Revision summary
Mobility: movement across class, status, or power. Closed systems: birth, endogamy, honour; Sanskritisation as group style. Open systems: achievement ideology and actual status attainment. Critique: Bourdieu, gender, caste, and class close the open school. Measure tables; do not trust the label.
Model answer
Introduction
Social mobility is movement across ranks of class, status, or power. Pitirim Sorokin distinguished vertical and horizontal, individual and group. Closed systems tie rank to birth. Open systems tie it to achievement. Real societies mix, so assessment must be critical.
Body
Closed systems
- Caste, estate, and racial caste-like orders restrict marriage and occupation.
- M. N. Srinivas’s Sanskritisation is group mobility of style, not an open individual market.
- Max Weber’s status closure explains how honour survives a wage.
Open systems
- Industrial class societies promise school-to-job mobility. Peter Blau and Otis Dudley Duncan measured status attainment.
- The promise is never pure. Pierre Bourdieu’s cultural capital closes the “open” school.
Critical assessment
- India: reservations open some doors; endogamy and informal labour close others. Census education tables show both.
- Gender: women’s mobility through jobs can coexist with hypergamy rules. NFHS still maps constrained movement.
- Openness can be ideological, as Davis and Moore’s functionalism made unequal reward look necessary.
- Karl Marx: even open markets rest on a class that is hard to leave across generations.
Verdict
- Closed and open are poles. Mobility exists in both, of different kinds.
- Assessment: measure intergenerational tables, then name the closures that the word “open” hides.
Flow diagram
flowchart TD CL[Closed] --> ASC[Ascription endogamy] OP[Open] --> ACH[School market] ASC --> GM[Group style mobility] ACH --> REP[Bourdieu reproduction] MIX[Real societies] --> CL MIX --> OP
Conclusion
Closed systems restrict individual vertical mobility and allow some group mimicry. Open systems increase occupational movement and still reproduce class, caste, and gender through school and honour. Sorokin, Weber, Bourdieu, and Srinivas are the assessment kit. Do not take the label “open” as a completed fact.
Quick related
Students also ask
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Davis and Moore made it clear that social stratification is a functional necessity and also an unconscious device. Discuss
Next question on this syllabus topic (2019 · Q1(b)). View answer →
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Is any society fully closed?
Ideal-typically caste. Empirically there are leaks. The type still organises marriage.
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Does more education mean an open system?
It can raise absolute schooling and still keep relative class odds sticky.
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