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Social Stratification

Notes The work-history material collected by Cousins, Curran and Brown (1983) also shows that, over a
10 year period, around 40 per cent of the men and women in their sample had held jobs located
in more than one Registrar General’s class. Other work-history material has also highlighted
considerable class mobility among women. These studies suggest a need for a more systematic
examination of short-term class mobility and its consequences.
In this unit, a model of the class structure which distinguishes classes according to market-related
criteria will be used to record the extent and nature of short-term interclass mobility, drawing on
a nationally representative sample of over 90,000 employed adults. The results will be compared
for men working full-time, women working full-time and women working part-time. The patterns
of interclass mobility will be shown to differ systematically for men and women, the occupational
system being considerably less structured for women. Particular occupations are observed to
facilitate mobility between classes. Overall, the pattern of mobility provides a view of the extent to
which occupational classes can be distinguished empirically as relatively stable collectivities.
The observed rate of class mobility depends upon a number of factors. First, it varies whit the
overall recorded rate of job changing, which, in turn, varies with the time span between observations
and with the economic climate at the time of measurement. For example, data for recent years are
likely to show the effect of the current economic decline and restructuring. If a new job can be
found when firms go out of business and workers are made redundant it often means working in
a different occupation and acquiring new skill. Second, the rate of observed class mobility will
depend upon the extent of occupational mobility. This may result from employees, 'normal
progression’ through promotion chains into managerial and supervisory positions. It may also
reflect occupational change occurring in a less coherent way in order to obtain better pay or
working conditions or for a wide variety of other reasons, such as a more convenient place of
work.

Structural changes are visualized only latently and that too due to sanskritization and
westernization. Emphasis on the study of social mobility in terms of upward movement
in the caste hierarchy further legitimizes the culturological approach to the study of society
and culture in India.

Although these types of job changing are necessary before a class change can occur, they do not in
themselves define a change of class; this occurs only when a job change coincides with a division
between the classes in whichever schema is used. Thus the class categorization will play a major
part in determining the nature and amount of class changing recorded. A class model which
makes a simple division between manual and non-manual work would be likely to record fewer
class changers than a model involving a greater number of classes.
If the boundaries between classes are established only in terms of the characteristics of the
occupational structure of male employment, which has often been the case in previous studies, the
mobility rates observed for women may be mainly an artefact of using that particular class schema.
Moreover, occupational segregation, which tends to cluster most women into a few occupations,
means that their mobility is to a large degree constrained to a small set of ‘female’ occupations; for
women, there are also likely to be fewer chances of promotion into supervisory and managerial
positions and thereby into a different class. These and other differences in the relationship of men
and women to the occupational structure have been used as the basis of arguments that married
women should be excluded from studies of either occupational mobility or the entire class system
We and others have attempted to counter this position elsewhere.

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