Mobility And Status

...They resort to time honored eclecticism, listing no less than six "factors" which bear on the problem...

...The more pity, then, that their most recent work, despite many excellences, is disappointing...

...In the typical case, an uprooted Irish peasant labored in this coun try as an unskilled or semi-skilled laborer...

...They deny this, of course, and wriggle out of the difficulty by maintaining that similar mobility rates can have radically different consequences in different social contexts...

...Since education, as Bendix and Lipset well know, is the prime agent of mobility in a technologically advanced society, what does account for the remarkable rate of upward mobility they claim to have discovered in Switzerland...

...The exaggeration stems from the fact that this procedure glosses over the cruel paradox of status illuminated in Mill's seminal book White Collar...

...Each point is cautiously qualified—at times, the exasperated reader may feel, qualified into limbo...

...As white collar jobs continue to fall in social prestige, economic reward, and quality of working conditions, the propriety of making the manual-non-manual divide a central one becomes increasingly dubious...

...Bendix and Lipset have written well in the past, but here are 294 pages of almost unvaried gray...

...He characteristically succeeded, in a small way, and this was sufficient to give him faith in America as the land of opportunity...

...The slender margin of economic security they enjoyed allowed them to educate their children, who then were equipped to climb out of the working class into jobs in the lower white collar, professional and managerial category...

...The unique character of the American faith, then, is finally to be explained as the product of other influences, such as economic abundance, mass immigration, and the absence of a feudal heritage...

...The authors note this possibility in a final chapter...

...THE PRINCIPAL THEME Of this book is that social mobility, as "an integral and continuing aspect of the process of industrialization," is "high in all industrial societies...

...Use of the manual—non-manual criterion in one way exaggerates, in another underestimates the amount of real social movement in society...

...Mobility appears rather a concomitant of urbanization...

...There is value, I suppose, in the reminder that Poona and Poughkeepsie are not wholly dissimilar, that the supposedly static stratification systems of the Orient do in fact allow for some degree of change in social status...

...Most national mobility studies depend on the manual—non-manual distinction, and Bendix and Lipset can hardly be blamed for the consequent thinness of available mobility data...

...than in many countries...

...The process which opened up once high-status positions in white collar and service occupations was the same process which degraded the status of these positions, so that one wonders what it means to label the independent shoemaker turned factory clerk "upwardly mobile...

...Part of the difficulty is stylistic...

...His children, forced into the factories in their early teens, crossed the manualnonmanual chasm infrequently, but usually managed to move into more highly skilled and better paid laboring jobs...

...Social mobility, they assert, has been no higher in the U.S...

...Kingsley Davis, however, underlined this point in a widelyread textbook years ago...

...The major flaw in Bendix and Lipset's argument, it should be obvious, is the fact that their index of class rigidity doesn't measure what it purports to...

...Thanks mainly to the foundations, the empirical study of social stratification and mobility has expanded enormously in the past decade...

...Yet if the authors really have discovered a valid index of social mobility, as they claim, and have shown that differences in mobility rates between societies with different political systems are negligible, then social mobility and political stability are independent phenomena...

...It is on precisely this topic, it strikes me, that Bendix and Lipset are least enlightening...

...But the apparent contrast between our non-feudal social structure and the more rigid 1I'YA class systems of the Old World is mistaken...

...Besides these mobility studies based on national samples, scattered materials utilizing less crude indices of social mobility are thrown into the text...

...To be sure...

...The authors are tireless in recording bits of fugitive evidence which point to "high rates of social mobility" anywhere and everywhere—even in Poona, India...

...The stature of Bendix and Lipset has been steadily growing...

...Here they have a point, but much of what they smuggle in under the category of "social context" really pertains to social mobility, once that concept is broadened beyond their simplistic definition...

...The chief puzzle involves America's widespread adherence to the Alger myth...

...Thus the immigrant, his son, and his grandson could all feel that opportunities for individual ascent within the system were great, although only the grandson made a move that would be registered on Bendix and Lipset's index...

...societies raises an other question...

...Long sections of this work are full of rich and subtle analysis...

...The presence here of a democratic educational system is listed as a principal factor, and striking evidence is marshalled to prove the marked superiority of educational opportunities for the common man in America...

...It contains outstanding discussion of the social origins of the American business elite, social mobility in a metropolitan community (Oakland, California), and other topics...

...One of these, curiously, turns out to be our old friend, the existence of "a continuous high rate of social mobility in American society...

...Simply movement, it turns out, between manuaI and non-manual positions in the occupational hierarchy...

...Instead of a peasantry and a classic proletariat, America has produced a class of farmer-capitalists and a working class that has rarely advanced beyond "trade-union consciousness...

...In an amazing display of bourgeois dedication, he sacrificed everything to one end—the accumulation of property...

...Research I am currently doing on the social mobility of workers in a nineteenth century New England mill town reveals a cycle at work which gave many American workers a strong (if deceptive) sense of status improvement...

...Bourgeois success values have somehow seeped down into even the lowest social levels here...

...But these virtues are not enough to rescue the book from its unfortunate thesis...

...America, often regarded as a distinctively "open" society, has indeed permitted a very high degree of "social mobility...

...In no other country has this escalator effect been quite so pronounced and dramatic, even though rates of manual to non-manual movement appear to have been roughly comparable in most of the industrialized nations...

...The mode of argumen tation is supremely academic...

...What has been lacking is a figure of real distinction to draw together these disparate, often trivial materials into a new synthesis...

...But they can legitimately be criticized for erecting a large expensive house on such sandy foundations...

...While the authors touch on this status cycle in their hasty discussion of immigration, their commitment to a superficial definition of mobility makes proper emphasis of it impossible...

...Research teams have been commissioned, thousands upon thousands of IBM cards punched, vast amounts of data accumulated...

...This not very convincing interpretation suggests the need for critical examination of the first premise which made it necessary, namely the hypothesis that mobility opportunities in America have been no greater than in other industrial nations...

...A wealth of comparative evidence— studies, that is, measuring moves between manual and non-manual occupations—shows that if America has been a "land of opportunity," so too have England, France, Italy, Germany, Sweden, Finland, and Japan...

...One footnote vividly contrasts the elitist educational system of Switzerland with that of the U.S...

...There were, in fact, vital differences in status within the broad range of working class occupations, with an extremely high degree of rapid movement into the more attractive positions...

...Why, one wonders, consider social mobility a function of industrialization at all if data from Poona and Sao Paulo, Brazil are included...

...Yet, as they sense, this can hardly play a major role in their analysis, else Finland would have its Algerism too...

...Seymour Lipset and Reinhard Bendix's Social Mobility in Industrial Society is an attempt at such a synthesis...

...THIS HEAVY EMPHASIS on the universality of social mobility in industrial (or is it urban...

...What, then, does account for all that is undeniably distinctive about American attitudes towards the economic and social structure...

...What is meant here by "social mobility...

...Why...

...MORE IMPORTANT for the problem of American Algerism, however, is the fact that the technique of Social Mobility in Industrial Society leads to an underestimation of the feeling of status improvement experienced by the American working class during the crucial years of industrial transformation...

...Social Mobility in Industrial Society, we learn in the introduction, grew originally out of an interest in social mobility in American society...

...There is," Bendix and Lipset assure us, "an important relationship between a society's internal mobility and the stability of its political regime...

...But Bendix and Lipset's mania for establishing these superficial similarities leads them far from their thesis...

...The real problem, however, is not one of form but of substance...

...They draw a Tocquevillean contrast between the flexible recruitment policy of the English aristocracy and the foolish rigidity of the French ruling class of the Ancien Regime...

...Lipset's Agrarian Socialism and Union Democracy, Bendix's Work and Authority in Industry, joint products like Class, Status and Power and numerous essays in professional journals: these have been refreshing exceptions to the general tendency of American sociologists to devote more and more attention to progressively less significant problems...

...BENDIX AND LIPSET devote thirty-seven pages to an explanation of the persistence of "ideological equalitarianism" in America...

...Accept this as a satisfactory definition, as do the authors, and dramatic conclusions follow...