“Write short note: Social Mobility and social change.” (2002)
Social mobility is the movement of individuals or groups between positions in a stratified order. Social change is an alteration in the pattern of social relations, institutions and values. The two are closely linked but not the same: people can move constantly within an unchanged structure, and a structure can change with little individual movement. Their relationship runs in both directions.
Change as a cause of mobility
- Structural mobility: industrialisation, urbanisation and the growth of services create new positions that must be filled from below. Pitirim A. Sorokin (Social Mobility, 1927) linked rates of vertical circulation to such shifts, as well as to wars, revolutions and differences in fertility between strata.
- Change of values: Talcott Parsons described modernisation as a move from ascription to achievement, which makes mobility legitimate. Daniel Lerner (The Passing of Traditional Society, 1958) saw “psychic mobility”, the capacity to imagine oneself in another role, as the mental precondition of modern life.
- India: land reform, the Green Revolution, mass schooling and reservation opened channels once blocked by caste. Sam Asher, Paul Novosad and Charlie Rafkin (2024) found evidence that affirmative action substantially raised the mobility of Scheduled Castes, even as overall intergenerational mobility stayed low.
Mobility as a cause of change
- Circulation of elites: Vilfredo Pareto argued that history is a “graveyard of aristocracies”. New elites rising from below renew or overturn a political order.
- Class formation: Karl Marx remarked that in the United States classes were not yet fixed and kept exchanging members, which slowed class consciousness. Ralf Dahrendorf likewise argued that high mobility weakens class solidarity and softens, but does not end, class conflict.
- Caste: Owen M. Lynch’s The Politics of Untouchability: Social Mobility and Social Change in a City of India (1969) showed Jatav mobility turning into a political movement that challenged hierarchy itself.
- Agrarian castes: after the Green Revolution, prosperous middle-peasant castes such as Jats and Yadavs turned economic gains into political mobilisation. This backward-caste politics helped bring the implementation of the Mandal Commission’s recommendations in 1990, which changed the rules by which public positions are distributed.
When mobility does not bring change
- M. N. Srinivas held that Sanskritisation produces positional change within a stable hierarchy, not structural change. Westernisation, through education, the professions and the courts, did more to alter the rules of ranking.
- Frank Parkin argued that individual upward mobility works as a safety valve. It absorbs discontent and so helps preserve the existing order.
- Mobility without new opportunities can breed anomie in Émile Durkheim’s sense, or innovation through illegitimate means in Robert K. Merton’s strain theory, instead of orderly change.
Conclusion
Mobility is an index of change, a product of change and sometimes an agent of it. It produces structural rather than merely positional change when it is collective and politicised, as the rise of backward castes and Dalits in Indian public life shows.