10 Jan 08

Men face increasing competition from women at the same time as the expansion of room at the top has slowed. Credit: iStockphoto/René Mansi

The government’s goal of promoting equality of opportunity omits to mention that increasing social mobility is likely to create as many losers as winners, according to Oxford University researchers. Their study, published in the British Journal of Sociology, concludes that total social mobility has stayed at the same level over recent decades, but that downward movement has increased.

The study co-authors, Dr John Goldthorpe and Dr Michelle Jackson say that, in particular, prospects for men are not as good as they once were. Men are experiencing a ‘double whammy’ of greater competition from women, coupled with a slow-down in the growth of senior professional and managerial positions. The study argues there is no longer the same expanding ‘room at the top’ – the same growth in professional and managerial employment - to accommodate ever-rising rates of upward mobility as there was over the second half of the 20th century.

Although policies aimed at promoting equality of opportunity and greater social mobility are attractive to politicians, the study argues that in present day conditions these policies, if successful, must increase upward and downward mobility to essentially the same extent. Under the structurally benign conditions of the mid-twentieth century social mobility was strongly asymmetrical, with far more upward than downward movement.

Under the less favourable conditions of today, greater upward mobility can only be achieved by increasing social fluidity: that is, by reducing the inherent ‘stickiness’ between the social positions of parents and their children. But increased mobility achieved in this way will of necessity be symmetrical: greater upward mobility will mean greater downward mobility.

Dr John Goldthorpe, from Nuffield College, said: ‘The politicians’ goal is to get back to the level and pattern of social mobility that characterised the post-war decades. Doing this through education and policies that will increase social fluidity is simply not attainable. ‘If we are to have an education-based meritocracy, then it must be accepted that this will mean significantly more downward mobility than occurs today. This may be no bad thing. But politicians should be honest about it, and not always try to imply that ‘more mobility’ means more upward mobility.

Dr Michelle Jackson, from the Department of Politics and International Relations, said: ‘The possible cause for concern is not a decline in the total mobility rate but the fact that, for men, the composition of this rate is tending to change and in an unfavourable way.’

The study concludes that New Labour is attempting to shift policy concerns away from supposedly more contentious issues of inequality of condition by talking about increasing equality of opportunity. But the study warns: ‘In the 21st century world, efforts at promoting greater quality of opportunity could well be as politically controversial and divisive – because of the necessarily accompanying increase in downward mobility – as attempts directly to reduce the widening inequalities of condition for which mobility is seen as the social balm.’  

The Oxford study points out that at the very point in time when social mobility has become a big political issue, there is less adequate data about it than there was 20 or 30 years ago. In 1993 the General Household Survey stopped asking questions about respondents' social origins.

According to the authors, since then researchers have had to resort to less satisfactory data from two birth cohort studies which are not a good basis for population estimates. Economists’ research using data from the National Child Development Study, which aims to cover all children born in Britain in one week in 1958 and the British Cohort Study, which covers all children born in Britain in one week in 1970, has looked at intergenerational income mobility, and has suggested that this is declining.

But the authors point out that a different picture emerges if the focus is on social position. They also had to rely on the birth cohort studies, but by then treating intergenerational mobility within a class structural context, they were able to integrate their findings with those resulting from earlier analyses of General Household Survey data, and thus to place them in a wider context.

Dr John Goldthorpe said: ‘Questions about the level, pattern and trend of mobility bear directly on the relevance of New Labour’s policy analysis and in turn are likely to be crucial to the evaluation of its performance in government. However, politically motivated discussion of social mobility often reveals an inadequate grasp of both empirical and analytical issues.’