of the historical tendency among the German political class to believe that,
with regard to matters of economic organization or constitutional structure it is
the duty and the right of a strong central state to impose and nourish a values
consensus, rather than allow them to be treated as mere procedure.
Social Mobility
Social mobility is a measure of the extent to which individuals in a society can
as adults find themselves in a different social class to that of their parents.
Although it may seem a dry sociological index, it is in fact crucial to many
sociological theories and impacts on an individual’s chances in life more than
most macro-characteristics of modern society. In an entirely meritocratic
society—to use the jargon—one’s class of origin would have no bearing on
which class one ended up in. In practice, social mobility is severely limited in
most societies; the higher one’s family class, the more likely one will spend
one’s adult life in that or a higher social location. The reasons for this
restrictiveness are complex and not fully understood. In older societies, not
wedded to doctrines of equal opportunity, there was little mystery—social
mobility was neither expected nor encouraged, and the prevailing ideology
often held strongly to the idea that people had a ‘natural’, that is, inherited,
class position. (Incastesocieties, of course, this is even more the case—caste
cannot,de jureand not justde facto, be overcome.) However, in the latter half of
the 20th century, mostliberal democracieshave officially accepted the
Napoleonic idea ofcarrie`re ouvert aux talents. Yet the chances of the son of a
professional or businessman achieving the same status as his father are still very
much higher than the chance that a coal miner’s son will become a doctor or an
executive. To a large extent this is a matter of education; despite full, free,
public education many factors restrict the educational success of those whose
parents are not themselves educated and relatively affluent.
There is some degree of implicit value judgement in most social mobility
research, however, because the idea that people might not want to ‘improve
themselves’, and might feel that following their father in a trade or even a
manual labouring job is a fully admirable and satisfactory life, is never
countenanced. In part this is because much of the research is influenced by a
theory of society which requires that, by the ‘logic of industrialization’,
efficient societies will ensure that the better jobs, because they are more
demanding, are always filled by the most able. The other half of the research
is influenced by a pervasive left-wing orientation, by which it is taken for
granted that low levels of recruitment to upper-class jobs from the lower class
must be against the interests and desires of those with low-status family
experiences.
Social Mobility