Social mobility

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Social mobility is lower in countries with higher inequality (here in English)

Social mobility describes the movement of individuals or groups between different socio-economic positions. For example, a change in occupation or position in professional life brings about changes in the social relational space , which are represented in ascension or descent ( vertical mobility ) , based on an imaginary order of social class or social stratification . Horizontal mobility is the change in occupation or activity without changing the social class or social class.

In contrast, spatial or territorial mobility describes the movement of individuals in geographical space (see also migration and emigration ).

term

The term "social mobility" was coined in 1929 by the Russian-American sociologist Pitirim Sorokin . He used it to describe upward and downward movements as well as lateral movements in what he called “social space”. These take place on the basis of changes in economic, class , occupational and settlement structures (e.g. due to industrialization, decline in employment in agriculture, urbanization, increase in the number of employees), due to demographic shifts (e.g. . by changing the average number of children or changing the generation gap ) as well as changes in the education system.

Social permeability is the name given to the easier possibility or increased probability of social mobility within the framework of an order of classes or strata. This increases z. B. through improved educational opportunities, through the loss of the influence of oligarchies and elites or political interventions such as the prohibition of discrimination against underprivileged ethnic groups or castes . The prestige of a social position and the gratuities associated with it (e.g. income) can also play a role in assessing the upward or downward direction of mobility.

Social mobility is a manifestation of social change. A distinction is made between intragenerational and intergenerational mobility.

Intra-generational mobility

The intra-generational social mobility occurs within a human life. It includes a change in the social position of a person through training , promotion , often also through inheritance from father and father-in-law or through structural changes in the economic structure (for example, through the closure of coal mines and the transition to alternative occupations); this is often associated with spatial mobility.

Intergenerational mobility / class mobility

Under intergenerational mobility , social mobility in the narrower sense, means the social Relegation, which takes place from one generation to the next. In a broader sense, it encompasses several generations (e.g. in the 19th and 20th centuries the not untypical occupation sequence farmer → elementary school teacher → doctor). Social research has often only measured social mobility as father-son or mother-daughter mobility.

Central questions

Any investigation of trends in social mobility is inevitably a foray into social and economic history , which should always include research into the causes. Nevertheless, mobility research often stops at the description.

The development of social mobility during the industrial revolution was the subject of numerous studies, which gave the impression that this was a singular development that lasted at a high level at least until the First World War . For the USA there are very high (around 80%), for England and Wales high, for France medium (almost 50%) and for the less industrialized Sweden (almost 30%) low values ​​for upward vertical mobility through job changes , Income increase, etc. In Germany, this form of mobility only reached a maximum of 50% between 1901 and 1905.

However, there are doubts as to whether this phase can be described as a time of one-off social change. In this phase, spatial mobility seems to have been much more pronounced than social mobility. In addition, mobility research during this phase focused strongly on commercial and port cities such as Cologne , Marseille or Boston , but less on slowly growing industrial or mining cities. Stephan Thernstrom examined the mobility in the small industrial town of Newburyport in New England between 1850 and 1880, in which there was also an immigration of Irish workers, and found a low intergenerational upward mobility with good social integration.

For the 20th century, most studies assume that mobility will stagnate at a relatively high level until the end of the 1950s, when mobility increased again.

According to Reinhard Schüren , four questions are of particular importance in recent research:

  1. The question of the connection between industrialization , change in occupational structure and occupational mobility, the latter often being interpreted as an indicator of the openness of a society .
  2. The interest in the changing degree of openness and permeability of a society, documented in the accessibility of elite positions through professional recruitment and through marriage circles . If this permeability is low, one speaks of high self-recruitment by the elites or professional groups.
  3. The interest in the social and political meaning and impact of mobility. Above all, questions were asked about the significance of opportunities and barriers to advancement for the life chances, awareness and movement of the working class .
  4. Frequent or increasing occupational mobility or marriage relationships between two or more social groups can be interpreted as an expression of greater or increasing social closeness between them, and conversely, low or decreasing mobility as an expression of pronounced or increasing social distance .

The thesis of a “ meritocratization ” of the social positioning process, according to which upward mobility is determined by education, does not apply to those born up to 1969 in West Germany. It could be shown that the relationship between education and social positioning is largely stable across several cohorts and even declines in the youngest cohort.

However, the recent increase in social mobility observed in most industrialized countries has not fundamentally reduced inequality of opportunity. On the contrary, migration to these countries is often initially associated with the downward mobility of migrants, as their human and social capital is partially devalued. The increasing spatial internal migration in Europe is also not associated with upward social mobility.

Methodical questions

Since classes and strata as well as occupations and employees in branches of industry are dynamic categories, the scope of which is constantly changing, complex methodological problems arise when measuring intergenerational mobility. From the point of view of scaling theory , the categories just mentioned are the measurement of mobility with nominal scales, which means that the values ​​in different countries or across several generations cannot be directly compared. Even if there has been no lack of efforts to deal with this problem, it is not possible to achieve complete comparability of data at this scaling level - with the exception of partial solutions.

It looks more favorable when comparing mobility on the basis of ordinal scales or quasimetric scales, i.e. with income , years of education , property and tax bracket . From these synthetic scales are often formed, such as social prestige and social status , which represent a statistical synthesis of the criteria just mentioned.

So there is no such thing as “social mobility per se”, only mobility on or within a defined scale. To establish that social mobility, for example on the educational scale (measured in years of education and qualification levels ) has increased or decreased, it is necessary to normalize this educational scale to standard values . However, mobility research has never worked exclusively with quantitative methods.

literature

  • Pitirim Sorokin: Social Mobility. New York: Harper 1927.
  • Peter A. Berger: Social Mobility. In: Bernhard Schäfers, Wolfgang Zapf (Hrsg.): Concise dictionary for society in Germany. Leske & Budrich, Opladen 2001, pp. 595–605, ISBN 978-3-8100-2926-3 ( PDF file: 68 kB; 10 pages, uni-rostock.de ).
  • Hartmut Kaelble : Historical mobility research: Western Europe and the USA in the 19th and 20th centuries. Darmstadt 1978.
  • Hartmut Kaelble: Social mobility and equal opportunities in the 19th and 20th centuries. Germany in an international comparison (= critical studies on historical studies . Volume 55). Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1983, ISBN 3-525-35713-3 .
  • Reinhard Schüren: Social mobility. Patterns, Changes, and Conditions in the 19th and 20th Centuries. Winkel, St. Katharina 1989, ISBN 3-922661-51-3 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Wolfgang J. Koschnick: Standard dictionary for the social sciences. Volume 2. Munich a. a. 1993, ISBN 3-598-11080-4 .
  2. ↑ Kaelble 1978, p. 38.
  3. ↑ Kaelble 1978, p. 12.
  4. ^ Stephan Thernstrom: Poverty and Progress: Social Mobility in a Nineteenth Century City. Harvard University Press 1980.
  5. ↑ Kaelble 1978, pp. 22, 26 f.
  6. ↑ On the mobility of elites see Kaelble 1978, p. 107 ff.
  7. ↑ See also Kaelble 1978, p. 40 ff.
  8. ↑ Reinhard Pollak: Education and social mobility in Germany: Institutional and historical causes for the development of social mobility over five birth cohorts 1920-1969. Diploma thesis University of Mannheim Online (PDF).
  9. ↑ For the USA: George J. Borjas, Barry R. Chiswick: Foundations of Migration Economics. Oxford University Press 2019.
  10. ↑ Michael Braun, Ettore Recchi: No limits, more opportunities? Migration and social mobility within the EU. In: Peter A. Berger, Anja Weiß, (Ed.): Transnationalization of Social Inequality. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag 2008, pp. 161-183.