Intergenerational Mobility and Social Network - Essay Example

Individual's Status Attainment and the Occupational Status, Intergenerational Mobility and Social Network 0 Introduction: "Status attainment can be understood as a process by which individuals mobilize and invest resources for returns in socioeconomic standing" (Nan Lin 1999) According to the theory of social production functions, all human beings strive for two major goals; physical well being and social approval. To produce social approval, status, behavioural confirmation and affection can be considered as means. One of the aspects for producing social approval thus is 'status attainment'. In order to establish the required degree of status attainment, the aspects of 'position attainment' and 'position allocation' are very relevant. While in the aspect of position attainment the focus is on personal characteristics, the efforts and choices made by the individuals, position allocation refers to the structural and cultural mechanisms in society. There are different factors which are responsible for status attainment. Some of them are occupational status, intergenerational mobility and social network. Depending on the positioning of the individual with respect to these factors, the status attainment of an individual is determined. This paper studies some of the likely effects of these three factors on the individual's attainment of his status. 2.0 Occupational Status Attainment: In studying the concept of social attainment, human capital theory, theories on discrimination and the status attainment models have been used. According to Dr.Pretty Lam (2000) Human capital theory explains the differences in social and economic positions on the basis of factors like, education, work experience and on the job training. Besides the human capital, the concepts of social capital and cultural capital will also be used. "The educational and occupational status attainment process links socio-economic status and mental ability to educational and occupational attainment by means of intervening social psychological variables, including academic performance, the influence of significant others and educational and occupational aspirations." (William H. Sewell, Archibald O. Haller, George W. Ohlendorf 1970) Many analysts even today will substantiate the statement of Blau & Duncan (1967) that "occupational status summarizes much of what matters in the system of inequality". While this fully applies to modern societies, it is even more true for historically observed societies. Occupational position has been the most prominent indicator of social inequality in the past, even more than it is today. Thus by subscribing to the social inequality, the status attainment is more than influenced by an individual's occupational standing and its relevance to his societal status. The occupational position this assumes an important position in the status attainment of an individual. 3.0 Intergenerational Mobility and Status Attainment: For quite some time, the influence of family background on the adult children's economic outcomes has been the focus of research economists. Most of the studies are based on the model developed by Becker and Tomes (1986). In the model, the altruism of the parents is assumed to be of great importance and the parents care about their children's welfare. Parents through heredity like generic traits, cognitive ability and through family environments like family connections pass on endowments to their children. As per Anh Nguyen and Haile Getinet (2003) in addition, parents can influence the economic outcomes of their children by purportedly investing in their children human capital. Because of market imperfections, some parents cannot invest in their children's education at the optimum points, which leads to persistence across generations in economic status, and the poor remains poor. Thus intergenerational mobility of income and earnings has a clear impact on the status attainment of an individual. Apart from the income and earnings, educational attainment and occupational linkage across generations is also important in reducing social inequality and also complements further studies on intergenerational income and/or earnings. Hence the intergenerational educational attainment as well as the occupational linkage goes a long way in influencing the status attainment of the individuals by affecting their societal status. 4.0 Social Networks and Status Attainment: A network is represented by a set of actors connected by a set of ties. In the networks persons, teams, organizations, concepts etc take the form of actors or nodes as they may be called. Ties connect pairs of actors and a set of ties of a given type constitutes a binary social relation and each relation defines a different network. For example friendship network is distinct from the advise network although empirically they might be correlated. A stream of research considers how actors develop the perceptions that they do which act as an approach of modeling the level of actor accuracy. Casciaro 1998 found that an actor's personality, hierarchical position and centrality in the network affected the accuracy of one's perception of the network. According to Miller McPherson et al. (2001) similarity breeds connection and this principle structures network ties of every type including marriage, friendship, work, advice, support, information transfer, exchange, co membership, and other types of relationship. As a result of this forming of different relationships, the personal networks of people become homogeneous with regard to many socio-demographic, behavioural and interpersonal characteristics. These network characteristics limit the social world of people in so many ways that the information they receive, the attitudes they form and the interactions they experience are greatly influenced by such characteristics embedded within the networks created. Miller (2001) further adds "Homophily in race and ethnicity creates the strongest divides in our personal environments, with age, religion, education, occupation, and gender following in roughly that order. Geographic propinquity, families, organizations, and isomorphic positions in social systems all create contexts in which homophilous relations form" This phenomenon of the social networks affects to a great extent either positively or negatively the social attainment of the individuals depending upon the way in which they perceive the value of the network and the effects the affiliations to such social networks create on the individuals view points. In addition ties between non-similar individuals also dissolve at a higher rate which sets the stage for the formation of niches within the social space which also affects the social attainment of the individuals. 5.0 Conclusion: Although several studies and research projects have been undertaken to study the field so Status attainment in sociology, still new approaches are being found to further the knowledge in this respect. The effect of the occupational status, intergenerational mobility and social networks on the status attainment has been tremendous. The individual could attain a significant societal status depending on his perceptions of the various information that the networks offer him. References: 1. Anh Nguyen and Haile Getinet (2003) Intergenerational mobility in educational and occupational status: evidence from the U.S MPRA Paper No 1383 http://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/1383/01/MPRA_paper_1383.pdf. 2. Blau, Peter M. and Duncan, Otis. 1967. The American Occupational Structure. New York: Free Press. 3. Casciaro, T. (1998). Seeing things clearly: Social structure, personality, and accuracy in social network perception. Social Networks, 20(4): 331-351. 4. Dr.Pretty Lam 2000 Steadily Forward: Status Attainment of Surinamese in The Netherlands Ercomer Publications http://www.ercomer.org/publish/reports/Liem_dis.html 5. Miller McPherson, Lynn Smith-Lovin, and James M Cook (2001) Birds of a Feather: Homophily in Social Networks Annual Review of Sociology Vol. 27 August 2001 pp 415-444 6. Nan Lin 1999 Social Networks and Status Attainment Annual Review of Sociology 1999 http://www.questia.com/PM.qsta=o&se=gglsc&d=5001895383 7. William H. Sewell, Archibald O. Haller, George W. Ohlendorf 1970 The Educational and Early Occupational Status Attainment Process: Replication and Revision American Sociological Review, Vol. 35, No. 6 (Dec., 1970), pp. 1014-1027 Read More