Rethinking Social Mobility: The Central Role of Microclasses
Rethinking Social Mobility: The Central Role of Microclasses
Introduction to Intergenerational Mobility and Research Gaps
Core Question: The research examines if children born into privilege or less privileged families are fated to remain in their social class of origin.
Motivation: This question is crucial for assessing the fairness of competition for money, power, and prestige. Many people are less concerned with inequality itself than with whether the competition for riches is fair, offering equal chances regardless of parental advantage/disadvantage.
Problem with Conventional Methods: The authors argue that conventional methods for monitoring mobility are inadequate. They may overlook significant forms and sources of rigidity in social reproduction.
Conventional Assumptions: Historically, intergenerational reproduction has been assumed to take one of two forms:
Categorical/Big-Class: Parents pass on a broad class position (e.g., manager, professional) to their children.
Gradational: Parents pass on their socioeconomic standing (e.g., occupational prestige) to their children.
Central Argument: Both standard approaches ignore the crucial role of detailed occupations (referred to as "microclasses") in reproducing inequality. These simplifying assumptions have been adopted with little evidence of their adequacy.
The Significance of Detailed Occupations (Microclasses)
Fundamental Conduits: Detailed occupations serve as fundamental pathways for intergenerational reproduction because the social, cultural, and economic resources conveyed to children depend significantly on their parents' specific occupations.
Omnibus Indicator: Occupations index the main communities and identities of workers. Asking "What do you do?" provides vast information about an individual's life chances (skills, credentials, earnings, networks), honor/esteem (prestige, socioeconomic status), and social/cultural world (consumption, politics, attitudes).
Information Richness: Occupations are seen as more strongly correlated with these many variables than income, making them a more useful indicator of social standing and life circumstances.
Mechanisms of Intergenerational Reproduction
The authors propose a comprehensive mobility model should simultaneously examine reproduction at the socioeconomic (gradational), big-class, and microclass levels, as these are often confounded in conventional analyses. They review each mechanism:
Gradational Regime: Represents inequality as a simple, unidimensional hierarchy based on income or occupational status. Children's life chances depend on their family's standing in this queue.
Mechanism: Privileged access to:
Economic resources: Wealth, income to purchase elite education or jobs (e.g., proprietorship).
Social networks: Information and entrée to desirable occupations.
Cultural resources: Socialization that motivates acquisition of best jobs and provides necessary cognitive/interactional skills (e.g., "culture of critical discourse").
Key Idea: The total amount of resources available matters. This imagery involves two unidimensional hierarchies (one for each generation) smoothly joined by total resources (Figure 55.1a).
Big-Class Regime: Depicts inequality through mutually exclusive and exhaustive social classes. These classes convey a package of conditions, a structuring social environment, and an adaptive culture.
Mechanism: Children born into the same class are presumed to have largely the same mobility chances, irrespective of their parents' specific occupations or socioeconomic standing within that class. This is because:
Tastes and aspirations are class-specific (e.g., proprietors' children desire autonomy; routine nonmanuals' children desire stability).
Human capital develops class-specifically (e.g., entrepreneurial skills for proprietors' children; bureaucratic skills for routine nonmanuals' children).
Social capital is distributed class-specifically (e.g., entrepreneurial opportunities for proprietors' children; routine nonmanual opportunities for others).
Tangible physical capital (e.g., a shop, business) is passed on, motivating children to remain in specific class positions.
Key Idea: Children are not given generic access to all occupations of comparable standing, but are positioned for occupations aligned with their class origins' culture, training, contacts, and capital (Figure 55.1b).
Microclass Regime: Shares with the big-class model the idea of balkanized labor markets, but this balkanization takes the form of institutionalized, detailed occupations (e.g., doctor, plumber).
Mechanism: Occupations within big classes have differing propensities for mobility/immobility because distinct occupational worlds influence children's aspirations, valued skills, and available networks (Table 55.1 summary):
Human Capital: Transmission of occupation-specific skills (e.g., carpentry skills from parent carpenters) is crucial, despite the separation of home and workplace. Parents inculcate specific perspectives, interests, and practical skills through conversation, toys, and shared activities (e.g., engineer's family discussing structural failure vs. sociologist's family discussing terrorism; mechanics involving children in repairs).
Cultural Capital: Parents transmit occupation-specific culture and tastes (e.g., aspirations to become a medical doctor).
Social Networks: Children are embedded in occupation-specific networks (often developed through on-the-job interactions) that provide information and access.
Economic Resources: Passing on fixed resources (e.g., a business, farm) rather than just liquid resources (e.g., stocks, bonds, income).
Key Idea: This leads to a finer-grained "lumpiness" in class reproduction than big-class analysts typically acknowledge. Apparent strong big-class reproduction might actually be artifactual, reflecting detailed occupational reproduction (Figure 55.1c).