Social mobility

Social mobility

What is social mobility?Does it really happen in our society?

All to be able to define different types of social mobility

and

be able to explain the factors that create or prevent social mobility.

Connector

Are theses example of upward or downward social mobility?Can you explain why?Getting married to someone in a higher class.Changes in job (more people working in offices).Winning the lottery.Bankruptcy. Gaining higher educational qualifications.Losing your job.Marrying someone without skills.Leaving school without qualifications.

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Mins

Home learning

Create your family tree looking at social mobility among your own family. Has there been any intergenerational upward or downward mobility?e.g.

Grandmother = housewife with no education

Mum = higher educational qualifications = upward intergenerational mobility

Types of social mobility

Social mobility can be:

Upward

Downward

Intragenerational

Intergenerational

Long range social mobility

Short range social mobility

Self-recruited social mobility

Task 1

Using what we had just discussed write your own definitions of the types of social mobility: Social mobilityUpward social mobilityDownward social mobilityIntragenerational social mobilityIntergenerational social mobilityLong range social mobilityShort range social mobilitySelf-recruited social mobilityYou can use the textbook, page 304 and the glossary, to help you.

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Mins

Types of social mobility

Social mobility

– refers to people’s movement between social strata (layer).

It can be:

Upward

– movement from a class to the one above, e.g. from working to middle class.

Downward

- movement from a class to the one below, e.g. from middle to working class.

Intragenerational

– movement of an individual from one class to another through the course of their life. It happens through changes in occupation, e.g. from being a secretary to being a teacher.

Intergenerational

– movement between the generations of a family, e.g. if an adult child become middle class through education even if they were born into a working class family.

Types of social mobility

Long range social mobility

-

movement from the bottom strata to the top, e.g. from lower working class to upper middle class.

Short range social mobility

– movement between strata that are close together, e.g. from the lower working class to upper working class.

Self-recruited social mobility

– where children remain in the same class as their parents when they grow up.

Task 2

On the worksheet, match the person with the type of social mobility they have experienced.

There may be more than one type of social mobility for each example.

Extension

- Can you explain why you matched each example with a particular type of social mobility?

Solution

Type of social mobilityExampleUpward social mobilityDownward social mobilityIntragenerational social mobilityIntergenerational social mobilitySelf-recruited A pilot whose son becomes a police constable. A sales assistant in a shop who becomes a priest. An immigrant from a poor farming background who gets a job in Britain as a farm labourer. The owner of a small shop whose daughter becomes an assistant manager in a large supermarket. The daughter of a skilled manual worker who becomes a routine clerical worker. A postal worker who becomes a traffic warden.A doctor’s son who becomes a taxi driver.A teacher who decides to retrain as a social worker.A nurse who decides to become a labourer on a building site. A daughter of a miner who becomes a bank manager.

Task 3

Work in pairs.

Read the textbook, pages 305 – 307, and fill in the worksheet.

For a few sections, you should be able to use your own K&U of Sociology.

Causes of social mobility

Educational achievement

- can lead to upward social mobility as a person can gain professional qualification needed for middle class occupations.

Marriage

– can lead to upward social mobility as a person can marry someone in the class above, e.g. Kate Middleton = upper middle class, but married into the upper class (aristocracy).

Inheritance

– can lead to a change in a person’s lifestyle, e.g. can afford to start going to the theatre, return to education, etc.

Changes in employment

– as the economy has changed (from manufacturing to service industry), there are now more lower and upper middle class occupations in the UK. Together with free education for all, this has enabled people to become upwardly socially mobile.

Home background

– parental values, e.g. the middle class value deferred gratification which can encourage their children to work hard and become upper middle class.

Barriers to social mobility

Social mobility can be prevented by:

Discrimination based on gender or ethnicity

– in education and employment may make people unemployed so they can’t better themselves.

Lack of qualifications and skills

– prevents people from getting even the lower middle class occupations.

Home background

- the underclass value immediate gratification and fatalism which may prevent their children from having aspirations and ambitions. This creates self-recruitment into the underclass.

The extent of social mobility

Goldthorpe

carried out a study into the extent of social mobility in Britain and found that, even though some working class children do end up in middle class occupations, their chances of doing so are a lot lower than the chances of middle class children.

He did find that there during the 1970s there was a great deal of long range social mobility which was caused by the changes to the economy.

However, according to

Crompton

, this does not mean that the UK is a more open society because social mobility had actually slowed down by the end of the 20

th

century because of the changes in employment. This is because there has been a decline in skilled manual jobs and professional jobs have stopped expanding.

Similarly,

Scott

argues that

education

does not really create social mobility. This is because a person’s class background is still a stronger influence on a person’s chances of raising or falling in the social hierarchy. The middle class are far more likely to become upwardly socially mobile than the working class.

The problems of measuring the extent of social mobility

However, the studies into social mobility often focus on studying men and ignore women’s social mobility.

Also, they ask people to remember their earlier occupations which may give unreliable data as people may have forgotten.

The age of the respondents may also create invalid data, e.g. a well educated young person working in a call centre may only be there temporarily while they look for a job they are qualified to do, e.g. teacher. The survey would show them to be upper working class, when in fact they may be upper middle class.

Task 4 – exam question

Describe one way in which a person can become upwardly socially mobile and explain why this might be difficult to achieve for some social groups in Britain today. (5 marks)A person can become upwardly socially mobile through... This might be difficult to achieve for some social groups because...

education by gaining the necessary qualifications, such as a university degree, for professional occupations such as doctors.

they may face discrimination in education as well as in employment as a result of their class, ethnicity and gender. For example,...

Review

‘Everyone in Britain has an equal chance of achieving social mobility’.

Stand up if you agree, stay sitting if you disagree.

Can you tell the class why you think that?