Social Mobility and Journalism Education

As a class escapee, I’ve always been inter­ested in social mobil­ity. What drives it? Well, here’s an inter­est­ing ana­lysis from the Janu­ary 2009 edi­tion of the Amer­ican Journal of Soci­ology: Micro­class Mobil­ity: Social Repro­duc­tion in Four Coun­tries (sub­scrip­tion). It should interest journ­al­ists and their social-mobility-minded offspring.

Why are occu­pa­tions such an import­ant con­duit for social repro­duc­tion? In all coun­tries, par­ents accu­mu­late much occupation‐specific cap­ital, identify with their occu­pa­tion, and accord­ingly “bring home” their occu­pa­tion in ways, both dir­ect and indir­ect, that then make it sali­ent to their chil­dren and lead their chil­dren to invest in it. It fol­lows that chil­dren develop a taste for occu­pa­tional repro­duc­tion, are trained by their par­ents in occupation‐specific skills, have access to occu­pa­tional net­works that facil­it­ate occu­pa­tional repro­duc­tion, and use those skills and net­works to acquire more occupation‐specific train­ing out­side the home. If chil­dren are risk‐averse and ori­ented prin­cip­ally to avoid­ing down­ward mobil­ity, the safest path to ensur­ing that object­ive may well be to use these vari­ous occupation‐specific resources on behalf of occu­pa­tional repro­duc­tion. Indeed, even in the absence of any intrinsic interest in occu­pa­tional repro­duc­tion, chil­dren may still pur­sue it because it is the best route to big‐class repro­duc­tion (Erikson and Jonsson 1996).

These supply‐side mech­an­isms, while likely to be import­ant, may be sup­ple­men­ted by addi­tional demand‐side mech­an­isms. Most not­ably, employ­ers or train­ing insti­tu­tions (e.g., pro­fes­sional schools) may some­times dis­crim­in­ate in favor of work­ers or stu­dents who have par­ents in their chosen trade or pro­fes­sion, either because such fam­ily involve­ment is pre­sumed to sig­nal under­ly­ing skills (stat­ist­ical dis­crim­in­a­tion) or because fam­ily net­works are dir­ectly deployed to garner favor or priv­ilege (pure dis­crim­in­a­tion). In sub­sequent ana­lyses, it would be use­ful to exam­ine the role of aspir­a­tions, train­ing, net­works, and dis­crim­in­a­tion in fur­ther­ing micro­class inher­it­ance and mobility.