Relevance: Sociology: Stratification and Mobility: Concepts- equality, inequality, hierarchy, exclusion, poverty and deprivation.Social mobility; open and closed systems, types of mobility, sources and causes of mobility.
INTRODUCTION
One of the major factors affecting income distribution is the hierarchical structure of different occupations and the occupational distribution of the workers. Occupational segregation leads to perpetuation and also the accentuation of income inequality over generations.
Therefore, examining the occupational distribution of workers becomes an important issue. We have used the Indian NCO-1968 classification in our study and workers have been divided into ten occupational classes. Arranged in descending order of hierarchy and prestige, these are:
Technical and Scientific Personnel, Professionals, Administrative, Clerical, Sales, Service, Farmers, Production-related, Transport, and Labourers not elsewhere classified. Occupational structure and mobility are discussed in terms of this structure.
At the second level, we have clubbed similar occupations to form three broad groups – Grade-I (White Collar jobs— Technical and Scientific Personnel, Professionals, and Administrative); Grade-II (Pink Collar jobs—Clerical, Sales, and Service); and Grade-III (Blue Collar jobs— Farmers, Productionrelated workers, Transport workers, and Labourers not elsewhere classified). This hierarchical structure has also been used in our study.
It is observed that the workers of the excluded classes are much more concentrated in the Grade-III jobs as compared to the advanced classes, while the proportion of the latter in Grade-I jobs is unduly large.
Some improvements are observed over time and across generations whereby the proportion of excluded class workers in higher occupation classes is increasing. However, the rate of improvement is much more pronounced for the advanced classes.
Moreover, the share of workers in Grade III jobs has increased for the parents and the daughters belonging to the SCs. Thus, occupational segregation and occupational stickiness among the excluded classes is very much a reality in India.
If we assess age groups instead of biological generations, a similar picture emerges. Moving from the population aged 40+ that in the age group of 20-40 years, in 2004, there was a marginal upward movement among the OBCs, while for the STs, there was a tendency towards concentration in mid-level occupations. For the SCs, there is a clear downward movement with the proportion of Blue Collar workers increasing in both the age groups.
INTERGENERATIONAL MOBILITY
We are more interested in examining how children’s education and occupation are related to parental standards. More specifically, we want to quantify the degree of intergenerational upward mobility in education and occupation. This would be given by the percentage of children moving to a higher educational or occupational class as compared to their parents. The cross-tabulation of children’s parameters with parental parameters yields the following results.
Occupational Mobility As compared to educational mobility, occupational attainment is much more sticky across generations, with upward mobility being only about 13-15 per cent in 2004.
Mobility improved during the period 1993-2004 for all the sub-groups. At the detailed occupational level, only about one-fifth of the boys and one-seventh of the girls were seen to be moving to the higher level of jobs as compared to their parents.
For the advanced classes, however, mobility among girls was higher as compared to boys, indicating a wider acceptability of women’s employment in diversified occupational positions and also higher aspirations among the present generation of women in the advanced classes.
However, much of this mobility is perceived to be at a comparable hierarchical level and grade level stickiness is observed to be much higher when viewed at the broad occupational levels.
Only about one-tenth of the workers in 2004 had better occupational grades as compared to those of their parents. Mobility among excluded classes was lower than that for advanced classes, indicating greater intergenerational stickiness for them.
This gap is higher at the broad occupational levels as compared to the detailed occupational levels. Thus, it emerges that for the advanced classes, the mobility from Blue Collar to Pink Collar and from Pink Collar to White Collar jobs is substantial while for the excluded classes much of the mobility is lateral, that is, from one occupation to other within the broad grades.
Quite surprisingly, mobility is higher among people of the older age group people as compared to the younger age group. This may be due to various reasons.
First, this may be a reflection of the lower initial or parental occupational levels of the people currently in the 40+ age group as compared to those in the 20-40 year age group, whose parents have already higher occupational levels.
Hence, upward mobility may be higher for the former as compared to the latter.
Second, this may also be because of tighter labour market situations in the post-1990 era whereby chances of vertical mobility have become much more sparse and most of the movements are horizontal among similar occupations.
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