Social and Occupational Mobility

Abstract

Social mobility is the movement of individuals, families, households, or other categories of people within or between social strata in a society. Societies organized by social class, rather than caste, usually allow greater social mobility; in such societies, one’s ability to achieve a higher social status can depend on factors such as social connections, wealth, effort, and education. In order to study the dynamics of social processes, it is natural to start by looking at the movement of people between social classes. Since such moves are largely unpredictable at the individual level, it is necessary for a model to describe mechanism of movement in probabilistic terms. A distinction has to be made between intergenerational mobility and intra-generational mobility. The former refers to social mobility which reflects changes of social class from one generation to another. Intra-generational mobility refers to changes of classes which take place during an individual’s life span. This type of movement is called occupational or labor mobility since it is usually more directly concerned with occupations. Many deterministic and stochastic models have been developed to study social and occupational mobility situations in the different parts of the world.