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In many parts of the world, individuals and groups have managed significant disruptions prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic. This article draws on data collected through interviews with 40 Australia-based participants regarding their day-to-day routines and technological engagement as they navigated mobility restrictions intended to prevent the spread of the coronavirus disease. We use insights from Science and Technology Studies to shed light on how their technosocial relations enabled and regulated participants' sociality while informing their desires for normalcy. Findings highlight perspectives and practices that diverge from popular framings of the pandemic as giving rise to a 'new normal'. Instead, our analysis shows how human and non-human actors became inextricably linked in the management of everyday disruptions, illustrating forms of mundane governance. We conclude by reflecting on how Science and Technology Studies-informed approaches to the mundane glean important insight for the sociological study of the pandemic specifically and of everyday life generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite decades of diversity and widening participation initiatives, access to elite professions for those from lower socio-economic backgrounds remains a troublingly persistent issue. Degree apprenticeships present an alternative to the traditional university pathway and an opportunity to increase social mobility into professional occupations. Yet, uptake of this pathway has so far been from more advantaged individuals. This article explores the dispositions of key stakeholders towards alternative pathways. It asks whether professional apprenticeships are perceived as legitimate and, if not, what are the likely consequences? Using the solicitors' profession in England as a pertinent case, interviews with 23 participants on the degree apprenticeship and university pathways were asked about their social and educational backgrounds, exploring the influences on their career and pathway decision making. The analysis demonstrates differing perceptions of risk and legitimacy among those from different social and educational backgrounds, with implications for equity, inequality and social mobility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the perspectives of student teachers from working class backgrounds about not becoming middle class. Little attention has been paid to conceptualisations of social class in teaching. In the context of drives internationally to diversify teaching populations, research is needed about the experiences of student teachers from working class backgrounds in their upwardly mobile trajectories. This article draws on a constructivist grounded theory study about the social class identities of 21 student teachers from working class backgrounds as part of a wider teacher diversity project in Ireland. Distinguishing between class 'mentality' and materiality, participants emphasised that one could not change class completely, rejected the middle classness of a teacher's social status and positioned working class 'mentality' as morally superior. Those from working class backgrounds do not simply relinquish aspects of their identity through upward social mobility, suggesting that habitus may not always be divided upon traversing class boundaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In all developed societies the class position that individuals come to occupy depends, inter alia, on their class origins, gender and ethnic group membership. It might be argued that these inequalities had 'meritocratic legitimation' if it transpired that they were largely the result of the differential distribution of merit across sexes, classes or ethnic groups. In this paper I address the question of how far Northern Ireland can be considered to be an educational meritocracy. In other words, to what extent might inequalities according to class origin, gender and ethnic group membership in the class positions that individuals attain be attributed, or legitimized, according to differences between classes, genders and ethnic groups in average educational attainment? The results suggest that in Northern Ireland, as in the cases of Britain (Marshall and Swift 1993; Breen and Goldthorpe, 1999, 2001) and the Republic of Ireland (Breen and Whelan, 1993), men and women and people from different class origins and ethnic groups experience different chances of gaining access to better class positions, even when they have the same level of educational attainment In seeking to explain the results of the analyses I draw on recent work that discusses and illustrates some of the difficulties with the concept of 'merit' and with the attempt to equate meritocracy with a diminishing role for ascription. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social mobility in the cultural sector is currently an important issue in government policy and public discussion, associated with perceptions of a collapse in numbers of working-class origin individuals becoming artists, actors, musicians and authors. The question of who works in creative occupations has also attracted significant sociological attention. To date, however, there have been no empirically grounded studies into the changing social composition of such occupations. This article uses the Office for National Statistics Longitudinal Study to show that, while those from more privileged social backgrounds have long dominated, there has been no change in the relative class mobility chances of gaining access to creative work. Instead, we must turn to the pattern of absolute mobility into this sector in order to understand claims that it is experiencing a 'mobility crisis'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents the first longitudinal analysis of social and geographic mobility into Britain's higher managerial and professional occupations. Using linked census records from the Office for National Statistics Longitudinal Study, we find that those from advantaged social origins are substantially more likely to make long-distance residential moves, implying that geographic mobility is a correlate of advantaged social origins rather than a determinant of an advantaged adult class position. Among higher managers and professionals, those with advantaged backgrounds lived in more affluent areas as children than those from disadvantaged backgrounds. This 'area gap' persists during adulthood: when the upwardly mobile move, they are unable to close the gap to their peers with privileged backgrounds in terms of the affluence of the areas they live in: they face a moving target. Geographic advantage, and disadvantage, thus lingers with individuals, even if they move. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing data on social mobility in Britain demonstrate a disparity of up to 4:1 in the relative chances of children from different social class backgrounds ending up at the top or bottom of the occupational class system. In an earlier paper, it was argued that such disparities should not necessarily be seen as the result of social advantages or disadvantages associated with different class origins, for they are also consistent with a model of meritocracy in which class differentials in average levels of ability are reflected in the class destinations achieved by people from different social backgrounds. That paper has been criticised, both analytically and empirically, and this paper addresses some of these criticisms through an analysis of data from the National Child Development Study. The analysis shows that ability is an important factor influencing social mobility chances, and through a series of logistic regression and multiple regression models, it demonstrates that meritocratic factors (individual effort and ability) outweigh social advantage/ disadvantage factors in predicting the occupational class achieved by over 6,000 men and women by age 33. The paper ends by answering the analytical criticisms made against the earlier paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Class analysis has recently been criticised from a variety of standpoints. In this paper we argue that much of this criticism is misplaced and that, as a research programme, the promise of class analysis is far from exhausted. The first part of the paper clarifies the nature and purpose of class analysis, as we would understand it, and in particular distinguishes it from the class analysis of Marxist sociology. The second part then makes the case for the continuing relevance of class analysis, in our conception of it, by reviewing findings from three central areas of current research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Earlier work (Hope, 1974, 1975a) demonstrated 'no change' in social mobility between the Glass inquiry of 1949 and the Oxford inquiry of 1972. However the mobility investigated was that known as exchange mobility (other synonyms being pure, perfect, fluidity and circulation mobility), which is defined as departure of observed mobility from perfect mobility. When the man in the street speaks of mobility he usually means something much more specific, namely mobility up or down a vertical hierarchy. The present paper investigates the meaning of perfect mobility by disaggregating the model for it into discrete, additive components, and it shows how the vertical dimension may be represented in a mobility analysis by just one of the many degrees of freedom which are associated with exchange mobility. Implications for comparative analysis, and also for investigation of the relations between vertical and class mobility, are discussed. The theoretical developments of this paper stem from the apparently novel observation that the `additive model' of status inconsistency analysis is formally identical with the `perfect mobility' model of social mobility analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although most studies of the transition from school to work take a snapshot perspective in examining economic returns to education, such returns evolve over an individual's lifetime. We empirically test a theoretical formulation derived from the cumulative advantage mechanism about enduring life-cycle effects of educational mobility on income. We analyse income trajectories for all Danes born in 1960–1961, and we consider how the welfare state may counteract certain mechanisms of intergenerational transmission that give children with college-educated parents better opportunities in the labour market. We find only small direct effects of parental college attainment on earnings trajectories after we control for offspring college attainment. Thus, schooling acts as a powerful and enduring economic leveller of family background effects in Denmark. Our analyses also show direct effects on trajectories in property income derived from wealth, suggesting that the welfare state has a harder time equalising income from wealth than from earnings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social mobility research mainly investigates directional change in socio-economic circumstance. This article contributes to the strand of social mobility research that examines subjective experiences of economic movement. It analyses social mobility as a set of relationally, temporally and spatially embedded social practices, subjectively experienced and interpreted. The interactive nexus between social and spatial mobility is a fruitful line of inquiry, and the experiences of international migrants are distinctly suited for developing this analysis. Drawing on a qualitative study of migrants' mobilities, both social and spatial, post-arrival in Australia, we argue that social mobility is experienced as sets of contingent social practices. These in/variably co-exist with aspirations for a sense of belonging and connectedness, a sense of security and other non-economic needs and desires and are also always adjusted over time. In addition, migrants' status as legal, cultural or social Others shapes the experience of social mobility in distinctive ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines Goldthorpe's attempt to develop a theory which explains the stability of class relations and the generative processes by which class inequalities are sustained in general and the application of rational action theory to the explanation of persistent class differentials in educational attainment in particular. It is argued that Goldthorpe has restricted the remit of his theory to the mobilization of economic resources and that the importance of cultural and social resources in the reproduction of advantage has been dropped from view. This development derives from his minimalist definition of class in terms of employment relations rather than collectivities of people who share identities and practices. Furthermore, Goldthorpe's reliance on rational action theory has led to an overly materialistic view of how individuals and families mobilize their resources across generations. He ignores the role of norms and values in shaping action and the level of indeterminacy or precariousness by which advancement may or may not be achieved. The implications of these criticisms for the future of class analysis are explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the intergenerational social mobility of young adults in Britain, from a secondary analysis of the National Child Development Study. We show that by examining the relationship between social class background and the tested 'ability' of boys and girls, it is possible to advance our understanding of some of the key processes that help facilitate the reproduction of class inequality. In particular, we emphasise that the advantages of the service class over other class rests not just upon their ability to impart appropriate cultural capital to their children, but also on other 'secondary' factors, notably material resources. We show how boys born in advantaged social positions have more resources than girls in maintaining their class advantages, and we indicate some patterns of closure within the 'service class'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This commentary focuses on the article, Might Britain Be a Meritocracy?, by Peter Saunders, published in the 1995 issue of Sociology. The model of social mobility under conditions of perfect meritocracy used in Saunder's paper assumes that all the service-class fathers in Goldthorpe's sample have IQ greater than those of all the fathers in the other classes. This commentary has shown that if, as seems likely, this assumption is incorrect, the consequence is that a model which assumes meritocractic recruitment to the service class predicts a percentage of sons of service-class fathers as attaining service-class occupations, which is smaller than the actual percentage as observed by Goldthorpe. Put simply, if the crucial assumption is incorrect, and hence the mean IQ of the service-class fathers is less than 123, a suitably amended version of Saunder's model demonstrates that many of the sons of service-class fathers do not merit the service-class occupations that they have attained. The model presented in this commentary is, like Saunder's model, a crude and over-simplistic one. The empirical estimates of the mean IQ of the various classes presented in this commentary are also flawed, since they are based on an unrepresentative sample that did not use the class categories used by Goldthorpe and Saunders.

Gender has frequently been identified as the most controversial issue confronting class analysis. In this paper we make use of data from the Republic of Ireland to assess the extent to which the incorporation of women in class mobility analysis alters our understanding of the central processes of social mobility. We find that for married women their husband's class is a more powerful predictor of household poverty and life-style than their own 'class' as indicated by current or previous occupation. With regard to employment mobility we find that the sole source of gender variation in mobility chances relates to differences in the objective opportunity structures faced by men and women. Applying a measured variable model to 'men only' and 'complete' mobility tables reveals only modest differences in the patterns of social fluidity. The inclusion of women in class mobility tables requires little in the way of substantial modification of our understanding of the pattern of class relationships underlying the observed pattern of mobility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of social closure has been employed by followers of Max Weber as part of an explanation of how members of a social stratum establish and maintain their status, and of how collective social mobility is achieved. Particular attention has been drawn to professional occupations and their registration under statute as an important part of the process of closure. This paper examines the case of the accountancy profession and shows how, after decades of attempting to achieve registration, this goal was abandoned, partly because the costs came to outweigh the rewards and partly because a very similar end was achieved by other means. A model of social closure is presented which allows this exceptional case to be explained without dispensing with existing formulations. The explanation hinges on the nature of occupational knowledge, the nature of the clientele, the historical/cultural antecedents and the interplay of these factors in the 'professional arena'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social Mobility in Britain has been a key work for theories of mobility and social stratification, but its basic data on the occupation of fathers and sons is open to question. Arguing from evidence (mainly from the Census) about occupational transition and differential fertility, this paper suggests that the 1949 study appears to have an implausible number of middle-class fathers. When this critique is related to the peculiarities of the data already separately reported by others such as Ridge, Hope, and Noble, a strong case can be made for the rejection of the Glass findings. It follows that the conventional sociological wisdom that Britain has a low rate of mobility must be reconsidered, and also that those theories of stratification which have drawn too uncritically on Social Mobility in Britain must now be re-examined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper reports the findings of intensive research on 120 middle class families. The geographical distribution of the members of the extended family was wider, and contact between them was less frequent than among the middle class families sampled by previous authors. In these seemingly adverse conditions the middle class extended family was nevertheless a functioning social entity. The relationship between the head of a household and his father or father-in-law was found to be frequently of great importance. It is by means of this link that the elder middle class generation channels financial aid to the next generation. This aid enhances the living standard of the recipients. It is an aspect of social mobility overlooked by studies concentrating upon occupational mobility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study uses data from consecutive England and Wales censuses to examine the intragenerational economic mobility of individuals with different ethnicities, religions and genders between 1971 and 2011, over time and across cohorts. The findings suggest more downward and less upward mobility among Black Caribbean, Indian Sikh and Muslim people with Bangladeshi, Indian and Pakistani ethnicities, relative to white British groups, and more positive relative progress among Indian Hindu people, but also some variation in the experiences of social mobility between individuals even in the same ethnic groups. For some groups, those becoming adults or migrating to the UK since 1971 occupy an improved position compared with older or longer resident people, but this is not universal. Findings suggest that these persistent inequalities will only be effectively addressed with attention to the structural factors which disadvantage particular ethnic and religious groups, and the specific ways in which these affect women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is located within sociological research exploring the subjective experiences and emotional consequences of social mobility in the UK. It adds to recent attempts to examine the role of everyday cultural practices in making sense of journeys of upward mobility. The article draws on these theoretical advancements and applies them to a case study of everyday gambling practices using qualitative data (N = 24) collected from the Mass Observation Archive. The article represents one of the first attempts to examine the connections between social mobility and gambling. It draws on sociological research that explores the cultural as well as the economic underpinnings of social mobility and connects this to research examining the inter-relationships between gambling and class. By doing so, it aims to present a novel theoretical approach to the study of gambling as everyday consumer practice; one which can be understood alongside broader cultural and structural inequalities of class. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the effects of China's household registration (hukou) system, which divides the population into rural and urban sectors with differential benefits and entitlements, on the link between intergenerational social mobility and people's well-being. Using China General Social Surveys of 2005 and 2011, we find that upward mobility has a similarly positive effect in the urban and the rural sectors but downward mobility has a markedly negative effect chiefly in the rural sector. We propose a thesis of 'asymmetrical permeability' to account for the findings. In the context of rapid economic development and staggering institutional reform, the upwardly mobile in both sectors enjoy ample socio-economic resources as provided by the advantaged destination classes whereas the downwardly mobile depend very much on the hukou status they have. In the urban but not rural sector, families in advantaged positions are able to protect the downwardly mobile offspring in their well-being. It is therefore the differences in the hukou system that explain the differential acculturation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The proliferation of migrant social media campaigns calling for a 'Yes' vote in the Irish Marriage Equality referendum (May 2015) raises new questions about the conventions of political participation and non-resident citizenship rights. Via a discourse analysis of these campaigns, this article shows how the algorithmic agency of social media combines with the political agency and affective identifications of campaigners to shape the terms of non-resident citizen claims for enfranchisement and sexual citizenship rights. The article argues that despite their novel political tactics, the central campaign discourses of (im)mobility (leaving/staying-put), connectivity (active engagement) and ongoing stake in an inclusive homeland are underpinned by conventional democratic criteria for enfranchisement. The article addresses how these discourses intersect with state and business regimes of mobility and connectivity to produce a particular ordering of citizenship. It also points to those emergent practices and norms of political participation generally, and of non-resident citizenship in particular, that are foregrounded by these campaigns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Governments are increasingly implementing policies aimed at attracting or retaining highly skilled migrants. While a growing number of studies examine the effectiveness of these efforts, the actual mechanisms through which migration policies may operate have not been questioned. Drawing on an aspirations-capability framework for mobility, this article explores the role of migration policies in the geographic mobility decisions of researchers, a highly skilled group that has been specifically targeted by such policies. Focusing on Indian researchers and using qualitative methodology (N = 40), we examine their decisions to study and/or work abroad, to stay or move elsewhere. The article shows that while migration policies do not seem to be influential in the attraction of students and researchers, they do play a role in the retention and subsequent moves of international talent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From 2014 to the end of 2016, over 450,000 people crossed from North Africa towards Italy via the Central Mediterranean route. The number of people recorded as dead or missing in the same stretch of water steadily increased too. Crisis-talk in the region led to renewed efforts by the European Union and its Member States to govern and control migration to and across the Central Mediterranean. Against this backdrop, this article draws upon over 200 interviews with newly arrived boat migrants and 55 stakeholders in Italy to reveal a fundamental disjuncture between the drivers and dynamics of migration and the assumptions underpinning policy development, the saliency of which becomes apparent at three crucial junctions: along migration land routes; at sea; and upon arrival in Europe. In doing so, the article questions current ways of understanding journeys in research and policy, and highlights their consequences for the governance of migration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article argues that everyday bordering has become a major technology of control of both social diversity and discourses on diversity, in a way that threatens the convivial co-existence of pluralist societies, especially in metropolitan cities, as well as reconstructs everyday citizenship. The article begins with an outline of a theoretical and methodological framework, which explores bordering, the politics of belonging and a situated intersectional perspective for the study of the everyday. It then analyses the shift in focus of recent UK immigration legislation from the external, territorial border to the internal border, incorporating technologies of everyday bordering in which ordinary citizens are demanded to become either border-guards and/or suspected illegitimate border crossers. We illustrate our argument in the area of employment examining the impact of the requirements of the immigration legislation from the situated gazes of professional border officers, employers and employees in their bordering encounters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Street-level bureaucrats implementing nation states’ migration policies increasingly find themselves in a structural tension between providing social assistance and regulating the flows of people entering and leaving the national territory. As a result, doing migration work involves a wide range of difficult, ambivalent situations. This article examines how and under which conditions these tensions translate into moral and political dilemmas in street-level bureaucrats’ everyday work. In doing so, it draws upon original qualitative research with street-level bureaucrats working in the Belgian programme for assisted voluntary return. The article concludes by proposing an approach centred around the notion of immunisation so as to understand the social context in which ambivalence and its contraries are produced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article develops a new explorative method for deriving social class categories from patterns of occupational mobility. In line with Max Weber, our research is based on the notion that, if class boundaries do not inhibit social mobility then the class categories are of little value. Thus, unlike dominant, theoretically defined class schemes, this article derives social class categories from observed patterns in a mobility network covering intra-generational mobility. The network is based on a mobility table of 109 occupational categories tied together by 1,590,834 job shifts on the Danish labour market 2001–2007. The number of categories are reduced from 109 to 34 by applying a new clustering algorithm specifically designed for the study of mobility tables (MONECA). These intra-generational social class categories are related to the central discussions of gender, income, education and political action by providing empirical evidence of strong patterns of intra-generational class divisions along these lines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is currently widespread concern that access to, and success within, the British acting profession is increasingly dominated by those from privileged class origins. This article seeks to empirically interrogate this claim using data on actors from the Great British Class Survey (N = 404) and 47 qualitative interviews. First, survey data demonstrate that actors from working-class origins are significantly underrepresented within the profession. Second, they indicate that even when those from working-class origins do enter the profession they do not have access to the same economic, cultural and social capital as those from privileged backgrounds. Third, and most significantly, qualitative interviews reveal how these capitals shape the way actors can respond to shared occupational challenges. In particular we demonstrate the profound occupational advantages afforded to actors who can draw upon familial economic resources, legitimate embodied markers of class origin (such as Received Pronunciation) and a favourable typecasting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article sheds light on the mediating role of social networks on consumption behaviour, a significant facet of social mobility and well-being. Based on the Indian Human Development Survey, the article explores to what extent households across India participating in social networks have increased their consumption levels. While participation in formal social networks does result in improved household consumption levels, the type and number of networks are pivotal to this change. Nevertheless, not all networks lead to similar effects, although the number of social networks per se has a positive effect on consumption. Furthermore, the networks based on homogeneous groups, such as women’s self-help groups, have a negative or lesser effect on smoothing consumption, while those affiliated with heterogeneous networks have a positive effect on increasing consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers changes in the association between educational attainment and occupational prestige in Germany over time. We argue that the link between attainment and occupational prestige has become weaker over time because of compositional changes in graduate occupational destinations. Prior to higher education expansion, the small elite group of graduates tended to access the occupationally closed and thus more prestigious professions on graduation. As higher education participation expanded, however, an increasing proportion of graduates found employment in less prestigious and more diverse graduate jobs. The results confirm our theoretical expectations. The association between educational attainment and occupational prestige has decreased over time as graduates entered a broader range of jobs and their relative advantage over those with lower levels of qualifications decreased. This can, in fact, be attributed to a merely compositional change among graduates’ occupational destinations from prestigious professions towards less prestigious free-market graduate occupations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increasing social mobility is the ‘principal goal’ of the current Coalition Government’s social policy. However, while mainstream political discourse frames mobility as an unequivocally progressive force, there is a striking absence of studies examining the long-term impact of mobility on individuals themselves. In British sociology the most influential research was carried out by Goldthorpe 40 years ago and argued that the mobile were overwhelmingly content with their trajectories. However, using a critique of Goldthorpe as its springboard, this article calls for a new research agenda in mobility studies. In particular, it proposes a large-scale re-examination of the mobility experience – one which addresses the possibility that people make sense of social trajectories not just through ‘objective’ markers of economic or occupational success, but also through symbols and artifacts of class-inflected cultural identity. Such enquiry may yield a richer account that explains both the potential social benefits and the costs of mobility. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Research emphasising the importance of parenting behaviours and aspirations for child outcomes has been seized on by policymakers to suggest the responsibility of the worst off themselves for low levels of social mobility. This article provides a critique of the way in which research evidence has been used to support the dominant policy discourse in this area, as well as an empirical analysis. We use the Millennium Cohort Study to interrogate the relationship between social class and attainment in the early years of schooling. We investigate the extent to which social class inequalities in early cognitive scores can be accounted for by parental education, income, family social resources and parental behaviours. We conclude that social class remains an important concept for both researchers and policymakers, and that the link between structural inequalities and inequalities in children’s cognitive scores cannot be readily accounted for in terms of individual parenting behaviours. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article uses multivariate logistic regression analyses of the 2005 General Household Survey to assess the impact of parents’ occupational and educational characteristics on occupational attainment in Britain, focusing specifically on the salariat. Differences in outcomes according to family structure are then examined, controlling for such parental characteristics. The results indicate that both parents’ characteristics are relevant, and that their effects interact. A smaller chance of a salariat occupation is evident for those who lived in a lone-mother family, lone-father family, or biological-mother stepfamily as a young teenager, reflecting different features of these family types, but consistently reflecting lower educational attainment. Both number of co-resident siblings and parental worklessness affect the odds of having a salariat occupation, this being relevant to family-type comparisons. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores the phenomenon of lifestyle migration from Britain to Spain to interrogate, empirically, the continued relevance of class in the era of individualizing modernity (Beck, 1994). Lifestyle migrants articulate an anti-materialist rhetoric and their experiences of retirement or self-employment diminish the significance of class divisions. However, as researchers who independently studied similar populations in the Eastern and Western Costa del Sol, we found these societies less 'classless' than espoused. Despite attempts to rewrite their own history and to mould a different life trajectory through geographical mobility, migrants were bound by the significance of class through both cultural process and the reproduction of (economic) position. Bourdieu's methodological approach and sociological concepts proved useful for understanding these processes. Employing his concepts throughout, we consider the (limited) possibilities for reinventing habitus, despite claims of an apparently egalitarian social field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the expectations and experiences of a group of Canadian working-class, first-generation university students. I outline the structural disadvantages, in terms of economic, social, and cultural capital, these young people encounter. Rather than viewing working-class status exclusively as a barrier, I show how these students draw on their working-class backgrounds to construct uniquely working-class moral advantages, such as those associated with a strong work ethic, maturity, responsibility, and real-life experiences, to overcome structural disadvantages. Their narratives of moral class advantages, however, lack class consciousness. They can be interpreted as individualistic strategies that draw on collective values. Ultimately, these working-class students hope to transcend their class position. Drawing on working-class moralities supports their claim for recognition as educated middle-class subjects, but with moral dispositions rooted in their social background and upbringing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the effects of material inequality and gender expectations in structuring working-class girls' aspirations about higher education (HE). Through reference to recent ethnographic work in an inner-London secondary school two key arguments are made about how the combined effects of gender and class limit the social mobility HE is expected to provide. First, it is argued that family ties generate gender-specific obligations for working-class women, which have strong social consequences in terms of the take-up of HE places and labour market participation. This is particularly important since the commitment of working-class girls to home and family has been neglected in many theories of gender and social mobility. Second, it is argued that despite the recent political energy devoted to espousing a democratic HE system, the sense of entitlement to HE entry is, for young working-class people, undermined by a diminishing sense of the right to access middle-class spaces and institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As sociology diversified, and under other academic pressures, British sociologists became 'hyper-specialized' in subject expertise and methodology. Exploring multidimensional social life requires knowing about more than one field and having skills in more than one method. The retreat from quantitative methods, however good our qualitative methods, loses opportunities to contribute to important issues, particularly those in the public arena, at the boundaries of the discipline, or which take numerical form. This argument is developed through three recent examples: a critique of Erikson's view of British sociology and the BSA; the socio-economic circumstances of minority ethnic groups; and the isolation of social mobility analysis from political discourse. An approach based on an integrated view of social divisions and expanded methodological pluralism, in which we moderate our claims to sociological generalization, is proposed as a way forward. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reflects on the concepts of class, culture and identity. Working class include those who lack control over the pace of their work and do not exercise supervisory power over others. It might be wise to add in a concern with command over actual economic resources as well as a concern with power in work, although in societies where work is more and more enforced on all adults that domain remains crucial. It is argued that any account of class status based on economic and production relations makes that class very large indeed. The trajectories of individuals and families through processes of social mobility and the transformation of industrial systems and employment structures into post-industrial forms has always been fatuous. Much of the literature on class as damage or injury has the expression of taste through consumption labelled as another basis on which recognition can be denied. There is another literature on consumption in which the consumption tastes of masses of ordinary people actually reconfigure the social as a whole. That reconfiguration is most evidently expressed in its impact on urban form. There is an confusing relationship between culture, consumption and representation.

This study examines the intergenerational social mobility of different ethnic groups in Britain between 1971 and 1991. The small body of previous research on inter-generational mobility and ethnicity in Britain has not distinguished between premigration and post-migration social class, and thus has been unable to relate findings directly to studies of intergenerational social mobility or to account of the changing class composition of different ethnic groups within Britain. This study, instead, focuses on social mobility between generations as it is experienced by different groups in the same country, over the same time period and over the same time period and over the same age range. Using data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) Longitudinal study, this study describes the different patterns of class mobility experienced by a single cohort of children aged 8-15 in 1971 from each of three ethnic groups: white non-migrants, Indians and Caribbeans. It finds that the impact of class origin varies with ethnicity. However, the impact of ethnicity is less salient in determining outcomes for women than it is for men. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]