Social Mobility for the 21st Century

Social Mobility for the 21^st Century addresses experiences of social mobility, and the detailed processes through which entrenched, intergenerationally transmitted privilege are reproduced. Contributions will include (but are not limited to) family relationships, students’ encounters with higher education, narratives of work careers, and ‘mobility identities’. The book intends to challenge both the framework of the more traditional approach, and the politicisation of mobility which casts ‘mobility’ as a possession, a commodity or a character trait, and threatens to castigate the ‘non-mobile’ as carrying a personal responsibility for their situation.

This book presents critical analyses of routes into social mobility, the experience of social mobility, and the political and social implications of social mobility’s ‘panacea’ status. Drawing on the work of established scholars and more recent entrants, the chapters will offer a fresh look at social mobility, opening up the topic to a wider readership among the profession and beyond, and stimulating further debate. This book will appeal to higher level students and scholars of sociology alike, as well as having a broad cross-disciplinary appeal.

Steph Lawler is a Reader in Sociology at the University of York. Her work considers identities, not in categorical terms, but in terms of how identities become produced and reproduced, approved or disapproved. She has written widely on the ways in which various social ‘troubles’ rest on concerns about what kinds of persons there are and there should be. She is the author of Mothering the Self: Mothers, Daughters, Subjects and Identity: Sociological Perspectives, as well as articles and chapters on social mobility and, more widely, the social relations of class and gender.

Geoff Payne, FAcSS, is a Senior Research Associate at Newcastle University. He was Director of the Scottish Mobility Study at Aberdeen University in the mid-1970s, subsequently producing over fifty articles and five books on social mobility. His The New Social Mobility was published by Policy Press in January 2017. A former President of the BSA, and winner of the 2012 HEA National Award for Excellence in Teaching Sociology, he has been an advisor for the Ministry of Justice's Social Mobility Strategy. He has served on the Editorial Boards of several leading Sociology journals, and has edited six books including his widely used Social Divisions.