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What Is Social Mobility and Why Does It Matter?

Introduction

High rates of social mobility – that is, movement between different positions in a society’s system of social stratification – are widely seen as a mark of a modern egalitarian society. Or to put it the other way round, a society in which top positions are reserved for the children of the privileged elite and where there are barriers preventing those from less privileged backgrounds from advancing is widely seen as retrograde. Sociologists often see a high rate of social mobility as a core feature of a liberal and democratic society in contrast to the immobility characterizing pre-modern societies. A range of international organizations, such as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the World Bank, advocate policies to promote social mobility.

There are several different reasons why people might wish to promote social mobility and to oppose the inheritance of privilege. First, there is a straightforward moral argument. In western liberal societies, prevalent values emphasize equality of opportunity and fairness in the sense that people should be treated according to their merits and not according to irrelevant criteria such as the colour of their skin, their gender or what their parents did for a living. These values are exemplified by anti-discrimination legislation across the European Union and developed nations more generally – although this legislation has primarily focused on criteria such as racial background, gender, sexual orientation and disability rather than on social class origins. To be sure, equality of opportunity is not the same concept as social mobility, although it is widely assumed that greater equality of opportunity will lead to greater social mobility.

Secondly, there is an efficiency argument in favour of social mobility. It has long been evident that the appointment of privileged but incompetent individuals to leadership positions can have disastrous consequences. It used to be the case for example that wealthy, well-connected individuals could purchase commissions in the British army (although interestingly not the navy) without any test of their competence. This worked well enough in peacetime, but the downside became obvious during the Crimean War of 1853–6 when incompetent leadership resulted in unnecessary disasters such as the Charge of the Light Brigade. Purchase of commissions was shortly afterwards abolished, following government inquiries into the army’s failings during the war.

More recently, academic economists (and some traditions in sociology, such as functionalism) have developed general theories showing that exclusion of individuals on the basis of irrelevant criteria is inefficient and reduces productivity. The economist Gary Becker presented the classic account of this in his 1957 book, The Economics of Discrimination. Discrimination essentially means that less productive individuals are preferred over more productive candidates who possess some stigmatized but irrelevant characteristic (irrelevant from the point of view of job performance) such as skin colour or social background. Eliminating forms of discrimination and appointing the most productive individuals will therefore tend to lead to better economic performance. Somewhat surprisingly economists do not appear to have actually tested whether firms that discriminate are more likely to go out of business, but sociologist Devah Pager has shown that in the United States firms which had discriminated against Black applicants were twice as likely as those who had not discriminated to have gone out of business six years later (Pager 2016).

An important variant of this efficiency argument (developed interestingly by psychologists rather than economists) holds that diversity may be positively beneficial in its own right (Maznevski 1994). Bringing together people with a range of different experiences and ideas is argued to facilitate a more innovative and dynamic business culture. Homogeneous groups, composed perhaps of middle-aged white men from a narrow range of elite schools, may be more likely to engage in ‘group think’ and to stick with the received wisdom. Newcomers with different perspectives bring in new, but uncomfortable, ideas. Thus evidence suggests that companies with a strong female representation at board and top management level perform better than those without, and that gender-diverse boards have a positive impact on performance. Lord Davies, in his independent review of ‘Women on Boards’, concluded, ‘It is clear that boards make better decisions where a range of voices, drawing on different life experiences, can be heard. That mix of voices must include women’ (Davies 2011: 3).

A third set of arguments focuses on the wider social and political consequences of immobility and social closure. A society in which a privileged elite is entrenched and in which there are major obstacles to the advancement of people from humble backgrounds could well be storing up discontent, class conflict and political instability. Conversely, a more open society might be more stable. The French political theorist and historian Alexis de Tocqueville, after travelling to America in 1831, suggested that the great opportunities for social mobility there contributed to the stability of political democracy in the country (de Tocqueville 1835).

Rather more recently, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson in their book Why Nations Fail (2012) have argued that ‘extractive’ institutions (which enable a privileged elite to cream off the nation’s wealth) are a major reason why nations fail, whereas inclusive institutions (which give ordinary citizens a chance to progress) facilitate political stability. Less dramatically, we might expect social closure to lead to political conflict between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’. A more open society might therefore be a more stable society.

However, there are some important critiques of the idea that increased social mobility should be a central target of policy. One rival and more critical account holds that social mobility is of only secondary importance compared with ‘the brute fact of class’. A highly unequal society in which there is a great deal of movement, both up and down, is not everyone’s idea of a good society. Thus John Westergaard and Henrietta Resler in their classic study Class in a Capitalist Society argued that social mobility concerns ‘the recruitment of people to classes; not the brute fact of the existence of classes. It is that which is primary’ (1975: 280). For these critics, changing the personnel who occupy the top (or bottom) positions in society does not alter the fact that some are privileged and others disadvantaged.

Another line of criticism focuses on the possible downsides of a highly mobile society. In a mobile society, there is going to be downward as well as upward mobility. Downward mobility will have both psychological and material consequences for those affected. Indeed, psychological research by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky showed that there is an important asymmetry between gains and losses. Psychologically, losses outweigh gains – for example, the pain from losing £1,000 might only be fully compensated by the pleasure of earning £2,000 (Kahneman and Tversky 1979). This raises the possibility that the subjective losses of the downwardly mobile are not fully compensated by the subjective gains of the upwardly mobile. It is conceivable, therefore, that overall well-being might be lower in a highly mobile society.

Furthermore, apart from the downwardly mobile, those people who are immobile but stuck at the bottom may feel disgruntled. T. H. Marshall, for example, speculated that ‘When the race is to the swift, the slow, who are always in a majority, grow tired of their perpetual defeat and become more disgruntled than if there were no race at all. They begin to regard the prizes as something to which they are entitled and of which they are unjustly deprived’ (Marshall 1938: 110–11). This argument foreshadowed the famous finding in the foundational wartime study of relative deprivation. In researching The American Soldier, Samuel Stouffer and his colleagues found to their surprise that morale tended to be lower in units which had higher rates of promotion than in those units which had lower prospects of promotion. The authors’ interpretation was that, if the norm is to receive promotion, people who do not gain promotion are more likely to experience feelings of relative deprivation. In contrast, if promotion is a rare event, failure to gain promotion will not be so psychologically upsetting (Stouffer et al. 1949: 250–3).

Thirdly, the politicians tend to slide rather too readily between arguments about equality of opportunity to conclusions about the desirability of increasing rates of social mobility. To be sure, greater equality of opportunity may, other things being equal, tend to increase rates of upward and downward mobility, but there are plenty of other reasons – as we will show in later chapters – why rates of mobility might be high or low. There is no one-to-one relationship between rates of social mobility and equality of opportunity. Fluidity can be a consequence of constraint rather than of opportunity and thus may have a perverse character. There is, for example, evidence that, among African Americans in the United States, there was a weak relationship between the...