Social Mobility

Social Mobility 

change in social position within the social structure by an individual or group.

Social mobility is related to the laws of social development and class struggle, which lead to the growth of certain classes and groups and the decline of others, and also to individual personal activity. A distinction is made between vertical social mobility—upward or downward movement in social position—and horizontal social mobility—movement by an individual within the same social level. Social mobility is broken down into interclass and intraclass mobility. Distinctions are also made between principal and secondary, typical and accidental, and mass and individual trends and channels of social mobility. Social mobility measures changes in social position within a single generation, two generations (fathers and sons), or three generations (grandfathers, fathers, and sons).

In a society with castes and estates, social mobility is severely restricted. Capitalism, in doing away with estate divisions, encourages social mobility. “Unlike social estates, classes always leave the road quite free for the transfer of individuals from one class to another” (V. I. Lenin, Poln. sobr. soch., 5th ed., vol. 2, p. 477). Members of the petite bourgeoisie who meet financial ruin generally become part of the working class, while some industrial workers become part of the intelligentsia or office workers. Some workers become entrepreneurs and members of the bourgeoisie.

Under socialism, profound social transformation has significantly increased mobility. Prediction and control of the processes of social mobility have also become very important. The principal trends of social mobility are the movement of the population from the peasantry to the working class and from the country to the city. Workers also tend to move upward from jobs entailing physical labor to become part of the intelligentsia or engage in office work. The stratum of unskilled workers decreases and the proportion of highly skilled and semiskilled workers increases.

In bourgeois sociology, theories of social mobility are closely related to concepts of social stratification. Directed against Marxist-Leninist theory, they deny the relation of class structure and class struggle under capitalism to property relations and allege that people can freely change their social position through their own efforts. In reality, socioeconomic processes in modern capitalist society make the antagonistic classes maintain their positions more firmly; they also reinforce the castelike nature of the ruling elite.

The class struggle of the working people and the student-youth movement have substantially undermined the basic premises of bourgeois theories of social mobility.

REFERENCES

Marx, K., and F. Engels. Manifest Kommunisticheskoipartii. Soch., 2nd ed., vol. 4.
Lenin, V. I. Razvitie kapitalizma v Rossii. Poln. sobr. soch., 5th ed., vol. 3.
Programma KPSS (Priniata XXIIs”ezdom KPSS). Moscow, 1974.
Semenov, V. S. Kapitalizm i klassy: Issledovanie sotsial’noi struktury sovremennogo kapitalicheskogo obshchestva, chs. 5-6. Moscow, 1969.
Rutkevich, M. N., and F. R. Filippov. Sotsial’nyeperemeshcheniia. Moscow, 1970.
Sorokin, P. A. Social and Cultural Mobility. Glencoe-London, 1964.
See also under CLASSES and SOCIAL STRATIFICATION.

V. S. SEMENOV