SOC 201 Chapter Notes - Chapter 13: Social Stratification, Social Fact
Document Summary
Those who study social stratification and mobility in the united states agree that most people do not experience vertical social mobility either between or within generations. For the most part, people who start out in blue-collar jobs tend to stay in them their entire working lives; people who start out in white-collar jobs tend to stay in them their entire working lives. In other words, most people do not experience either intergenerational or intragenerational mobility. Nonetheless, social mobility is not exactly rare in this country. Overall, there has been a great deal of upward social mobility in the united states and in many european countries over the past century. But this mobility generally involves short steps rather than long leaps. Most occupational mobility, for example, tends to be between closely related occupations. Sociologists have found that most of the mobility that has occurred over the past century can be better explained by social factors than by individual effort.
