Page 264 - Essencials of Sociology

Social Mobility 237

Janice grabbed the chance to put a down payment on the Toyota dealership. She has since
intergenerational mobility the
paid the business off and has opened another at a second location. change that family members make
in social class from one generation
When grown-up children like Janice end up on a different rung of the social class ladder to the next
from the one occupied by their parents, it is called intergenerational mobility. You can
upward social mobility
go up or down, of course. Janice experienced upward social mobility. If her mother
movement up the social class
had owned the dealership and Janice had dropped out of college and ended up selling
ladder
cars, she would have experienced downward social mobility.
We like to think that individual efforts are the reason people move up the class downward social mobility
movement down the social class
ladder—and their faults the reason they move down. In this example, we can identify
ladder
intelligence, hard work, and ambition. Although individual factors such as these do
underlie social mobility, we must place Janice in the context of structural mobility. structural mobility movement
up or down the social class lad-
This second basic type of mobility refers to changes in society that allow large num-
der that is due more to changes in
bers of people to move up or down the class ladder.
the structure of society than to the
Janice grew up during a boom time of easy credit and business expansion. Oppor- actions of individuals
tunities were abundant, and colleges were looking for women from working-class
exchange mobility a large
backgrounds. It is far different for people who grow up during an economic bust when
number of people moving up the
opportunities are shrinking. As sociologists point out, in analyzing social mobility, we social class ladder, while a large
must always look at structural mobility, how changes in society (its structure) make number move down; it is as though
opportunities plentiful or scarce. they have exchanged places, and
The third type of social mobility is exchange mobility. This occurs when large the social class system shows little
numbers of people move up and down the social class ladder, but, on balance, the pro- change
portions of the social classes remain about the same. Suppose that a million or so work-
ing-class people are trained in some new technology, and they move up the class ladder. Read on MySocLab
Suppose also that because of a surge in imports, about a million skilled workers have to Document: A Different Mirror
take lower-status jobs. Although millions of people change their social class, there is, in
effect, an exchange among them. The net result more or less balances out, and the class
system remains basically untouched.
How much social mobility is there? For an overview of intergenerational social mobil-
ity today, read the Down-to-Earth Sociology box on the next page.

The term structural mobility refers to
changes in society that push large
numbers of people either up or down
the social class ladder. A remarkable
example was the stock market crash
of 1929 when thousands of people
suddenly lost their wealth. People
who once “had it made” found
themselves standing on street corners
selling apples or, as depicted here,
selling their possessions at fire-sale
prices. The crash of 2008 brought
similar problems to untold numbers
of people.