'Social mobility' is all the rage these days and the very term grates on me like nails down a blackboard. Where has it come from, why is it being used, who thought the whole bloody thing up? And then I read Stefan Collini's article in the Guardian.
Are you in favour of social mobility? Everyone to have an equal chance to get on, no one to be held back by their social background? Nick Clegg is just the latest to say that's what we all want, and he's putting his Milburn where his mouth is. But what is this fashionable discourse of "social mobility" actually about?
Last year Alan Milburn prepared a report on Fair Access to the Professions. Over and over, the report used the empty, misleading rhetoric of a race in which "everyone" is "entitled" to have a "fair chance" of "winning". But if there are winners there are losers, and such sporting metaphors are intended to deflect attention from the fact that the most important determinants of who ends up in which category are not miraculously independent qualities of "ability" or "effort" on the part of the individual but the pre-existing distribution of wealth and power in society.
The ideological functions of this language are most tellingly exhibited in the use of the metaphor of "the level playing field". We think we know what this phrase means. But language carries its own DNA that works itself out without our intending or even being aware of it. We might note that sports contested on a playing field are nearly always between two teams; the metaphor suggests something as old-fashioned as the conflict between two classes. And the teams usually change ends at half-time; any slope affects both teams equally. But the most important limitation of the metaphor is that what happens on the playing field, however level, is determined by things off it: recruitment, wealth, time, training ... Taking a spirit-level to every inch of the pitch is not going to even up a contest between Man Utd and a pub team.
But it is in its handling of its central category of social mobility that this feelgood discourse most tellingly reveals its ideological character. The category has become a difficult one to use with any precision. In different settings, it is now deployed to refer to one (or more) of the following three things:
1. The trajectory of individuals in the course of their lifetime away from a starting-point defined by their parents' socioeconomic position.
2. The changing patterns of advantage and disadvantage between social groups in comparison to the patterns among the previous generation.
3. The changing structure of employment or prosperity across society such that a larger proportion of the population come to be in "higher" occupations.
These changes do not all entail each other, and one may be at the expense of the others. A long familiar criticism of the "scholarship boy" model of individual mobility was that it left the relative position of the social classes unchanged, even reinforcing hierarchies by siphoning off some outstanding talents of the lower classes into higher classes. Conversely, the third type of social mobility may result in, say, many manual jobs being replaced by white-collar jobs without the relative status and scale of rewards of most of the class filling those jobs being significantly altered. In 1951, one in eight jobs was classified as professional; by 2001 over one in three jobs was so classified, but the relative position of the groups who filled them may not have changed very much.
The current discourse is almost silent on what happens to those who are left behind when the "talented" and "able" have sped off along the highway of success. Life is, it seems, a benign competition in which most shall have prizes.
Social mobility discourse might seem to be exemplary "Yes, we can" politics, but its assumptions reveal a profound pessimism: first, about there being any way in which society can reshape its socioeconomic structure – staggering inequalities of wealth are seen as natural; and second, about there being any way for people to agree on what is valuable in life other than in terms of market-modelled consumer satisfaction. The only goals people may be assumed to share are a desire to "get on", to move up some imaginary (but misleading) social ladder.
When these two forms of pessimism are combined, we get the hollow activism of "fair access". Everyone has an equal right to try to get what they think they want (mostly at others' expense). Wants can't be criticised: that would be "elitist". The market cannot be gainsaid: that would reduce prosperity (itself a completely undemonstrated contention). The only function of government, it seems, is to ensure that those with sharp elbows have a "fair chance" of using them. We have been here before.
Stefan Collini, the Guardian
