Re-Imagining Social Mobility: The Role of Alternate Value Systems, Social Class and Locality in Reconstructing Notions of Mobility

As neoliberalism has flourished, the responsibility for ‘success’ and self-improvement has shifted onto the individual. Social mobility policy in the UK has focused its attention on marginalised and disadvantaged communities, utilising programmes focused around education and employment as a vehicle for individual social mobility. Often drawing on a discourse of ‘lack’, this paper questions the power, violence and justice of these hegemonic, individualistic constructs of social mobility.

Based upon an ethnographic study in a small, white working-class community, this paper will focus on the ongoing analysis of family interviews that explored biography (imagined and actual) and community. The importance of the familial bond and keeping close is central to many participants’ narratives, alongside discourses of happiness that are decoupled from wealth and work. Furthermore, the complex and varied constructions of community are vital to many families’ subjectivities. This paper will argue that constructing the self-through-others, such as nearby family or community members, may be more salient to the working-class families in this study than the individualism propagated by dominant social mobility discourses (Skeggs 1997). By focusing more on the ‘social’ of social mobility, such as family and community, we can see how the families in this study reconstruct the notion of social mobility. The importance of this aspect is undervalued and overlooked in the dominant social mobility discourses that permeate government policy and academia. It is not that these families are not ‘strivers’ or ‘lack’ certain abilities, but that the focus of success is not always based on individual gains alone.