Social Mobility: Sociology, Types & Examples 

Social mobility in sociology means the movement of individuals or groups up or down the social hierarchy, usually measured by changes in income, education, or occupation. It can occur across a lifetime or between generations, and is shaped by factors like education, family background, and social policies. Sociologists study it to understand inequality and opportunities in society.

Types of Social Mobility

Sociologists distinguish between several kinds of social mobility, grouped into two main pairs: vertical vs horizontal mobility and intergenerational vs intragenerational mobility.

Each captures a different way that individuals or families move within a social class system.

Vertical vs Horizontal Mobility

This distinction centres on whether a change in position involves a shift up or down the social hierarchy or simply a move to a different role at the same level.

Vertical Mobility: This is the type of mobility sociologists are most interested in. It involves a person’s occupational status or social class moving either upward or downward.

Upward Vertical Mobility:

This refers to an increase or an upward shift in socioeconomic class.

A plumber’s daughter who becomes a physician is one example.

In the United States, education is a key vehicle for upward mobility. A college, graduate, or professional degree makes a high-paying job much more likely.

The ‘American Dream’ is built on the belief in upward mobility through hard work and talent.

However, great leaps in social class are rare. One’s chances are heavily influenced by the socioeconomic status of one’s parents.

Downward Vertical Mobility:

This is the lowering of one’s social class.

This can be caused by various factors such as business setbacks, unemployment, illness, dropping out of school, or getting a divorce.

In recent decades, the U.S. has seen a wave of downward structural mobility due to recessions and the outsourcing of high-paying manufacturing jobs, forcing some workers into lower-paying positions.

Sociologist Katherine Newman describes the immense social and psychological costs of this, including lowered self-esteem, despair, and depression, particularly in a society that measures self-worth by occupational status.

Horizontal Mobility: This type of mobility involves changing from one occupation to another at the same social class level. Examples include an army captain becoming a public school teacher or a restaurant server becoming a taxi driver.

Since horizontal mobility does not involve a change in occupational status or social class, sociologists are generally less interested in studying it.

---

Intergenerational vs Intragenerational Mobility

This pair of concepts distinguishes between mobility that occurs across generations of a family and mobility that occurs within an individual’s own lifetime.

Intergenerational Mobility: This refers to social mobility from one generation to the next within the same family. It is a difference in social class between different generations of a family.

Upward Intergenerational Mobility:

This occurs when children end up in a higher-paying or more prestigious job than their parents.

For example, if the daughter of a hairdresser becomes a college professor, she has experienced upward intergenerational mobility.

Downward Intergenerational Mobility:

This happens when children of parents in a higher class end up in a lower-class position. An example would be if a lawyer’s son becomes a carpenter.

Patterns of intergenerational mobility can also reflect long-term societal changes.

Research shows that a family’s socioeconomic status strongly affects children’s chances of success. Children from advantaged backgrounds are more likely to achieve upward mobility.

Intragenerational Mobility: This refers to movement up or down the social hierarchy within a person’s own lifetime. It describes mobility within a single generation.

Upward Intragenerational Mobility:

This is experienced when an individual moves up the social ladder during their life.

For instance, if you start as an administrative assistant and eventually become an upper-level manager, you have experienced upward intragenerational mobility.

Downward Intragenerational Mobility:

This occurs when a person moves down the social hierarchy in their lifetime.

For example, if an upper-level manager gets laid off due to corporate downsizing, they have experienced downward intragenerational mobility.

Intragenerational mobility can also highlight differences between siblings; the wealth and prestige experienced by one person may be quite different from that of their siblings.

---

Structural Mobility

Structural mobility occurs when large-scale social or economic changes cause entire groups to move up or down the social hierarchy at the same time.

Structural mobility is a collective shift. It is shaped by transformations in society itself, unlike intergenerational or intragenerational mobility, which focus on individuals or families.

Major drivers include industrialisation, which created new factory and middle-class jobs in the 20th-century U.S. and led to widespread upward mobility.

Technological change cuts both ways. It can eliminate old jobs while creating new ones, pushing some groups downward while lifting others.

Economic recessions and outsourcing have also forced many people into lower-paying work.

Sociologists link structural mobility to broader social change.

Functionalist theorists see it as part of societal differentiation, while conflict theorists emphasise economic restructuring and class struggle. In either case, the economy is the key driver.

Structural mobility reminds us that opportunities are not shaped only by personal effort; they depend heavily on the wider historical and economic context that opens or closes paths to mobility.

---

Examples of Social Mobility

Both the UK and the US are formally “open” class systems, but mobility is constrained by social class, race, and inequality.

The American Dream ideal is undermined by structural barriers, while UK mobility is heavily shaped by persistent educational inequalities.

In contrast, Scandinavian social democracies demonstrate higher levels of mobility, suggesting that policy choices strongly influence opportunity structures.

The “American Dream” in the US

The United States is often associated with the American Dream: the belief that hard work and ambition can secure upward mobility regardless of background.

Stories of figures like Abraham Lincoln or Barack Obama embody this ideal. However, sociologists argue the dream often functions more as a cultural myth than a lived reality.

• Unequal Opportunity: Resources such as quality education and well-paid jobs are unequally distributed. White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) elites have historically enjoyed greater advantages than working-class Whites, Black Americans, Hispanics, and Native Americans.

• Barriers for Minorities: Studies show discrimination in hiring, with “white-sounding” names receiving more callbacks than “African American-sounding” ones. Even with similar education, African Americans and Latinos achieve less upward mobility than White counterparts.

• Downward Trends: Katherine Newman’s research highlights a “withering American Dream”, as corporate downsizing and the decline of manufacturing jobs led to widespread downward mobility and psychological strain. The transition to a postindustrial economy has widened inequality between the “haves” and “have-nots.”

Mobility Patterns in the UK

The UK’s history also reveals shifting patterns of mobility.

• Industrialisation: In the 19th century, the move from agriculture to industry created new opportunities for upward mobility but also widened inequalities, as conflict theorists argue workers were exploited.

• Post-War Expansion: The growth of higher education and comprehensive schooling in the mid-20th century created new opportunities. Functionalists such as Young and Willmott described a “March of Progress,” with more symmetrical nuclear families and greater opportunities for advancement.

• Persistent Class Inequalities: Despite reforms, social class remains the strongest predictor of educational attainment. The attainment gap persists between pupils from professional and manual backgrounds. Middle-class parents use economic, cultural, and social capital to secure advantages, while working-class students may be deterred from university by fear of debt. Conflict theorists argue the system continues to reproduce inequality.

• Economic Change and Crime: Globalisation has reshaped mobility and related behaviours. Rising affluence from the 1960s–2000 increased property crime opportunities, while cheaper imported goods reduced burglary rates but contributed to new forms of street robbery.

Comparative Trends: US vs Europe

Comparative research shows the US has lower mobility than most other Western nations.

European and Scandinavian countries typically provide stronger social safety nets and invest more in social services.

For example, Sweden and Denmark combine market economies with robust welfare states, resulting in less inequality and greater mobility.

Generous policies such as subsidised parental leave promote gender equality and reduce structural barriers.

---

Causes of Social Mobility

The chances of moving up or down the social ladder are shaped by a range of interconnected influences.

Theories of Social Mobility

• Functionalists argue that mobility reflects meritocracy, with education and effort allowing talent to rise. They see mobility as functional for society because it ensures the most capable people fill the most important roles.

• Marxists and conflict theorists reject the idea of equal opportunity, emphasising that structural inequalities and capitalist systems ensure privilege is reproduced across generations. Education and policies, they argue, often serve ruling-class interests.

• Interactionists focus on the micro-level, showing how labelling, teacher expectations, and everyday discrimination shape individuals’ self-concept and opportunities, often reinforcing disadvantage.

Together, these perspectives illustrate that social mobility is not simply about individual ambition but is deeply influenced by broader social structures and interactions.

Three explanations go further, describing the mechanism by which privilege is earned or passed on.

• Role allocation (Davis & Moore, 1945): Society must fill demanding positions with talented people. Unequal rewards motivate people to train for them, and open competition produces mobility.
• Cultural reproduction (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977): Schools reward cultural capital that middle-class children absorb at home. They turn that advantage into neutral-looking credentials, which the authors called symbolic violence because it disguises privilege as merit.
• Correspondence principle (Bowles & Gintis, 1976): Schools mirror the hierarchy of the capitalist workplace. They mainly produce a workforce used to obedience and externally set rewards, not sorted talent.

Saunders (1995) extends the functionalist case for Britain. Once ability and effort are controlled for, he argued, class differences in occupational attainment are fairly modest.

1. Education

Education is widely seen as the most important vehicle for upward mobility.

Functionalist theorists argue that schools act as a meritocracy, equipping students with skills and allocating them to roles based on talent and effort.

Higher qualifications strongly increase access to high-status, well-paid jobs. This is especially true of university degrees.

Social democratic reforms such as the expansion of higher education opened professional opportunities to more working-class students.

However, conflict theorists like Marxists disagree. They claim that education often reproduces inequality through three mechanisms.

• Myth of meritocracy: the belief that rewards follow talent and effort, which justifies unequal outcomes.
• Hidden curriculum: the informal lessons schools teach, such as obedience and acceptance of hierarchy.
• Tracking (streaming): sorting pupils into ability groups, which disproportionately places working-class and minority children in lower tracks.

Schools in deprived areas also suffer from fewer resources, reinforcing disadvantage.

2. Family

Family background is another decisive factor.

Parents transmit their social position through socialization and by passing on different forms of capital.

Middle-class parents typically encourage creativity and independent thinking, reflecting the autonomy of their jobs, while working-class parents emphasise obedience and conformity, preparing children for subordinate roles (Kohn).

Bourdieu (1986) distinguished economic, cultural, and social capital.

• Cultural capital: language styles, knowledge, and values that give middle-class children a better fit with school expectations.
• Economic capital: money, which enables advantages such as private tutoring.
• Social capital: networks and contacts, which help secure access to better schools or job opportunities.

Together, these forms of capital reproduce class inequalities across generations.

3. Discrimination

Discrimination creates structural barriers that limit mobility for many groups.

Research shows that racial discrimination in hiring persists, with identical CVs receiving more callbacks when paired with “white-sounding” names.

Institutional bias also operates in the criminal justice system, where minorities may face harsher treatment.

Gender inequality also restricts upward mobility. Although women now outperform men in education, they still face a pay gap, glass ceilings, and concentration in lower-paid sectors.

Within schools, teacher labelling and stereotyping by class, race, or gender can create self-fulfilling prophecies that lower achievement.

4. Government Policies

Government policies shape the overall environment for mobility.

• Education reforms: School marketisation and parental choice aimed to raise standards. Critics argue they mostly benefit middle-class families, who can use their resources and knowledge to access the best schools.
• Welfare and social policy: Policies on poverty, housing, and healthcare matter because poor living conditions and lack of opportunity trap families in cycles of disadvantage.
• Anti-discrimination measures: Affirmative action and legislation such as the Civil Rights Act 1964 aim to address systemic barriers, though debates remain about their fairness and effectiveness.
• Structural interventions: Investing in early childhood education or tackling regional inequalities is often seen as essential for expanding opportunity (Heckman & Mosso, 2014).

---

Implications of Social Mobility

Social mobility carries far-reaching implications for society, the economy, and individuals.

These implications are understood very differently across sociological perspectives, particularly functionalism and conflict theory, and revolve around questions of social order, inequality, and life chances.

Implications for Society and the Economy

From a functionalist perspective, social mobility is essential for stability and efficiency.

• Role Allocation and Economic Efficiency: Davis and Moore argue that mobility allocates the most talented individuals to the most critical roles.
  
  Higher rewards, such as income and prestige, motivate people to invest in education and training. This ensures that demanding professions like medicine or engineering are filled.
  
  In this sense, a meritocratic system that supports upward mobility is not just fair but functionally necessary for a strong economy.

• Social Stability and Integration: Mobility also promotes cohesion by providing a legitimate route for advancement.
  
  The belief that success is attainable through hard work, embodied in the ideology of the American Dream, helps sustain social order and discourages discontent.
  
  Education plays a central role here, acting as a bridge between family and wider society while sorting individuals into positions based on merit.

From a conflict theory perspective, the idea of mobility operates less as a reality and more as a mechanism that sustains inequality.

• Reproduction of Inequality: Conflict theorists argue that mobility largely serves to legitimate existing class structures.
  
  Families with greater economic, cultural, and social capital are able to secure the best schools and jobs for their children, reproducing privilege across generations.
  
  Practices such as tracking, standardised testing, and the hidden curriculum all reinforce the advantage of dominant groups while marginalising the poor.

• Ideology and Legitimation: Meritocracy and the American Dream are viewed as ideological tools that justify inequality.
  
  By framing success as the product of individual effort, the system shifts blame for failure onto the disadvantaged themselves.

• This encourages what Marx called false consciousness, a distorted view of society that stops people challenging structural inequalities.

Implications for the Individual

The presence, or absence, of mobility has profound consequences for people’s lives, shaping opportunities, self-concept, and behaviour.

• Life Chances and Well-Being: Position within the stratification system affects opportunities for health, education, and income.
  
  Upward mobility brings material security and improved prospects for one’s children, while downward mobility often results in lowered self-esteem, depression, and a sense of powerlessness, particularly in societies where occupational success defines self-worth.

• Identity and Social Interaction: Symbolic interactionists highlight how mobility influences identity.
  
  Charles Horton Cooley’s looking-glass self suggests that individuals construct self-concepts based on how they believe others perceive them.
  
  Those from lower classes may internalise stigma, while those at the top cultivate a sense of superiority.
  
  Nicola Ingram’s research shows that upwardly mobile working-class youth often face tension as they adapt to middle-class norms, sometimes at the expense of their original identities.

• Deviance and Crime: Limited legitimate opportunities for upward mobility can foster deviant responses.
  
  Robert Merton’s strain theory argues that when society promotes cultural goals like wealth but denies equal means of achieving them, individuals may innovate through crime.
  
  This implies that high barriers to mobility contribute to social problems such as crime rates among disadvantaged groups.

Classic Studies of Social Mobility

Claims about mobility are empirical claims, so sociologists have spent over half a century measuring how much movement really occurs. Sorokin (1927) first framed movement between social strata as a distinct object of sociological study.

Three studies define the classical evidence. Between them, they supplied the tools every later study still uses: the status-attainment model and the distinction between absolute and relative mobility.

Blau and Duncan: The Status-Attainment Model

This was the most detailed single-country mobility study of its time, and its method became a template for a generation.

It covered men only, so women’s mobility went largely undocumented. The design also could not separate mobility created by job growth (structural mobility) from a genuine rise in equality of opportunity. The next study made that distinction its centrepiece.

An influential comparison complicated the American picture. Lipset and Bendix (1959) compared blue-collar to white-collar mobility across nine industrialised countries.

Mobility across that line clustered between roughly 27 and 31 per cent in every country. That contradicted the assumption that the US was exceptionally open.

Later researchers argued the comparison understated genuine differences, because it examined only one dividing line and excluded downward and long-range mobility.

The Oxford Mobility Study: Absolute vs Relative Mobility

This distinction is arguably the most important tool the field has produced. It explains how functionalists and conflict theorists can both be right about the same data.

Functionalists point to rising absolute mobility. Conflict theorists point to stubborn relative inequality.

Like Blau and Duncan, the study covered men only. Critics also say its class scheme squeezes different occupations into broad categories and captures women’s work poorly.

Blanden and Colleagues: Mobility Going into Reverse

The comparison rests on only two cohorts from one country, so it cannot show whether the decline is a lasting trend.

Even so, it has been highly influential. It shows that mobility can fall within a single generation, even in a mature industrial democracy.

---

Measuring Social Mobility

Sociologists measure mobility using both objective indicators, such as occupation, education, and income, and subjective perceptions of class.

The choice of measure often reflects theoretical perspectives. Functionalists prefer composite metrics such as socioeconomic status (SES), a single score combining occupation, income, and education. Conflict theorists focus on structural inequalities in wealth and class relations.

1. Occupation

Occupation is one of the most widely used indicators.

• Prestige scores: National surveys rank jobs by prestige (e.g., physician: 86, janitor: 22). Intergenerational mobility is assessed by comparing a person’s score with their parents.

• Classification schemes: Systems like the UK’s Office for National Statistics (ONS) Social Class Scheme group occupations into categories (e.g., “higher managerial” vs. “routine manual”). Movement between these categories reflects mobility.

• Marxist models: Conflict theorists, such as Erik Olin Wright, argue mobility should be measured by control over production, autonomy, and authority rather than prestige alone.

2. Education

Education is both a pathway to and a measure of mobility.

• Qualifications: Comparing highest qualifications across generations (e.g., GCSEs vs. degrees) shows intergenerational shifts.

• School performance: Standardised test scores, enrolment rates, and type of institution attended (elite vs. non-elite) reveal inequality and opportunity.

• Cultural bias: Conflict theorists argue test outcomes often reflect class and cultural capital rather than merit.

3. Income and Wealth

Economic resources offer another crucial lens.

• Income mobility: Movement between income quintiles (fifths of the income distribution) or out of poverty illustrates upward or downward shifts.

• Wealth: Assets such as property and investments, often inherited, highlight long-term class reproduction.

• Poverty lines and indicators: In the UK, eligibility for Free School Meals (FSMs) is used to track mobility among disadvantaged children.

4. Socioeconomic Status (SES)

Functionalists often combine occupation, income, and education into a composite SES score. This gives a fuller picture of a person’s social standing and lets researchers track movement between levels of the social hierarchy.

5. Subjective Measures

In addition to objective measures, sociologists sometimes use subjective methods, where individuals are asked to identify their own social class.

For example, the General Social Survey asks respondents to place themselves in the lower, working, middle, or upper class.

While useful for studying class identity and consciousness, these measures often diverge from objective criteria.

6. Research Methods

Mobility is studied using:

• Large-scale surveys:  Surveys like the Youth Cohort Study and the General Social Survey collect quantitative data on parental occupation, education, income, and respondents’ own achievements, allowing for statistical analysis of mobility trend

• Secondary data analysis of government statistics, like the U.S. Census Bureau or the UK’s Department for Children, Schools and Families.

• Qualitative interviews, which capture lived experiences of class movement, cultural capital, and identity. They help researchers understand the meanings people attach to their class background, the role of cultural capital, and how they navigate their educational and career choices.

Critical Evaluation of Social Mobility Research

Research on social mobility fits parts of every theoretical account, and none is simply refuted. The newest evidence also challenges the American Dream directly.

Contemporary Research

The Fading American Dream

Chetty and colleagues (2017) measured absolute income mobility: the share of children whose inflation-adjusted household income exceeds their parents’ at the same age.

Because it uses near-complete administrative records rather than a survey sample, this sits close to the top of the evidence for measuring absolute mobility.

It cannot isolate every cause, and it measures absolute rather than relative mobility. The two can move independently.

Inequality and Stalling Mobility Across Countries

Corak (2013) reviewed cross-national data from roughly twenty high-income countries. Countries with more unequal incomes, including the US and UK, also showed less relative mobility, a pattern known as the Great Gatsby Curve.

Corak reads the link as causal. Greater inequality widens the gap in what families can invest in children, such as schooling quality, health, and enriching early environments.

Bukodi and colleagues (2015) extended the British cohort comparison into the 2000s. Relative mobility showed little recovery.

The decline Blanden and colleagues found persisted: class origin still mattered about as much for adult class as it did for earlier cohorts.

The three sources converge. Rising inequality and stalling relative mobility appear causally linked. This is a fanning out of life chances that mid-century optimism did not anticipate (Corak, 2013; Blanden et al., 2004; Bukodi et al., 2015).

The studies cover different countries and different mobility concepts, so their findings cannot simply be added together. Even so, an administrative-data study and linked birth-cohort studies, both high in the hierarchy of evidence, point the same way.

Testing Cultural Capital Directly

Bourdieu’s cultural-capital account is hard to test with aggregate mobility statistics. Jæger and Møllegaard (2017) tested it directly with Danish identical twins.

The twin design is a stronger basis for causal claims than correlational cultural-capital research. The sample comes from one low-inequality Scandinavian welfare state, though. Whether the finding holds in more unequal Anglo-American societies remains untested.

Which Theory Fits the Evidence?

Role allocation is the account most directly contradicted by the relative-mobility evidence (Davis & Moore, 1945). A genuinely meritocratic sorting mechanism should narrow, not sustain, the gap in outcomes between equally able children from different class origins.

Conflict theory fits the relative-mobility findings better, whether through cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1986) or the correspondence principle (Bowles & Gintis, 1976).

It has a problem of its own. It struggles to explain why absolute mobility rose so much for most of the twentieth century. The structural account resolves the tension: more room at the top, not fairer competition for existing room.

Symbolic interactionism and Merton’s strain theory work at another level. They explain how individuals respond to blocked or downward mobility, not the aggregate rates, so they complement the structural theories.

Neither side is simply wrong. Each describes a different property of the same data.

Meritocracy as Ideology

Michael Young coined the word meritocracy as a warning, not an endorsement. His satirical essay The Rise of the Meritocracy (Young, 1958) imagined a rigid new elite, selected by IQ and effort rather than birth.

Believing they deserved their position, its members justified their dominance more fully than any inherited aristocracy.

Survey evidence gives the warning empirical weight. Mijs (2021) analysed cross-national attitude data and found that belief in meritocracy tends to rise, not fall, as income inequality rises.

He traced this to growing economic segregation. As rich and poor increasingly live and work apart, both lose everyday exposure to unequal starting conditions that would undercut belief in merit.

Together, Young and Mijs suggest that meritocratic narratives are not neutral summaries of how mobility works. As the concept of false consciousness implies, they can make rising inequality feel more legitimate.

Limits of the Evidence

Measurement choices shape how much mobility appears to exist. Every estimate depends on how “origin” and “destination” classes are defined.

Savage and colleagues (2013) combined economic, cultural, and social capital in a large BBC survey of British class. They proposed a revised model with a small, wealth-concentrated elite at the top and a large, economically and socially isolated class at the bottom.

A scheme drawn too coarsely can understate real movement. One drawn too finely can manufacture movement between categories that are not meaningfully different.

The evidence is also mostly Anglo-American. Blau and Duncan (1967), Goldthorpe (1980), Blanden et al. (2004), and Chetty et al. (2017) all study the US or Britain.

Corak’s (2013) comparison is the best corrective. Even it covers only about twenty high-income countries, so conclusions about social mobility mostly describe rich, Western, industrialised societies.

The clearest next step is comparable linked tax and education records in more countries. Built to the standard of the US data Chetty and colleagues used, they would test whether American findings generalise.

Further Information

• Brown, P. (2013). Education, opportunity and the prospects for social mobility. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 34(5-6), 678-700.
• Hout, M. (2015). A summary of what we know about social mobility. The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 657(1), 27-36.
• Van Leeuwen, M. H., & Maas, I. (2010). Historical studies of social mobility and stratification. Annual Review of Sociology, 36, 429-451.

References

Blanden, J., Goodman, A., Gregg, P., & Machin, S. (2004). Changes in intergenerational mobility in Britain. In M. Corak (Ed.), Generational income mobility in North America and Europe (pp. 122–146). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511492549.007

Blau, P. M., & Duncan, O. D. (1967). The American occupational structure. Wiley.

Bourdieu, P. (1986). The forms of capital. In J. Richardson (Ed.), Handbook of theory and research for the sociology of education (pp. 241–258). Greenwood.

Bourdieu, P., & Passeron, J.-C. (1977). Reproduction in education, society and culture. Sage.

Bowles, S., & Gintis, H. (1976). Schooling in capitalist America: Educational reform and the contradictions of economic life. Basic Books.

Bukodi, E., Goldthorpe, J. H., Waller, L., & Kuha, J. (2015). The mobility problem in Britain: New findings from the analysis of birth cohort data. British Journal of Sociology, 66(1), 93–117. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-4446.12096

Corak, M. (2013). Income inequality, equality of opportunity, and intergenerational mobility. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 27(3), 79–102. https://doi.org/10.1257/jep.27.3.79

Davis, K., & Moore, W. E. (1945). Some principles of stratification. American Sociological Review, 10(2), 242–249. https://doi.org/10.2307/2085643

Goldthorpe, J. H. (1980). Social mobility and class structure in modern Britain. Oxford University Press.

Heckman, J. J., & Mosso, S. (2014). The economics of human development and social mobility. Annual Review of Economics, 6(1), 689–733. 

Ingram, N. (2011). Within school and beyond the gate: The complexities of being educationally successful and working class. Sociology, 45(2), 287–302.

Jæger, M. M., & Møllegaard, S. (2017). Cultural capital, teacher bias, and educational success: New evidence from monozygotic twins. Social Science Research, 65, 130–144. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssresearch.2017.04.003

Lipset, S. M., & Bendix, R. (1959). Social mobility in industrial society. University of California Press.

Mijs, J. J. B. (2021). The paradox of inequality: Income inequality and belief in meritocracy go hand in hand. Socio-Economic Review, 19(1), 7–35. https://doi.org/10.1093/ser/mwy051

OECD. (2010). A family affair. In Economic policy reforms 2010: Going for growth (pp. 181–198). OECD Publishing.

Parsons, T. (1951). The social system. Free Press.

Saunders, P. (1995). Social class and stratification. Routledge.

Sorokin, P. A. (1927). Social mobility. Harper & Brothers.

Wright, E. O. (1997). Class counts: Comparative studies in class analysis. Cambridge University Press.

Young, M. (1958). The rise of the meritocracy, 1870–2033: An essay on education and equality. Thames and Hudson.

Empirical UK Studies

• Breen, R., & Goldthorpe, J. H. (2001). Class, mobility and merit: The experience of two British birth cohorts. European Sociological Review, 17(2), 81–101.

• Erikson, R., & Goldthorpe, J. H. (1992). The constant flux: A study of class mobility in industrial societies. Oxford University Press.

• Savage, M., Devine, F., Cunningham, N., Taylor, M., Li, Y., Hjellbrekke, J., Le Roux, B., Friedman, S., & Miles, A. (2013). A new model of social class? Findings from the BBC’s Great British Class Survey experiment. Sociology, 47(2), 219–250. https://doi.org/10.1177/0038038513481128

Contemporary US Research

• Putnam, R. D. (2015). Our kids: The American dream in crisis. Simon & Schuster.

• Chetty, R., Grusky, D., Hell, M., Hendren, N., Manduca, R., & Narang, J. (2017). The fading American dream: Trends in absolute income mobility since 1940. Science, 356(6336), 398–406. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aal4617

International & Policy-Focused

• OECD. (2018). A broken social elevator? How to promote social mobility. OECD Publishing. 

• Breen, R. (Ed.). (2004). Social mobility in Europe. Oxford University Press.