Social Mobility for the 21st Century: Everyone a Winner?

Description

Social Mobility for the 21st Century addresses experiences of social mobility, and the detailed processes through which entrenched, intergenerationally transmitted privilege is reproduced. Contributions include (but are not limited to) family relationships, students’ encounters with higher education, narratives of work careers, and ‘mobility identities’. The book intends to challenge both the framework of the more traditional approach, and the politicisation of mobility which casts ‘mobility’ as a possession, a commodity or a character trait, and threatens to castigate the ‘non-mobile’ as carrying a personal responsibility for their situation. This book presents critical analyses of routes into social mobility, the experience of social mobility, and the political and social implications of social mobility’s ‘panacea’ status. Drawing on the work of established scholars and more recent entrants, the chapters offer a fresh look at social mobility, opening up the topic to a wider readership among the profession and beyond, and stimulating further debate. This book will appeal to higher level students and scholars of sociology alike, as well as having a broad cross-disciplinary appeal. Cover Half Title Series Information Title Page Copyright Page Epigraph Table of contents Figures Tables Notes on contributors Acknowledgements Introduction: Everyone a winner? Analytic levels in social mobility: people, classes, and methodology Social mobility as ideological discourse Everyone a winner? Sociological accounts of social mobility A third way? Chapter 1 Social mobility: Which ways now? Alternative sociological perspectives Absolute mobility and occupational transition A new mobility regime? Some concluding observations Chapter 2 Disruption in the working-class family: The early origins of social mobility and habitus clivé Families, habitus, and mobility Methodology Carrying the torch: ambition and unfulfilled family potential Divergence from family, and defensive trajectories Conclusion: infinitesimal breaks from family Chapter 3 Mobile immobilities: The formation of habitus in ‘disadvantaged’ families Data and methods The Care group Can a habitus be ‘adaptive’? Stead Street Encouraging and discouraging education Generating habitus and consequent dissociation Chapter 4 Getting up and staying up: Understanding social mobility over three generations in Britain Data and methods Absolute mobility rates from a two-generation and three-generation perspective Relative mobility chances from a three-generation perspective The impact of fathers’ social mobility histories on their socio-economic characteristics Mediating effect of other family socio-economic characteristics on children’s mobility chances Conclusions Chapter 5 Time, accumulation and trajectory: Bourdieu and social mobility Time and social mobility Bourdieu as a sociologist of dynamic change An elaborated Bourdieusian approach to social mobility: force, trajectory, and ‘class ceilings’ Habitus and temporality Conclusion Chapter 6 Moving on up?: Social mobility, class and higher education The politics of social mobility The research study: Paired Peers Phase 2 Graduates in the labour market The graduate game: winning hands and losing cards A tale of two law students: Zoe and Nathan The same as my parents: cultural immobility? Fitting in or sticking out Moving up against the odds: the story of Harvey Conclusions Chapter 7 ‘To become upwardly mobile you have to be a Swede’: Women’s upward class mobility in the neo-liberal Swedish ... The failed promise of social democracy: racialised and classed inequalities in Sweden Methodological framework ‘Totally obsessed’ with getting away Becoming upwardly mobile in a racialised Sweden Concluding remarks: the only way is up? Chapter 8 Experiencing upward mobility: The case of self-employed businessmen Experiencing self-employment Mobility: masculinity or self-employment? Two mobility case studies: Tom and Danny Key theme 1: ‘I want it all yesterday’: frustration and impatience Key theme 2: self-confidence Key theme 3: spouses Conclusion Chapter 9 Social mobility talk: Class-making in neo-liberal times Who goes there? The persons of social mobility Producing valued subjects Values and markets Denial of the social: class/not-class Concluding remarks: who built the wall? Chapter 10 Promoting young people’s social mobility: Applying sociological perspectives to frame social policy objectives Individual responsibility for social mobility Shaping young people’s aspirations Small steps and giant leaps Proximate ambitions and achievements Concluding observations Chapter 11 The cruelty of social mobility: Individual success at the cost of collective failure The personal costs of social mobility Social mobility for boys Akim: the case study of a young working-class Asian man Closer to home Success as transgression Conclusion Bibliography Index