Structural and Circulation Mobility are Alive and Well: A Critical Comment on Sobel's Premature Obituary Notice

Abstract

Hope's halfway model, which represents an attempt to differentiate structural from other sources of occupational mobility, is defended against Sobel's recent criticism, which has force only if the independence model is rejected as an appropriate baseline from which to measure social mobility and immobility. Sobel treats the independence model primarily as a statistical model, whereas in the classical tradition it was a substantive model as well: the model of equality of opportunity. Understood in this way, the independence model, and the macrosociological concepts of structural and circulation mobility, have a continuing place in mobility analysis. It is also argued that Sobel's strictures on the Yasuda index are vacuous, since the examples he gives merely illustrate the nature (and crudity) of that measure.