following cluster of images of mobility. There is a relatively long social ladder on which persons fall as well as rise. (Or are there perhaps agricultural, commercial, industrial, professional ladders?) Persons may reverse direction or directions one or more times. They may also move at different speeds, and at different speeds at different segments of the ladder. They may move differing amounts of distances. They may employ different total strategies and sets of tactics to rise or to stem their falling—as well as even to cause falling or to block further rising. The institutions which answer to their mobility aspirations or anxieties may be quite varied. Individuals also may rise or fall (or block a rise or stem a fall) through their participation in social movements; whether religious movements, or political, or racial, or educational. And it may not be the individual who is the chief or only actor in the mobility drama, but somebody else who aids or chiefly determines his rise or fall. Moreover, it may not merely be individuals who are mobile but families or other collectivities. Perhaps two additional images should be added to this total picture. First, our nation has a considerable history and is continental in size—so even if we do not care to look at mobility over long historical time, we may have to look at it regionally at least. Second, we ought to keep a steady focus on the consequences of mobility for implicated persons, institutions, social movements and regions. Altogether the images which constitute the cluster noted above will suggest some of the more important limitations of research and theory on mobility.

Research on Mobility

SOCIOLOGISTS’ RESEARCH

There is a curious paradox about sociologists’ research on mobility. All of us citizens are likely to be fascinated by the great American theme of “success and failure” and by its many exemplifications as portrayed in the mass media. However, when I have queried colleagues whose opinions I respect about their reactions to mobility (and stratification) research, they have answered that the literature on it is boring. Why should this be so? Why should not their interests and imaginations be as captured by mobility research as by anecdotes about mobility? The answer surely lies in the flavor of that research and in its limitations. Colleagues remark that the research is rather bloodless, rather statistical, often is concerned with elegant proof of the insignificant or the obvious, and rarely tells much about any individual’s experience as he moves up or down the social ladder.

In commenting critically on contemporary mobility research, I have in mind discussing only enough of this specialized literature—summaries of it are abundant—to underline what are, from my viewpoint, some of its gravest limitations. The areas left relatively untouched in this research, because of its limitations, are precisely those which will be explored in this book. The character and focus of mobility research (plus the probable commitment of researchers to popular ideological positions) gives this research a striking narrowness which will continue, I believe, even if sociologists continue to look abroad to foreign lands for comparative data because of a conviction that their American perspectives thereby will be counterbalanced. That conviction is at best overly optimistic, at worst it is naive.

Characteristics of the Research. A notable feature of research on mobility is that a relatively few problems receive the most attention. One central problem which has been studied and debated almost to death is whether mobility in America is slowing down, remaining about the same or increasing. Phrased another way: is American society becoming more rigid (closed) or remaining relatively flexible (open)? This is an empirical issue of great moment for practical and descriptive as well as theoretical reasons. A second key problem is the nature of relationships which exist among different orders or dimensions of mobility, such as occupation, income, wealth, prestige and power. Each of the above central problems has been elaborated into sub-problems, for instance, status consistency vis-a-vis the second problem; intergenerational versus intragenerational mobility with regard to the first problem. A third important problem concerns the personal, familial, institutional and societal consequences of mobility. Untoward consequences are studied most frequently: mental illness, role and cultural conflict, alienation, conformity and so on. A related sub-problem concerns the changes in life-style associated with upward mobility. A fourth major research problem concerns the primary means used by mobile individuals: therefore such institutions as education and occupations have come in for considerable research scrutiny.¹

In general the research publications tend to take an “objective” or “hard data” form: quantitative analyses are more characteristic in this research, more so than in many another sociological area. The very natures of the rigidity-flexibility problem and the multiple-dimensions problem suggest the usefulness and perhaps the necessity of highly quantified research. Probably the “consequences” problem has lent itself more readily to qualitative research (as in the work of Allison Davis.² Qualitative data is perhaps most used where class styles are described, mobility routes and tactics are noted, or specific low-mobility groups are studied ethnographically.³

Limitations of the research. The images of mobility used at the outset of this chapter suggest important limitations of the sociological research on mobility. To begin with the obvious: more than one critic has noted how little attention is paid to downward mobility, except notably for skid row studies. There is also, much research about upward mobility and about certain points on the total ladder; researchers ignore many other segments of the ladder. Focus is on individuals, less on families and other collectivities, and hardly at all on social movements—as if those latter were only of importance to historians. Attention to relevant institutions is relatively narrow in focus; surely there are a number of others relevant to mobility. The strategies and tactics of individuals, let alone families and social movements, are hardly touched on because researchers do not associate them with the main problems. Historical aspects of mobility are also virtually ignored or underdeveloped—except in textbooks, where speculation quite often substitutes for research. And the exploration of contrasting regional data for all the above issues is rarely attempted, except for the standard research issues. Finally, it seems probable that the range of consequences unearthed through current research is relatively narrow. We are not likely to grasp the full range of mobility nor understand its meanings until more thorough study of the American scene is undertaken. Some of these limitations surely flow from the character of American sociological research in general, such as its underemphasis of historical contexts and its increasing reliance on quantitative analysis. Unquestionably, also, the symbolic representations of sociologists qua Americans have also helped to create professional blindness.

A corollary of these limitations is the frequent citation of research in misleading or inaccurate ways. The principal type of erroneous citing of research findings is an undifferentiated analysis, where a flat or a suggestive statement of empirical fact is made without qualifying under what conditions this fact is true. For instance, “Friendships may be dissolved when one of the parties is upwardly mobile and gets a better job or moves to a more expensive neighborhood.” But when may the dissolution not occur, despite a better job and neighborhood? Or: Working class siblings “may grow up in the same area and, when married, may exchange services such as baby-care or aid in housebuilding which tends to keep solidarity alive. These mutual exchanges can function well so long as social mobility is not present; if one of a pair of siblings climbs into the middle class, opportunity for equal reciprocity is lost, the less successful sibling feels awkward in the presence of the more successful one, and interaction declines.” Only a moment’s genuine thought makes suspect the above types of assertions, because we have all known instances where they would be wholly or partly false. Such assertions simply fail to meet the requirements of moderately careful structural analysis, which typically requires asking (and verifying) under what conditions the stated phenomena occur, or occur only in part or not at all. In the citation a researcher may not be at fault, because his findings are reinterpreted. For instance, Lipset and Bendix have noted that their study of American mobility between skilled and propriatory statuses was quickly over-generalized to represent mobility at all points of the total hierarchy. Undoubtedly, some researchers make the same kinds of misleading or careless over-interpretations. Even when they carefully note the limitations of their researches, they can easily either give the impression of generalizing further than they do or actually give way to the temptation to over-generalize. W. L. Warner and J. C. Abegglin, for instance, early in their book on occupational mobility note carefully they have studied only that one type of mobility, and at the top of our occupational hierarchy (top corporation administrators);⁴ yet they end the book with optimistic and widesweeping interpretations about the United States, concerning its continued open mobility—open except for the Negroes in our midst who eventually will rise.

HISTORIANS’ RESEARCH

Perhaps less need be said about the historians’ researches on mobility. Although their descriptive studies of American life shed much light on mobility, only recently have historians begun to examine mobility as a major substantive topic. To some extent they have engaged in much the same pragmatic and factual inquiries as sociologists regarding whether American society is still as open as it once was. As historians, they are understandably sometimes more skeptical about the rags-to-riches legend of the wide-open nineteenth century; so there has been a relatively recent literature seeking to set this legend straight, or at least to qualify or document its more extreme forms.⁵

Historians thus provide a partial corrective for the non-historical assertions about mobility by sociologists. Oscar Handlin, for instance, has remarked that recent investigations “have suggested that the extent and rate of American mobility have been exaggerated and have also cast doubt on the degree of difference that obtained between the United States and other countries.”⁶ Sociologists have not treated mobility “across any extended time interval and their conclusions have therefore necessarily been limited.” Also, Handlin maintains, historians generally have taken for granted the greater fluidity of American society without any systematically organized data, using rather their general impressions. Handlin suggests contemporary sociologists probably fail to perceive significant differences between the United States and other countries because of inadequate sociological concepts and reliance on quantitative methods. After all, the observations of many generations of past observers of the national characteristics lead one to believe otherwise than is now believed by sociologists. Perhaps the contemporary sociological modes of “examining and assessing the phenomenon thrown together as mobility is deceptive”; or perhaps societal fluidity is really independent of the rate of mobility, so that some individuals are able to move without being much affected by the rigidity of class barriers. Although Handlin suggests that these possibilities all need exploration, he levels equally severe criticism at his own colleagues whose historical information on mobility is of poor quality, and he notes that the history of social mobility in America has thus far “received no study whatever.” He means research focused directly on mobility as such.

The difficulties faced by historians in studying mobility may have something to do with how that task is conceived. We can glimpse its difficulties when it is phrased in the following terms: imagine tracing “the life threads of obscure immigrants who never received the notice of history” and then evaluating their social and economic rise “in sufficient numbers to establish a measurable pattern of success in a given period.”⁷ That represents quite a difficult task indeed. When a strict chronology is eschewed for more abstract analyses, other problems attendant on historical conceptualization may appear. These are exemplified by Irvin Wyllie’s The Self-Made Man in America,⁸ in which the analyses of rags-to-riches mythology are quite open to criticism for their obscuring, even jumbling up, of varieties of popular images of success which vary considerably, as we shall see, by the generation and the social position of those who subscribed to the various images. At least one historian, Stephan Thernstrom, has shown recently how historians might utilize civic records in chronological studies for tracing the mobility of workingmen of the past. Yet even his research is conceived partly as a corrective to sociological conceptions⁹—an entire chapter of his monograph is devoted to attacking Warner, who had studied the same city as it appeared many decades later. And, like the sociologists, Thernstrom makes some of the same assumptions about the mobility beliefs of Americans so that skeptical readers may have second thoughts about his conclusions.

“MAINSTREAM” VERSUS “MARGINAL” RESEARCH

The historians aside, there is the nagging question of why sociologists, especially, have so restricted the potential research questions about mobility (as measured against the cluster of images noted earlier). Some immediate light can be shed on this question by noting that most sociological research discussed above is part of “mainstream” research into American stratification and social class.¹⁰ By mainstream I mean that specialists in stratification and social class readily recognize these studies as important and relevant—these studies are the ones frequently quoted and footnoted in other monographs, journal articles and textbooks. Doubtless this body of literature also is in the mainstream because of the relatively large number of researchers who engage in these kinds of investigations. Some of the restricted focus in these studies is due to the use of quantitative methods; some because of the conventional efforts of researchers to refine both the methods and the standard answers to mobility questions as yielded by the methods; and perhaps some restriction flows from the assumptions of sociologists themselves.

Along the margins of mobility research, however, there exist a number of qualitative studies which touch directly or indirectly on mobility, although they tend to be quoted less frequently in—no irony is intended—the more official literature of mobility research. These qualitative studies deal with race, poverty, skid row, vice and delinquincy; or describe the structure and arrangements of communities, including the life styles of social classes; or touch on aspects of mobility through their discussions of occupational or professional careers and work situations. In very few of these studies, however, is mobility the central concern because the researcher’s primary focus is on substantive matters, delinquency, occupation and the like. Nevertheless, the questions about mobility raised in or by these studies somewhat enlarge those raised in the more official literature, because explicit consideration often is given to institutions and agents in relation to mobility, as well as to the strategies and tactics of upward mobility, and to the individual and institutional consequences of mobility. These studies have the disadvantage, however, of being too closely linked with substantive areas which interest the investigators; hence the research results tend not to get pulled systematically into the research and theoretical literature which bears directly on mobility.

Further out still on the margins of sociological research are the theoretical and the critical writings of sociologists. These scholars tend to emphasize yet other mobility questions, perhaps overlapping most with the mainstream literature on the single issue of whether our class system is growing increasingly rigid. This type of writing ha...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Introduction to the AldineTransaction Edition
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part One Limitations of Research and Theory
• Part Two Ideology
• One Images of the Frontier
• Two Rural Images
• Three Urban Images
• Four The Imagery of Immigration and Ethnicity
• Five Images of Industrialization, I
• Six Images of Industrialization, II
• Seven Images of Civilization
• Part Three A Theory of Mobility
• Eight Direction and Distance
• Nine Temporal Aspects of Mobility
• Ten The Articulation of Concerns
• Eleven The Shape of Mobility
• Epilogue The Variable Society, Chinese Boxes, and the Concerned Citizen
• INDEX