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This dissertation brings together an archive of texts that both reflect and challenge the construction of a contemporary crisis of social mobility and working-class decline as a racial problem. British news media, political rhetoric, and creative work such as literature and film have increasingly represented the expansion of multicultural Britain, particularly after postwar decolonization, as responsible for the loss of the good life for the white working classes. In response to this causatively intertwined narrative of migrant mobilities and class stagnation, this doctoral project has developed an alternate dialogue between the present day and the postwar by examining social mobility as an affective genre in representations of race and class. By exploring literary and cinematic representations of urban mobilities, the home, and the school, my thesis demonstrates the ways in which social mobility materializes as an affective structure that shapes the connections between white working-class and migrant communities in more nuanced ways than has been portrayed by British media and politicians. My analysis of literature and film reveals that the affective genre of social mobility since the postwar era has tended to shore up the continuation and preservation of white nationalism through the marginalization and continued exploitation of racialized subjects. And yet, although the contemporary rhetorical construct of social mobility and its apparently racially-caused endangerment utilizes the white working class as its litmus test and ultimate victim, what the narrative of the good (white) life obfuscates is its inaccessibility for not just the racialized other, but for the white working classes as well. Thus, while my project teases out the colonial structuring of relationships between white working class and migrant and minority ethnic subjects within narratives of class desire, it also ultimately understands classed and racialized communities as jointly — if unevenly — impacted by capitalism. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / This project critically examines the common portrayal of the decline of white working-class social mobility as caused by immigration and multiculturalism in British media, politics, and culture. In particular, this narrative of racially-caused social “immobility” cultivates a comparison between the postwar era, which was supposedly a time of working-class affluence, and the twenty-first century present, which is characterized through economic austerity and lack of opportunity for lower income communities. My dissertation counters this popular and politically motivated narrative by bringing together an archive of cultural material — literature, film, political speeches, and news media coverage — that provides a more nuanced description of interactions between the white working class and migrant communities in Britain from the postwar and contemporary eras. This thesis ultimately examines social mobility as a desire that mediates relationships between classed and racialized people under capitalism, rather than a pre-existing economic and social privilege that has been “taken away” by immigrants and the expansion of multiculturalism in Britain.

No / Higher education is welcoming students from diverse educational, social, and economic backgrounds, and yet it predominantly employs middle-class academics. Conceptually, there appears, on at least these grounds alone, to be a cultural and class mismatch. This work discusses empirical interviews with tenured academics from a working-class heritage employed in one UK university. Interviewees talk candidly about their childhood backgrounds, their school experiences, and what happened to them after leaving compulsory education. They also reveal their experiences of university, both as students and academics from their early careers to the present day. This book will be of interest to an international audience that includes new and aspiring academics who come from a working-class background themselves. The multifaceted findings will also be relevant to established academics and students of sociology, education studies and social class.

by Wing-kwong Tsang. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1990. / Bibliography: leaves 224-235. / ACKNOWLEDGMENTS --- p.i / TABLE OF CONTENTS --- p.iii / LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS --- p.v / LIST OF TABLES --- p.vi / prologue ：statement of the problem --- p.1 / Chapter CHAPTER 1 --- on the shoulders of a giant : review of literature --- p.5 / Chapter 1. --- Definitions of Social Class and Measures of Socioeconomic Status --- p.5 / Chapter (a) --- The Gradational Perspective / Chapter (b) --- The Market-Relational Perspective / Chapter (c) --- The Production-Relational Perspective / Chapter 2. --- Analysis of Social Mobility --- p.27 / Chapter (a) --- Propositions of Social Mobilityin Industrialized Society / Chapter (b) --- Analyses on Social Fluidity and Openness / Chapter 3. --- Construction of Status Attainment Process --- p.39 / Chapter (a) --- Blau-Duncan Status Attainment Model / Chapter (b) --- The Wisconsin Model / Chapter (c) --- The Structural Models / Chapter 4. --- The Shoulders of a Giant---a Summary --- p.52 / Chapter CHAPTER 2 --- the study --- p.55 / Chapter 1. --- The Theoretical Framework: the Weberlan Approach to Class Structure and Social Mobility --- p.55 / Chapter (a) --- Locating the Theoretical Footing of the Study / Chapter (b) --- Economic Class; and the Measures of Socioeconomic Status / Chapter (c) --- Social Class and the Study of Social Mobility / Chapter (d) --- Class Situation and the Study of Status Attainment / Chapter 2. --- The Hong Kong Context --- p.66 / Chapter (a) --- An Outline of the Economic History of Hong Kong since the Second World War / Chapter (b) --- Differentials in Market Situations / Chapter 3. --- The Hypotheses --- p.79 / Chapter 4. --- The Data Sets --- p.82 / Chapter 5. --- Recapitulation --- p.90 / Chapter CHAPTER 3 --- BUILDING THE OCCUPATIONAL HIERARCHY --- p.92 / Chapter 1. --- The Occupational Groupings --- p.94 / Chapter 2. --- "The Criteria, for Rating" --- p.100 / Chapter 3. --- The Socioeconomic Index of Hong Kong --- p.107 / Chapter 4. --- Discussion --- p.115 / Chapter CHAPTER 4 --- IN SEARCH OF A CLASS STRUCTURE --- p.118 / Chapter 1. --- Identification of Class Boundary --- p.119 / Chapter 2 . --- 14 X 14 Mobility Table Analysis --- p.126 / Chapter (a) --- The Perfect Mobility Model / Chapter (b) --- The Quasi-Perfect Mobility Model / Chapter 3 --- 10 x 10 Mobility Table Analysis --- p.136 / Chapter 4 --- 5x5 Mobility Table Analysis --- p.147 / Chapter 5. --- Analysis of Mobility Table of Father and Son --- p.153 / Chapter 6. --- Emergence of a Class Structure / Chapter ---- --- a Summary of the Analyses --- p.164 / Chapter CHAPTER 5 --- CONSTRUCTING THE LADDER OF SUCCESS --- p.164 / Chapter 1. --- Social Background and Status Attainment / Chapter ---- --- a Test of Blau and Duncan's Basic Model --- p.168 / Chapter 2. --- Socialization and Status Attainment / Chapter ---- --- a Test of Blau and Duncan's Extended Model --- p.181 / Chapter 3. --- Structural Constraints and Status Attainment / Chapter ---- --- a Test of the Structuralist Model --- p.191 / Chapter 4. --- Achievement or Ascription ？ / Chapter ---- --- a Summary of the Analyses --- p.206 / CONCLUSION ：IS HONG KONG AN OPEN SOCIETY？ --- p.209 / NOTES --- p.220 / REFERENCES --- p.224

Thesis (Ph. D.)--UCLA, 2007. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 328-347).

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Social mobility has been extensively documented based on two-generational associations. Whereas a few studies suggest that the approach related to social inequalities should be open to multigenerational associations, the topic of social mobility over multiple generations is still at its blooming stage. Very little is known about multigenerational effects on education in Britain and about empirical evidence of the mechanisms that underlie multigenerational effects. Drawing on the British Household Panel Survey and the UK Longitudinal Household Study, this thesis examines social mobility over three generations in Britain. The central aims of the thesis are to explore direct grandparental effects on grandchildren's educational and class attainments independent of parental influences. In particular, it focuses on mechanisms through which grandparental effects operate. The thesis finds that grandparental class is significantly associated with grandchildren's educational achievement, despite parental class, parental education, and parental wealth being taken into account. Regarding the mechanisms, the evidence suggests first that the impacts of grandparental class on education remain even though grandparents have passed away at the time of the survey, and second that the impacts disappear only when grandparents have only infrequent contact with the family. Furthermore, I find that grandparental effects are significantly stronger on grandchildren originating from advantaged parents than on those from disadvantaged parents, indicating the strong persistence of inequalities at the top of social stratification. The research also highlights significant, albeit modest, effects of grandparental class on grandchildren's class attainment over and above parental influences. For grandsons, maternal grandparental class still matters even after grandsons' education has been controlled for. In particular, self-employed grandparents have a strong impact on grandsons' likelihood of engagement in self-employment, a pattern that holds true even when parents are not self-employed. For granddaughters, neither paternal nor maternal grandparental class is found to have a direct substantial impact on granddaughters' class after granddaughters' education has been controlled for. The thesis suggests that the conventional social mobility approach based on parentchild associations may overestimate the effects of parental characteristics and underestimate the effects of family origins. Family advantages run deep; they are maintained over generations in Britain.

This thesis explores how Chilean teachers understand their life trajectories in terms of life-course change, socio-historical change and social mobility, examining whether they make distinctions between these different kinds of understandings of transitions. In a context of 40 years of transformations in Chile, teachers are used as a case-study for examination of the subjective dimension of social mobility, and people's sense of class location and inequality. Methodologically, this research adopted the approach of exploring people's sense of life course and social movement in its broadest sense, examining how teachers talked about their life trajectories in order to consider whether questions of social change, life-course change, social structure and social mobility featured. It is built on data collected through interviews with 41 teachers who live in Santiago, who were asked to outline their personal timelines as a way to reflect on the main changes which they regarded as significant in their life stories. The argument of this thesis draws on and contributes to sociological work on class and social mobility. Most social mobility research has been dominated by quantitative work about occupational patterns of movement, with subjective social mobility neglected because people's subjective understandings of social movement have been seen to be contradictory and inconsistent. It has been suggested that 'lay' understandings fail to distinguish 'social mobility' from socio-historical change and life-course change, so people fail to recognise the true extent of inequality and the limited nature of social mobility. This thesis foregrounds subjective social mobility and critically examines these assumptions. On the basis of my empirical research, I argue that the apparent inconsistences in 'lay' subjective social mobility disappear, or at least make more sense, when we locate people's understandings of social location, social change and social mobility within their broader sense of their life stories. These inconsistencies are partly the result of the complex ways in which people understand their life stories and position themselves within a broader social structure, and are best explained using an analytical focus which emphasises the multidimensional nature of trajectories in social space (Bourdieu, 1984) and a methodological focus which is sensitive to the multifaceted and practical ways in which people speak about their lives. The teachers in my sample resisted a linear summary of their timelines and issues of life-course change and socio-historical change also framed their accounts, adding additional layers of complexity to them, in narratives of trajectories along different dimensions which qualified or disrupted each other. Despite that the teachers framed their trajectories as complex, non-linear constructs, and some rejected 'social mobility' stories, they still all offered overall evaluations of their changing life circumstances. They looked beyond their own trajectories to make different sort of comparisons which helped them to establish a sense of relative social movement, characterising their lives as showing social improvement, stability or decline as different views of their relative social position, and of the social structure and inequalities. I argue that rather than focusing on whether or not ordinary people correctly recognise relative or absolute mobility, it is more pivotal to examine how these different understandings come into play when ordinary people reflect about their location in an unequal society. The thesis argues that subjective social mobility needs to be analysed in term of a multidimensional model of class location and class movement, and this also argues for a greater understanding of the complexities of issues of social location, trajectories and social mobility in which 'class' emerges in different way in people's accounts. Therefore, a more open-ended approach to how people understand their relative situation is needed, in order to explore whether and how issues of class position, social inequalities and social mobility feature in the accounts of 'ordinary' people when they discuss the key transitions of their lives.