“Write short note: Types of mobility.” (1997)
Sociologists classify mobility by direction, time span, unit, cause, standard of measurement and mode of selection. Pitirim Sorokin (Social Mobility, 1927) began the classification. Later mobility researchers such as John H. Goldthorpe and Ralph H. Turner refined it. Each type answers a different question about how open a society is.
A typology
| Basis | Types | Meaning | Indian illustration |
|---|---|---|---|
| Direction | Vertical: upward / downward | A change in rank | A tea-seller’s son clears the civil services exam / a weaver family ruined by power looms |
| Horizontal | A change of position at the same rank | A nurse moves from a district hospital to a city hospital | |
| Space | Geographical (territorial) | A change of place, which may or may not change rank | Seasonal migration from Odisha to brick kilns in Telangana |
| Time | Intergenerational | A comparison of parents and children | A sharecropper’s daughter becomes a lecturer |
| Intragenerational | A change within one career | A constable promoted to inspector | |
| Unit | Individual / group | A person moves, or a whole collectivity | A Dalit entrepreneur / the Patidars of Gujarat moving from cultivators to a business community |
| Cause | Structural / exchange (circulation) | Movement forced by change in the occupational structure / movement within a fixed structure, where one person’s rise means another’s fall | Growth of IT and service jobs after 1991 / competition for a fixed number of government posts |
| Measure | Absolute / relative | The total amount of movement / the odds of people from different origins, net of structural change | More first-generation graduates / the unchanged gap between the children of professionals and of labourers |
| Mode of selection | Contest / sponsored (Turner, 1960) | Open competition / early selection or support by an authority | Open merit competition / reservation, and selective residential schools such as Navodaya Vidyalayas |
| Perception | Objective / subjective | A measured change / the change a person feels | Higher income / a person who still feels low-ranked because of caste stigma |
| Range | Short-range / long-range | A move to a nearby stratum / a move across several strata | Peon to clerk / labourer’s son to surgeon |
Why the distinctions matter
- Structural versus exchange mobility. Much of the upward movement in industrialising societies is structural. Goldthorpe’s Oxford Mobility Study (1980) showed that more “room at the top” can raise absolute mobility while relative chances stay the same.
- Group versus individual mobility. M. N. Srinivas‘s Sanskritisation is group mobility within a closed system. It changes a caste’s position, not the hierarchy.
- Downward mobility is unequal too. Vegard Iversen, Anirudh Krishna and Kunal Sen, using IHDS 2011-12 data, estimated the chance that a professional father’s son ends up a manual labourer. It was about 22% for Scheduled Caste sons and 24% for Scheduled Tribe sons, against 4.3% for forward-caste sons.
- Sponsored mobility and gender. Sam Asher, Paul Novosad and Charlie Rafkin (2024) linked rising Scheduled Caste mobility to affirmative action. Daughters, however, remained less mobile than sons.
Conclusion
No single type captures mobility. A society may have plenty of structural, short-range and horizontal movement and still show little long-range or relative mobility. India today fits that pattern: movement has increased, but the odds for people of different origins remain unequal.