Vertical Mobility in Britain: A Structured Analysis

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Abstract
Earlier work (Hope, 1974, 1975a) demonstrated `no change' in social mobility between the Glass inquiry of 1949 and the Oxford inquiry of 1972. However the mobility investigated was that known as exchange mobility (other synonyms being pure, perfect, fluidity and circulation mobility), which is defined as departure of observed mobility from perfect mobility. When the man in the street speaks of mobility he usually means something much more specific, namely mobility up or down a vertical hierarchy. The present paper investigates the meaning of perfect mobility by disaggregating the model for it into discrete, additive components, and it shows how the vertical dimension may be represented in a mobility analysis by just one of the many degrees of freedom which are associated with exchange mobility. Implications for comparative analysis, and also for investigation of the relations between vertical and class mobility, are discussed. The theoretical developments of this paper stem from the apparently novel observation that the `additive model' of status inconsistency analysis is formally identical with the `perfect mobility' model of social mobility analysis.

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