Difference between horizontal and vertical social mobility

Difference between horizontal and vertical social mobility

Source: Social and Cultural Mobility by Pitirim Alexandrovich Sorokin (1941, p. 136)

P. A. Sorokin (1941, pp. 133-134) has distinguished between two principal types of social mobility, horizontal and vertical. These forms of social mobility are differentiated in the following—

1. Horizontal Social Mobility: 

By horizontal social mobility or shifting, it meant the transition of an individual or social object from one social group to another situated on the same level. It indicates a change in position within the range of the same status. For instance, we see the transitions of individuals, as from the Baptist to the Methodist religious group, from one citizenship to another, from one family (as a husband or wife) to another by divorce and remarriage, from one factory to another in the same occupational status, are all instances of social mobility.

For examples:

i. A college graduate with a degree in chemistry planned to work in the research department of a large chemical company, but after a year he finds that the work seems dull and repetitive, with no improvement in sight. He quits that job and instead becomes a professor of chemistry at a nearby university. Because the two occupations are at roughly the same level his mobility involved no essential change of status; it was simply a move to a more satisfying job

ii. An engineer working in a factory may resign his job and join another factory as an engineer and may work in more or less the same capacity or join an engineering college and start working as a professor. In this example also, though there is a change of workplace and work, the general status of the person does not change much.

2. Vertical Social Mobility: 

By vertical social mobility is meant the relations involved in a transition of an individual (or a social object) from one social stratum to another. According to the direction of the transition, there are two types of vertical social mobility:

i. Ascending (social climbing): The ascending currents exist in two principal forms:

a. As infiltration of the individuals of a lower stratum into an existing higher one.

b. As a creation of a new group by such individuals, and the insertion of such a group into a higher stratum instead of, or side by side with, the existing groups of this stratum.

ii. Descending (social sinking): The descending current has also two principal forms:

a. The first consists in a dropping of individuals from a higher social position into an existing lower one, without degradation or disintegration of the higher group to which they belonged.

b. The second is manifested in a degradation of a social group as a whole, in a basement of its rank among other groups, or in its disintegration as a social unit.

On the above points, the first case of “sinking” reminds one of an individual falling from a ship; the second of the sinking of the ship itself with all on board, or of the ship as a wreck breaking itself to pieces.

For example:

i. Movement from the status of a plumber to that of a corporation president, or vice versa, is an example of vertical mobility.

ii. Movement of people from the poor class to the middle class, from the occupation of labourers to that of bank clerks, from the position of the opposition to that of the ruling class, etc.

Sorokin attributes these differences mainly to inherent biological causes and fears that the “racial fund” of vigour and talent may be depleted through differential fertility. He finds that high mobility has historically been associated with versatility, invention, and discovery, but also with cynicism, social isolation of the individual, skepticism, moral disintegration, and suicide.