“The youngsters of the generation now entering the so-called "labour market" have been groomed and honed to believe that their life task is to outshoot and leave behind the parental success stories, and that such a task is fully within their capacity. However far their parents have reached, they will reach further. Nothing has prepared them for the arrival of the hard, uninviting and inhospitable new world of
downgrading of results, devaluation of earned value, volatility of jobs and stubbornness of joblessness, transience of prospects and durability of defeats, stillborn projects and frustrated hopes and chances ever more conspicuous by their absence. The higher they looked, the more deceived and downtrodden they
49
would feel.”
Zygmunt Bauman, Downward Mobility is Now a Reality (2012)
In any society based on the exchange of labour and capital there has been a notable and persistent turn towards some form of class structure. The prevailing economic conditions in which young people tasked with combating austerity find themselves in are no different. One major point of discussion upon which this dynamic rests that has become a key concern of sociology is that of social mobility (Goldthorpe et al, 1982; Willis, 2000; Brown, 2018; Bukodi & Goldthorpe, 2018, Major & Machin, 2018). The term social mobility refers to the process by which individuals move from one position in a society to another, positions by which general consent have been given generalised hierarchical value (Lipset & Bendix, 1992). This term is largely used in relation to upward mobility i.e. the process of moving from a lower economic class to a higher one, yet as Bauman (2012) adequately describes, the onset of austerity and the globalised economy we have built has very much made downwards mobility a distinct reality in ostensibly developed
economies.
Focusing on mobility is, according to some writers, misplaced and overly focused on achievements in regards salary and position (Grusky & Weeden, 2006; Pfeffer, 2014). In Hoskins & Barker’s (2017) research consisting of 32 interviews with pupils from academies in England they found that young people’s desire for occupations that could provide opportunities for job satisfaction was often rooted in their family
background and environment, and if the impetus to pursue this was lacking, so too was the desire for job satisfaction to some degree. In this they further identify that aspirations for job satisfaction are largely linked to professional and personal happiness, with an emphasis on status above income, a notion which is almost entirely absent from policymakers’ expectations. McPherson (2019) studied this phenomena with young people in Clackmannanshire, a semi-rural location and Scotland’s smallest council area, and found that interviewees’ sense of mobility was severely restricted by the area they lived in and the immediate opportunities available to them. In such areas the roles that are deemed to be upwardly mobile are largely unavailable, furthering individuals’ need to exhibit status through their professional responsibility over others rather than financial or skills based advancement.
The over emphasis on promoting upward social mobility is partially concerned with improving the lot of the worst off without damaging the interests of the more advantaged, particularly those with inherited wealth (Wilkinson & Pickett, 2009). Despite this, the growth in poverty and the exclusion felt by many in society are genuine concerns felt by global lawmakers and establishment figures, largely as such sentiments do not fit with the idealised perception of a capitalist economy even its most fundamental advocates would like to broadcast. Even in the land of manifest destiny, the United States, the dream of mobility is dying, where
50 rates of upward income mobility have fallen sharply over the past half century (Breen, 2019). Further, there have been two important macroeconomic trends that have affected the incomes of children born in the 1980s relative to those born in the 1940s in the United States: lower Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth rates and greater inequality in the distribution of growth (Chetty et al, 2017), a trend that is reflected in the UK also.
During times of economic prosperity the argument that social mobility was on an upwards curve was easier for policy makers to articulate as the expansion of higher level jobs drove a growth in the need for high skilled workers (Mitchell, 2005). The growth in skilled workers was matched by an expansion in higher education graduates, who in the initial decades of the liberalisation of degree entry at least found fruitful returns on their years of study, a trend that has not lasted in the UK (Naylor et al, 2015). Growth of this kind led to the widely accepted expectation that young people would inevitably do better than their parents, an expectation assumed with each passing generation, and one that until now rang true (Corlett, 2017). Yet even before the onset of the financial crisis, this polarisation of the economy between high and low skilled rapidly led to an increasing difficulty for those beginning in low skilled jobs to climb the career ladder (Plunkett & Pessoa, 2013). Gone were the progressions from shop floor to upper management, as now the same position not only required experience, but a variety of academic certification too (Goos & Manning, 2007; Gardiner & Corlett, 2015).
There is plentiful longitudinal research on the subject of social mobility that suggests the UK in particular experiences relatively low social mobility (Dearden et al., 1997; Blanden et al., 2004; Goldthorpe & Mills, 2008). Further, there is a widely assumed narrative that generational differences have heightened expectations among young people regarding where their futures might lie and their ultimate career destinations. Despite this, Turok et al’s (2009), study of 12-13 year olds in three schools, concluded that aspiration differences between children and their parents, despite divergent upbringings, were largely the same and that this had remained consistent across generations with only marginal variance. Erikson & Goldthorpe (1992) had previously evidenced this trend when showing that relative differences among social classes have not substantially changed over time in nine industrialised countries, including the UK. Though mobility is a problem for the entire world, the systems that have prevailed in the developed west have been particularly poor at allowing for this form of progress (Esping-Anderson & Cimentada, 2018). As Gugushvili (2017) found, mobility is lower in more unequal, democratic, and liberalised societies –
particularly among those aged 25-40, calling into question the belief that liberal capitalism has necessitated an upturn in social mobility. This potential failure has warped what is perceived as valuable work and in order to better understand whether that remains within the classic wage labour paradigm it is imperative to speak to young people directly about these concerns.
51 The declining mobility in western economies is of great concern to the liberal democratic project as it suggests, not without evidence, that for all of the prosperity and educational amenities we have developed a young person leaving school at 16 is not likely to be much worse off in the long run than one of their peers who continues on to higher education and beyond (Chapter 6 for the research participants’ accounts
on the issue of social mobility). Further, this problem is exacerbated by the view which suggests that those
already disadvantaged by the system, i.e. the working class, are subject to very limited educational experiences within the existing system. Reay (2018:31) describes this phenomenon when she says ‘working-class schools have become punishment factories that increasingly subject their students to pedagogies of control, discipline and surveillance. Pedagogy has been emptied of critical content and now imposes on students mind-numbing teaching practices organized around teaching to the test.’ As McKnight (2015) found, the downward mobility among initially low attaining children from advantaged backgrounds partly contributes to there being fewer opportunities for high attaining children from less advantaged backgrounds to succeed as they grow up. Reeves & Howard (2013) represented this idea through the lens that individuals born to affluent families are largely protected from this phenomenon of downward mobility, even when they have performed poorly educationally, an observation they refer to as a glass floor. Our educational and employment system is ostensibly based on a meritocratic system of effort-laden input and output in the form of financial success and/or career fulfilment, yet the data simply does not support the idea that such a system is prevalent for all, rather it is largely the preserve of a particular class. Despite this, some commentators have claimed that as a society we are advancing closer towards that ideal, yet the measures by which we assess social mobility are ill equipped to represent it (Payne, 2012; Nunn, 2012).