“What is social mobility? Critically examine the classification of ‘closed’ and ‘open’ models of social stratification.” (2024)
Social mobility is the movement of individuals or groups from one position to another within a system of stratification. Pitirim A. Sorokin, who founded the field with Social Mobility (1927), treated it as any shift of a person, group or value in “social space”. The closed–open classification ranks whole societies by how far they permit such movement. It is a useful device, but a contested one.
Social mobility: the concept
- Vertical (up or down between strata) vs horizontal (change of position at the same rank).
- Intergenerational (child compared with parent) vs intragenerational (within one career).
- Individual vs group mobility; structural mobility (created by change in the occupational structure) vs exchange mobility.
- Absolute mobility (total movement) vs relative mobility (comparative odds by origin), the distinction drawn by John H. Goldthorpe.
The classification stated
| Criterion | Closed model | Open model |
|---|---|---|
| Basis of rank | Ascription: birth, lineage, ritual purity | Achievement: education, skill, occupation |
| Norm on mobility | Proscribed; sanctioned by religion (karma, divine order) | Prescribed; sanctioned by equality of opportunity |
| Boundaries | Endogamy, commensal rules, hereditary occupation | Permeable marriage and occupational choice |
| Examples | Caste, estate, slavery | Class in industrial capitalism |
Functionalists read the passage from closed to open as modernisation. Talcott Parsons’s pattern variable of ascription versus achievement, and the argument of Kingsley Davis and Wilbert E. Moore (1945) that positions must go to the most talented, both assume industrial society needs open recruitment.
Critical examination
- Ideal types, not societies. The two models are poles of a continuum. Sorokin’s own historical survey found no society at either extreme.
- Closed systems move. M. N. Srinivas showed through Sanskritisation and the dominant caste that castes rose over generations. The model mistakes the scriptural “book view” for the “field view”.
- Open systems close. Goldthorpe’s Oxford Mobility Study (1980) found absolute mobility rising while relative chances hardly changed. Pierre Bourdieu (Distinction, 1979) showed cultural capital passing inheritance off as merit. Frank Parkin found social closure through property and credentials inside class societies.
- An orientalist binary. Louis Dumont’s Homo Hierarchicus (1966) set a hierarchical India against an egalitarian West. André Béteille answered that caste, class and power in Sripuram vary independently. Gerald D. Berreman (1960) found caste-like closure in the race relations of the American South.
- Gender-blind. Joan Acker (1973) showed that mobility studies measured fathers against sons and ignored women, whose ascribed gender works as closure within “open” systems.
- Ideological. Marxists such as John Westergaard and Henrietta Resler (Class in a Capitalist Society, 1975) argue that openness only moves individuals through class positions and leaves class relations intact.
- Indian evidence. Sam Asher, Paul Novosad and Charlie Rafkin (American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 2024) found India’s intergenerational mobility low and flat since before liberalisation. Scheduled Caste sons gained, helped by reservations. Muslim sons lost ground. Daughters stayed well behind sons. So the market did not open the society on its own, and a supposedly closed group rose through state sponsorship.
Conclusion
The classification describes normative ideals better than it describes actual mobility. Openness is best treated as a matter of degree, measured by relative mobility along several axes (caste, class, gender, religion) at once. Every real society, India included, sits somewhere between the two poles.