Which concept refers to change in social position during a persons lifetime?

3.1.6 Social Mobility

Social mobility refers to changes in social status. Science is a social system in which resources tend to accumulate among a few individuals and a few institutions [Merton, 1968]. Social systems are structured in ways that limit movements across social strata, which means that individuals and groups move down or, less often, up the socioeconomic scale in terms of property, income, or status. Thus, a researcher who joins a high-quality department could be considered to be upwardly mobile, whereas a researcher who joins a lower-quality department could be considered downwardly mobile. Since movements up and down are associated with different access to resources and peers, social mobility aspects are relevant to an analysis of researcher mobility and its effects. Allison and Long [1990] addressed the effects of departmental affiliation on research productivity for a sample of 179 job changes and found that researchers who move upward show increased publication and citation rates, whereas those who move downward experience a decrease in productivity. Fernandez-Zubieta et al. [Chapter 4] confirm the importance of qualifying mobility according to the quality of the sending and receiving departments, and they show that mobility downward into a lower-quality department can decrease the mobile researcher’s academic performance. Similarly, Kahn and MacGarvie [in press] showed that researchers obliged by visa restrictions to leave the United States and return to a low-income country publish less than a matched researcher who is able to remain in the United States. Thus, social mobility across country boundaries is observed.

Social Mobility

Social mobility, or as Wilson [1987] calls it, “neighborhood sorting,” is another reason often put forward to help explain the growing concentration of urban poverty. There are two dimensions of this concept. The first focuses on white flight; that is, as more and more minorities move into urban areas, better educated and more affluent whites move to the suburbs. Reasons most often given for this out-migration of whites from central city areas include: a desire to provide better educational opportunities for their children, safer neighborhoods, better and cheaper services, more neighborhood amenities, and the ability to realize greater return on their investment in housing.

These same interests are propelling the move of middle-class African-Americans from inner city areas, leaving poor African-Americans behind. The consequence is, further concentration of poor people in central city poverty neighborhoods [Wilson, 1987].

Equality of Opportunity and Stratification

Social stratification and mobility processes can be depicted as a race, with winners and losers obviously. Thus, social stratification and mobility processes are associated with inequality of results [of the race] and conditions. How one defines the concept equality of opportunity is important in assessing whether or not social inequality is fair and justifiable. A very wide array of definitions for the concept equality of opportunity exists in the literature, providing many – nearly all possible – justifications for the existence of inequality in society.

A thin definition of the concept equality of opportunity postulates that opportunities are equal as long as no overt discrimination on the grounds of race, ethnicity, gender, and the like prevents anyone from entering a race. This minimal definition is also known as formal equality of opportunity, and is concerned with equality of the access to available opportunity. Examples for the lack of equal access to opportunity used to be very common in the past. For example, for many years women did not have access to the political spheres and were denied access to higher education. This formal definition of the concept is apparent in the legislation.

Entering the race does not necessarily mean winning it, and thus the concept equality of opportunity can be extended to include also the rules governing the competition and how the winner is selected, that is, equality in the selection processes, once access is granted. At the formal level, an extension of the concept to include also selection processes would require, in the context of the labor market for example, the adaptation of race, age, gender, etc., blind procedures for job hiring and firing. Under such a policy, equality of opportunity does not necessarily mean that social background is not associated with the winners of the race. This is so simply because of the advantages and disadvantages that social background entails. Accordingly, a child of educated professional parents is better equipped to take advantage of the educational system than a child of uneducated working class parents. Defining equality of opportunity with reference to equal chances for access and advancement is akin to Sorokin's characterization of modern democratic societies, as societies in which “there are no judicial or religious obstacles to climbing or going down” [Sorokin, 1959: p. 153].

Racial and Ethnic Stratification

When scholars study social mobility, they are of course exploring a particular form of ascription, a form that arises insofar as children born into well-off families are advantaged in the labor market, the marriage market, and in the competition for other valued resources. But of course class-based ascription is but one of many forms of ascription. Especially in the US, racial and ethnic inequalities are also very potent examples of ascription, and a large body of scholarship has accordingly developed to understand its causes and effects.

The obvious starting point in studying racial and ethnic inequality is to understand how the classification schemes themselves [e.g., ‘black,’ ‘white,’ ‘Asian’] come to be constructed and reconstructed over time. It is important, for example, to understand the processes by which such schemes come into being and are reproduced [see Omi and Winant, 1986] as well as the processes by which individuals are sorted [and sort themselves] into such schemes as are already in place [Saperstein and Penner, 2014]. There is an increasingly large literature showing that racial and ethnic identities, far from being ascriptively fixed at birth, are in fact very malleable over the course of one's life.

As important as these processes are, there is yet more research on the dynamics by which entire immigrant groups, not just particular individuals, are sorted into the racial and ethnic system within the host country. This line of research examines, for example, whether new entrants are assimilating in ‘straight-line’ fashion [e.g., Alba and Nee, 2014], whether especially large and ongoing immigrant streams work to interrupt such straight-line assimilation [e.g., Jiménez, 2014], and whether ethnic enclaves work to hinder or impede the incorporation process [e.g., Portes and Manning, 1986].

There is also much research on the forces making for change and stability in racial and ethnic inequality. Because our various institutions have all been profoundly racialized, there are accordingly many institutional arenas in which change might occur, a point that Wilson [2011] nicely makes. At various points in US history, we have witnessed profound transformations of racial and ethnic inequality, transformations that appear to be linked to changes in residential segregation [e.g., Massey and Denton, 1993]; changes in interracial assortative mating [Qian and Lichter, 2014]; changes in laws, norms, and institutional forms [e.g., Sampson, 2012]; and of course economic changes and transformations [e.g., Wilson, 2011].

Occupational Mobility

Occupational mobility, or more broadly social mobility, can be modeled by a Markov chain. The data of Table 2 display the probabilities associated with the son's [first] occupation and the occupation of the father. There are S = 5 possible occupations: self-employed and salaried professionals [s = 1]; proprietors, clerical workers, and retail sellers [s = 2]; craftsmen in manufacturing, construction, and other industries [s = 3]; service workers, operatives, and laborers [s = 4]; and farm managers and workers [s = 5]. Thus, pii, i = 1,…, 5, represents the probability of a son following his father's footsteps by going into the same occupation; e.g., the probability a son follows his father into farming is p55 = 0.39. The pij, i ≠ j represent the probabilities that the son goes into a different occupation; e.g., the probability a son goes into a self-employed position while his father worked as a construction worker is p21 = 0.32. The Biblarz and Raftery [1993] study was actually concerned with whether occupational mobility varied across race and/or across types of family disruption. Thus, instead of Table 2, there is a corresponding table for each of the demographic categories considered. Although it is beyond the scope of this article, logistic regression methods were used subsequently to study what factors most influenced occupational mobility, with the transition probabilities pij being the starting point.

Table 2. Occupational mobility transition probabilities

Father's occupationSon's occupation1234510.480.180.110.220.0120.320.240.110.310.0230.190.160.210.420.0240.130.150.130.550.0450.090.080.090.350.39

Adapted from Biblarz, T.J., Raftery, A.E., 1993. The effects of family disruption on social mobility. American Sociological Review 58, 97–109.

In this example, changes in time t correspond to generational changes. Had the interest focused on occupational mobility of individuals over time [let us say, over decades], then data of the type of Table 2 pertain but where now, e.g., p31 = 0.19 is the probability that an individual working in construction has moved into a self-employed or salaried professional position one decade later.

Instead of occupational mobility, states may represent social classes so that social mobility questions can be studied. Or, in a study of economic mobility, states would represent levels of economic status, be these states representing financial assets [say], credit-worthiness [say], income levels, or whatever economic factor is the focus. In all cases, the probabilities of movement from one state to another take the form of Table 2.

Housing Wealth, Regional Inequality, and Social Mobility

To some extent housing wealth is a reflection of achieved social mobility in that those with a sequence of good jobs and good incomes are most easily able to purchase more expensive or better-quality housing in more attractive areas. Over time, and assuming no drop into negative equity, their purchases will be transformed into housing wealth. In this sense, higher levels of housing wealth are the result of sustained prosperity and a lifetime cycle of earnings. In addition, it is more possible for those with high levels of embedded housing wealth to trade down and retire to an area of their choice which also has the effect of pushing up prices in popular retirement areas. High house prices and associated levels of housing wealth in part of the country thus have spill-over effects on other parts of the country. Conversely, those households without substantial incomes or housing wealth are unlikely to be able to achieve geographical mobility from areas of low prices to areas of high prices which can impede labour market mobility.

Introduction

Owing to urban policy demands, research on residential location and social mobility opportunities within metropolitan neighbourhoods is becoming a widespread practice. In a society in which spatial determining factors, the increase of migratory flows, and social diversity enhance the importance of a residential–social mix, more attention to social cohesion as basis for urban management should be paid. In order to advance in the research on location, it is necessary to determine the concepts that are to be used, although carrying out this research means accepting great variations that depend on the historical conditions of the places to which they are applied. Research on segregation processes is oriented differently in Europe, where it has been related to social class and more recently to immigration; whereas in the United States, it has been centred on the behaviour of ethnic minorities. In contrast, in developing countries the emphasis has mainly been on the differences in household incomes.

Concentration and segregation of social groups in the cities are as old as the cities themselves. There are many authors who describe the social patterns of cities in antiquity by stressing the different distributions of social groups in terms of caste, occupation, or religion. The Jews in Venice at the beginning of the sixteenth century are a good example of this. They formed a segregated community called a ‘ghetto’, which grew around the existence of a foundry within it. The same situation was later reproduced in Rome. The term ‘ghetto’ was thus generalised and its definition became the concentration of a population that had homogeneous characteristics in common. These characteristics were also different from those of the rest of the society. The notion of ghetto has a negative connotation owing to the fact that it is associated with a form of acute and compulsory segregation. The concept has subsequently been applied to different situations, but has always expressed the idea of an exclusive concentration of a certain social group, which is separated from the rest. History has provided a series of manifestations of ghettos such as the one built in Poland during the Second World War, which was an extreme manifestation of residential segregation.

The following pages will analyse the limits of the concept, the historical considerations in social science, the different approaches, and the ways of measuring segregation in urban areas.

What is a change in social position occurring during a person's lifetime?

Which of the following terms refers to change in social position?

What is the social movement of individuals within their own lifetime?

What is the term for changes in people's positions in a system of social stratification?