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8 - Social Mobility

from II - Applications

Lisa A. Keister  and
Darby E. Southgate
Lisa A. Keister
Affiliation:
Duke University, North Carolina
Darby E. Southgate
Affiliation:
Los Angeles Valley College
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Summary

Most Americans have thought about the chance that they will change social positions during their life. Trying to improve social status – that is, to move up the status hierarchy over time – is usually considered a desirable objective and a positive individual trait. It is common for young people to imagine that they can achieve more in their life than their parents, and many elements of the way we socialize children encourages or assumes that social mobility is a real possibility. Whereas we have begun to take for granted that social mobility is at least possible, the potential for change of this type is relatively recent. Throughout most of history and in most societies, people grew up to occupy the same social positions as their parents: Peasants remained peasants, elites remained elites, and those in the middle remained in the middle. People even had surnames to indicate their social position (e.g., Bishop, Carpenter, Miller, and Wainwright). Today, we accept that through education, occupational change, entrepreneurship, and other processes, at least some people will not follow the same patterns as their parents. However, determining who is socially mobile and why is not a simple task.

In this chapter, we explore patterns of social mobility and ask which factors affect a person’s chances of mobility. Pitirim Sorokin, one of the first scholars to produce a comprehensive treatment of social mobility, wrote that mobility is “any transition of an individual or social object or value – anything that has been created or modified by human activity – from one social position to another” (Sorokin 1959/2001: 133). That is, social mobility is change in social status over time, for either an individual or an entire group. Mobility can be measured across generations (i.e., a change in status compared to a person’s parents) or within a generation (i.e., a change in status in a person’s own life). It refers to movement up and down various social hierarchies, including income, wealth, education, and occupation. Social mobility refers to both upward and downward mobility; that is, some people achieve more than their parents, others achieve less.

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Type
Chapter
Information
Inequality
A Contemporary Approach to Race, Class, and Gender
 , pp. 294 - 333
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2012

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