Social Mobility and Its Limits

Social mobility refers to the movement of individuals, families, or groups between positions in a stratification system. Sociologists distinguish several types. Intergenerational mobility compares the class or income position of children to that of their parents. Intragenerational mobility (or career mobility) tracks movement over the course of an individual's working life. Vertical mobility moves up or down a hierarchy; horizontal mobility involves lateral movement between positions at the same level. Absolute mobility refers to the raw proportion of people who end up in a different class than their parents', while relative mobility (or social fluidity) adjusts for structural change to capture the underlying association between origin and destination.

The classical Anglo-American tradition of mobility research began with Pitirim Sorokin's Social Mobility (1927) and matured with Peter Blau and Otis Dudley Duncan's The American Occupational Structure (1967). Blau and Duncan introduced path analysis to decompose the effect of family background on offspring attainment: father's education and occupation shape son's education, which in turn shapes son's first job and current occupation. They found that education was the dominant mediator of background effects, a finding confirmed in many subsequent studies and across many countries.

The status attainment research program Blau and Duncan founded dominated American mobility research through the 1970s. It was extended and critiqued by the Wisconsin model (William Sewell and colleagues) which added aspirations and peer/parental encouragement as mediating mechanisms, and by Christopher Jencks's Inequality (1972) which argued that even large interventions on education would leave much of inequality intact because so much variance is within rather than between groups.

European mobility research took a somewhat different turn in the 1970s-90s, focusing on comparative analysis using the EGP class schema. The CASMIN project (Comparative Analysis of Social Mobility in Industrial Nations) produced systematic cross-national comparisons, culminating in Erikson and Goldthorpe's The Constant Flux (1992). Their central finding — that relative mobility rates are broadly similar across advanced societies once occupational structural change is netted out — became known as the FJH hypothesis and reframed debates about national exceptionalism. The US was not, on this view, unusually mobile; it was unusually dynamic in its occupational structure while being no more fluid than Germany or France in the underlying class-origin-to-destination association.