Name: Reda El Makroum

Family, Education and Social

Mobility
Summary:

In today’s world, social mobility is an issue with an uprising importance all around the globe.

Whether it regards developed countries or third world nations, this phenomenon has a huge impact on

societies and on the well-being of the people and the prosperity of their lives. In order to deepen my

knowledge about this topic, I chose a book called “Social Changes in Western Europe” by the English

sociologist and political scientist Colin Crouch. More precisely, the eight chapter of this book

discusses social mobility with regards to education and family within different European countries.

To discuss it’s ideas, this chapter mainly relies on a study done by Erikson and Goldthorpe in

1992 on 9 different countries to assess the amplitude of social mobility in Europe. These countries

were: Japan, France, Italy, Germany, Ireland, Netherlands, Sweden, the USA and the UK.

Surprisingly enough, Even though most of these countries are considered developed, the social

mobility differs greatly between them. For example, in France and the UK , social mobility is very

difficult as social positions and statuses are mostly inherited through family relations. As for Sweden,

we find a more flexible social mobility and better chances for the Swedish citizens to improve their

social status. While for the United States of America, despite it being recognized as the land of

opportunities, the study showed that social mobility is still difficult in the American society of

nowadays.

Pr. Crouch related these results to two main reasons. The first one was Social Position

Inheritance as in most of the studied countries, if a certain person is born within a certain social status,

he remains in the same position throughout his whole life. You might expect that in countries as

developed as the ones studied, status inheritance should have been overthrown by equality a long time
ago. However, it is a fact that opportunities as more abundant for you if you are at a high status in

society. The second reason is Gender Inequality, the access to education has been known to be mainly

provided for men and limited for women. Even though this problem had declined heavily, it’s

consequence is affecting social mobility in a severe way as ,in most cases, women are less paid than

men which makes social mobility all the most difficult and inaccessible.

In my humble opinion, I believe that the author, Colin Crouch, was successful in describing

social mobility and its relationship with education and family throughout the whole chapter. Also, he

presented valid facts and structured ideas as well as recent studies to strengthen his point of view.

However, it would have been better for the sake of the topic to take into account more countries and

more cases of social mobility around the globe.

References:

Colin, C.(1999). Social Changes in Western Europe .New York, NY: Oxford University Press.