Mobility, Occupations and Class

Abstract

In looking at work and mobility we may begin by asking mundane questions about work processes in life cycles. How do men obtain employment, or lose it; what are the requirements for promotion, why do men change jobs, and so on? These kinds of questions mean that we take the metaphor of occupational mobility seriously, and narrow down our focus from the grand horizon of stratification theory to the more commonplace world of work. This does not imply that we are concerned solely with work tasks, or that we are abandoning our earlier statement that occupation cannot be isolated from other aspects of stratification. Rather, we are recognising that our view of stratification, if based on occupation, is conditioned by the processes which themselves condition occupations. The other side of this proposed concentration on occupation operates in the reverse direction; we can expand our interest by asking wider, historical questions, such as how do social changes generate new patterns of occupations, patterns which in turn account for observed mobility? In other words, we need to consider theories of the evolution of advanced industrial society, or the emergence of modern capitalism, which either directly or indirectly deal with occupational processes.