Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-xfwgj Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-06T22:18:38.487Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Notes on the Historical Study of Social Mobility*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

Stephan Thernstorm
Stephan Thernstorm
Affiliation:
Brandeis University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

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

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

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

2 Warner, W. Lloyd and Low, J. O., The Social System of the Modern Factory (New Haven, 1947);Google ScholarRobert, S. and Lynd, Helen M., Middletown: A Study in American Culture (New York, 1929)Google Scholar and Middletown in Transition: A Study in Cultural Conflict (New York, 1937);Google ScholarSibley, Elbridge, “Some Demographic Clues to Stratification”, American Sociological Review, 1 (1942), 322–330;CrossRefGoogle ScholarAnderson, D. H. and Davidson, P. E., Occupational Mobility in an American Community (Stanford, 1937);Google ScholarHertzler, J. O., “Some Tendencies Towards a Closed Class System in the United States”, Social Forces, 30 (1952), 313–323.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 Jackson, E. F. and Crockett, H. J., “Occupational Mobility in the United States: A Point Estimate and Trend Comparison”, American Sociological Review, 29 (1964), 5–15;CrossRefGoogle ScholarDuncan, O. D., “The Trend of Occupational Mobility in the United States”, American Sociological Review, 30 (1965), 491–498.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 Rogoff, Natalie, Recent Trends in Occupational Mobility (Glencoe, III., 1953).Google Scholar

5 Aronson, Sidney, Status and Kinship in the Higher Civil Service (Cambridge, 1964).CrossRefGoogle Scholar The business-elite literature is conveniently summarized and analyzed in Lipset, S. M. and Bendix, R., Social Mobility in Industrial Society (Berkeley, 1959), Chapter IV.Google Scholar

6 Smyth, Newman, Social Problems: Sermons to Workingmen (Boston, 1885), 12–13.Google Scholar

7 Ware, Norman, The Industrial Worker, 1840–1860 (Boston, 1934; paperback edition, Chicago, 1964),Google Scholarpassim. For similar fears in the latter half of the nineteenth century, see the documents in Litwack, Leon, The American Labor Movement (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1962), 3–14. Both Ware and Litwack were insufficiently critical of the testimony they cite, and assumed that if contemporary witnesses thought that opportunities were declining, they must have been in fact, an assumption questioned below.Google Scholar

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

9 For a good example from the field of demography, see Antonovsky, Aaron, “Social Class, Life Expectancy, and Overall Mortality”, Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly, 45 (1967), 38–39.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed For further discussion of the advantages of longitudinal studies over static cross-sectional ones, see Goldfarb, Nathan, An Introduction to Longitudinal Statistical Analysis (Glencoe, III., 1960),Google Scholar and Ryder, Norman B., “The Cohort as a Concept in the Study of Social Change”, American Sociological Review, 30 (1965), 843–861.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10 Thernstrom, Stephan, Poverty and Progress: Social Mobility in a Nineteenth Century City (Cambridge, 1964).Google Scholar

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

14 Lipset, and Bendix, , op, cit., 203–226;Google ScholarSjoberg, Gideon, “Rural-Urban Balance and Models of Economic Development”, in Smelser, Neil and Lipset, S. M., Social Structure and Mobility in Economic Development (Chicago, 1966), 235–261;Google ScholarBoalt, Gunnar, ”Social Mobility in Stockholm: A Pilot Investigation”, Transactions of the Second World Congress of Sociology (London, 1954), II, 67–73;Google ScholarMorris, Morris D., “The Recruitment of an Industrial Labor Force in India, with British and American Comparisons”, Comparative Studies in Society and History, II (1960), 305–328;CrossRefGoogle ScholarRonald, and Freedman, Deborah, “Farm-Reared Elements in the Non-Farm Population”, Rural Sociology, 21 (1956), 50–61.Google Scholar

15 Cf. Thompson, E. P., The Making of the English Working Class (London, 1963).Google Scholar

16 Goldstein, Sidney, Patterns of Mobility, 1910–1950: The Norristown Study (Philadelphia, 1958).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

17 Rudé, George, The Crowd in History, 1730–1848 (New York, 1964), 196–197.Google Scholar

18 Thompson, , op. cit., 55.Google Scholar

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