In previous chapters, politicians and the media were taken to task for misrepresenting the amounts of, and reasons for, mobility in Britain. The implication was that all specialist research studies by academic sociologists offered a better guide and that no blame could be laid at their door. While it is true that serious sociological research offers a more systematic and evidenced approach, it too has inadvertently contributed to an unduly narrow and negative impression that very little mobility has been taking place and that mobility rates have not improved.Problems have arisen from overreliance on research techniques now seen as questionable and the interpretation of the evidence from particular perspectives. These studies had little direct impact on the public consciousness, but when political commentators did seek empirical data and research-based judgements (as for the Aldridge Report) the apparent findings of low mobility rates fed into the public domain (for example, the impact of Blanden and colleagues’ (2005) work on income mobility). This chapter therefore looks at limitations in three major studies, as exemplars of research on British mobility, to redress the balance of earlier criticism and further display the roots of current thinking. It concludes by also briefly considering geographical mobility and ethnicity, which have previously been largely ignored in mobility analysis – and indeed, which also receive only little discussion in this book due to limited space.

With apologies to the many colleagues who have added significantly to our understanding of social mobility, the three studies to be considered can be said to have dominated the British ‘scene’: the LSE (or ‘David Glass’) study in 1949, published in 1954 as Social Mobility in Britain; the 1972 Nuffield College survey, mainly first reported in 1980 in Goldthorpe's Social Mobility and Class Structure in Modern Britain; and the work of economists Jo Blanden, Paul Gregg, Stephen Machen and colleagues (2001; 2004) in papers on income mobility produced since the turn of the millennium. Each cluster of research included a key publication that was representative of considerable amounts of other research output. What these influential studies have in common is that they all convey an impression that rates of UK social mobility are low.