This important new book is a comparative study of social mobility based on qualitative interviews with middle-class parents in America and Britain. It addresses the key issue in stratification ...research, namely, the stability of class relations and middle-class reproduction. Drawing on interviewee accounts of how parents mobilised economic, cultural and social resources to help them into professional careers, it then considers how the interviewees, as parents, seek to increase their children's chances of educational success and occupational advancement. Middle-class parents may try to secure their children's social position but it is not an easy or straightforward affair. With the decline of the quality of state education and increased job insecurity in the labour market since the 1970s and 1980s, the reproduction of advantage is more difficult than in the affluent decades of the 1950s and 1960s. The implications for public policy, especially public investment in higher education, are considered.
We make use of newly available data that include roughly 5 million linked household and population records from 1850 to 2015 to document long-term trends in intergenerational social mobility in the ...United States. Intergenerational mobility declined substantially over the past 150 y, but more slowly than previously thought. Intergenerational occupational rank–rank correlations increased from less than 0.17 to as high as 0.32, but most of this change occurred to Americans born before 1900. After controlling for the relatively high mobility of persons from farm origins, we find that intergenerational social mobility has been remarkably stable. In contrast with relative stability in rank-based measures of mobility, absolute mobility for the nonfarm population—the fraction of offspring whose occupational ranks are higher than those of their parents—increased for birth cohorts born prior to 1900 and has fallen for those born after 1940.
In this research note we explore how the discipline of sociology could reconceptualise social mobility. Within sociology, Sorokin (1960) is often seen as the father of social mobility studies. ...Sorokin defined social mobility as the phenomenon of individuals’ circulation within the social space, meaning any transition of an individual, object or social value from one social position to another. Sorokin argued that a fundamental factor in the social distribution of individuals is the material human itself, its physical and mental qualities, whether inherited or acquired. However, within this definition, how can you explain people’s change in social mobility? Indeed, Sorokin’s conceptualisation of social mobility obscures that not everyone has equal opportunities or begin their journey at the same starting point. We suggest in this paper that conceptualisations of social mobility need to take into account dynamic and fluid conceptualisation of social mobility that recognises the inherent power relations within social structures. We use the theoretical insights of Pierre Bourdieu to generate new considerations for the analysis of social mobility, in a field of study that is characterised by deterministic approaches focused on quantitative data and that underestimates the complexity of social mobility as a process (Friedman, 2014, 2016; Horvat, 2003; Horvat & Antonio, 1999; Horvat & Davis, 2011; Lee & Kramer, 2013; Lehmann, 2009).
New Social Mobility Schneider, Jens; Crul, Maurice; Pott, Andreas
2022, 2022-06-28
eBook
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This open access book comparatively analyses intergenerational social mobility in immigrant families in Europe. It is based on qualitative in-depth research into several hundred biographies and ...professional trajectories of young people with an immigrant working-class background, who made it into high-prestige professions. The biographies were collected and analysed by a consortium of researchers in nine European countries from Norway to Spain. Through these analyses, the book explores the possibilities of cross-country comparisons of how trajectories are related to different institutional arrangements at the national and local level. The analysis uncovers the interaction effects between structural/institutional settings and specific individual achievements and family backgrounds, and how these individuals responsed to and navigated successfully through sector-specific pathways into high-skilled professions, such as becoming a lawyer or a teacher. By this, it also explains why these trajectories of professional success and upward mobility have been so exceptional in the second generation of working-class origins, and it tells us a lot also about exclusion mechanisms that marked the school and professional careers of children of immigrants who went to school in the 1970s to 2000s in Europe – and still do.
In Social Mobility in Late Antique Gaul, Allen Jones explores the situation of the non-elite living in Gaul during the late fifth and sixth centuries. Drawing especially on evidence from Gregory of ...Tours' writings, he formulates a social model based on people of all ranks who were acting in ways that were socially advantageous to them, such as combining resources, serving at court, and participating in ostentatious religious pursuits, such as building churches. Viewing the society as a whole, and taking into account specific social groups, such as impoverished prisoners, paupers active at churches, physicians, and wonder-working enchanters, Jones creates an image of Barbarian Gaul as an honor-driven, brutal, and flexible society defined by social mobility. His work also addresses topics such as social engineering and competition, magic and religion, and the cult of saints.
Unequal chances Bowles, Samuel; Bowles, Samuel; Gintis, Herbert ...
2005, 2005., 20091015, 2009, 2005-01-01, 20050101
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Is the United States "the land of equal opportunity" or is the playing field tilted in favor of those whose parents are wealthy, well educated, and white? If family background is important in getting ...ahead, why? And if the processes that transmit economic status from parent to child are unfair, could public policy address the problem? Unequal Chances provides new answers to these questions by leading economists, sociologists, biologists, behavioral geneticists, and philosophers.
In this paper, we study long-term trends in social mobility in the People's Republic of China since its inception in 1949, with two operationalizations: 1) intergenerational occupational mobility and ...2) intergenerational educational mobility. We draw on an accumulation of administrative and survey data and provide comparable estimates of these measures for birth cohorts born after 1945. To help interpret the results, we compare trends in China to those in the United States for the same birth cohorts. We find an increase in intergenerational occupational mobility in China due to its rapid industrialization in recent decades. Net of industrialization, however, intergenerational occupational mobility has been declining for recent cohorts. Intergenerational educational mobility in China shows a similar declining trend. In addition, mobility patterns have differed greatly by gender, with women in earlier cohorts and from a rural origin particularly disadvantaged. We attribute the general decline in social mobility to market forces that have taken hold since China's economic reform that began in 1978. In contrast, social mobility by both measures has been relatively stable in the United States. However, while social mobility in China has trended downward, it is still higher than that in the United States, except for women's educational mobility.
Recent research on inequality and poverty has shown that those born into low-income families, especially African Americans, still have difficulty entering the middle class, in part because of the ...disadvantages they experience living in more dangerous neighborhoods, going to inferior public schools, and persistent racial inequality.Coming of Age in the Other Americashows that despite overwhelming odds, some disadvantaged urban youth do achieve upward mobility. Drawing from ten years of fieldwork with parents and children who resided in Baltimore public housing, sociologists Stefanie DeLuca, Susan Clampet-Lundquist, and Kathryn Edin highlight the remarkable resiliency of some of the youth who hailed from the nation's poorest neighborhoods and show how the right public policies might help break the cycle of disadvantage.
Coming of Age in the Other Americailluminates the profound effects of neighborhoods on impoverished families. The authors conducted in-depth interviews and fieldwork with 150 young adults, and found that those who had been able to move to better neighborhoods-either as part of the Moving to Opportunity program or by other means-achieved much higher rates of high school completion and college enrollment than their parents. About half the youth surveyed reported being motivated by an "identity project"-or a strong passion such as music, art, or a dream job-to finish school and build a career.
Yet the authors also found troubling evidence that some of the most promising young adults often fell short of their goals and remained mired in poverty. Factors such as neighborhood violence and family trauma put these youth on expedited paths to adulthood, forcing them to shorten or end their schooling and find jobs much earlier than their middle-class counterparts. Weak labor markets and subpar postsecondary educational institutions, including exploitative for-profit trade schools and under-funded community colleges, saddle some young adults with debt and trap them in low-wage jobs. A third of the youth surveyed-particularly those who had not developed identity projects-were neither employed nor in school. To address these barriers to success, the authors recommend initiatives that help transform poor neighborhoods and provide institutional support for the identity projects that motivate youth to stay in school. They propose increased regulation of for-profit schools and increased college resources for low-income high school students.
Coming of Age in the Other Americapresents a sensitive, nuanced account of how a generation of ambitious but underprivileged young Baltimoreans has struggled to succeed. It both challenges long-held myths about inner-city youth and shows how the process of "social reproduction"-where children end up stuck in the same place as their parents-is far from inevitable.
From the Fat of Our Souls offers a revealing new
perspective on medicine, and the reasons for choosing or combining
indigenous and cosmopolitan medical systems, in the Andean
highlands. Closely ...observing the dialogue that surrounds medicine
and medical care among Indians and Mestizos, Catholics and
Protestants, peasants and professionals in the rural town of
Kachitu, Libbet Crandon-Malamud finds that medical choice is based
not on medical efficacy but on political concerns. Through the
primary resource of medicine, people have access to secondary
resources, the principal one being social mobility. This
investigation of medical pluralism is also a history of class
formation and the fluidity of both medical theory and social
identity in highland Bolivia, and it is told through the often
heartrending, often hilarious stories of the people who live there.
While we hear much about the "culture of poverty" that keeps poor black men poor, we know little about how such men understand their social position and relationship to the American dream. Moving ...beyond stereotypes, this book examines how twenty-six poverty-stricken African American men from Chicago view their prospects for getting ahead. It documents their definitions of good jobs and the good life--and their beliefs about whether and how these can be attained. In its pages, we meet men who think seriously about work, family, and community and whose differing experiences shape their views of their social world.
Based on intensive interviews, the book reveals how these men have experienced varying degrees of exposure to more-privileged Americans--differences that ground their understandings of how racism and socioeconomic inequality determine their life chances. The poorest and most socially isolated are, perhaps surprisingly, most likely to believe that individuals can improve their own lot. By contrast, men who regularly leave their neighborhood tend to have a wider range of opportunities but also have met with more racism, hostility, and institutional obstacles--making them less likely to believe in the American Dream.
Demonstrating how these men interpret their social world, this book seeks to de-pathologize them without ignoring their experiences with chronic unemployment, prison, and substance abuse. It shows how the men draw upon such experiences as they make meaning of the complex circumstances in which they strive to succeed.
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