Introduction

This chapter presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book. The book examines the ideologies of American mobility. This necessitates a focus on the continuing public conversation about opportunities, equality, inequality, success, and failure, mobility—or any other relevant terminology such as poverty or business leadership—along with the manifold cultural and institutional contexts within which the conversation has occurred. For tracing out the contextual properties of competing conceptions and consequent actualities of mobility, the sociologist has readily available large quantities of documentary data. The book analyzes some of these. This analysis leads to a major concern: the development of theory about the varieties of mobility of Americans. To this end, the book draws on the implications of a highly relevant type of more general theory ("Status Passage theory") as developed previously with Barney G. Glaser. For this theory, it draws on various kinds of data including that from biographies and novels as well as the standard, technical literature.