Abstract
Concern about the implications of social mobility, or the lack of it, has a long pedigree in political and social theory. As Anthony Heath has written, the two enduring themes which have sponsored this interest are order and efficiency:1 in other words, how does the pattern of mobility affect the way in which societies cohere and function? Most have argued that too little mobility can, by encouraging the formation of antagonistic groups or classes, lead to social upheaval, while mobile societies individualise success and failure, and weaken the bonds of group solidarity. Marx, for example, wrote famously in the third volume of Capital that, ‘the more a ruling class is able to assimilate the foremost minds of a ruled class, the more stable and dangerous becomes its rule’, and elsewhere pointed to the exceptional degree of social flux then popularly perceived to pertain in the New World as an explanation for the immaturity of the American labour movement.2 However, some have argued that too much mobility can be just as dangerous as too little because it generates rootlessness, uncertainty and insecurity,3 while others have shown that mobile societies can give rise to processes of group formation as well as disaggregation.4
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Notes
Karl Marx, Capital Vol. III, Moscow, 1959, p. 587.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works Vol. 39, London, 1963, pp. 60–6.
See Pitrim Sorokin, Social and Cultural Mobility Glencoe, 1927, pp. 510, 524
and S.M. Lipset and R. Bendix, Social Mobility in Industrial Society London, 1950, pp. 284–5.
R.H. Tawney, Equality, London, 1938
D.V. Glass (ed.), Social Mobility in Britain, London, 1954.
See, for example, Mancur Olson, The Rise and Decline of Nations: Economic Growth, Stagflation, and Social Rigidities, New Haven, 1982.
Also David Landes, The Unbound Prometheus. Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present Day, Cambridge, 1972.
For a extended summary of this debate, see Robert Erikson and John H. Goldthorpe, The Constant Flux: A Study of Class Mobility in Industrial Societies Oxford, 1993, chapter 1.
Also, John H. Goldthorpe, ‘On Economic Development and Social Mobility’, British Journal of Sociology 36, 1985.
P.M. Blau and O.D. Duncan, The American Occupational Structure, New York, 1967.
D.L. Featherman, F.L. Jones and R.M. Hauser, ‘Assumptions of Social Mobility Research in the US: The Case of Occupational Status’, Social Science Research, 4, 1975.
H.B.G. Ganzeboom, R. Luijkx and D.J. Treiman, ‘International Class Mobility in Comparative Perspective’, in Arne L. Kalleberg (ed.), Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, 8, 1989.
Keith Hope, ‘Trends in the Openness of British Society in the Present Century’, in Donald J. Treiman and Robert V. Robinson (eds.), Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, 1981, pp. 127–70
R.D. Penn and D.C Dawkins, ‘Structural Transformations in the British Class Structure: A Log Linear Analysis of Marital Endogamy in Rochdale 1856–1964’, Sociology, 17, 1983.
There are numerous studies of recruitment to particular elite groups. See, for example, P.E. Razzel, ‘Social Origins of Officers in the Indian and British Home Army’, British Journal of Sociology 14, 1963, and also Charlotte Erikson’s work mentioned in note 31 below. A broader study of the social composition of the British elite was conducted by Harold Perkin with the assistance of W.D. Rubinstein in the early 1970s.
See Perkin, ‘The Recruitment of Elites in British Society since 1800’, Journal of Social History 12, 2, 1978.
See also, Rubinstein’s work on millionaires, for example, Men of Property London, 1981, chapter 4.
John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy, ed. Sir William Ashley, London, 1909, p. 393.
Walter Bagehot, ‘Sterne and Thackeray’, The Collected Works of Walter Bagehot. Vol 2, The Literary Essays, ed. Norman St John-Stevas, London, 1965, pp. 307–8.
Arthur Marshall, Principles of Economics ninth edition, 1961, pp. 217, 218, n. 1.
Harold Perkin, Origins of Modern English Society 1780–1880 London, 1985, p. 225.
Patrick Joyce, Work, Society and Politics. The Culture of the Factory in Later Victorian England London, 1980, pp. xvii–xviii.
Flora Thompson, Lark Rise to Candleford London, 1984, p. 183.
Michael Anderson, Family Structure in Nineteenth Century Lancashire Cambridge, 1971, pp. 26, 28.
See, for example, Brian Preston, ‘Occupations of Father and Son in Mid-Victorian England’, Reading University, Department of Geography, Geographical Papers, 1977.
Also P.E. Razell, ‘Statistics and English Historical Sociology’, in R.M. Hartwell (ed.), Industrial Revolution, Oxford, 1970.
F. Engels, ‘England in 1845 and 1885’, incorporated into the preface of the 1892 edition of The Condition of the Working Class in England, reprinted in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, On Britain, Moscow, 1953, pp. 28–33
V.I. Lenin, ‘Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism’, in Selected Works, Peking, 1975, pp. 128–31.
R.Q. Gray, The Labour Aristocracy in Victorian Edinburgh Oxford, 1976, chapter 5.
See, for example, Olson, Rise and Decline pp. 82–3; Andrew Gamble, Britain in Decline. Economic Policy, Political Strategy and the British State Basingstoke, 1990, pp. 78–83
Harold Perkin, The Rise of Professional Society. England since 1880 London, 1989, p. 516.
Hartmut Kaelble, Social Mobility in the 19th and 20th Centuries: Europe and America in Comparative Perspective Leamington Spa, 1985, chapter 4.
Reinhard Schüren, ‘Intergenerational Occupational and Marital Mobility in German Cities in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries’, in Miles and Vincent (eds.), Building European Society. See also Jürgen Kocka, ‘The Study of Social Mobility and the Formation of the Working Class in the Nineteenth Century’, Le Mouvement Social, 111, 1980.
M.H.D. van Leeuwen and I. Maas, ‘Long-term Mobility in a European City: Berlin 1835–1957’, paper to the ISA Committee on Social Stratification, University of Trento, 1992; D.B. Grusky and I.K. Fukumoto, ‘Social History Update: a Sociological Approach to Historical Social Mobility’, Journal of Social History 23, 1, 1989
A.M. Guest, N.S Langdale and J.C. McCann, ‘Intergenerational Occupational Mobility in the Late 19th-Century United States’, Social Forces 68, 1989
; M.H.D. van Leeuwen and I. Maas, ‘Log-linear Analysis of Changes in Mobility Patterns. Some Models with an Application to the Amsterdam Upper Classes in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century’, Historical Methods, 24, 2, 1991.
See David Vincent, Literacy and Popular Culture. England 1750–1914 Cambridge, 1989.
B.R. Mitchell and P. Deane, Abstract of British Historical Statistics, Cambridge, 1962, p. 15.
R.S. Schofield, ‘English Marriage Patterns Revisited’, Journal of Family History, 10, 1985. Michael Anderson, ‘The Social Implications of Demographic Change’, in F.M.L. Thompson (ed.), The Cambridge Social History of Britain, 1750–1985, Vol. 2, p. 28.
Occupational information does appear in some church registers prior to this date, but the practice was dependent on the initiative of individual parish priests. In the light of recent revisionist studies the whole notion of industrial ‘revolution’ must, in any case, be handled with care. See N.F.R. Crafts, British Economic Growth during the Industrial Revolution Oxford, 1985
Maxine Berg, The Age of Manufactures, 1700–1820 London, 1985.
O. Anderson, ‘The Incidence of Civil Marriage in Victorian England and Wales’, Past and Present, 69, November 1975, pp. 50–87.
On the considerable problems associated with the interpretation and use of historical occupational titles, see R.J. Morris ‘Fuller Values, Questions and Contexts: Occupational Coding and the Historian’, in Kevin Schürer and Herman Diederiks (eds.), The Use of Occupations in Historical Analysis, St. Katherine, 1993.
Also his Class, Sect and Party. The Making of the British Middle Class: Leeds, 1820–32, Manchester, 1990.
See A.B. Sorensen, ‘Theory and Methodology in Social Stratification’, in U. Himmelstrand (ed.), The Sociology of Structure and Action, Vol. 1, Sociology: From Crisis to Science, London, 1986.
Frank McKenna, ‘Victorian Railway Workers’, History Workshop Journal 1, Spring 1976, p. 32.
See Colin G. Pooley and John C. Doherty, ‘The Longitudinal Study of Welsh Migration to English Towns in the Nineteenth Century’, in Colin G. Pooley and Ian D. White (eds.), Migrants, Emigrants and Immigrants. A Social History of Migration, London, 1991, pp. 148–50. Also, Hershberg, ‘New Urban History’, p. 16.
John Burnett, David Vincent and David Mayall (eds.), The Autobiography of the Working Class. An Annotated, Critical Bibliography, Vol. I: 1790–1900 London,1984, pp. xviii–xix.
Goldthorpe, Social Mobility pp. 26, 39. The assumption that occupation is a good indicator of class is widely held in sociology. See, for example, Blau and Duncan, American Occupational Structure pp. 5–6. Also, Frank Parkin, Class, Inequality and Political Order London, 1971.
Citing Gosta Carlsson, Social Mobility and Class Structure Lund, 1958, Thernstrom writes, ‘The historical study of mobility requires the use of an objective criteria of social status. The most convenient of these is occupation. Occupation may be only one variable in a comprehensive theory of class, but it is the variable which includes more, which sets more limits on the other variables, than any other criterion of status’, Poverty and Progress p. 84.
Census 1951, Classification of Occupations HMSO, London, 1955. For further discussion of the suitability of this classification, see W.A. Armstrong, ‘The Use of Information about Occupation’, in E.A. Wrigley (ed.), Nineteenth-Century Society. Essays in the Use of Quantitative Methods for the Study of Social Data Cambridge, 1972.
See Gordon Marshall, David Rose, Howard Newby and Carolyn Vogler, Social Class in Modern Britain London, 1989, pp. 18–19
R.S. Szreter, ‘The Genesis of the Registrar-General’s Social Classification of Occupations’, British Journal of Sociology 35, 1984, pp. 522–46
Catherine Marsh, ‘Social Class and Occupation’, in Robert G. Burgess (ed.), Key Variables in Social Investigation London, 1986, pp. 123–52. From the perspective of historical data, see Penn, Skilled Workers chapter 8
and Simon Szreter, Fertility, Class and Gender in Britain, 1860–1940 Cambridge, 1996, part II.
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Miles, A. (1999). Exploring the Land of ‘Boundless Opportunity’. In: Social Mobility in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century England. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230373211_2
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