Experience Of Social Mobility Research Articles

Crossing the borders of social class: Social mobility as translational experience

ABSTRACT This article suggests that we might conceive of the experience of upward social mobility as a form of translational experience and view the socially mobile individual as both translatum and translator. Acknowledging that the experience of social mobility varies enormously in its specificity, the article’s temporal focus is on upward social mobility in Britain since the expansion of higher education in the early 1990s. It draws on the author’s own experience of social mobility and on the memoirs Hungry by Grace Dent (2021), Respectable by Lynsey Hanley (2017), and People Like Us (2020) by Hashi Mohamed, and relates the socially mobile self to the phenomenon of textual translation. It also theorises the ‘return’ – post-translation communication with the ‘source culture’ or social class of origin – and the process of back-and-forth translation in which socially mobile individuals are constantly engaged.

SYSTEM OF SOCIAL ELEVATORS, ADAPTATION AND INTEGRATION FOR RURAL YOUTH

This article studies the issues of adaptation and integration of rural youth in society using a system of social elevators. The author considers and analyzes the current situation and prospects of rural youth within the framework of the theoretical concepts of "social elevators" by P. Sorokin and from the point of the concept of "precariat" by G. Standing. The study concludes that the absence or ineffectiveness of social elevators in the context of growing inequality and social stratification in society creates conditions for developing of marginalization among rural youth, increasing inequality and social tension. The author tries to explore the foreign experience of social mobility and determine conditions favorable for the development and functioning of social mobility for rural youth in Kazakhstan. It also identifies factors which impede full development of social mobility among rural youth and increase inequality in society, and measures that can be countered against them. The author emphasizes the need for an integral approach for solving the problems of rural youth, reducing inequality and creating conditions for full functioning of social mobility channels, mechanisms for adaptation and integration of rural youth.

‘I was told the position has already been filled’

The article investigates educational and career paths of educated Roma youth in Hungary as striving to enter quality employment in the business sector. While the employment rate of well-educated Roma youth is high compared to the general Roma population, their sectoral distribution is skewed towards self-employment, and towards the public sector vis-à-vis private sector. Our article investigates the reasons for the low presence of educated Roma in the business sphere, a sector which holds the greatest potential of occupational and social mobility. We use a survey dataset of educated young Roma (N=381), and also rely on in-depth interviews with youth from the same group, which provided us with a better understanding of the individual experiences of social mobility. We identify some of the main barriers linked to business sector employment of the Roma youth. By utilising the Bourdesian theoretical lens, we focus on the importance of cultural habitus and its misrecognition in professional settings. The paper analyses successful capital mobilizations of those striving towards/ experiencing social mobility, while discussing experiences of failures too. These findings are unique in their nature as they pinpoint individual mobility strategies, the role of different forms of capitals in strive for jobs and later in early professional career.

Re-examining Social Mobility: Migrants’ Relationally, Temporally, and Spatially Embedded Mobility Trajectories

Social mobility research mainly investigates directional change in socio-economic circumstance. This article contributes to the strand of social mobility research that examines subjective experiences of economic movement. It analyses social mobility as a set of relationally, temporally and spatially embedded social practices, subjectively experienced and interpreted. The interactive nexus between social and spatial mobility is a fruitful line of inquiry, and the experiences of international migrants are distinctly suited for developing this analysis. Drawing on a qualitative study of migrants’ mobilities, both social and spatial, post-arrival in Australia, we argue that social mobility is experienced as sets of contingent social practices. These in/variably co-exist with aspirations for a sense of belonging and connectedness, a sense of security and other non-economic needs and desires and are also always adjusted over time. In addition, migrants’ status as legal, cultural or social Others shapes the experience of social mobility in distinctive ways.

Experience of social mobility and support for redistribution: Beating the odds or blaming the system?

How does the experience of social mobility affect people's distributive preferences? Using cross-country survey data and a survey experiment, I examine the effects of experienced social mobility on support for redistribution. The results indicate an asymmetric relationship - experiencing downward mobility increases support for redistribution while experiencing upward mobility does not affect distributive preferences. In line with a common attribution bias, the self-serving bias, those with negative mobility experiences 'blame the system' and extrapolate from their negative experience onto society at large, which increases their demand for redistribution. Conversely, those who experienced positive mobility believe they `beat the odds' and do not extrapolate from their experience onto perceptions of societal mobility, leading to no less support for redistribution. This finding suggests significant implications at the aggregate and a potential demand-side explanation for the Great Gatsby Curve: As overall absolute mobility decreases (increases), ceteris paribus, demand for redistribution also decreases (increases).

Moving into multiculturalism. Multicultural attitudes of socially mobile individuals without a migration background

ABSTRACT In various Western European cities, international migration has transformed the former ethnic majority into a numerical ethnic minority. We study people without a migration background to shed light on the former majority’s attitudes towards multiculturalism in these majority-minority contexts. Among those without a migration background, we specifically focus on socially mobile individuals in order to disentangle the influence of primary and secondary socialization on attitudes towards multiculturalism. Using survey data on Amsterdam, Antwerp, Malmo, Rotterdam and Vienna (n = 2,457), we found that, whilst controlling for the effects of primary and secondary socialization, both upward and downward mobility associates to more optimistic multicultural attitudes. We argue that the experience of social mobility equips people with a reflexivity which allows them to have a more optimistic perspective on the multi-ethnic city. In this way, this article improves our understanding of why some people are more willing than others to adapt to multi-ethnic contexts.

Teachers’ Narratives of Life Satisfaction, Social Mobility, and Practical Sense of Inequalities in Chile

The academic literature argues that understandings of the subjective experience of social mobility differ from objective measure of social mobility – based on occupational patterns of movement – because people tend to conflate changes of the social structure (social change) and changes within the social structure (social mobility), resulting in a limited sense of social inequalities. This article explores subjective understandings of social mobility through the lens of Chilean school-teachers’ narratives of their life trajectories. Methodologically, data were collected through in-depth interviews with 41 teachers who live in Santiago. They were also asked to draw a timeline with the main transitions in their lives. The findings of this article show that teachers’ evaluations of their trajectories are first expressed as narratives relating to their life satisfaction. Differential forms of social comparison that emerge from teachers’ evaluations of their trajectories reveal how people position themselves within a broader structure of social inequalities. In consequence, teachers’ evaluations of their trajectories contain implicit or explicit narratives of social mobility which are often bound up with a subjective sense of social change and life-course change. This article demonstrates that lay understandings of social mobility potentially illuminate academic understandings, by addressing a multidimensional and fluid model of social mobility as well as the practical experiences of inequalities that frame people’s everyday lives.

‘I Don’t Want to Completely Lose Myself’: Social Mobility as Movement Across Classed, Ethnicised, and Gendered Spaces

This article explores how subjective experiences of social mobility are informed by dimensions of identity other than class (e.g. ethnicity, gender). Drawing on in-depth interviews with British-born young women of Bangladeshi Muslim, working class origins in higher education, I critically interrogate their articulations of class positioning and trajectory and the interplay between participation in education and employment and gendered identities. Findings evidence the multifarious and value-ridden character of class signifiers, the relational nature of class positioning and the entrenchment of middle-classness and Whiteness, and testify to the compounding tensions experienced by upwardly mobile individuals of minority ethnic origins. The pursuit of upward mobility through participation in higher education and employment is also shown to entail shifts in gendered expectations and strains in performing valued gendered identities. Ultimately, I argue that social mobility processes are better understood as involving a movement across material and symbolic spaces where markers, dispositions, and practices linked to individuals’ class, ethnicity, religion, and gender acquire differential value. This intersectional lens enables a complex and nuanced picture to emerge, which foregrounds multiple tensions, displacements, and resulting inequalities in experiences and outcomes.

Different Routes to University: Exploring Intersectional and Multi-Dimensional Social Mobility Under A Comparative Approach in Chile

The article aims to cover a gap in research, including an ethnic dimension to explore the relationship between people’s trajectories and their experiences at university. Drawing on a retrospective life-story approach, the article compares how 55 respondents of different social origins recount both their routes to university and their experiences at university. By adopting an intersectional lens of analysis, we argue that differential experiences at university affect people’s trajectories of social mobility. Data from two qualitative studies are analysed in this article to explore how class and ethnic background, but also people’s location in urban or rural areas and other aspects of their family situation, affected their educational routes to earning a university place. We argue for the subjective experience of social mobility as a process of achievement, but one fraught with numerous obstacles and challenges. This article shows that respondents from working-class social backgrounds encounter different barriers because of the lack of socioeconomic resources, previous educational disadvantages, class/ethnic discrimination, and family cultural background. Meanwhile, respondents from middle-class and upper-class backgrounds have to face different issues related to their families’ expectations of maintaining their social status. Based on those findings, we suggest that research on social mobility needs to consider multiple and intersectional dimensions that frame an individual’s life trajectories, instead of focusing on movements between fixed educational or occupational positions.

Experience of Social Mobility and Support for Redistribution: Beating the Odds or Blaming the System?

Experience of Social Mobility and Support for Redistribution: Beating the Odds or Blaming the System?

Experience of Social Mobility and Support for Redistribution: Beating the Odds or Blaming the System?

Experience of Social Mobility and Support for Redistribution: Beating the Odds or Blaming the System?

Connecting Work To Workers’ Social Past: A Dispositional Analysis of Police Work

AbstractThis article explores the impact of experiences police officers went through before they joined the Force on how they see and perform their job. I propose a new approach to police culture and practices based on a Bourdieu-inspired model of analysis, which includes its subsequent development by Lahire’s ‘dispositional analysis’. The model looks at how dispositions interiorized—particularly through the experience of social mobility and gender socialization—have a great impact on how police officers see and perform their job. The results suggest that divisions within police culture, long acknowledged by criminologists and sociologists, can be explained by the prior socialization of police officers.

Ethnic, Religious and Gender Differences in Intragenerational Economic Mobility in England and Wales

This study uses data from consecutive England and Wales censuses to examine the intragenerational economic mobility of individuals with different ethnicities, religions and genders between 1971 and 2011, over time and across cohorts. The findings suggest more downward and less upward mobility among Black Caribbean, Indian Sikh and Muslim people with Bangladeshi, Indian and Pakistani ethnicities, relative to white British groups, and more positive relative progress among Indian Hindu people, but also some variation in the experiences of social mobility between individuals even in the same ethnic groups. For some groups, those becoming adults or migrating to the UK since 1971 occupy an improved position compared with older or longer resident people, but this is not universal. Findings suggest that these persistent inequalities will only be effectively addressed with attention to the structural factors which disadvantage particular ethnic and religious groups, and the specific ways in which these affect women.

Beyond Social Mobility: Biographies, Habitus and Responses to Changing ‘Conditions of Existence’ among University Scholarship Students

Wider access to higher education at a global level has been accompanied by growing literature on experiences of social mobility often using the concept of habitus as a theoretical tool to frame responses to changes in ‘conditions of existence’. Drawing on the case study of a scholarship programme within an elite university in Lebanon, through in-depth interviews with students and university faculty and staff, this article elaborates on the typologies in responses that emerged as students position themselves in a new environment. These typologies, in contrast to the literature which presents them as a result of alterations in the habitus, appear to be related to each other and occur simultaneously within one person’s trajectory. As such, instead of viewing these responses as degrees of incorporation of each set of schemes of perceptions from both fields, the context of origin and the new social context appear to be multi-faceted, and the interaction between them is complex. I argue, along the lines of Lahire’s dispositional perspective, that the situation of contradictory experiences is not exceptional but characterizes all individuals to a certain extent, especially in the Lebanese context which is distinguished by its diversity in terms of regional and religious affiliations and in which class intersects with other types of identifications.

"You Always Remain Slightly an Outsider": Workplace Experiences of Academics from Working-Class or Impoverished Backgrounds.

Debates surrounding class inequality and social mobility often highlight the role of higher education in reducing income inequality and promoting equity through upward social mobility. We explore the lived experience of social mobility through an analysis of 11 semistructured interviews with Canadian academics who self-identified as having working-class or impoverished family origins. While economic capital increased substantially, cultural capital and habitus left many feeling like cultural outsiders. Isolation-both chosen and imposed-reduced professional networks, diminishing social capital. Caught between social worlds, participants mobilized symbolic capital in moral boundary marking, aligning themselves strategically with either their current class status or their working-class roots. While upward social mobility is a path toward reducing economic inequality, the lived experience of social mobility suggests it may exact a high emotional cost.

How Intergenerational Mobility Shapes Attitudes toward Work and Welfare

Past experiences and expectations about the future shape how people think about work and welfare. Given the uncertainty many young people face when entering the labor market, we investigate whether 1) young peoples’ experiences of social mobility and 2) their future mobility expectations impact their attitudes regarding the meaning of work and welfare. Drawing on the concepts of self-interest and deservingness, we examine how both the experiences and expectations of intergenerational social mobility influence the ways in which young adults view the so-called moral dimension of work and welfare. Results of logistic regression analyses of around 11,000 young adults in eleven countries suggest that the relationship between mobility and individuals’ views on work and welfare varies depending on the dimension of mobility (economic and social origins, for example), with expected future mobility exerting a stronger effect on attitudes than past mobility experiences. We find that self-interest, not empathy with one’s social origins, appears to be the primary driver of these attitudes.

Social Mobility and Life Satisfaction across European Countries: A Compositional Perspective on Dissociative Consequences of Social Mobility

A classic claim in social mobility effects research holds that social mobility is a disruptive and harmful experience. It has been suggested that the experience of social mobility is less disruptive when mobility at the national level is high, because this increases the social and cultural heterogeneity of social classes, which may facilitate the adaptation to the social class of destination. In this article we empirically test the tenability of this claim for social class mobility and life satisfaction. Using Diagonal Reference Models on data for 44 European countries from the 2008 European Values Study, we find evidence for processes of acculturation: the life satisfaction of socially mobile individuals is associated with the class of origin and destination. There is no evidence for effects of social mobility over and above those of social class position of origin and destination. Interestingly, in contrast to suggestions from the literature, national upward or downward mobility rates do not moderate the effect of social mobility on life satisfaction. This study suggests that class heterogeneity does not influence the difficulty of the adaptation to the social class of destination.

Less advantaged, more optimistic? Subjective well-being among rural, migrant and urban populations in contemporary China

Using a recent national dataset from the China Family Panel Studies, this study provides new evidence regarding the subjective well-being puzzle across multiple indicators among rural, migrant and urban populations in contemporary China. The results show that rural people on average have higher levels of life satisfaction than do migrants or urban residents, despite their disadvantaged economic situations. The decomposition analyses reveal that subjective social status plays a substantial role in accounting for group disparities in life satisfaction, whereas objective social status and experiences of social mobility have less explanatory power. These findings suggest the importance of within-group comparison in shaping individuals' well-being in segregated societies such as China.

A habitus divided? The effects of social mobility on the habitus and consumption

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to examine social mobility. Social mobility has traditionally been thought to result in a divided habitus. However, recent work has suggested that for the socially mobile, habitus may become blended or even that individuals can choose their habitus in a strategic fashion. Each position has received empirical support, raising two questions. First, does the experience of social mobility result in a habitus that is more divided or strategic? Second, what factors affect this outcome?Design/methodology/approachThese questions are investigated by conducting depth interviews with people who have experienced social mobility.FindingsThe direction of social mobility determines what effect social mobility has on the habitus. For the downwardly mobile, the habitus appears to remain rooted in one’s former class. This is because downward movement is devalued, and so there is less incentive for those who experience it to change their thoughts, feelings or behaviors to match their new position. For the upwardly mobile, the habitus changes slowly. The trajectory and the subjective experience also affect the outcome. Two strategies respondents use to deal with social mobility are noted.Research limitations/implicationsBourdieu’s notion of the divided habitus is reconsidered and compared to newer incarnations, and the importance of the direction of social mobility is underlined. This work explains why upward and downward mobility result in different changes in the habitus.Practical implicationsInvestigating the experience of social mobility is particularly important given the frequent, dynamic nature of mobility in European countries. Two strategies used to manage downward mobility are identified.Originality/valueThis work reconsiders Bourdieu’s notion of the divided habitus and newer incarnations and explains why upward and downward mobility result in different changes in the habitus. Such a finding is not only an invitation to expand on the notion of habitus but also works to draw attention to other factors that play a role in habitus and strategies used to manage change.

Contextualising transformed intergenerational relationships in China: using adult daughters’ mate selection as an example

Recent studies indicate that a shift from the notion of filial piety to a contract of reciprocal care characterises the changing intergenerational relationship in Asian societies. Using women’s experience of dealing with the parent–child relationship during their mate selection process as an example, this article seeks to further examine transformed intergenerational relationships in China. Findings of the study show that when contextualising the contract of reciprocal care in China, the aspect of intergenerational negotiation concerning adult children’s mate selection should not be underestimated. In outlining how Chinese individuals’ redefinition and experience of intergenerational relationships are shaped by intersectional factors such as parents’ economic wellbeing, residential proximity, parental material and emotional investment influenced by the one-child policy, and changes of daughters’ mating values due to their experience of social mobility, the study contributes to the ongoing exploration of how modern intimate relations are situationally shaped by local material, cultural and political circumstances.