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Notes on the Historical Study of Social Mobility*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

Stephan Thernstorm
Stephan Thernstorm
Affiliation:
Brandeis University
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Extract

In recent years sociological work in the field of stratification and social mobility has become, in at least one sense of the term, impressively cosmopolitan. National sample surveys which include data on inter-generational occupational mobility have been carried out in every major Western nation and in a good many non-Western societies as well, and those have inspired some ambitious comparative analyses of social mobility. This development, as S. M. Miller puts it, has had the virtue of making "the study of mobility one of the few fields of sociology which has overcome national parochialisms”. True as this is, however, it must be said that there are forms of parochialism other than national. Much contemporary research into social mobility suffers from one of these - a parochialism of time rather than of place, as it were, the parochialism of presentism. My purpose here is to suggest what is lost as a result of that parochialism, and to argue that a sense of the past, an ability to see his subject in historical depth, is not a luxury but a necessity for the student of social mobility.

Type
Social Mobility
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 10 , Issue 2 , January 1968 , pp. 162 - 172
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1968

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References

1 Miller, S. M., “Comparative Social Mobility: A Trend Report and Bibliography”, Current Sociology, 9 (1960), 2.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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8 For further development of this point, see Thernstrom, Stephan, “‘Yankee City’ Revisited: The Perils of Historical Naïveté”, American Sociological Review, 30 (1965), 234–242.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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11 Rogoff, , op. cit., 44.Google Scholar

12 Thernstrom, , op. cit., 84–86, 167–168, 195–196.Google Scholar

13 Hatt, Paul K., “Occupation and Social Stratification”, American Journal of Sociology, 55 (1950), 539.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For an excellent historical illustration, see Tilly's, Charles discussion of the dual class structure of the Vendée in the 1790's; The Vendée (Cambridge, 1964), 79–80, 98–99.Google Scholar

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19 A judicious review of the controversy and selections from the leading contributions is available in Stone, Lawrence, ed., Social Change and Revolution in England, 1540–1640 (London, 1965).Google Scholar For splendid examples of the sort of historical analysis I have in mind, see Stone's essay on “Social Mobility in England, 1500–1700”, Past and Present, 33 (1966), 16–55,CrossRefGoogle Scholar and his book The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558–1641 (Oxford, 1965).Google Scholar