Openness Is Not the Same as Movement
Class begins with two rival definitions:
- Marx: defined class relationally by ownership of the means of production.
- Weber: split inequality into three distinct dimensions:
- class: a shared market situation
- status: a shared level of social honour
- party: the organised pursuit of power
Modern sociology inherits this division:
| Erik Olin Wright | John Goldthorpe | |
|---|---|---|
| Grounded in | Exploitation and productive assets | Employment contracts |
| Key distinction | Capital, organisation, and skill assets | Service relationship vs labour contract |
| Managers | Occupy contradictory class locations | Are in a service class |
| Schema purpose | Theory of exploitation | Predict life chances and mobility |
Wright focuses on exploitation. Goldthorpe focuses on monitoring costs and asset specificity. Difficult monitoring yields a service relationship with long-term prospects. Easy monitoring yields a basic labour contract.
The resulting EGP schema informs official statistics across Europe.
Measuring Mobility
Mobility has two distinct meanings:
- Absolute mobility: the proportion of people ending in a different class from their origin.
- Relative mobility: the comparative chance of reaching a destination from different origins, measured as an odds ratio.
Consider a cohort of 1,000 individuals:
| Origin | To service | To intermediate | To working | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Service | 120 | 50 | 30 | 200 |
| Intermediate | 120 | 100 | 80 | 300 |
| Working | 150 | 150 | 200 | 500 |
Here, 60 per cent of service-origin individuals reach service destinations, versus 30 per cent from working origins. In absolute terms, 150 working-class individuals reached the top.
Yet the odds of reaching service rather than working destinations are 120/30 against 150/200. This yields an odds ratio of 5.3.
Erikson and Goldthorpe showed that absolute mobility rose across industrial nations as structures shifted, while relative mobility remained largely the Same.
Common pitfall: Confusing absolute movement with openness. Openness is Not merely more room at the top.