SOCIOLOGY AND SOCIAL MOBILITY

Social Mobility
People are often inspired and amazed at people's ability to overcome extremely difficult
upbringings. Mariano
Rivera, acknowledged to be the best relief pitcher in history, made a baseball glove out
of cardboard and tape
because his family could not afford a real one. Alice Coachman grew up with few
resources and was denied
access to training facilities because of her race; she ran barefoot and built her own high
jump equipment
before becoming the first Black athlete (and one of the first American track and field
athletes) to win an
Olympic Gold. Pelé, perhaps the most transformative figure in soccer, learned the game
while using a rag stuffed sock for a ball. These are some of the stories told in
documentaries or biographies meant to inspire and
share the challenges of unequal upbringings. Relative to the overall population, the
number of people who rise
from poverty to become very successful is small, and the number that become wealthy
is even smaller.
Systemic barriers like unequal education, discrimination, and lack of opportunity can
slow or diminish one's
ability to move up. Still, people who earn a college degree, get a job promotion, or marry
someone with a good
income may move up socially.
Social mobility refers to the ability of individuals to change positions within a social
stratification system.
When people improve or diminish their economic status in a way that affects social
class, they experience
social mobility. Individuals can experience upward or downward social mobility for a
variety of reasons.
Upward mobility refers to an increase—or upward shift—when they move from a lower
to a higher
socio economic class. In contrast, individuals experience downward mobility when they
move from higher
socioeconomic class to a lower one. Some people move downward because of
business setbacks,
unemployment, or illness. Dropping out of school, losing a job, or getting a divorce may
result in a loss of
income or status and, therefore, downward social mobility.
It is not uncommon for different generations of a family to belong to varying social
classes. This is known as
intergenerational mobility. For example, an upper-class executive may have parents
who belonged to the
middle class. In turn, those parents may have been raised in the lower class. Patterns of
intergenerational
mobility can reflect long-term societal changes.
On the other hand, intragenerational mobility refers to changes in a person's social
mobility over the course of their lifetime. For example, the wealth and prestige
experienced by one person may be quite different from that of their siblings. Structural
mobility happens when societal changes enable a whole group of people to move up or
down the social class ladder. Structural mobility is attributable to changes in society as
a whole. In the first half of the twentieth century, industrialization expanded the U.S.
economy, raising the standard of living and leading to upward structural mobility for
almost everyone. In the decade and a half of the twenty-first century, recessions and
the outsourcing of jobs overseas have contributed to the withdrawal of Americans from
the workforce (BLS 2021). Many people experienced economic setbacks, creating a
wave of downward structural mobility. When analyzing the trends and movements in
social mobility, sociologists consider all modes of mobility. Scholars recognize that
mobility is not as common or easy to achieve as many people think.