L’expérience de la mobilité sociale- Plaidoyer pour une approche par le discours

Abstract

The Experience of Social Mobility — A Plea for a Discourse Approach: This article discusses the theoretical and methodological debates concerning the experience and consequences of upward social mobility between generations. The methods employed by researchers working on this subject are diverse, and the results they arrive at are sometimes contradictory. This article proposes, firstly, to give an overview of the different traditions of studying the experience of social mobility in order to identify the conditions for potential ‘‘cumulative’’ knowledge. In a second step, we argue that it is mainly through a study of the narratives of mobility that one can, simultaneously and comprehensively, grasp the ambivalence and multiplicity of effects that produce upward social mobility.