ABSTRACT
Beliefs about social mobility in Britain – the extent to which people move, or fail to move, up or down the social hierarchy – are dominated by two schools of thought, one rooted in seventy years of sociological research and the other in more recent political discourse. Not only do these two perspectives disagree about how much mobility there is, but in their contrasting ways, both offer constraining and partial pictures of what mobility is all about. It is therefore time for a fresh approach to the familiar problem of social mobility. Anselm Strauss’s long-neglected argument that ‘marginal’ research has a great deal to offer to ‘mainstream’ mobility perspectives (Strauss 1971: 8–10) may have been made nearly half a century ago but it is still relevant in the first quarter of the twenty-first century.
