SOCIAL MOBILITY
All to be able to define different types of social mobility and be able to explain the
factors that create or prevent social mobility.
What is social mobility?
Does it really happen in our society?
Connector
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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.
5 Mins
Home learning
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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
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Social mobility can be:
Upward
Downward
Intragenerational
Intergenerational
Long range social mobility
Short range social mobility
Self-recruited social mobility
Task 1
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Using what we had just discussed write your own definitions of the
types of social mobility:
Social mobility
Upward social mobility
Downward social mobility
Intragenerational social mobility
Intergenerational social mobility
Long range social mobility
Short range social mobility
Self-recruited social mobility
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You can use the textbook, page 304 and the glossary, to help you.
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10 Mins
Types of social mobility
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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
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Long range social mobility - movement from the
bottom strata to the top, e.g. from lower
working class to upper middle class.
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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
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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 mobility
Example
A pilot whose son becomes a police constable.
Upward social mobility
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.
Downward social mobility
Intragenerational social mobility
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.
Intergenerational social mobility
Self-recruited
A nurse who decides to become a labourer on a building
site.
A daughter of a miner who becomes a bank manager.
Task 3
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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
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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
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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
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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 20th 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
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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
1.
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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...
education by gaining the necessary qualifications, such as a university degree, for
professional occupations such as doctors.
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This might be difficult to achieve for some social
groups because...
they may face discrimination in education as well as in employment as a result of
their class, ethnicity and gender. For example,...
Review
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‘Everyone in Britain has an equal chance of achieving
social mobility’.
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Stand up if you agree, stay sitting if you disagree.
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Can you tell the class why you think that?