The Writing on the Wall

Abstract

Much of the intellectual preoccupation of the British post-war sociologists was, unquestionably, with social mobility. It was essentially a collective concern with origins and destinations. It was rather widely defined and could have meant any movement from one social position to another including marriage, religious faith, political affiliation, or even geographical movement. All of these possible facets, and especially the complicated connections between them, were part of the research, teaching and practice of this first group of professional sociologists. But within the subject the focus was narrower. Is there an end? John Goldthorpe, who came to Nuffield from Cambridge in ‘69, remains a heavy-weight in it, and has become an international leader in the field along with Robert Erikson of Stockholm. My purpose in adding the present chapter is to emphasise that social mobility has been a personal as well as a professional concern. My knowledge of it is accordingly a life-long accumulation. I appreciate, for example, that recent research has demonstrated the stability of relative rates of class mobility and that the United States is, in this sense, not different from but similar to Britain. But this is not the place for a professional recital of research findings. Instead I want to stress the extreme complication of the determinants of modern mobility.