To the Editor:
Mr. S. M. Lipset and Miss Natalie Rogoff express the belief that the data on social mobility which they report in their article, “Class and Opportunity in Europe and the U.S.,” published in your issue of December 1954, are “exciting.” I suspect that such excitement is quite unjustified. If a man’s passage from a manual to a non-manual job is defined as “upward social mobility” then it is obvious that since in all societies industrialization has brought in its wake a secular trend of increase in white-collar work, only data which would show contrary evidence might be deemed “exciting.” As it is, the authors have only belabored the obvious.
Nowhere in their article do Lipset and Rogoff even attempt to explain why they believe that a movement from, say, skilled manual work to routine office work is evidence of social or class mobility upward. Do they contend that if the son of a typographer becomes a sales clerk he has experienced upward social mobility? And if they so contend, what criteria of class or status do they in fact employ? Income? Power? Prestige? According to all these criteria, downward rather than upward mobility might indeed be involved.
In fact, the authors operate with a rather muddled mixture of occupational and class criteria. Thus throughout the article they equate white-collar jobs with (new) middle class status but then assert that while in America workers and middle class people can own cars, in Europe only the middle class can. I submit that an Italian clerk, a French saleslady or a German municipal employee would be astonished indeed were they to learn from Mr. Lipset and Miss Rogoff that they belong to the car-owning middle class.
William Petersen proved to the apparent satisfaction of the editors of COMMENTARY that America is the land of opportunity; now Lipset and Rogoff prove that Europe too provides mobility channels aplenty—let’s have a similar study of Japan to round out the picture. It’s the best of all possible worlds, a perpetuum mobile in fact.
Lewis A. Coser
Brandeis University
Waltham, Massachusetts
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Mr. Lipset and Miss Rogoff write:
Mr. Coser’s chief criticism of our article is his suggestion that a shift from manual to non-manual work does not necessarily constitute upward mobility. This is, of course, quite true; but it should be obvious that the simple classification of occupations into manual and non-manual was forced on us by the lack of comparability in occupational or status categories in existing research. However, even when we limit the comparison to opportunities to move into admittedly high level occupations, rather than into just non-manual work, the data still indicate that a significant minority are able to move sharply upwards in countries such as Sweden, the Netherlands, Great Britain, and the United States. The variations in the systems of classifying occupations make it impossible to come to any definitive statistical conclusions, although the data are sufficient to indicate that these and other countries probably have mobility rates comparable to that of the United States. Mr. Coser’s conclusion that similarities in occupational mobility are purely a consequence of changes in the distribution of occupations is also belied by the fact that there is much downward mobility in each country.
Mr. Coser raises precisely the sort of questions which we hoped our report would stimulate. By pointing to the different criteria of class and status that one might use in judging the amount of opportunity existing in a society, he suggests the need for a much more differentiated and intensive study of comparative social structures than has heretofore been made. It was our aim to clear away one of the inappropriate and vaguely conceived notions that has hindered such analysis. We cannot agree that the findings are at all “obvious” to a generation nourished on the idea that if there is a land of opportunity anywhere in the world, America is it. If Mr. Coser thinks that the most important question is, opportunity for what—jobs, income, prestige, or power?—we wish nothing more than that he would take his opinion seriously enough to make or encourage others to make systematic studies of the different countries—including Japan.
We are puzzled by Mr. Coser’s being disturbed by the fact that there is more mobility, both upwards and downwards, than has traditionally been thought. The facts about mobility do not make this the best of all possible worlds; but they do suggest that the world is a lot different from what some of us thought it was. If Mr. Coser objects to the evidence we have assembled, he will have to take the trouble to find evidence sustaining his own view.
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To the Editor:
. . . I am very glad to have S. M. Lipset’s and Natalie Rogoff’s “Class and Opportunity in Europe and the U.S.” (December 1954) at my disposal, because I plan to revise and bring up to date my volume on Social Mobility, and their study is a valuable contribution in this field. . . .
Pitirim A. Sorokin
Harvard University
Cambridge, Massachusetts
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