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Trends in Intergenerational Class Mobility in Britain in the Late Twentieth Century

John H. Goldthorpe

in Social Mobility in Europe

Analyses trends in intergenerational class mobility in Britain between the early 1970s and the early 1990s on the basis of data from the General Household Survey. Over this period there was little ... More

Analyses trends in intergenerational class mobility in Britain between the early 1970s and the early 1990s on the basis of data from the General Household Survey. Over this period there was little change in total mobility rates. Rates of upward mobility, if anything, fell while rates of downward mobility rose–in contrast to the situation in the middle decades of the twentieth century when rising rates of upward mobility were the salient feature. However, there is continuity in that relative rates of mobility, indicating the level of social fluidity, remain little altered. Education plays a major part in mediating class mobility but its influence is now tending to decrease rather than increase, and individuals’ class origins still have a significant independent effect on their class destinations.Less

The Downwardly Mobile

Jessi Streib

in Privilege Lost: Who Leaves the Upper Middle Class and How They Fall

Downward mobility is common, but we know little about who falls from the upper-middle class, how, and why they don’t see it coming. This chapter provides an overview of how intergenerational downward ... More

Downward mobility is common, but we know little about who falls from the upper-middle class, how, and why they don’t see it coming. This chapter provides an overview of how intergenerational downward mobility occurs. It shows that both resources and identities are associated with downward mobility from the upper-middle class. Individuals who inherit relatively high levels of academic knowledge, institutional insights, and money tend to develop an identity that leads them to maintain high levels of these resources. They use these resources to reproduce their class position. Individuals who inherit relatively low levels of academic knowledge, institutional insights, or money tend to develop an identity that encourages them to maintain their resource weaknesses. Without the resources that schools, colleges, and professional workplaces reward, they tend to enter downwardly mobile trajectories. They do not necessarily anticipate their impending downward mobility as they observe times when they or their parents moved toward class reproduction while not having high levels of these resources.Less

‘There’s a lot of it about’

Geoff Payne

in The New Social Mobility: How the Politicians Got it Wrong

Academic mobility analysts, who until very recently have looked at national rates rather than at the personal experience and consequences of being mobile and immobile, have tended to emphasise the ... More

Academic mobility analysts, who until very recently have looked at national rates rather than at the personal experience and consequences of being mobile and immobile, have tended to emphasise the constraints on mobility. Politicians want more upward mobility, not the downward mobility this would also inevitably involve. Many proposals for policies to improve mobility rates following the political re-discovery of mobility still ultimately depend on individualistic explanations, but recent surveys have shown that around three quarters of British adults have been intergenerationally socially mobile (that is, when downward mobility is included) as conventionally measured across seven social classes. Whether these ‘classes’ are seen as a set of categories, or a system of inter-connected advantages and disadvantage, by definition there have to be ‘losers’ in the mobility race.Less

Tracing the origins

Geoff Payne

in The New Social Mobility: How the Politicians Got it Wrong

For three decades after the mid-1970s there were almost no new sociological surveys of mobility. In this vacuum, findings (or rather a distorted version of them) were repeated and cross-referenced in ... More

For three decades after the mid-1970s there were almost no new sociological surveys of mobility. In this vacuum, findings (or rather a distorted version of them) were repeated and cross-referenced in successive government reports. Given the misrepresentation and misunderstanding of mobility revealed in Chapter 4, this chapter traces how mistakes have been copied from one document to another. The Cabinet Office Strategy Unit’s online discussion, Getting on, getting ahead is identified as a key influence on all three governing parties’ policies, with its incorrect measurements, and neglect of downward mobility. The earlier ‘Aldridge reports’ (2004, 2006) although over-pessimistic about mobility rates, briefly provided a better account.Less

What’s Next

Jessi Streib

in Privilege Lost: Who Leaves the Upper Middle Class and How They Fall

This chapter discusses the book’s unanswered questions, reveals the myths the book shattered, and explains the implications of the findings for parents, youth, policy makers, and voters.

Politicians rediscover social mobility

Geoff Payne

in The New Social Mobility: How the Politicians Got it Wrong

Although politicians previously nodded in the direction of social mobility, it was under New Labour that it became an increasingly frequent element in manifestos, ministerial speeches and policy ... More

Although politicians previously nodded in the direction of social mobility, it was under New Labour that it became an increasingly frequent element in manifestos, ministerial speeches and policy proposals. This chapter traces mobility’s rise up the political agenda to today, showing how and when politicians invoked mobility as a solution to problems of social inequalities. Mobility ceased to be a topic of academic research as it was taken up by the politicians. Despite different stances among the parties, there was a consensus that mobility rates were low, had been declining and were lower than other countries. Calling for ‘more mobility’ neglects downward mobility. On the back of this mistaken interpretation, a veritable ‘social mobility industry’ has grown up since 2000, supported by extensive media coverage.Less

Debating Immigration: Are We Addressing the Right Issues?

Mary C. Waters

in Writing Immigration: Scholars and Journalists in Dialogue

Debates about immigration in the news media and among politicians often focus on “problems” that social scientists can easily dismiss as misguided or lacking in factual basis. These public debates ... More

Debates about immigration in the news media and among politicians often focus on “problems” that social scientists can easily dismiss as misguided or lacking in factual basis. These public debates and news reports also often missed as important topics that could profit from rigorous analysis, discussion, and good reporting. This chapter reviews two of these misguided issues—the supposed refusal of immigrants and their children to learn English and the fears of downward mobility among immigrant children. It also explores what it believes is a “missing issue”—the ways in which the children of immigrants may be doing much better than comparable native minorities. It highlights the value of comparative research in Europe and the United States on a topic that is neither misguided nor missing: what to do about the eleven million undocumented immigrants currently living in the United States. The chapter overviews research on patterns of socioeconomic mobility and integration among the adult children of immigrants to the United States.Less

The dispossessed precariat

Patrícia Alves de Matos

in Disciplined Agency: Neoliberal Precarity, Generational Dispossession and Call Centre Labour in Portugal

Chapter 7 concentrates mainly on workers' reports of their sense of dispossession, shame and stigma, based on semi-biographical interviews with forty workers. It focuses on three main aspects: how ... More

Chapter 7 concentrates mainly on workers' reports of their sense of dispossession, shame and stigma, based on semi-biographical interviews with forty workers. It focuses on three main aspects: how the uncertainty and vulnerability attached to precarious labour are experienced as dispossession and how this is connected to the experience of downward mobility (‘falling from grace'); social isolation in personal relationships and feelings of shame towards the family; and the interpretation of the stigma attached to call centre operators in Portuguese society. These have an important impact on the way agents constitute their subjectivity and consciousness. Workers' accounts of their circumstances reveal a considerable degree of insight into what exactly it is about the workplace and their working conditions that produces such a profound sense of disenchantment.Less

Exceptions

Jessi Streib

in Privilege Lost: Who Leaves the Upper Middle Class and How They Fall

Previous chapters focused on youth whose identities followed from their resources, making identities and resources difficult to separate. This chapter examines individuals whose resources and ... More

Previous chapters focused on youth whose identities followed from their resources, making identities and resources difficult to separate. This chapter examines individuals whose resources and identities are misaligned as well as those whose resources or identities dramatically changed. These stories show that resources and identities each relate to downward mobility. Among those with the same resource inheritances, identities relate to who falls. And among those with the same identities, resources relate to who falls. Moreover, when inherited resources change, identities and then mobility pathways sometimes change as well. And when identities alone change, mobility pathways tend to change too.Less

Finding Facts: The Great Depression, from the Bottom Up

Mark Pittenger

in Class Unknown: Undercover Investigations of American Work and Poverty from the Progressive Era to the Present

This chapter examines how undercover investigation endured defeats and struggles during the Great Depression. The Depression saw undercover writers shift their focus from work to unemployment. Images ... More

This chapter examines how undercover investigation endured defeats and struggles during the Great Depression. The Depression saw undercover writers shift their focus from work to unemployment. Images of downward mobility and poverty permeated print culture during the 1930s, from the reportage of intellectuals like Edmund Wilson to various magazine articles of the “We Live in the Slums” variety. Sociologists undertook studies of the emergent cultures of the unemployed. Tensions over objectivity among social scientists continued to shape the reception of their work, while novelists and playwrights drew positive critical attention by incorporating undercover experiences into art. In particular, the early 1930s witnessed the emergence of a lively left-wing theater movement that would take various organizational forms throughout the decade. This chapter explains how the appearance and behavior of poor people were especially cast in the spotlight, and in particular how class was increasingly subsumed by culture, during the Depression era.Less

Stay-at-Home Mothers

Jessi Streib

in Privilege Lost: Who Leaves the Upper Middle Class and How They Fall

Women who identify as stay-at-home mothers have only one option for class reproduction: through marriage. Most college-educated professional men now marry college-educated women. Women raised with ... More

Women who identify as stay-at-home mothers have only one option for class reproduction: through marriage. Most college-educated professional men now marry college-educated women. Women raised with college-educated mothers tend to receive enough academic and institutional knowledge from their mothers to graduate from college, marry a college-educated professional, and reproduce their class position. Women raised without college-educated mothers tend to inherit less academic and institutional knowledge and struggle with or reject college. Wanting to become stay-at-home mothers, they marry young—but to working-class men who further their slide out of the upper-middle class.Less

Family Men

Jessi Streib

in Privilege Lost: Who Leaves the Upper Middle Class and How They Fall

There are two types of family men: those raised in conservative communities and with resource strengths, and those raised with resource weaknesses who use the identity to make a virtue of necessity. ... More

There are two types of family men: those raised in conservative communities and with resource strengths, and those raised with resource weaknesses who use the identity to make a virtue of necessity. The former distances themselves from school, college, and work but maintain enough resources to remain insecurely tied to the upper-middle class. The latter distances themselves from school, college, and work too. However, having started with fewer resources, they are unable to stay in the upper-middle class. Still, most are pleased with how their lives unfold: they are on route to marrying, becoming fathers, and providing—becoming the family men they’ve long wanted to be.Less

Rebels

Jessi Streib

in Privilege Lost: Who Leaves the Upper Middle Class and How They Fall

Men raised in liberal communities with low levels of academic and institutional knowledge see no institution that will reward them. In liberal communities, early marriage is frowned upon, and they ... More

Men raised in liberal communities with low levels of academic and institutional knowledge see no institution that will reward them. In liberal communities, early marriage is frowned upon, and they did not receive the resources that would give them status in school, college, or work. They respond by becoming rebels—by repeatedly breaking institutional rules. This identity does not thwart their ability to stay in the upper-middle class at first, but it does after they graduate from college. Most become unemployed or underemployed—and begin to fall out of their original social class.Less

Treading Water in the Great Recession

Chad Broughton

in Boom, Bust, Exodus: The Rust Belt, the Maquilas, and a Tale of Two Cities

In April 2010 George Carney found himself stacking and banding wooden boards to be made into roof and barn trusses. His new workplace was Roberts and Dybdahl, a lumberyard in Milan, Illinois. ... More

In April 2010 George Carney found himself stacking and banding wooden boards to be made into roof and barn trusses. His new workplace was Roberts and Dybdahl, a lumberyard in Milan, Illinois. Carney was paired with a partner, an automated cutting machine with five enormous shark-toothed saw blades that bit loudly into lumber and dropped boards onto the tray below. Now 51, Carney was using his body to earn a living again, even if the job paid only $9 an hour, a shade above the Illinois minimum. The first week he put in 60 hours. “It was a hard job. It was perfect for me.” On April 29, his ninth day on the job, Carney’s life changed forever, again. Two days after an unremarkable Occupational Safety and Health Administration inspection, a two-by-six shot out of the saws like “a ball out of pitching machine.” Its long side smacked right into Carney’s skull, and in an instant his world went dark. In the previous year Carney had been bartending while he lived in his son’s extra bedroom in Matherville, Illinois. He served “fancy, high falutin” drinks at the Oak View Country Club starting in late May 2009, after being unemployed for a couple of months. Members liked Carney because he would remember their names and favorite drink. The “whisky-beer man” learned to make cosmopolitans, martinis, manhattans, and other country club mixes. “I always told myself I was shy, but everyone tells me I’m not. I feel uncomfortable with it, but I seem to be fairly sociable.” In August he added a day job at Milan Lanes, a bowling alley and bar, and was working almost every day. Still, it was a “pretty low point” to be a working-age man living in his son’s extra room. It was a role-reversal that neither of them relished. “You don’t feel like you got anything,” Carney said of the year after leaving the Town Tavern. Then Carney’s father succumbed to cancer in March 2010. Less

Artists and Athletes

Jessi Streib

in Privilege Lost: Who Leaves the Upper Middle Class and How They Fall

Youth with more human and cultural capital than economic capital tend to identify as artists and athletes. These identities hold that individuals should follow their passion rather than following the ... More

Youth with more human and cultural capital than economic capital tend to identify as artists and athletes. These identities hold that individuals should follow their passion rather than following the money—making it seem virtuous that their families have little money compared to those in their class. However, by following their passion without thinking about money, they do not realize that there are few full-time jobs in the arts or in sports. They then graduate from college and struggle to find a professional job—putting them on the path toward downward mobility.Less

Explorers

Jessi Streib

in Privilege Lost: Who Leaves the Upper Middle Class and How They Fall

Youth who grow up with conflicting influences from their resources and communities tend to identify as explorers—those who hold multiple identities at once. This causes them to vacillate between ... More

Youth who grow up with conflicting influences from their resources and communities tend to identify as explorers—those who hold multiple identities at once. This causes them to vacillate between various goals rather than to focus on one. Those who vacillate between goals that lead them to become a professional or marry one tend to reproduce their class position. Others pursue goals that take them away from resource acquisition, leading them onto downwardly mobile paths.Less

Getting Back to Work in the ’Burg

Chad Broughton

in Boom, Bust, Exodus: The Rust Belt, the Maquilas, and a Tale of Two Cities

Tracy Warner Began to worry after she got a rejection letter from Pizza Hut a few weeks after graduating from Western. She hadn’t heard on some manager-level jobs at the Carl Sandburg Mall, but she ... More

Tracy Warner Began to worry after she got a rejection letter from Pizza Hut a few weeks after graduating from Western. She hadn’t heard on some manager-level jobs at the Carl Sandburg Mall, but she expected at least some positive responses from the entry-level ones. “We wish you luck in finding a job worthy of your skills,” read the Pizza Hut letter. “What’s that?” Warner said, exasperated. “Either my skills suck, or I have too many skills. Which is it? ’Cause I’m kind of curious! It’s flattering to be overqualified but it doesn’t pay the bills.” Warner hadn’t expected a dream job to suddenly appear, but she had hoped for more than a quiet phone and a growing pile of rejection letters. She just needed something, anything, to get by. Several months into 2007, the newly minted and distinguished WIU graduate was still unemployed and uninsured. Although sworn off factory life, a desperate Warner applied to Farmland Foods. When Maytag shuttered in 2004, Farmland, a massive, loud, hog disassembly operation, became the largest employer in this part of western Illinois. With about 1,200 to 1,400 cutters and slicers and a $60 million payroll, the slaughterhouse employed a couple hundred more than BNSF, the largest employer in Galesburg. Like Mike Smith, Warner was just looking for a wage, any wage, with a “1” in front of it, and Farmland, on Monmouth’s northern edge, was close. It was so close, in fact, that on some days Warner could smell the tangy mix of rendered hog, hydrogen sulfide, methane, and whatever else made up that vile smell in her house, a mile to the south. Farmland was a last resort for former Maytag workers. The jobs there, involving tearing apart pig carcasses with razor-sharp knives and powerful pneumatic tools were, frankly, tougher than appliance work. Perhaps worst was the “sticker,” which slit the throats of about 1,000 shrieking animals each hour for about $12 an hour. That was one pig every four seconds, at about a penny per kill. Less