Mr. potato head plain clip art series#

My mother was born in September 1945 and my father in April 1946, at the start of the post-war baby boom. This article tries to ‘re-inject the personal’ in a quite literal way – by exploring social mobility in post-war Britain through the lens of my own family history.

3 The study of social mobility demands the particularising work of social and cultural history. Only through this kind of approach can we open up what Peter Mandler calls ‘the “black box” of motivations and behaviours’ that is so hard to unlock with quantitative statistical analyses and rational choice theories. 1 Savage and Flemmen’s work is part of a recent effort by historians ‘to re-inject the personal into social mobility’ 2 – to see the process as shaped by our emotional investments in distinctive, situated and richly textured experiences.

Mr. potato head plain clip art series#

They saw their own lives not in terms of ‘straight lines’ or clear trajectories ‘up’ or ‘down’ but as ‘a series of jagged movements’, with turning points, interruptions and contingent events. Mike Savage and Magne Flemmen, analysing interviews with 50-year-old participants in the longitudinal National Child Development Study, found that they often resisted these dominant narratives of social mobility. In post-war Britain, though, this normal urge became attached to a set of largely unexamined ideas about what a mobile, aspirant and worthwhile life looked like. Most of us want to see our life course as an upward trajectory and nourish hopes and ambitions of increasing our stake in the world and leading useful, prosperous and socially esteemed lives.

It is also inseparable from the stories we tell about it.

Social mobility has as much to do with ideas and feelings as it does with the statistical analysis of university enrolments, income redistribution or changing patterns of work. The questions it raises – why one person succeeds and another fails, and why it matters so much that we ‘succeed’ or ‘fail’ in certain highly circumscribed ways – cut to the heart of who we think we are, what kind of work (and workers) we value, and what kind of life we want to live. ‘Social mobility’ is an emotionally freighted subject, both awkwardly personal and inescapably social.