scholarly journals Understanding the Social Mobility Chances of Children from Working- Class Backgrounds in Britain: How Important are Cognitive Ability and Locus of Control?

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bastian Andreas Betthäuser ◽  
Mollie Bourne ◽  
Erzsebet Bukodi
Keyword(s):  
Locus Of Control ◽  
Social Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Educational Attainment ◽  
Cognitive Ability ◽  
Labour Market ◽  
Social Stratification ◽  
Class Effect ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Parental Class

Research in social stratification has shown that children from working-class backgrounds tend to obtain substantially lower levels of educational attainment and lower labour market positions than children from higher social class backgrounds. However, we still know relatively little about the micro-level processes that account for this empirical regularity. Our study examines the roles of two individual-level characteristics—cognitive ability and locus of control—in mediating the effect of individuals’ parental class background on their educational attainment and social class position in Britain. We find that cognitive ability mediates only about 35 per cent of the total parental class effect on educational attainment and only about 20 per cent of the total parental class effect on respondents’ social class position, net of their educational attainment. These findings contradict existing claims that differences in the life chances of children from different social class backgrounds are largely due to differences in cognitive ability. Moreover, we find that although individuals’ locus of control plays some role in mediating the parental class effect, its role is substantially smaller than the mediating role of cognitive ability. We measure individuals’ social class positions at different points in their careers—at labour market entry and at occupational maturity—and find that the mediating roles of cognitive ability and locus of control are remarkably stable across individuals’ working lives.

scholarly journals Re-Imagining Social Mobility: The Role of Relationality, Social Class and Place in Qualitative Constructions of Mobility

2021 ◽  
pp. 136078042098512 ◽  
Author(s):  
Louise Folkes
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Social Mobility ◽  
Educational Achievement ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
Ontological Security ◽  
Occupational Position ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Key Techniques ◽  
Class Community

Discussions around social mobility have increasingly gained traction in both political and academic circles in the last two decades. The current, established conceptualisation of social mobility reduces ‘success’ down to individual level of educational achievement, occupational position and income, focusing on the successful few who rise up and move out. For many in working-class communities, this discourse is undesirable or antithetical to everyday life. Drawing upon 13 interviews with 9 families collected as part of an ethnographic study, this article asks, ‘how were social (im)mobility narratives and notions of value constructed by residents of one working-class community?’ Its findings highlight how alternative narratives of social (im)mobility were constructed; emphasising the value of fixity, anchorage, and relationality. Three key techniques were used by participants when constructing social (im)mobility narratives: the born and bred narrative; distancing from education as a route to mobility; and the construction of a distinct working-class discourse of fulfilment. Participants highlighted the value of anchorage to place and kinship, where fulfilment results from finding ontological security. The findings demonstrate that residents of a working-class community constructed alternative social mobility narratives using a relational selfhood model that held local value. This article makes important contributions to the theorisation of social mobility in which it might be understood as a collective rather than individual endeavour, improving entire communities that seek ontological security instead of social class movement and dislocation.

scholarly journals Social Stratification of Education by Ethnic Minority Groups over Generations in the UK

2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurence Lessard-Phillips ◽  
Yaojun Li
Keyword(s):  
Educational Attainment ◽  
Ethnic Minority ◽  
Social Stratification ◽  
Second Generation ◽  
Minority Groups ◽  
General Level ◽  
Ethnic Minority Groups ◽  
Generational Groups ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Parental Class

A large body of research has been conducted both on the social stratification of education at the general level and on the educational attainments of ethnic minority groups in the UK. The former has established the increasing fluidity in the class–education association, without paying much attention to ethnicity, whilst the latter has shown reinvigorated aspirations by the second generation without fine-grained analyses. This paper adds to this literature by examining the relationship between family class, ethno-generational status and educational attainment for various 1<sup>st</sup>, 1.5, 2<sup>nd</sup>, 2.5, 3rd and 4<sup>th</sup> generations in contemporary UK society. Using data from Understanding Society, we study the educational attainment of different ethno-generational groups. Our analysis shows high educational selectivity among the earlier generations, a disruptive process for the 1.5 generation, high second-generation achievement, and a ‘convergence toward the mean’ for later generations. Parental class generally operates in a similar way for the ethno-generational groups and for the majority population, yet some minority ethnic groups of salariat origins do not benefit from parental advantages as easily. An ‘elite, middle and lower’ structure manifests itself in the intergenerational transmission of advantage in educational attainment. This paper thus reveals new features of class-ethno relations hitherto unavailable in UK research.

scholarly journals Social class and the risk of unemployment: Trends, gender differences and the contribution of education

2018 ◽  
Vol 63 (3) ◽  
pp. 303-321 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hannu Lahtinen ◽  
Outi Sirniö ◽  
Pekka Martikainen
Keyword(s):  
Gender Differences ◽  
Social Class ◽  
Labour Market ◽  
Social Stratification ◽  
Labour Force ◽  
Turn Of The Millennium ◽  
Employment Relations ◽  
Market Structures ◽  
Market Risks ◽  
Over Time

Previous research has shown that an advantaged social class position protects individuals from unemployment, but less is known about how this relationship has developed after the turn of the millennium, how it varies by gender and to what extent education contributes to the association between these factors. We assess these questions using register-based data on the Finnish labour force over a 28-year period between 1988 and 2015. The overall risk of unemployment was 2.7–3.7-fold among manual classes compared to upper non-manual classes, and 1.4–1.7-fold among lower compared to upper non-manual classes. Controlling for education attenuated the differences between social classes by about two-thirds. Social class disparities were somewhat more distinct among men than among women, but gender differences narrowed over time. Overall, temporal changes were small, especially among men, except for a curvilinear pattern observed for the relative unemployment risk of the lower non-manual class. To conclude, despite a comparatively egalitarian context and drastic changes in economic conditions and labour market structures over time, social stratification in unemployment has been substantial and considerably persistent. This is in line with the conceptualization of social class underpinning differing employment relations and, therefore, inherently creating variation in labour market risks.

scholarly journals Class, Gender, and Rhoticity: The Social Stratification of Non-Prevocalic /r/ in Edinburgh Speech

2017 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 229-259 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victoria Dickson ◽  
Lauren Hall-Lew
Keyword(s):  
Socioeconomic Status ◽  
Social Class ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Social Stratification ◽  
Acoustic Analysis ◽  
The Social ◽  
Analysis Of Variation ◽  
Middle Aged Adults ◽  
The Relationship

Despite the prominence of socioeconomic status as a factor in models of English variation, few studies have explicitly considered speakers whose social class status changed over their lifetime. This paper presents an auditory and acoustic analysis of variation in non-prevocalic /r/ among middle-aged adults from Edinburgh, Scotland. The speakers represent three groups: the Established Middle Class (EMC) and the Working Class (WC), both of which are characterized as socioeconomically non-mobile, and a third group we call the New Middle Class (NMC), comprising individuals born to working-class families and living middle-class lives at the time of data collection. The results demonstrate that realizations of /r/ have a significant correlation with socioeconomic status, and that the effect of class further interacts with gender. NMC speakers demonstrate the highest level of rhoticity of all three groups. In contrast, WC men show extensive derhoticization and deletion, while WC women show patterns of rhoticity that are more comparable to the NMC women. The EMC speakers show more non-rhoticity than either the NMC speakers or the WC women. A consideration of the indexical value of weak rhoticity highlights the need for more robust phonetic measures distinguishing non-rhoticity from derhoticization, and to that end we consider the cue of post-vocalic frication. Overall, the results point to the need to conceptualize socioeconomic status as potentially fluid and changeable across the lifespan, thereby improving models of the relationship between social class and linguistic variation.

scholarly journals Left behind? Over-time change in the social mobility of children from unskilled working-class backgrounds in Germany

2019 ◽  
Vol 63 (2) ◽  
pp. 133-155 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bastian A Betthäuser
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Labour Market ◽  
Social Mobility ◽  
Educational Inequality ◽  
Birth Cohorts ◽  
Left Behind ◽  
The Social ◽  
High Level ◽  
Social Fluidity

Research on intergenerational social mobility tends to focus on examining the level of overall social fluidity in society. However, from a social justice perspective it can be argued that the type of social fluidity that matters most is upward mobility from the lowest rung of the social ladder. This article examines the labour market chances of children from parents in unskilled working-class positions, relative to children from skilled working-class and higher social class backgrounds, and how they have changed across four birth cohorts in post-WWII Germany. We find that individuals from unskilled working-class backgrounds have substantially lower labour market chances than individuals from skilled working-class backgrounds or higher social class backgrounds. Moreover, we find that the gap in labour market chances between individuals from unskilled working-class backgrounds and individuals from more advantaged backgrounds has not narrowed but, if anything, has widened across the four birth cohorts we examine. Our results suggest that an important factor underlying this sustained labour market inequality is a persistently high level of educational inequality between these groups.

scholarly journals Left behind? Over-time change in the social mobility of children from unskilled working-class backgrounds in Germany

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bastian Betthäuser
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Labour Market ◽  
Social Mobility ◽  
Educational Inequality ◽  
Birth Cohorts ◽  
Left Behind ◽  
The Social ◽  
High Level ◽  
Social Fluidity

Research on intergenerational social mobility tends to focus on examining the level of overall social fluidity in society. However, from a social justice perspective it can be argued that the type of social fluidity that matters most is upward mobility from the lowest rung of the social ladder. This article examines the labour market chances of children from parents in unskilled working-class positions, relative to children from skilled working-class and higher social class backgrounds, and how they have changed across four birth cohorts in post-WWII Germany. We find that individuals from unskilled working-class backgrounds have substantially lower labour market chances than individuals from skilled working-class backgrounds or higher social class backgrounds. Moreover, we find that the gap in labour market chances between indi- viduals from unskilled working-class backgrounds and individuals from more advantaged backgrounds has not narrowed but, if anything, has widened across the four birth cohorts we examine. Our results suggest that an important factor underlying this sustained labour market inequality is a persistently high level of educational inequality between these groups.

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