Social exclusion,mobility and access1

Much of the literature on social exclusion ignores its ‘spatial’ or ‘mobility’ related aspects. This paper seeks to rectify this by examining the mobile processes and infrastructures of travel and transport that engender and reinforce social exclusion in contemporary societies. To the extent to which this issue is addressed, it is mainly organized around the notion of ‘access’ to activities, values and goods. This paper examines this discourse in some detail. It is argued that there are many dimensions of such access, that improving access is a complex matter because of the range of human activities that might need to be ‘accessed’, that in order to know what is to be accessed the changing nature of travel and communications requires examination, and that some dimensions of access are only revealed through changes in the infrastructure that ‘uncover’ previously hidden social exclusions. Claims about access and socio‐spatial exclusion routinely make assumptions about what it is to participate effectively in society. We turn this question around, also asking how mobilities of different forms constitute societal values and sets of relations, participation in which may become important for social inclusion. This paper draws upon an extensive range of library, desk and field research to deal with crucial issues relating to the nature of a fair, just and mobile society.     

Social mobility and occupational attainments of university graduates

L'article présente une analyse du changement dans les taux de mobilité sociale et de réussite professionnelle chez 2137 hommes ontariens qui ont reçu le BA OU Ie BSC en 1960, 1964 et 1968. Malgré une certaine ambivalence dans les résultats, ceux-ci confirme d'une façon générale les hypothèses suivantes: que la proportion des gradués universitaires récents qui sont susceptibles d'être en mobilité ascendante diminue et que cette diminution s'observe davantage chez les gradués provenant d'un niveau socioéconomique moyen que chez ceux venant d'un milieu inférieur. L'analyse porte également sur des hypothèses concernant l'effet de l'origine socioéconomique, de l'année de graduation, du domaine principal d'étude et de la formation postgraduée sur la réussite professionelle.
This paper presents an analysis of the changing rates of social mobility and the changes in occupational attainment patterns of 2137 Ontario males who received BA or BSC degrees in 1960, 1964, and 1968. Although some findings are mixed, there is general support for hypotheses that a declining proportion of recent university graduates are likely to be upwardly mobile and that this decline will be more pronounced for graduates from middle level socioeconomic backgrounds than for those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. Hypotheses relating the effect of socioeconomic background, year of graduation, major field of study, and postgraduate training on occupational attainment are also tested.     

Social mobility and social capital in contemporary Britain

This paper seeks to contribute to social capital research by linking measures of formal and informal forms of social capital to social mobility trajectories and assessing their impact on social trust. Drawing on data from a recent national survey – Cultural Capital and Social Exclusion (2003/2004 ) – we analyse formal civic engagement and informal social connections. The latter data are obtained using, for the first time in a study in Britain, Lin's (2001 ) 'Position Generator' approach as a means to identify the volume, range and position of individuals' informal social contacts. The pattern of contacts suggests that access to social ties is strongly conditioned by mobility trajectory. We also show that civic engagement in formal associations is especially high among second-generation members of the service class. It is also shown that both class trajectory and possession of two types of social capital have significant impacts on trust. Among the social groups disadvantaged in terms of bridging social ties are not only those in lower classes but also women and members of minority ethnic groups.     

Social network capital, economic mobility and poverty traps

This paper explores the role social network capital might play in facilitating poor agents?? escape from poverty traps. We model and simulate endogenous link formation among households heterogeneously endowed with both traditional and social network capital who make investment and technology choices over time in the absence of financial markets and faced with multiple production technologies featuring different fixed costs and returns. We show that social network capital can either complement or substitute for productive assets in facilitating some poor households?? escape from poverty. However, the voluntary nature of costly link formation also creates exclusionary mechanisms that impede some poor households?? use of social network capital. Through numerical simulation, we show that the ameliorative potential of social networks therefore depends fundamentally on the broader socio-economic wealth distribution in the economy, which determines the feasibility of social interactions and the net intertemporal benefits resulting from endogenous network formation. In some settings, targeted public transfers to the poor can crowd-in private resources by inducing new social links that the poor can exploit to escape from poverty.     

Social mobility and constitutional and political preferences in Northern Ireland

During the past thirty years Catholics in Northern Ireland have experienced unprecedented upward social mobility. Some commentators have suggested that this has led Catholics not merely to adopt the lifestyles of the middle class but also to modify their constitutional preferences, leading to a decline in nationalism. In this paper I examine the relationship between social mobility, on the one hand, and, on the other, both constitutional preferences and political (left or right wing) preferences among Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland, using survey data collected in 1996. There is no evidence that Catholics' constitutional preferences are related to their mobility experiences.     

Social mobility and the interpretation of social class mortality differentials

The discussion of health inequalities in Britain (e.g. in the Black Report) has been conducted largely on the basis of social class mortality differentials measured by achieved social class and not by social class of origin. It is shown in this paper that social class mortality differentials by achieved social class are not invariant to the rate of social mobility and that the use of them is likely to result in a biased measure of trends in health inequalities when the absolute rate of social mobility varies over time. It is further shown that if, as is likely, health status is a factor systematically affecting the probability for an individual of upward or downward social mobility, then an increase in the rate of social mobility may well result in constant or widening social class mortality differentials by achieved social class even if the differentials are narrowing when measured by social class of origin. It is claimed that this process may well explain why the observed social class mortality differentials, which are measured by achieved social class, have not fallen in Britain during the post-1945 period.     

Social mobility and the well‐being of individuals

Several papers published in recent years have revived interest in Sorokin's dissociative thesis: the view that intergenerational social mobility has detrimental effects on the social relationships and wellbeing of individuals. In this paper, I test the dissociative thesis using data from the British Household Panel Survey and Understanding Society. On a wide range of indicators that measure participation in civic associations, contact with parents, close personal relationships, social support, subjective wellbeing, etc. individuals who have achieved long‐range upward mobility (i.e. those who move from working class origin to salariat destination) tend to fare better than those who are immobile in the working class. Those who have experienced long‐range downward mobility (moving from salariat origin to working class destination) do about as well as second‐generation members of the working class. Overall, there is no support for Sorokin's thesis.     

Social mobility and personal satisfaction: evidence from ten countries

This paper examines survey data relating class mobility to satisfaction and dissatisfaction with seven different domains of everyday life among nationally representative samples of men and women living in ten industrialized nations. The evidence is set against competing pessimistic and optimistic accounts of the mobility experience found in earlier literature. Results show that individuals who move from working-class origins to middle-class destinations are no more likely to be systematically satisfied or dissatisfied with life than are the socially immobile or even those downwardly mobile from advantaged backgrounds into the working class. Indeed, in all nations, the overall association between class experience and satisfaction with life is both weak and uneven across the different life-domains. The study also serves to illustrate an important principle of research methodology more generally.     

Size doesn't matter: The fallacy of class-differential fertility in social mobility analysis

One of the key methodological and conceptual constraints in social mobility analysis has been how to differentiate between the 'core' pattern connecting social origins and destinations, and the effect of different distributions of origins and destinations across nations and time points. Conventional sociological wisdom has held that class differentials in family size (and occupational change) impose a significant constraint on the marginal distributions in a mobility table. Due to the logic of the random sampling process, middle class fathers with smaller families are under-represented in mobility tables. It is therefore necessary to approach mobility via the randomly sampled social destinations, rather than as a process moving chronologically from origins to destinations. However, a re-working of the Nuffield Mobility Study data-set is used to show that class differentials in fertility have virtually no effect. The explanation of this surprising finding is shown to lie in class size and the actual distribution of large and small families. The finding implies that if occupational change is left as the only process modifying marginal distributions, it deserves greater attention.     

Social mobility and demand for redistribution in Europe: a comparative analysis

The literature on preferences for redistribution has paid little attention to the effect of social mobility on the demand for redistribution and no systematic test of the hypotheses connecting social mobility and preferences for redistribution has yet been done to date. We use the diagonal reference model to estimate the effect of origin and destination classes on preferences for redistribution in a large sample of European countries using data from the European Social Survey. Our findings are consistent with the logic of acculturation in the sense that newcomers tend to adapt their views to those of the destination class at early stages and that upward and downward mobility do not have distinctive effects on the formation of political preferences. However, even though social origins seem to have a limited impact on preferences for redistribution, the evidence does not support the hypothesis that mobile and non‐mobile individuals are alike. We also find that the effect of social origin on preferences varies largely across countries. The empirical evidence leads to the conclusion that the effect of social origin on preferences for redistribution increases in contexts of strong familism.     

Social mobility in Scotland since the middle of the twentieth century

Extensive mobility between class of origin and class of destination has been a characteristic feature of societies in Europe and North America since the middle of the twentieth century. Most mobility has been upward, and most of that has been explicable by occupational change – by the rise in the proportion of the labour force which works in service‐class jobs and the decline in the proportion in manual jobs. This pattern may now be changing, because parents of younger cohorts (people born since the 1960s) have themselves benefited from upward mobility and so there is less scope for further upward movement by their offspring. The paper uses a large new data source for Scotland to investigate these topics. It finds that there is still a great deal of mobility, and that, although upward mobility still predominates, its amount is lower in younger cohorts than in older. Nevertheless, relative mobility has not changed as upward mobility has declined, just as in earlier studies it was found not to have changed as upward mobility rose. These patterns are similar for men and women.