ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explains an outgrowth of a series of studies undertaken for the Institute of Industrial Relations of the University of California, Berkeley, studies which began as a secondary analysis of data collected for a labor-market survey of Oakland, California. It summarizes the findings from the Oakland study that are particularly relevant to an understanding of American patterns of mobility. An ideal ratio between the distribution of talents and the distribution of rewards can obviously never occur in society, but the approximation to this ideal, or the failure to approximate it, lends fascination to the study of social mobility. The book focuses on the rates of social mobility and beliefs about mobility in various societies, and suggests reasons for the patterns revealed by the data. It deals with the sociological and the social-psychological approach to the study of the causes of individual mobility.
