Social Mobility
Social mobility refers to the ability of individuals or groups to move within or between social strata or classes in a society. It encompasses upward or downward movement in terms of wealth, education, occupation, or social status. The concept is central to understanding the dynamics of inequality and opportunity within a society.
8 Key excerpts on "Social Mobility"
eBook - ePubThe Sociology of Education
An Introduction
- Ivor Morrish(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Chapter 8 Social Mobility and Education A. The Meaning of Social Mobility Social Mobility is basically the movement of individuals, or groups of individuals, from one social position to another; such a movement may be up or down between the classes in any social hierarchy or stratification (that is, vertical mobility), or it may occur within a particular social class (that is, horizontal mobility). In his discussion of this topic, J. A. Schumpeter (1) regarded the abilities of persons as the key to upward mobility, although he provided a variety of reasons why both individuals and families might rise or fall within a particular class, or might move from one class to another. Without considering all the details of his arguments, we may note his suggestion that the history of mobility has elicited the following causes, some of which are more important factors in mobility than others. Thus, for example, a man whose status and wealth are really invested in his possession of land may find that his property has suddenly, or over a period of years; appreciated or depreciated. This will mean that, although he still has the status of a landowner, his style of living may be considerably improved or may suffer. Social Mobility may also occur through the sort of power which accrues to certain families, not merely via nepotism but because of the fact that they are in a favourable position for self-advancement. Skill and success in war have also been the cause of advancement of certain notable individuals, including many others who have suddenly discovered that the services were, in fact, their particular métier and their ideal milieu for upward mobility...
eBook - ePubClass Stratification
Comparative Perspectives
- Richard Breen, David B. Rottman(Authors)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...CHAPTER 5 Social Mobility Introduction Neither the position of families nor individuals within the class structure nor that structure itself, remain constant over time. Individuals and families change their class position and the class structure itself evolves, as some occupations decline and others become more numerous. Both these sorts of change have been intensively studied by sociologists and other social scientists. Examining the development of a class structure over time involves adopting a historical perspective, as in the work of Przeworski et al. (1980) or Wright and Martin (1987). The extent and the way in which families move through the class structure – between positions in it, in other words – is the subject matter of the study of Social Mobility. Social Mobility has long been a central topic of sociological inquiry, and has been particularly actively pursued over the past 25 years. In this chapter our aim is to explain what the study of Social Mobility is, to give a brief explanation of the methods used in Social Mobility analysis, and to summarize the main results of recent research. Before we begin, however, we need first to set the scene by saying something about the temporal dimension of social class. The temporal dimension of social class There are a number of ways in which the temporal dimension of social class might be of relevance to us. We have already mentioned the phenomenon of people or families moving from one class to another: this is called Social Mobility, and examples of this are all around us. But there are other aspects to the temporal dimension of social class, of which we can identify three. First, the relative sizes of social classes can change over time. We see examples of this during the twentieth century in Europe, where the class structures of many societies have changed markedly...
eBook - ePubThe Success Paradox
Why We Need a Holistic Theory of Social Mobility
- Atherton, Graeme(Authors)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Policy Press(Publisher)
...But his work does make the examination of these issues the legitimate business of Social Mobility analysis. Conclusions The academic study of Social Mobility is a growing field, drawing in researchers from different disciplines who are taking up a more diverse range of positions. On one level there is little consensus about the discourse. Depending on who you believe and the definition of Social Mobility you adopt, the discourse has been increasing, decreasing or static. However, on another level the discourse remains both consensual and also conservative. It is constructed within a conception of stratification that is based around narrowly economistic measures of welfare. In one way, this is entirely appropriate. Occupation and/or income exert a fundamental hold on the relative welfare of individuals and groups. However, there is little appetite for assessing the extent of this relative hold. The emphasis is predominantly on the measurement of rates of change in Social Mobility within schemas that are taken as read by their protagonists or criticised by their opponents on the grounds of their methodological weaknesses. For sociologists in particular, the importance of social class as the anchor around which the whole discipline is secured implies that more fundamental questions regarding what Social Mobility may actually mean – or how important it is – are largely untouched. It takes the intervention of those operating mainly outside the field, such as Swift, for the issue of how much mobility is desirable to be debated. The inability or unwillingness to invite such questions, and the narrowness of focus around class or income alone, mean that while the existing approach to Social Mobility study does a comprehensive job in explaining part of the picture, it does not portray the whole of it....
eBook - ePubEducation, Inequality and Social Class
Expansion and Stratification in Educational Opportunity
- Ron Thompson(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Reducing educational inequality may have a part to play in this, but the interactions involved are complex and difficult to predict. It is well known that the greater class mobility in Britain between the late 1940s and the early 1970s was largely due to the first of these conditions being met (Goldthorpe 1980). The second condition would require a reduction in the effectiveness of class strategies aimed at maintaining the position of more advantaged groups; as we have seen in previous chapters, this would imply a move away from policies such as marketization and diversification which are associated with greater inequality – a move unlikely to occur in countries dominated by neo-liberal approaches to managing their economies and educational systems. Patterns of intergenerational Social Mobility Concerns in the United Kingdom over whether Social Mobility has stalled are echoed in the United States and in many other countries (OECD 2010; Hout 2015). As is often the case, such debates hinge around questions of definition and measurement: what do we mean precisely by Social Mobility, and how can we measure it? In his pioneering study, Pitirim Sorokin (1927, p. 133) defines Social Mobility quite generally as the transition of individuals from one social position to another within a society stratified by attributes such as class, status or income. Transitions between positions at similar levels are examples of horizontal mobility, whilst vertical mobility (upwards or downwards) describes transitions between positions on different social levels. As with educational inequality, choices concerning how stratification is measured depend partly on the disciplinary location of researchers: for economists, social position is most often conceptualized in terms of a continuous variable, such as income, whereas for sociologists, categorical variables, such as social class or socio-economic status, are more likely to be of interest...
eBook - ePub- Peter Saunders(Author)
- 2006(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...4 Social Mobility Social Mobility in industrial societies The Davis and Moore thesis was concerned solely with the question of why different positions in society come to be ranked and rewarded differently. They deliberately did not address the related question of why particular individuals come to find themselves in specific social positions. It is to this issue that we now turn. Trends in Social Mobility We have already seen that systems of stratification based on social class tend to be more ‘open’ than those based on status. What this means is that people’s position in modern class societies is not determined at birth in the way that it tended to be in feudal and caste systems. There is movement between class positions. This movement may occur within one individual’s lifetime (for example, the person who starts work as a clerk and ends up as managing director), in which case sociologists refer to intra-generational mobility. Or movement may occur between generations as children achieve a different position from that occupied by their parents, in which case we refer to intergenerational mobility. It is also an important feature of class systems that movement between classes may occur in both directions. It is possible, for example, to start life as the son of a petrol pump attendant but end up as a chartered accountant, just as it is also possible for the daughter of a high court judge to end up as a shorthand typist. In other words, movement may involve both upward mobility and downward mobility. Three points can immediately be made about the pattern of Social Mobility in all industrial societies. The first is that rates of inter-generational mobility have generally become more significant over time. It is now far more common than it used to be for children to enter the workforce at a much higher position than their parents attained when they started work...
eBook - ePubSocial Mobility for the 21st Century
Everyone a Winner?
- Steph Lawler, Geoff Payne, Steph Lawler, Geoff Payne(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...But a strong emphasis on the idea that upward ‘Social Mobility for everyone’ is desirable or possible has consequences at both an individual level and at a societal level.From the perspective of the individual, who comes from a deprived or marginalised background, Social Mobility does not just involve educational performance, whilst also overcoming relational and situational disadvantages; but also involves the assimilation of middle-class values. Such transformations are not possible for everyone, the barriers are too high to overcome. It is easy to lose sight of the fact that many people may, if circumstances are right, to be entirely content to remain in the communities within which they were born because they value the importance of people, culture, and place (Hadjar and Samuel 2015). Upward Social Mobility often requires that such links are fractured or severed through geographical mobility and resultant processes of social and cultural re-adjustment (seeChapters 3and7). In the current political climate the gold standard of being middle class, ‘just like us’, has relentlessly been reinforced. For a government minister to assert that ordinary people should be encouraged to ‘settle for less’ (or worse, ‘know their place’) would be tantamount to political suicide.The issue of social immobility for people from less advantaged backgrounds has become toxic because the political, business and some parts of the civil society establishment have undermined the values associated with working-class community life. The security, status, and economic value of ordinary jobs have been attacked over the last few decades except in areas where trade unions have managed to protect (usually highly skilled and hard to replace) workers...
eBook - ePubCrosscutting Social Circles
Testing a Macrostructural Theory of Intergroup Relations
- Peter Blau, Joseph Schwartz(Authors)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...CHAPTER 3 Social Mobility Two important social processes that are closely connected with a social structure and its dynamics are processes of association between people and processes of mobility of people. Social associations are channels of communications, while Social Mobility entails channels of movements of people from one social position to another. The processes of social association and mobility influence each other directly, and mobility also exerts an indirect influence on rates of associations between groups by usually altering their relative size. Social Mobility typically results in structural change, that is, in changes in population distributions, whatever the ultimate exogenous conditions that created the demands for the redistribution of people. Whether technological or economic or political developments are the basic cause of the required redistribution, it is the movement of people that brings the redistribution about—their occupational or economic or educational or industrial mobility. Although differences in fertility among groups or strata alter population distributions even in the absence of Social Mobility, the very population changes so produced generally precipitate mobility as a needed adjustment to economic conditions. An illustration is the high birth rate of farmers which engenders pressures to move out of farming into other lines of work. The next three chapters deal with the dynamics of Social Mobility and structural change. The relationships of mobility with social associations and with changes in structural differentiation in any one dimension are examined in this chapter. The intersection and consolidation of multiple dimensions of social differences and how mobility is related to change in these structural conditions are analyzed in the next chapter...
eBook - ePub- Seymour Lipset(Author)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...It is plain that individuals increase their power by belonging to these groups.These considerations should make it apparent that the concept “social stratification” comprises a series of partly overlapping and partly conflicting rank-orders which, although they should be studied together, have so far been either treated singly or actually neglected.Social Mobility as a Problem for InvestigationWe have discussed briefly the relations between Social Mobility and social structure, about which little is known and much remains to be learned. We have also discussed the multiple rank-orders which constitute the social stratification of a society, but which have often been neglected in favor of a unidimensional approach to the rank-order of occupations. Though awareness of the limitation that such an approach imposes may aid in the development of a more refined method, we think it is also necessary to give attention to the intellectual rationale that is the basis for the assumption that studies of Social Mobility are worth pursuing at all. Since the findings of this study (especially those of the first part) raise certain pertinent as well as perplexing questions, it will be useful to give an evaluative summary of these findings at this point.38The studies of the American business elite indicated that the opportunity to enter this elite from below has remained about the samethroughoutthe process of industrialization, thus contradicting the frequently voiced opinion that it has become more restricted. We noted, however, that in the United States (and in other countries as well) access to the limited number of top-elite positions should be distinguished from movement into and out of the more numerous middle class. Regardless of how open the top elite is in any country, the number of persons who can achieve positions in it is not large enough to make it a goal toward which men may realistically work...
