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This paper presents the outputs of a research in which stratification, social classes and social mobility are approached from a perspective that incorporates the perceptions of the subjects regarding to the forms of construction of a symbolic normality about this issues during contemporary Argentina. In the last decade Argentina characterized itself by a model of state intervention that is consolidated in 2007, and establishes a new link between labor and social policies. This new relationship comes into tension with the neoliberal ideology of individualization, typical of the neoliberal decade, the nineties. To do so, it involves two theoretical perspectives, and a strategy that combines quantitative and qualitative techniques. The quantitative approach allowed us to describe trends that characterize social mobility and social stratification processes, which contextualize this article. The qualitative approach allowed us to analyze perceptions of one's position in the social structure (Echeverria Zabalza, 1999). The biographical method was used. Life stories addressed through thematic analysis (and not the story of life as a unit in itself) from a comparative perspective (Bertaux, 1994; 2005). In this line, we reconstructed the perceptions that the subjects that make up different paths class enunciate and construct discursively, as far as mechanisms of state intervention concerned, and particularly the way in which these utterances are related to perceptions about one's place in the social structure and the potential of that space, differentially with others. Our conclusions claim that the break of the neoliberal consensus regarding forms of state intervention was not necessarily hand to hand by a one of values and principles on which the society organized the common Life, and built explanations and justifications about social inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main objective of this article is to identify the hegemonic perspective on social mobility studies, the political assumptions of this, and present an alternative. This alternative would allow us to use the social mobility concept but regarding the study of the social class structuring processes. Particularly, we try to show how both alternatives have different explanations for social inequality on Latin American societies. A synthesis of the functionalist vision is presented, in association with the interpretative and political inferences that emerge from it. Then, an alternative proposal that allows us to consider social mobility in the field of class structuring processes, in which social policies have a key role by promoting different gradients of income distribution, with regressive or redistributed effects on class inequality. Class paths appear as the concept that joins these processes within a relational view of social classes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]