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one - Getting in

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 April 2023

Sam Friedman
Affiliation:
London School of Economics and Political Science
Daniel Laurison
Affiliation:
Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania
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Summary

Social mobility has become one of the central political issues of our times; certainly across the Western world, it has emerged as the rhetorical weapon of choice for a generation of political leaders. Impassioned speeches abound. “The American Dream is dead,” Donald Trump declared throughout his 2016 presidential campaign, “But I will bring it back.” In France, Emmanuel Macron has made similar promises. It is in the UK, however, that mobility is most explicitly centre-stage. As Theresa May proclaimed in her maiden speech as Prime Minister: “We won’t entrench the advantages of the fortunate few; we will do everything we can to help anybody, whatever your background, to go as far as your talents will take you.”

The bellwether for how nations are doing on social mobility, as we explained in the Introduction, is very often access to the top – who gets into elite occupations and how this relates to their class background. This is perhaps partly due to the limited slice of society that politicians tend to see in their everyday lives. But it also reflects the way in which elite careers are routinely held up by politicians as what we should all be striving towards – occupational destinations that offer high incomes, high status and considerable decision-making power. Such political narratives are fairly obviously undermined, however, if such highly prized arenas are seen as inaccessible, or rigged in favour of the privileged.

But there has long been a perception that many high-status occupations in the UK, such as law, medicine and journalism, are exactly that: professions that have traditionally been, and remain today, stubbornly elitist. As Alan Milburn wrote before resigning in protest as Chair of the UK Social Mobility Commission (SMC), ‘the most pressing policy priority facing the country is opening up the top of British society.’ Britain, he argued, ‘remains – at heart – elitist.’

Yet despite the impassioned political rhetoric surrounding ‘fair access’, the truth is that our actual understanding of this issue has long lagged behind. This is because the surveys traditionally used to look at social mobility have at most a few thousand respondents. That is more than enough for capturing the overall relationship between origins and destinations in terms of ‘big social classes’.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Class Ceiling
Why It Pays to Be Privileged
, pp. 29 - 44
Publisher: Bristol University Press
Print publication year: 2019

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  • Getting in
  • Sam Friedman, London School of Economics and Political Science, Daniel Laurison, Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania
  • Book: The Class Ceiling
  • Online publication: 14 April 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.46692/9781447336075.002
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To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

  • Getting in
  • Sam Friedman, London School of Economics and Political Science, Daniel Laurison, Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania
  • Book: The Class Ceiling
  • Online publication: 14 April 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.46692/9781447336075.002
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Getting in
  • Sam Friedman, London School of Economics and Political Science, Daniel Laurison, Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania
  • Book: The Class Ceiling
  • Online publication: 14 April 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.46692/9781447336075.002
Available formats
×