Telling a modest story: Accounts of men's upward mobility from the National Child Development Study: Telling a modest story

(2011) - Andrew Miles, Mike Savage, Felix Bühlmann

Journal: The British Journal of Sociology
Link:: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-4446.2011.01372.x
DOI:: 10.1111/j.1468-4446.2011.01372.x
Links::
Tags:: #paper #NCDS #Gender #Mobility #SocialClass #Transition
Cite Key:: [@milesTellingModestStory2011]

Abstract

While the pattern of social mobility in postwar Britain has been extensively studied, revealing considerable upward mobility, much less is known about the subjective dimension to mobility. In this article, we employ a new sample of in-depth interviews with 50-year old men from the National Child Development Study to examine in detail the link between objective mobility patterns and the way the upwardly mobile narrate their life trajectories. In contrast to the mobility ideology suggested by the Oxford mobility survey of the early 1970s, in which the upwardly mobile recognized and internalized their success as a project of the self, we report how members of this later generation of men with highly successful careers prefer instead to articulate ‘modest’ life stories.

Notes

“Having shown that men’s accounts of mobility are suffused with an awareness of their need to establish their own individuality through repudiating the social trope of the instrumental careerist, we conclude that the links between career identities and objective mobility patterns are not straightforward and need careful unravelling” (Miles et al., 2011, p. 418)

“Here men can attest to their individuality in terms of their deviation from a straightforward success story, parading their distinctiveness through providing their own account of how they happened to get on.” (Miles et al., 2011, p. 435)