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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Key Concepts
- Sprache: Englisch
Social mobility has long been one of the central topics of sociology. It has been the subject of major theoretical contributions from the earliest generations of scholars, as well as being of persistent political interest and concern. Social mobility is frequently used as a key measure of fairness and social justice, given the central role that modern liberal democracies give to equality of opportunity. More pragmatically, policymakers often consider it a force for economic growth and social integration.
However, discussions of social mobility have increasingly become dominated by advanced statistical techniques, impenetrable to all but specialists in quantitative methods. In this concise and lucid book, Anthony Heath and Yaojun Li cut through the technical literature to provide an eye-opening account of the ideas, debates and realities that surround this important social phenomenon. Their book illuminates the major patterns and trends in rates of social mobility, and their drivers, in contemporary western and emerging societies, ultimately enabling readers to understand and engage with this perennially relevant social issue.
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Seitenzahl: 362
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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Table of Contents
Cover
Series Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Tables and Figures
Tables
Figures
1 What Is Social Mobility and Why Does It Matter?
Introduction
Defining social mobility
Outline of the book
2 Landmarks: A Brief History of Mobility Research
Beginnings
Growing up
Coming of age
The entry of the economists
3 Intergenerational Social Class Mobility in the Twenty-First Century
Social origins of elites in modern Britain
Dispersion out of class origins – outflow mobility
Social fluidity and hierarchy in contemporary Britain
Cross-national comparisons
Social mobility in the global South
4 Intergenerational Income Mobility and the Great Gatsby Curve
The advantages, and technical challenges, of studying income mobility
Some illustrative results from the United Kingdom
The Great Gatsby Curve – cross-national variations in income mobility and inequality
Absolute income mobility
Conclusions
5 Gender: Bringing Mobility Research into the Twenty-First Century
How might women’s mobility be expected to differ from men’s?
Men and women in the class structure
Comparing female and male mobility: absolute mobility
Relative mobility
Gender differences in career mobility
Notes
6 Race and Ethnicity: Entrenched Disadvantage?
Ethnic differences in rates of convergence with the majority group
Migrants in the 1970s and 1980s
The second generation in the 1990s and 2000s
The second and third generations in the 2010s and early 2020s
Ethnic differences in intergenerational rates of upward and downward mobility
The first generation during the 1970–1989 period
The second generation in the 1990s and 2000s
The second and third generations in the 2010s and early 2020s
Research in other countries
7 Trends in Social Mobility: From the Medieval Period to the Twenty-First Century
The long-run context of social mobility
Nineteenth- and twentieth-century trends in absolute rates of social mobility
Long-term trends in relative social mobility
A caveat
8 Who Gets Ahead and Why?
Origins, education and destination
Unpacking the occupational attainment process
Unpacking the OE, ED and OD arrows
The OE link
The ED link
The OD link
9 Conclusions: Individual and Collective Consequences of Mobility
The consequences of social mobility for individual well-being
The consequences of social mobility for the society
References
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Tables
Chapter 2
Table 2.1
The relationship between fathers’ and sons’ regular occupations in...
Chapter 3
Table 3.1
The social class distribution of life chances
Table 3.2
Social origins of members of elite professions (column percentages)
Table 3.3
The class destinations of men and women from different social class origins (row...
Table 3.4
Upward, downward, horizontal and immobility (percentages)
Table 3.5
Social fluidity and stickiness (symmetrical odds ratios)
Table 3.6
The occupational destinations of men from different social class origins in Indi...
Chapter 4
Table 4.1
Intergenerational income mobility of men in the United Kingdom, 2000 (percentage...
Chapter 5
Table 5.1
Men’s and women’s occupational positions and life chances
Table 5.2a
The occupational destinations of men from different social class origins (row pe...
Table 5.2b
The occupational destinations of women from different social class origins (row ...
Table 5.3
Absolute rates of intergenerational class mobility among men and women (row perc...
Table 5.4
Social fluidity among men and women (symmetrical odds ratios)
Table 5.5
Symmetrical odds ratios for income mobility among men and women
Chapter 6
Table 6.1
Changing social class distributions of the Irish in Yankee City in the nineteent...
Table 6.2
Changes across generations and time in access to the salariat (percentages)
Chapter 7
Table 7.1
Trends in absolute rates of mobility in England over the nineteenth and twentiet...
Table 7.2
Trends in relative mobility in England over the nineteenth and twentieth centuri...
Chapter 9
Table 9.1
Subjective well-being among the intergenerationally stable and mobile, mainland ...
Table 9.2
Anti-immigrant sentiment among the intergenerationally stable and mobile, Europe
List of Illustrations
Chapter 2
Figure 2.1
Path coefficients in a basic model of the process of stratification
Chapter 3
Figure 3.1
Absolute social class mobility in 26 countries (percentages)
Figure 3.2
Relative social class mobility (fluidity) in 25 countries
Chapter 4
Figure 4.1
The Great Gatsby Curve
Figure 4.2
Estimates of upward absolute income mobility by country and birth cohort from 19...
Chapter 5
Figure 5.1
The gender pay gap in 40 countries (percentage)
Figure 5.2a
Access to the higher salariat by men in the United Kingdom (probabilities)
Figure 5.2b
Access to the higher salariat by women in the United Kingdom (probabilities)
Chapter 6
Figure 6.1
Long-range upward and downward mobility, migrants compared with white British bo...
Figure 6.2
Long-range upward and downward mobility, children of migrants compared with whit...
Figure 6.3
Long-range upward and downward mobility, the second and third generations compar...
Figure 6.4
Levels of relative mobility among second/third-generation ethnic minorities comp...
Chapter 7
Figure 7.1
Sectoral change in England and Wales 1380–2011 (percentages)
Chapter 8
Figure 8.1
The Origin/Education/Destination triangle
Figure 8.2a
The OED triangle: results for men
Figure 8.2b
The OED triangle: results for women
Figure 8.3
Total and direct effects of social origins on occupational attainment (unstandar...
Figure 8.4a
An expanded model: men
Figure 8.4b
An expanded model: women
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Series Title
Key Concepts Series
Barbara Adam,
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Anthony Heath and Yaojun Li
polity
Copyright Page
Copyright © Anthony Heath and Yaojun Li 2024
The right of Anthony Heath and Yaojun Li to be identified as Authors of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2024 by Polity Press
Polity Press
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Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8306-5
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8307-2(pb)
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2023937069
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Dedication
For Jane and Junian
Tables and Figures
Tables
2.1 The relationship between fathers’ and sons’ regular occupations in San Jose, California, 1933/4
3.1 The social class distribution of life chances
3.2 Social origins of members of elite professions
3.3 The class destinations of men and women from different social class origins
3.4 Upward, downward, horizontal and immobility
3.5 Social fluidity and stickiness
3.6 The occupational destinations of men from different social class origins in India
4.1 Intergenerational income mobility of men in the United Kingdom, 2000
5.1 Men’s and women’s occupational positions and life chances
5.2a The occupational destinations of men from different social class origins
5.2b The occupational destinations of women from different social class origins
5.3 Absolute rates of intergenerational class mobility among men and women
5.4 Social fluidity among men and women
5.5Symmetrical odds ratios for income mobility among men and women
6.1 Changing social class distributions of the Irish in Yankee City in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
6.2 Changes across generations and time in access to the salariat
7.1 Trends in absolute rates of mobility in England over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by birth cohort
7.2 Trends in relative mobility in England over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by birth cohort
9.1 Subjective well-being among the intergenerationally stable and mobile, mainland China
9.2 Anti-immigrant sentiment among the intergenerationally stable and mobile, Europe
Figures
2.1 Path coefficients in a basic model of the process of stratification
3.1 Absolute social class mobility in 26 countries
3.2 Relative social class mobility (fluidity) in 25 countries
4.1 The Great Gatsby Curve
4.2 Estimates of upward absolute income mobility by country and birth cohort from 1960 to 1987
5.1 The gender pay gap in 40 countries
5.2a Access to the higher salariat by men in the United Kingdom
5.2b Access to the higher salariat by women in the United Kingdom
6.1 Long-range upward and downward mobility, migrants compared with white British born in Britain, 1970s and 1980s
6.2Long-range upward and downward mobility, children of migrants compared with white British born in Britain, 1990s and 2000s
6.3 Long-range upward and downward mobility, the second and third generations compared with white British born in Britain, 2010s and 2020s
6.4 Levels of relative mobility among second-/third-generation ethnic minorities compared with white British, 2018–2022
7.1 Sectoral change in England and Wales 1380–2011
8.1 The Origin/Education/Destination triangle
8.2a The OED triangle: results for men
8.2b The OED triangle: results for women
8.3 Total and direct effects of social origins on occupational attainment
8.4a An expanded model: men
8.4b An expanded model: women
1What Is Social Mobility and Why Does It Matter?
Introduction
High rates of social mobility – that is, movement between different positions in a society’s system of social stratification – are widely seen as a mark of a modern egalitarian society. Or to put it the other way round, a society in which top positions are reserved for the children of the privileged elite and where there are barriers preventing those from less privileged backgrounds from advancing is widely seen as retrograde. Sociologists often see a high rate of social mobility as a core feature of a liberal and democratic society in contrast to the immobility characterizing pre-modern societies. A range of international organizations, such as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the World Bank, advocate policies to promote social mobility.
There are several different reasons why people might wish to promote social mobility and to oppose the inheritance of privilege. First, there is a straightforward moral argument. In western liberal societies, prevalent values emphasize equality of opportunity and fairness in the sense that people should be treated according to their merits and not according to irrelevant criteria such as the colour of their skin, their gender or what their parents did for a living. These values are exemplified by anti-discrimination legislation across the European Union and developed nations more generally – although this legislation has primarily focused on criteria such as racial background, gender, sexual orientation and disability rather than on social class origins. To be sure, equality of opportunity is not the same concept as social mobility, although it is widely assumed that greater equality of opportunity will lead to greater social mobility.
Secondly, there is an efficiency argument in favour of social mobility. It has long been evident that the appointment of privileged but incompetent individuals to leadership positions can have disastrous consequences. It used to be the case for example that wealthy, well-connected individuals could purchase commissions in the British army (although interestingly not the navy) without any test of their competence. This worked well enough in peacetime, but the downside became obvious during the Crimean War of 1853–6 when incompetent leadership resulted in unnecessary disasters such as the Charge of the Light Brigade. Purchase of commissions was shortly afterwards abolished, following government inquiries into the army’s failings during the war.
More recently, academic economists (and some traditions in sociology, such as functionalism) have developed general theories showing that exclusion of individuals on the basis of irrelevant criteria is inefficient and reduces productivity. The economist Gary Becker presented the classic account of this in his 1957 book, The Economics of Discrimination. Discrimination essentially means that less productive individuals are preferred over more productive candidates who possess some stigmatized but irrelevant characteristic (irrelevant from the point of view of job performance) such as skin colour or social background. Eliminating forms of discrimination and appointing the most productive individuals will therefore tend to lead to better economic performance. Somewhat surprisingly economists do not appear to have actually tested whether firms that discriminate are more likely to go out of business, but sociologist Devah Pager has shown that in the United States firms which had discriminated against Black applicants were twice as likely as those who had not discriminated to have gone out of business six years later (Pager 2016).
An important variant of this efficiency argument (developed interestingly by psychologists rather than economists) holds that diversity may be positively beneficial in its own right (Maznevski 1994). Bringing together people with a range of different experiences and ideas is argued to facilitate a more innovative and dynamic business culture. Homogeneous groups, composed perhaps of middle-aged white men from a narrow range of elite schools, may be more likely to engage in ‘group think’ and to stick with the received wisdom. Newcomers with different perspectives bring in new, but uncomfortable, ideas. Thus evidence suggests that companies with a strong female representation at board and top management level perform better than those without, and that gender-diverse boards have a positive impact on performance. Lord Davies, in his independent review of ‘Women on Boards’, concluded, ‘It is clear that boards make better decisions where a range of voices, drawing on different life experiences, can be heard. That mix of voices must include women’ (Davies 2011: 3).
A third set of arguments focuses on the wider social and political consequences of immobility and social closure. A society in which a privileged elite is entrenched and in which there are major obstacles to the advancement of people from humble backgrounds could well be storing up discontent, class conflict and political instability. Conversely, a more open society might be more stable. The French political theorist and historian Alexis de Tocqueville, after travelling to America in 1831, suggested that the great opportunities for social mobility there contributed to the stability of political democracy in the country (de Tocqueville 1835).
Rather more recently, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson in their book Why Nations Fail (2012) have argued that ‘extractive’ institutions (which enable a privileged elite to cream off the nation’s wealth) are a major reason why nations fail, whereas inclusive institutions (which give ordinary citizens a chance to progress) facilitate political stability. Less dramatically, we might expect social closure to lead to political conflict between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’. A more open society might therefore be a more stable society.
However, there are some important critiques of the idea that increased social mobility should be a central target of policy. One rival and more critical account holds that social mobility is of only secondary importance compared with ‘the brute fact of class’. A highly unequal society in which there is a great deal of movement, both up and down, is not everyone’s idea of a good society. Thus John Westergaard and Henrietta Resler in their classic study Class in a Capitalist Society argued that social mobility concerns ‘the recruitment of people to classes; not the brute fact of the existence of classes. It is that which is primary’ (1975: 280). For these critics, changing the personnel who occupy the top (or bottom) positions in society does not alter the fact that some are privileged and others disadvantaged.
Another line of criticism focuses on the possible downsides of a highly mobile society. In a mobile society, there is going to be downward as well as upward mobility. Downward mobility will have both psychological and material consequences for those affected. Indeed, psychological research by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky showed that there is an important asymmetry between gains and losses. Psychologically, losses outweigh gains – for example, the pain from losing £1,000 might only be fully compensated by the pleasure of earning £2,000 (Kahneman and Tversky 1979). This raises the possibility that the subjective losses of the downwardly mobile are not fully compensated by the subjective gains of the upwardly mobile. It is conceivable, therefore, that overall well-being might be lower in a highly mobile society.
Furthermore, apart from the downwardly mobile, those people who are immobile but stuck at the bottom may feel disgruntled. T. H. Marshall, for example, speculated that ‘When the race is to the swift, the slow, who are always in a majority, grow tired of their perpetual defeat and become more disgruntled than if there were no race at all. They begin to regard the prizes as something to which they are entitled and of which they are unjustly deprived’ (Marshall 1938: 110–11). This argument foreshadowed the famous finding in the foundational wartime study of relative deprivation. In researching The American Soldier, Samuel Stouffer and his colleagues found to their surprise that morale tended to be lower in units which had higher rates of promotion than in those units which had lower prospects of promotion. The authors’ interpretation was that, if the norm is to receive promotion, people who do not gain promotion are more likely to experience feelings of relative deprivation. In contrast, if promotion is a rare event, failure to gain promotion will not be so psychologically upsetting (Stouffer et al. 1949: 250–3).
Thirdly, the politicians tend to slide rather too readily between arguments about equality of opportunity to conclusions about the desirability of increasing rates of social mobility. To be sure, greater equality of opportunity may, other things being equal, tend to increase rates of upward and downward mobility, but there are plenty of other reasons – as we will show in later chapters – why rates of mobility might be high or low. There is no one-to-one relationship between rates of social mobility and equality of opportunity. Fluidity can be a consequence of constraint rather than of opportunity and thus may have a perverse character. There is, for example, evidence that, among African Americans in the United States, there was a weak relationship between the occupations of fathers and those of their children and thus a high level of social fluidity (Duncan 1968). However, this weak relationship appeared to hold because occupationally successful African-American fathers were not able to pass on their advantaged positions to their children, probably due to various forms of discrimination against Black minorities. Michael Hout therefore termed this an example of ‘perverse fluidity’. Similarly, it has been suggested that women who work part-time exhibit a high degree of fluidity, relative to their parents, but this may be due to the narrow (and relatively low-level) range of jobs open to women working part-time (Goldthorpe and Mills 2004: 209). Perverse fluidity may therefore occur because of disproportionately high rates of downward mobility experienced by some groups within a society as a result of various constraints on their opportunities. A weak relationship between parents’ and their children’s occupational positions may, in these circumstances, be indicative of lack of opportunity rather than of equality of opportunity.
Defining social mobility
We have not so far defined social mobility. The core of the concept is the nature of recruitment to different positions in society, and in particular the extent of inheritance of privileged positions, and conversely the extent of inheritance of disadvantage. We can define social mobility as movement in social space, more specifically as movement between different positions in a society’s system of social stratification. Movements can be ones over one’s own career – intra-generational mobility – or movements between parents’ positions and those of their adult children – intergenerational mobility.
Much of the empirical (and theoretical) literature has focused on vertical, intergenerational movement between more and less disadvantaged positions, distinguishing upward from downward mobility, and distinguishing both from immobility. Contemporary European sociologists, such as John Goldthorpe and Erzsébet Bukodi, have tended to focus on movements between broad occupational classes which can be ranked in terms of their ‘life chances’, such as their chances for material prosperity, security of employment and income, promotion prospects and well-being (Bukodi and Goldthorpe 2019: ch. 1). American sociologists such as Peter Blau and Otis Dudley Duncan (1967) have tended to focus on movements up and down a scale of socio-economic status (SES), while earlier sociologists such as Vilfredo Pareto (1935 [1916]) and Pitirim Sorokin (1927) were more interested in access to elite positions in society, such as to Parliament, the established professions or leadership positions in big business.
Sociologists have many different ways of conceptualizing and classifying social class, but most agree on using occupations as the building blocks, and place more secure, better-paid jobs towards the top of the class or socio-economic hierarchy, and insecure jobs (with higher risks of unemployment and poor pay and working conditions) towards the bottom. Professional and higher managerial occupations are typically assigned to the highest social class, and routine manual or service occupations to the lowest social class. (In developing countries, it would also be appropriate to distinguish a separate class of agricultural workers, who typically are the most disadvantaged with the poorest mobility prospects.) So a great deal of the interest is in whether sons and daughters end up in occupations of a similar, higher or lower level than those held by their parents.
Whereas most sociologists have tended to focus on mobility (and stability) between occupational classes or levels, economists have recently turned their attention to income mobility and, to a lesser extent, to the intergenerational transmission of wealth. There are also some studies of educational mobility (education sometimes being thought of as tapping a status dimension rather than a class dimension). All have in common a concern with the chances of individuals born and brought up in one kind of situation of moving up or down to a higher or lower position, or staying in the same position as their parents, and we would not expect the results to differ all that much, given the strong links between education, occupation and income.
Outline of the book
We will take up these themes throughout the book. We will begin in chapter 2 by briefly summarizing the key landmarks, both theoretical and empirical, in the sociological and economic literatures on social mobility. In chapter 3, we will then describe the key concepts and techniques used by sociologists to study social class mobility, illustrating their application with recent data from contemporary Britain. We place the British results in a comparative perspective and explore theories and research that attempt to explain why rates of social mobility vary across the developed world as well as in the global South.
In chapter 4, we turn to the economics literature on income mobility, again illustrating economists’ methods with recent data for Britain and setting the British results within a broader comparative framework. We pay particular attention to the so-called ‘Great Gatsby Curve’, which demonstrates a strong association between the strength of intergenerational persistence and national levels of income inequality.
In chapter 5, we investigate gender differences in mobility patterns. Earlier sociologists and economists frequently ignored women. This could perhaps once have been justified but is nowadays absurd, given the large-scale participation of women in the labour market. We compare men’s and women’s chances both of occupational mobility and of income mobility and explore which countries offer greater equality of opportunity and outcome for men and women.
Another major issue, which we investigate in chapter 6, is that other ascribed characteristics, such as race and ethnicity, have been generally ignored in discussions of social class and income mobility. Since the early empirical studies of social mobility were conducted in the 1950s, western societies have been transformed by the influx of migrants and refugees. There have also been long-standing obstacles facing the advance of forced migrants, particularly the victims of the slave trade and their descendants, while many indigenous peoples miss out on the mobility opportunities available to the now dominant groups in their societies. Most mobility researchers have ignored these phenomena, and yet it is by no means clear that mobility processes will be the same for voluntary migrants, forced migrants, the descendants of migrants or indigenous peoples as they are for the majority group.
In chapter 7, we investigate long-term trends in rates of social class mobility, for which we have some data going back to the beginning of the nineteenth century in both Britain and the United States. We focus in particular on the evidence for and against the liberal theory of ‘the logic of industrialism’, which predicts that there will be gradual but long-term increases in social fluidity as societies industrialize and modernize.
Chapter 8 turns to the factors which might explain the persistence of advantage and disadvantage across generations. We explore the role of the different sorts of capital – financial, human, social and cultural capital – as well as the barriers to mobility arising from the decisions and practices of firms and other selectors.
We conclude in chapter 9 with an exploration of the implications of social mobility for society, in particular for well-being and for social conflict and cohesion, revisiting the themes raised by earlier scholars, such as de Tocqueville in the nineteenth century.
2Landmarks: A Brief History of Mobility Research
The systematic empirical study of social mobility began in the twentieth century, and mobility research really took off in the second half of the century with the availability of national sample surveys and new statistical techniques for analysing the data. However, there is a longer tradition of thinking about mobility, particularly about recruitment of elites, going back to Greek thinkers in the fourth century bc, such as the philosopher Plato. In this chapter we will briefly describe some of the main contributions to the literature, drawing out the main ideas, concepts and theories, the kind of data that was used, and how the data were analysed. We return in more depth to the various themes identified here throughout the subsequent chapters.
Like all selections, ours is inevitably idiosyncratic. We recognize that our selection is also biased in that it relies primarily on English-language literature and draws on the research that has been carried out, most often by men, in a rather restricted selection of wealthy countries in the global North. We trust that this will change in future.
Beginnings
In his influential magnum opus Republic (written around 375 bc), Plato advanced a theory of social selection and recruitment that would have found favour with, and may even have influenced, the architects of the selective systems of education that still dominate in several European countries, such as the Netherlands and Germany.
In Plato’s ideal republic there were to be three classes of citizen: the guardians or rulers, the auxiliaries or soldiers, and the rest of the citizen body – the farmers, builders, weavers and the like. (There were plenty of slaves, too, in ancient Greece, but Plato has little to say about them.) Recruitment to the three classes was to be on merit, which meant, since Plato was a believer in heredity, that there was to be substantial self-recruitment to the three classes. However, where children from the lower classes possessed the qualities appropriate for a higher one, they were to receive the education which fitted them for upward mobility.
Plato put these ideas into a myth which the citizens of his ideal society were to be taught:
You are all brothers, fellow citizens, but when God made you he mixed gold in the nature of those who are fitted to be rulers – and that is why they are held in the highest esteem. He put silver in those who were to be their assistants, and iron and bronze in the farmers and workers. Children will usually have the same nature as their parents, but since you all come from the same stock, there will sometimes be ‘golden’ parents with a ‘silver’ child, ‘silver’ parents with a ‘golden’ child, and so on. God’s first and most important commandment to the rulers, therefore, is that they must scrutinize the mixture of metals in their children’s characters. If one of their own children has iron or bronze in its make-up, they must harden themselves and assign him to his appropriate level among farming or working people. Conversely, a child from the latter origins with gold or silver in his nature must be promoted accordingly to become a ruler or an assistant. For the oracle has prophesied that the State will be destroyed if it ever comes to have rulers of iron or bronze. (Plato 1902 [375 bc], Republic: book 3, 415a–c)
Similar ideas about the need for elites to refresh themselves by recruiting from lower social classes reappear in later sociology. While Karl Marx, for example, did not deal with social mobility in any great depth or detail, he did remark that upward mobility into the ruling class will serve to strengthen its hold and thus serve as a stabilizing, anti-revolutionary process. In a famous passage he wrote:
The circumstance that a man without fortune, but possessing energy, solidity, ability and business acumen may become a capitalist . . . is greatly admired by apologists of the capitalist system. Although this circumstance continually brings an unwelcome number of new soldiers of fortune into the field and into competition with the already existing individual capitalists, it also reinforces the supremacy of capital itself, expands its base and enables it to recruit ever new forces for itself out of the substratum of society. . . . The more a ruling class is able to assimilate the foremost minds of a ruled class, the more stable and dangerous becomes its rule. (Marx 1959 [1894]: 587, our emphasis)
Elsewhere, Marx observed that, although classes existed in the United States, ‘they have not yet become fixed, but continually change and interchange their elements in constant flux’ (Marx 1958 [1852]: 255). This was a theme later taken up by the German sociologist Werner Sombart in his classic 1906 article ‘Why Is There No Socialism in the United States?’ The key idea was that there were greater opportunities to get ahead in America than there were in Europe – a thesis of American exceptionalism – and higher rates of upward mobility. These high rates of upward mobility inhibited the formation of a mature and consolidated working class. Thus, although the brute facts of class inequality occurred in America as much as in Europe, the greater opportunities for upward mobility out of the subordinate classes meant that working-class solidarity and collective action were less likely to develop in the United States.
Similarly, another German sociologist, Robert Michels, argued that ‘the certainty of being condemned to hired labour throughout natural life is one of the most important causes that lead to the rise of anti-capitalist movements in the modern masses’ (Michels 1965 [1927]: 82). To be sure, it is not entirely obvious that Marx, Sombart or Michels had in mind intergenerational social mobility when they were penning these thoughts. It is rather more likely that they were thinking of the opportunities for people to move within the course of their own lifetimes, that is, with intra-generational mobility. In practice, though, a society in which intra-generational mobility is high is likely to be one where intergenerational mobility is also high.
The kind of reasoning behind these claims is similar to that of Albert O. Hirschman in his celebrated study Exit, Voice and Loyalty (1970). Basically, people have three options if they are in a disadvantaged situation. They can quietly put up with it (Loyalty); they can put their energies into Exit, in this example into upward mobility into a more advantaged class or emigration to a country which offers greater opportunities; or they can give vent to Voice, that is, to protest. Hence the greater the chances of successful exit through upward mobility, the less the likelihood that voice and collective protest and class conflict will emerge.
These discussions were largely formulated as part of a wider socialist concern about possible impediments to the reform or overthrow of capitalism through collective action on the part of the labour movement. Although we can derive from them hypotheses about the conditions likely to promote or undermine the development of working-class consciousness and class conflict, the study of social mobility was an incidental rather than a prime concern for Marx, Sombart and Michels. Their focus was essentially on the possibilities of organized class action.
Marx’s scattered remarks about social mobility hardly constitute a systematic theory or even a large-scale assault on the topic. Nor does mobility figure prominently in the work of the other masters, Emile Durkheim and Max Weber. The only one of the founding fathers to concentrate on mobility was the now neglected Vilfredo Pareto, whose work, though scarcely systematic, certainly had the attribute of scale. His Trattato di Sociologia Generale (published in 1916) contains over a million words and is correspondingly difficult to summarize succinctly.
Like Plato and Marx, Pareto’s key interest was in the nature of recruitment into the ruling elite. The kernel of Pareto’s theory was that elites are inevitable and that history demonstrates a continual succession or circulation of these elites. In a famous passage, he wrote, ‘History is a graveyard of aristocracies.’ He went on:
Aristocracies decay not only in number but also in quality, in the sense that their energy diminishes and there is a debilitating alteration in the proportion of the [psychological attributes] which originally favoured their capture and retention of power. . . . The governing class is renovated not only in number but also – and this is more important – in quality, by recruiting to it families rising from the lower classes, bringing with them the energy and [attributes] necessary for maintaining them in power. It is renovated also by the loss of its more degenerate elements. . . . The accumulation of superior elements in the lower classes and, conversely, of inferior elements in the upper classes, is a potent cause of disturbance in the social equilibrium. (Pareto 1935 [1916]: 2054, 2055)
The broad outline of Pareto’s theory, then – that governing elites must allow recruitment from below, otherwise they will decay and be supplanted – is in essence a restatement of Plato’s ideas from over two millennia earlier. Pareto further suggested that there would be a continual circulation of elites. For example, socialism might replace bourgeois government, but socialism is itself a chimera. There will simply be a new socialist elite and the cycle will be repeated.
Growing up
A much more systematic, and empirically based, treatment of these themes comes with Pitirim A. Sorokin’s Social Mobility of 1927, which represents the coming of age of the sociological study of mobility. Pareto’s work has a curiously archaic quality, with anecdotal evidence drawn from a vast period of European history, whereas Sorokin’s work, although published only eleven years after the Trattato, with which it has many affinities, is nevertheless recognizably that of a modern sociologist. Sorokin was certainly influenced by Pareto and frequently cites his work; Sorokin also covers the same huge timespan, and he shared Pareto’s distaste for complacent theories of social progress. But Sorokin’s methods of treating the subject, his way of posing the questions and his recourse to data are not so very different from that of sociologists of the post-war period.
While born in Russia and himself a member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, Sorokin was exiled by Lenin and emigrated to America. He spent much of his career at Harvard, and we would now think of him as essentially an American sociologist who established many of the themes which have dominated subsequent American (and European) research on social mobility. While he touched on the same issues as the European tradition about the implications of social mobility for class conflict and solidarity, he was also interested in describing the pattern and trends in social mobility, using quantitative data as far as possible, and trying to understand the various channels or routes for social mobility as well as the underlying causes of the trends. He also explored various other aspects which now seem very dated, for example the role of physical characteristics such as the size of one’s skull, which happened to be part of the intellectual debates of his day. No doubt many of our current intellectual concerns will appear very outmoded and dated to writers in a hundred years’ time.
Sorokin’s fundamental points were that stratification exists in all societies, and that various mechanisms or channels exist in all societies for ensuring mobility between the classes. He noted that contemporary western democracies, especially the United States, were notably open societies with high and increasing rates of mobility. However, he did not believe that these trends were in any way inevitable, and he emphasized the way in which, in past epochs in ancient Rome, Greece, India and China, periods of relative openness and mobility had been followed by periods of stagnation. He characterized long-term historical mobility trends (spanning centuries rather than decades) as ones exhibiting ‘trendless fluctuation’ (Sorokin 1927: ch. VII).
In many ways, Sorokin anticipated some of the elements of functionalism which became a dominant force in post-war American theory, although he was always more sceptical than most of his successors. In essence, Sorokin argued that social inequality was inevitable. He argued that there were certain permanent and universal bases of occupational inequality. ‘At least two conditions seem to have been fundamental,’ he wrote; ‘first, the importance of an occupation for the survival and existence of a group as a whole; second, the degree of intelligence necessary for a successful performance of an occupation’ (Sorokin 1927: 100–1; italics in the original). In turn, ‘varying in their concrete forms and in their size, the channels of vertical circulation exist in any stratified society, and are as necessary as channels for blood circulation in the body’ (1927: 180).
