Social Mobility Definition: 6 Types of Social Mobility

Social mobility is a social science concept meaning the ability to change your station in your society’s class structure (or social hierarchy) over a period of time. Euphemistically, it means to climb or descend on the social ladder.

The breadth and potentiality of this sort of social movement depends on any given country or region providing adequate equality of opportunity for its citizenry. Without the equal opportunity to change one’s socioeconomic status, individuals might find themselves locked into a rigid caste system without the ability to escape it. Once more opportunities to improve one’s skill set and social level are available, there’s a greater chance to reduce previously immovable aspects of the class system.

Even if this baseline opportunity is available for all, other factors can deeply affect the movement of individuals from one social group to another. For instance, economic inequality—even in the presence of de facto public and universal resources like education to improve one’s social status—can prevent many from taking advantage of opportunities to change their social standing and ascend from the lower class to the middle class or upper class.

There are many different ways people change their social class status. Here are just six of the most common forms of social mobility:

1. 1. Absolute mobility: Absolute mobility is social mobility that is quantifiable in absolute terms for an entire group of people. For instance, if a certain agrarian society undergoes rapid industrialization, leading to more free time for education for all its citizens, this sort of economic development renders the entire society socially mobile in a way it wasn’t before in an absolute sense.
2. 2. Horizontal mobility: Horizontal social mobility is when you move from one position in the occupational structure to another without necessarily losing or gaining a new class status as a result. You can also refer to it as occupational mobility. If a lawyer stops actively practicing law and becomes a law professor or business consultant instead, some might consider this a horizontally mobile move.
3. 3. Intergenerational mobility: Generational mobility from one generation to the next is intergenerational social mobility. If the children of a previous generation experience a higher standard of living than their parents did, that newly acquired high status is an example of intergenerational mobility.
4. 4. Intragenerational mobility: Generational mobility within a specific generation is intragenerational mobility. Individual members of birth cohorts—like millennials or those in Gen Z—might experience a life course characterized by high or low social mobility depending on a litany of factors, including location, employment, and social standing. For instance, low-income students born to working-class parents in inner city Los Angeles will likely find themselves in a lower status socioeconomically than the children of a high-income Wall Street banker in New York or the royal family in the United Kingdom, despite being part of the same generation as a whole.
5. 5. Relative mobility: Relative social mobility is any type of social mobility that depends on various other factors, from the opportunities and hard work of a specific individual to the varying degrees of economic growth experienced in a specific labor market to income inequality in a society as a whole. None of these factors guarantee social mobility upward or downward in an absolute sense.
6. 6. Vertical mobility: The movement of individuals into either a lower or higher position in the social structure is known as vertical social mobility. Meritocratic, rags-to-riches stories are examples of vertical mobility (upward mobility, more specifically). Still, upward social mobility isn’t the only type of vertical mobility—plenty of people fall into a lower status in the class system throughout their lives as well (downward mobility).

Any individual’s ability to be socially mobile is affected by a wide array of factors. Here are four of the most important:

1. 1. Educational attainment: Higher education levels lead to more structural mobility within a social stratification system. By and large, those who complete high school and obtain a college degree are more likely to ascend to a higher standard of living than those who do not.
2. 2. Identity and discrimination: Discrimination based on aspects of a person’s identity can gravely and unjustly affect their ability to be socially mobile. For instance, despite the allegedly universal promise of “the American dream,” racial and ethnic groups like Black Americans were coercively prevented from seizing opportunities to increase their family income or personal station.
3. 3. Overall income distribution: The overall income distribution in society as a whole can greatly affect individual social mobility. By using a metric like the Gini coefficient—which makes it possible to rank countries based on equitable distribution of wealth—it’s quantifiably true that more equitably wealthy societies like Sweden or Denmark allow for greater social mobility than more inequitably wealthy societies like the United States or Russia.
4. 4. Various forms of capital: Capital, in a variety of types, greatly affects a person’s ability to progress through the social hierarchy. Possessing a greater economic capital baseline generally allows people to take advantage of better educational resources, for instance. Social capital (an inherited or acquired network of social connections) and human capital (innate or cultivated individual talents and skills) are also important.

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