Industrialization and Intergenerational Social Mobility in a Rhenish Textile Town

Abstract

Industrialization and Intergenerational Social Mobility in a Rhenish Textile Town Historians and sociologists have assessed negatively the opportunities for social mobility in nineteenth-century Germany, especially the prospects for the upward mobility of laborers. Thus, for example, Crew, in his study of the mining and metallurgical city of Bochum, claimed that the unwillingness of workers to pursue upward mobility corresponded to the real structure of opportunity. He thereby challenged Dahrendorf's emphasis on the failure of Germans to modernize their attitudes toward social mobility, but he nonetheless sustained Dahrendorf's contentions about Imperial Germany's exceptional social system by concluding that significant upward mobility in Bochum was neither widespread nor rapid. Rates of intergenerational mobility were low both in absolute terms and in comparison to those observed in America. Moreover, this lack of opportunity for upward social mobility has long been adduced as an explanation for the sharpness of class antagonism in Germany and the strength of the organized social democratic movement.1