Prof Mike Savage STC S210

This course is available on the MSc in Inequalities and Social Science. This course is available with permission as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit.

This course has a limited number of places (it is controlled access). Places are allocated based on a written statement. Priority will be given to students on the MSc in Inequalities and Social Science. This may mean that not all students who apply will be able to get a place on this course.

The analysis of social mobility has been one of the strongest specialisms in sociology since the 1950s. It addresses how far inequality of outcomes may be related to inequality of opportunity, by considering the prospects of upward and downward mobility from different social positions. It raises fundamental questions about how inequalities of class, gender, race & ethnicity, nationality (and other axes) shape people’s social trajectories. This course will introduce students to theoretical and methodological issues in the study of social mobility, including structural analyses of frequency and propensity along with qualitative studies of the experience of mobility and immobility. The course will consider exemplars of cutting-edge studies across the globe. Students will be introduced to the best contemporary exemplars of social mobility research to inform them in their own studies.

This course is delivered through a combination of lectures, seminars and online materials totalling a minimum of 20 hours in the WT.

Reading Weeks: Students on this course will have a reading week in WT Week 6, in line with departmental policy.

Students will be expected to produce a 1000 word book review in week 6 of WT.

Students will sit a test on interpretation of quantitative analyses of social mobility in week 4 of WT.

Mike Savage, The Return of Inequality: Social Change and the Weight of History, Harvard University Press, 2021.

Shamus Khan, Privilege, Princeton UP, 2010

Sam Friedman and Daniel Laurison, The Class Ceiling: why it pays to be privileged, Bristol University Press, 2019

Lee Eliot Major and Stephen Machin, Social Mobility and its Enemies, Penguin, 2019

Khan, S.R., 2012. Privilege: The making of an adolescent elite at St. Paul's School (Vol. 56). Princeton University Press.

Rivera, L.A., 2015. Pedigree: How elite students get elite jobs. Princeton University Press.

Reay, Diane, 2018, Miseducation: Inequality, Education and the Working Classes, Polity

Essay (100%, 5000 words) in the ST.

An electronic copy of the assessed essay, to be uploaded to Moodle, no later than 4.00pm on the first Thursday of Spring Term.

Attendance at all seminars and submission of all set coursework is required.