A unified middle class or two middle classes? A comparison of career strategies and intergenerational mobility strategies between teachers and managers in contemporary Hong Kong.

A debate over whether the ‘service class’ is a unitary middle class or is divided between professionals and managers remains unsettled. This qualitative mobility study seeks to elucidate mobility processes of how professional and managerial groups secure their advantages throughout their working lives and over generations. Using data on contemporary Hong Kong, this paper compares the career strategies and intergenerational mobility strategies of forty teachers and thirty managers. Despite employing somewhat different career strategies, managers do not seem less able than teachers to secure their advantages through their work-lives. Using the same intergenerational mobility strategies, teachers and managers exploit economic, cultural, and social resources in a similar way for their children's education. So far as demographic stability over generations is concerned a unified service class is in the making.