“Critically assess social mobility in closed and open systems.” (2020)
Assessing mobility means asking two questions: how much movement each system actually produces, and what that movement changes. The textbook contrast of immobile caste and estate against fluid industrial class holds as a statement of norms. The evidence from both types of system is more mixed.
The conventional assessment
- Liberal-functionalist view: industrialism needs talent allocated by merit, so mobility rises with development. Clark Kerr and colleagues (Industrialism and Industrial Man, 1960) predicted that all industrial societies would converge on open, achievement-based structures.
- Seymour Martin Lipset and Reinhard Bendix (1959) found high and broadly similar mobility rates once industrialisation passed a threshold.
- Melvin Tumin (1953) held the opposite about closed systems: ascription wastes talent and so is dysfunctional.
Closed systems re-assessed: more movement than their norms allow
- M. N. Srinivas noted that caste ranks in the “middle regions” were vague and open to negotiation. Sanskritisation and the rise of dominant castes show real group mobility.
- F. G. Bailey (Caste and the Economic Frontier, 1957) found the Boad and Ganjam Distillers of Bisipara converting liquor-trade profits into land and local influence.
- The catch: such mobility is collective, slow and positional. It needs prior wealth or power and borrows the Brahmanical idiom, which endorses the hierarchy. B. R. Ambedkar’s idea of graded inequality (Annihilation of Caste, 1936) explains why the whole ladder rarely moves: each caste looks down on another, so resistance fragments, and those at the bottom gain least.
Open systems re-assessed: less fluid than their ideology claims
- John H. Goldthorpe’s Oxford Mobility Study (1980) found that more room at the top raised absolute mobility, but relative chances barely moved. Peter Kellner and Peter Wilby summed up the pattern as the “1:2:4 rule of relative hope”: for every chance a working-class boy had of reaching the service class, an intermediate-class boy had two and a service-class boy four.
- Raj Chetty and colleagues (Science, 2017) found that about 90% of Americans born in 1940 out-earned their parents, but only about half of those born in the 1980s did.
- Marxist critique: mobility changes who fills class places, not the places themselves. Frank Parkin saw upward mobility as a political safety valve that lets off working-class discontent.
- Reproduction theorists: Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis (Schooling in Capitalist America, 1976) showed that schooling mirrors workplace hierarchy and so reproduces it.
- Feminist critique: mobility tables built on fathers and sons leave women’s mobility, often through marriage, out of the count.
Indian evidence
India’s formal equality of opportunity has not produced high fluidity. The World Economic Forum’s first Global Social Mobility Index (2020) placed India 76th of 82 economies. Where Dalit mobility has been significant, it has come largely through state-sponsored channels (reservation, public employment) rather than through the market alone.
Verdict
The difference between the two systems is one of degree and mechanism more than of kind. Closed systems permit collective, positional mobility within a hierarchy that stays in place. Open systems permit individual mobility while keeping the relative advantages of origin largely intact. Judged by relative odds, neither system is as open, or as closed, as it claims to be.