What you'll learn

• What sociologists mean by social mobility and the main types: vertical, horizontal, intergenerational and intragenerational.
• How researchers measure the extent of mobility in the UK using class schemas, surveys and official data.
• Why mobility matters for debates about meritocracy, inequality, power and identity.
• How to evaluate different explanations, including functionalist, Marxist, Weberian, feminist and cultural-capital approaches.

Starting point: stratification, class and life chances

Before you study mobility, you need the idea of social stratification. This means society is organised into layers, where some groups have more wealth, power, status and opportunities than others.

Social class is one major form of stratification. In A-Level Sociology, class is usually linked to a person’s economic position: their occupation, income, wealth, job security and relationship to the labour market.

Social mobility is important because it asks whether people can move between these layers — or whether their class background strongly shapes their future.

What is social mobility?

Mobility can be about occupation, income, wealth, education or status. In practice, many sociological studies use occupation as the main indicator of class because it is easier to classify and compare across large samples.

The diagram below maps the main types of mobility you need to recognise.

The nature of social mobility: main types

Vertical mobility

Vertical mobility means moving up or down the social hierarchy.

• Upward mobility: moving to a higher class position, such as a child of routine manual workers becoming a doctor.
• Downward mobility: moving to a lower class position, such as a middle-class professional losing secure employment and moving into unstable low-paid work.

Horizontal mobility

Horizontal mobility means moving to a different role or occupation at a similar class level. For example, a teacher becoming a social worker may involve a change in job, but not necessarily a large change in class position.

Intergenerational mobility

Intergenerational mobility means comparing the class position of one generation with another, usually parents and children. This is central to debates about whether class advantage is passed down through families.

Intragenerational mobility

Intragenerational mobility means movement within one person’s lifetime, such as someone starting in a low-paid service job and later becoming a manager.

Absolute and relative mobility

Absolute mobility

Absolute mobility means the total amount of movement between class positions in society. It is strongly affected by changes in the occupational structure.

For example, after the Second World War, the UK saw growth in professional, managerial and white-collar jobs. This created more “room at the top”, so many people experienced upward mobility even if class inequalities still remained.

Relative mobility

Relative mobility means the chances of people from different class origins reaching different class destinations compared with each other. It is about equality of opportunity.

If middle-class children are still far more likely than working-class children to enter elite occupations, then relative mobility is low, even if some working-class children do move up.

Measuring patterns of social mobility

Sociologists need a way to classify class positions. UK studies often use occupational class schemes, such as the National Statistics Socio-economic Classification or NS-SEC, which groups people by employment relations, job security, autonomy and skill.

Researchers may use:

• Mobility tables, comparing class origins and class destinations.
• Longitudinal studies, which follow the same people over time.
• Birth cohort studies, which track people born in the same period.
• Official statistics, such as Census data, Labour Force Survey data and ONS employment data.
• Reports from organisations such as the Social Mobility Commission and the Sutton Trust.

Important studies include Glass (1954), who found Britain was not fully open, and Goldthorpe et al. (1980), whose Oxford Mobility Study argued that absolute mobility had increased but relative class inequalities persisted. Later work by Bukodi and Goldthorpe continued to question claims that Britain had become fully meritocratic.

Methods evaluation

There are practical, ethical and theoretical issues when studying mobility.

• Practical issues: large samples are expensive and difficult to follow over time; people change jobs; some have unstable or mixed employment histories.
• Ethical issues: longitudinal research must protect confidentiality because it may collect sensitive data on income, family background and education.
• Theoretical issues: positivists value large-scale data for reliability and comparison, while interpretivists argue that occupation alone may miss people’s lived experience, identity and status.

The extent of mobility in the UK

Post-war upward mobility

In the mid-to-late twentieth century, many people experienced upward mobility because the occupational structure changed. Manufacturing declined, while professional, managerial and service-sector employment expanded.

This is called structural mobility: movement caused by changes in the economy rather than only individual effort.

Persistent class inequality

However, relative mobility has remained more limited. Class background still influences educational achievement, access to elite universities, unpaid internships, professional networks and confidence in middle-class institutions.

The Social Mobility Commission has repeatedly highlighted “stickiness” at the top and bottom:

• Top stickiness: advantaged families are good at preserving privilege.
• Bottom stickiness: disadvantaged families often face barriers to moving up.

A useful contemporary example is the over-representation of privately educated people in elite professions such as senior law, politics, journalism and finance. This supports the argument that class advantages are reproduced, not simply earned.

Downward mobility and insecurity

Mobility is not only upward. Some groups experience downward mobility through deindustrialisation, precarious employment, housing insecurity or regional economic decline.

Precarious work means insecure employment, often with low pay, unpredictable hours and limited rights. Sociologists sometimes link this to the precariat, a term associated with Guy Standing, meaning a group marked by insecure labour and unstable life chances.

Why social mobility matters

Social mobility is significant because it connects directly to the two core themes in sociology.

Socialisation, culture and identity

Families transmit values, expectations, speech styles, tastes and confidence. This shapes how young people see themselves and what futures feel “realistic”.

Bourdieu argued that middle-class families pass on cultural capital: knowledge, language, tastes and behaviours rewarded by schools and employers. They also pass on social capital, meaning useful networks and contacts, and economic capital, meaning money and assets.

This helps explain why two students with similar ability may have different outcomes depending on their class background.

Social differentiation, power and stratification

Mobility patterns reveal how resources and power are distributed. If people from privileged backgrounds dominate top jobs, they may also shape laws, media agendas, workplace cultures and definitions of “merit”.

This links to Weber, who argued that class affects market situation and life chances, but status and power also matter. It also links to Marxist approaches, which stress that class inequality is built into capitalism because wealth and control over production are unequally distributed.

Theoretical explanations

Evaluation: is Britain meritocratic?

A meritocracy is a society where people achieve positions based on ability and effort rather than background.

There is evidence of openness: education has expanded, more women enter professional employment, and some people from disadvantaged backgrounds do achieve upward mobility.

However, there is also strong evidence of continuing closure. Housing wealth, private schooling, parental income, regional inequality and social networks all affect opportunities. The “class ceiling” idea, associated with Friedman and Laurison, suggests that even when working-class people enter elite occupations, they may earn less and progress more slowly than colleagues from privileged backgrounds.

How to use this in essays

For AO1, define the types of mobility and use named studies such as Glass, Goldthorpe, Bourdieu, Saunders or the Social Mobility Commission.

For AO2, apply the ideas to UK examples: private schooling, Russell Group access, regional inequality, professional internships, housing wealth, deindustrialisation or precarious work.

For AO3, evaluate whether mobility proves meritocracy or whether it hides deeper inequalities in power, wealth and cultural advantage.