“What do you mean by social mobility? Discuss the major sources and causes of mobility?” (2011)
Social mobility is the movement of individuals or groups from one position to another in a system of stratification. Pitirim Sorokin, whose Social Mobility (1927) founded the field, held that no society is completely closed or completely open. The useful question is therefore what makes people move, and why they move at different rates in different societies.
Meaning in brief
- Direction: vertical mobility (up or down) and horizontal mobility (a change at the same rank).
- Time span: intergenerational and intragenerational mobility.
- Unit: individual mobility, or group mobility, such as a whole caste rising in rank.
- Why it matters: the rate of mobility shows whether life chances are ascribed at birth or achieved.
Sources and causes
1. Structural causes
- Change in the occupational structure. Industrialisation and the growth of services create more white-collar posts than the higher strata can fill. This is structural mobility. John H. Goldthorpe‘s Oxford study (1980) traced most upward movement in post-war Britain to this “room at the top”.
- In India, PLFS 2025 shows regular wage and salaried workers at 23.6% of the workforce, up from 22.4% a year earlier. That slow shift is what limits mobility out of farming and casual labour.
- Differential fertility. Higher strata have fewer children than they have vacancies, so recruits must come from below. Sorokin listed this among the demographic factors of mobility.
- Technological change destroys some occupations and creates others. Hand-pumps, for example, displaced traditional water-carrier castes.
- Migration and urbanisation loosen local hierarchies. Urban anonymity lets people compete as individuals rather than as caste members.
2. Institutional and political causes
- Education: the main modern channel of mobility, and Sorokin’s chief “sieve” for selecting people.
- The state: legal equality, land reforms and reservation. Viktoria Hnatkovska, Amartya Lahiri and Sourabh Paul (2013) found that between 1983 and 2005 Scheduled Castes and Tribes caught up with other groups in intergenerational education and income mobility.
- Democratic politics: numbers turn into power. M. N. Srinivas‘s idea of the dominant caste, and the rise of backward-caste parties, show political mobility becoming social mobility.
- Market and property: money can buy status, as F. G. Bailey showed for the enriched Distillers of Bisipara (Caste and the Economic Frontier, 1957).
3. Cultural causes
- Sanskritisation (Srinivas) and Westernisation gave castes ways to claim higher rank.
- Reference-group behaviour (Robert K. Merton) and rising aspirations push people to seek better positions.
4. Individual causes
Talent, achievement motivation, marriage (especially hypergamy), social networks, and luck.
5. Causes of downward mobility
Economic crises, indebtedness, illness, the division of land between heirs, and job loss through automation.
Limits
- Relative mobility changes slowly. A study of four generations in Pune by Rajeshwari Deshpande and Suhas Palshikar (2008) found that caste still mattered for upward mobility. Maratha-Kunbis and Dalits gained most, while several OBC groups lagged.
- Mobility for some, closure for others. Causes that lift one group can shut out another, which Frank Parkin described as social closure.
Conclusion
Mobility has no single cause. Structural change creates openings, institutions such as schools and reservation decide who reaches them, and culture shapes who wants to. In India all three are at work, but the slow growth of salaried jobs limits how far the others can reach.