1. Social Mobility
5th April 2011

2. Recap... Income Wealth Marketable wealth
Is income linked to social class?
Is wealth linked to social class?

3. What is social mobility?

4. Moving across social boundaries
From one occupational level to another
Upwards
Downwards
Intergenerational
Intragenerational

5. In previous societies, a person’s position was determined by ascribed characteristics
i.e. Family origin
Gender
Ethnic group
e.g. Feudal society

6. What people can do rather than their social origins
Ascribed characteristics are still important today
BUT more emphasis placed on ACHIEVED status!
What people can do rather than their social origins

7. Position in the hierarchy is determined by individual merit
meritocracy

8. Is Britain a meritocracy?

9. Why is there more social mobility today?

10. Occupational changes More room at the ‘top’ Technology/computerisation
Less demand for manual labour
More educated workforce needed

11. Industrial changes
Shift away from old ‘smokestack’ industries (e.g. Basic cyclical manufacturing)
New, high technology ‘sunrise’ industries
Higher proportion of non-manual jobs
White collar service sector

12. Ladders Social progression in the past based on:
Connections
Working up from bottom
Luck
Still available today BUT education usually seen as more important
‘Knowledge economy’

13. How can you measure social mobility?
Intragenerational?
Intergenerational?

14. Goldthorpe (1963) The Affluent Worker
In 1950s some manual workers were earning high wages for jobs, such as assembly workers
‘you have never had it so good’
Had affluence really changed the class of this group of workers ?

15. Although getting paid £££
They were not really middle class in attitudes:
Paid in cash
No job security
Many didn’t have bank accounts
W/class attitudes towards unions and politics

16. Only 2 out of the 80 workers studied had become middle class (and accepted)
‘new middle-class’
Own homes etc but still working class in outlook, norms, values, sociability etc

17. Oxford Mobility Study
Interviews with 10,000 men aged 20 – 64 in England and Wales in 1972
Allocated men to seven social classes based on market situation and work situation
Grouped into three clusters:
service class, intermediate class and working class
Service class: bridge between top decision makers and the mass of the people

18. 1. Closure thesis Service class is largely self recruiting
Reserving its privileged positions for its own offspring
Closing ranks to newcomers from lower social classes
GOLDTHORPE:
Only a minority of the service class had been born into it, so this class was only partly successful in guarding its privileges

19. 2. Buffer zone thesis
Occupations clustered tightly around the manual/non manual zone act as a brake
Prevents long range mobility
People who are mobile across the manual/non manual line are usually ‘absorbed’ into this zone
GOLDTHORPE: Newcomers to the service class had been drawn from all the other social classes.

20. 3. Counterbalancing thesis
Intergenerational mobility = increased
Intragenerational mobility = declined
GOLDTHORPE:
some signs that employers were increasingly relying on the direct recruitment of highly qualified and educated individuals, but intergenerational mobility had been just as important as intergenerational mobility

21. Evaluation of Oxford Mobility Study
Pessimistic picture of social mobility in Britain
Scottish mobility study (Payne 1987)