Social Mobility (AQA GCSE Sociology)

Social mobility refers to people's movement up or down a society's strata, i.e. between social classes

Sociologists, politicians, and policymakers are interested in social mobility because it is an important indicator of how open a society is

Rates of upward and downward mobility can be used to argue that:

• status is achieved, not ascribed

• society functions as a meritocracy and offers equality of opportunity, e.g., through state education, everyone is assumed a chance of success

• instead of inherited wealth or personal connections, people are rewarded on the basis of merit

There are two types of social mobility:

• Intra-generational social mobility: When a person moves between social classes over their lifetime, e.g., due to promotion

• Inter-generational social mobility: When a child moves to a different social class from their parents

There are different routes to upward social mobility:

• Educational achievements and qualifications can lead to high-status roles

• Marriage, even though most people marry people with similar educational backgrounds and professions to their own

• Windfalls like a sizable lottery win or inheritance

• Occupational structure changes, such as a rise in white collar work and a decline in manual labour, lead to more opportunities for upward mobility

Barriers to social mobility include:

• limited prospects, e.g., a lack of growth in the economy, which leads to fewer secure, well-paid job opportunities

• limited access to further or higher education, e.g., students from working-class backgrounds are less likely to attend university than their middle-class peers

• graduate earning potential, e.g., working-class graduates still tend to earn less than their middle-class peers

• discrimination based on ethnicity or gender, e.g., second-generation Pakistani and Bangladeshi women are less likely to be in professional or managerial jobsthan similarly qualified white British women

• a lack of skills and qualifications, e.g., ONS figures show that 13.2% of all people aged 16-24 were NEET in July to September 2024

  • There are too few alternatives to university that allow young people to develop the skills and qualifications needed for social mobility

Research on social mobility in the UK shows that:

• The likelihood of a working-class child landing a managerial or professional position is only 25% that of a middle-class child

  • Since Goldthorpe's 1972-1974 mobility study, there has been minimal change in the relative chances of working-class and middle-class children obtaining professional jobs

• In the UK, social mobility declined towards the end of the 20th century

  • Compared to children born in the 1970s, children born into manual working-class families in 1958 had a higher chance of advancing into higher occupations

• Social mobility is in decline

  • Professional and manual job growth has slowed, and skilled manual jobs have decreased (Crompton, 2008)

• Investment banking has an over-representation of people from wealthier backgrounds (The Social Mobility Commission, 2016)

  • Banks hire from prestigious universities like Warwick, Cambridge, and Oxford

  • A candidate's "polish," or confidence, dress, speech, accent, and demeanour is also a factor in determining their suitability

  • Therefore, those who have grown up in a middle-class or upper-class environment have an advantage

Measuring social mobility has several issues:

• Some studies of inter-generational mobility focus only on males

  • They provide no information about the experiences of women in social mobility

• Research asks participants to recall their own or their parents' work histories

  • They are likely to be based on unreliable data

• Researchers decide which age and point in a person's career to measure mobility from

  • This is problematic as it does not always provide the full picture

  • For example, a person might be in a temporary retail job while waiting for a suitable opening on a management programme

Whether "class" is still a useful concept in sociology is up for debate

• One approach is that social class is not as relevant in the UK today

  • Class divisions and identities are no longer significant

• Another theory holds that since the 1970s, there has been less of a correlation between voting behaviour and class

  • Working-class people tended to vote Labour and middle-class people tended to vote Conservative

  • This is known as class alignment

• One recent approach is that voting behaviour is no longer thought to be strongly predicted by class

  • This is known as class dealignment

According to the 2016 British Social Attitudes Survey, 40% of respondents identify as middle class and 60% as working class

• Despite a decline in working-class jobs, the percentage of people who identify as working-class remains unchanged from 1983

People's class identity is influenced by their family background and educational attainments

• For instance, many middle-class individuals who are from working-class backgrounds or did not go to university consider themselves to be working-class

Economic changes since 2005, such as recessions and zero-hours contracts, have made people more aware of class differences

The working class has shrunk in size since working-class employment has declined

• For example, coal mining and shipbuilding

• Trade union membership has declined since the 1970s

Over time, particularly in the past 20 years, class identities have weakened

• People now tend to pick and choose from other social identities, such as gender and ethnicity

According to Saunders (1996), the advantages that children of wealthy parents enjoy do not significantly influence outcomes in modern-day Britain

• However, social background and social identities can influence where people end up in the hierarchy at work

• He argues that the following social factors all count:

  • Parents, e.g. their social class, education and interest in their children's schooling

  • Gender

  • Type of school attended, e.g. private education

  • Conditions at home, e.g. overcrowding hinders success

• Saunders places more emphasis on a person's ability and motivation for their occupation than their social class

  • This includes mental ability, motivation to succeed and qualifications

• In Britain, people are categorised according to their ability and effort, making it a meritocracy