ABSTRACT
From an academic’s point of view, people in general and politicians in particular have only a vague conception of what constitutes ‘social mobility’. Mainstream mobility researchers employ technical rigour and demand intellectual precision in analysis which specifies social mobility in terms of upward or downward movement between social classes. Class position, in such work, is normally defined by a person’s situation in a commonly accepted hierarchy of occupations as defined by their employment contract, status, level of skill, and/or financial remuneration. This points analysis towards the study of society-wide structures and processes by which class is reproduced, and the unequal distribution of mobility opportunities between large aggregates of people. While politicians, by contrast, often use some of the terminology devised in the sociological study of social mobility when they frame social policy, they focus more closely on the personal attributes and aspirations of individuals and how these are marshalled to achieve particular social mobility outcomes. If academics and policy-makers confront the issue of social mobility from these different positions, as they generally do, it is not surprising that the influence of researchers on the way that policies are formulated and effected is somewhat limited.
