Social mobility and complexity theory: towards a critique of the sociological mainstream

Abstract

Social mobility studies reveal remarkable stability as far as relative mobility chances are concerned, both over time and as between different industrial nations, even while absolute mobility rates reveal considerable diversity. Nevertheless there is evidence that vigorous social policies aimed at greater equality can reduce the harshness or gradient of these inequalities. This article questions the theoretical account that so far has been offered to explain on the one hand the aforementioned stability, on the other hand the muting effects of egalitarian policies. It offers, instead, an account in terms of ‘self-organised criticality’, as expounded by writers on complexity science. It seeks to demonstrate, thereby, the utility of such complexity perspectives and the scope for deploying them to good explanatory effect in social and policy studies.

Keywords:

• social mobility
• social stratification
• complexity
• self-organised criticality

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to John Goldthorpe, Ian Gough, and Jane Millar for comments on a draft of this article.

Notes

1. The classes distinguished in the CASMIN framework comprise:

I Service class – professionals, managers and large employers

II Service class – lower professional and managerial

III Routine non-manual/white collar

IVa/b Small employers/petty bourgeoisie

IVc Farmers

V Foremen and technicians

VI Skilled manual workers

VIIa Semi-skilled and unskilled

VIIb Agricultural workers

2. Goldthorpe has undertaken a substantial amount of work on the mobility experience of women: see, for example, Erikson and Goldthorpe (1993), Chap. 7. Nevertheless, given the data sources at his disposal, the bulk of his work concentrates on sons and it is on this, therefore, that the present article also concentrates.

3. We here use the notion of status in the sense employed by Weber – and indeed Goldthorpe himself – to refer to claims to social honour, as expressed in patterns of shared life style and socialisation (Chan and Goldthorpe 2007). Goldthorpe is always at pains to distinguish this from notions of ‘socio-economic status’, as commonly used by sociologists in the US, a notion that he rather convincingly argues is vacuous.

4. Notice also that the occupational destinations that more advantaged parents – in what Goldthorpe calls the ‘service class’ – target for their offspring tend to be in the long upper tail of the distribution: the rational parent may judge that some extra investment on their part may well be worthwhile if it moves the likely destination significantly along that tail. Contrast the situation of a parent from, let us say, the skilled working class, where not only are spare resources more modest, but also the range of occupations that are potential targets offer a narrower ‘spread’ and thus a more modest likely return on any extra investment.

5. Goldthorpe distinguishes a number of channels through which this advantage is mobilised: these he discusses in terms of ‘hierarchy’, ‘inheritance’, ‘sector’, ‘affinity’, and ‘disaffinity’ (Erikson and Goldthorpe 1993, pp. 121–131). If there are national deviations from the contours of the ‘core model’, he explains these in terms of the weighting that should be given to these different elements and he provides a theoretically grounded justification for each of these adjustments (Erikson and Goldthorpe 1993, Chap. 5).

6. It did not, of course, take Bak or complex systems analysis to make social scientists aware of such power law distributions: they were highlighted by Pareto in regards to the distribution of wealth and income and Zipf in regards to the frequency of cities of different populations (Krugman 1996, Chap. 3). Neither, however, ventured any generic explanatory model.