Social Mobility: How People Move Up and Down in Society

What Is Social Mobility

When the child of a factory worker becomes an engineer, or when someone who opened a small shop sees it fail and goes back to working for someone else, that is social mobility in action. Treccani defines the concept as the movement of an individual, or of a social value, from one position to another. The idea sits close to social status, the position a person occupies at a given moment: social mobility is the change in that position, not the position itself.

A sociology textbook (LibreTexts) adds that the phenomenon concerns groups just as much as individuals, often through a new job or a marriage.

Forms of Social Mobility

Treccani distinguishes two main directions. Vertical mobility moves a person up or down the social scale: it is called upward mobility when someone rises, and downward mobility when someone falls. Horizontal mobility, by contrast, changes a person’s position while keeping them at the same social level: a teacher who moves from one school to another, while remaining a teacher, is moving horizontally.

Alongside this first distinction sits another one, about the point of comparison. Intergenerational mobility compares a person’s social position with that of their parents or family of origin; intragenerational mobility instead looks at the same person’s path over the course of their own life, an internal comparison rather than one between generations.

Worked example: two brothers grow up in the same working-class family. The first finishes university and becomes a lawyer: for him, that is upward, intergenerational mobility, because he rises above his parents. The second stays a factory worker like his father, but over his career moves from the production line to a coordinating role at the same plant: for him, that is intragenerational mobility, a change internal to his own life, unrelated to any comparison with the previous generation.

What Helps, or Hinders, Social Mobility

According to Treccani, some institutions have historically acted as channels allowing people to move from one social stratum to another: schools, the army, the church, and political, economic and professional organizations, with an influence that shifts from era to era and from society to society. The sociology textbook cited above adds a complementary angle, closer to the resources available to each individual: mobility can be helped by economic capital (money and property), cultural capital (qualifications, skills, habits passed down within the family), human capital (personal abilities) and social capital (a person’s network of relationships).

These factors also explain why family background keeps mattering. The socialization a person receives as a child, within their own family, already transmits part of that cultural capital: reading habits, expectations about schooling, a certain way of navigating the workplace. A country’s economic inequality and its social mobility tend to move together: where families start out far apart, the distance they have to travel tends to stretch out too.

Education alone is not enough to guarantee moving up. The OECD calculates that four people out of ten whose parents have a low level of education go no further than lower secondary school, while only one in ten from that same group reaches university. School remains an important channel, but one that works together with the starting point a family provides. That is part of why many countries hand some of this task to the welfare state, through public education, health care and income-support policies designed to widen the opportunities available to those who start from harder conditions.

How Much People Actually Move: The Data

In Italy, the 2026 ISTAT annual report measured intergenerational mobility for the cohort of workers born between 1980 and 1994. Close to three in ten, 27.1%, saw their occupational class fall below their parents’ by age 30: that is downward mobility. Those who climbed, in the same generation, stop at 25.1%. According to ISTAT, this is the first time it has happened this way: throughout the 20th century, the prevailing direction had been the opposite one, upward.

Looking beyond Italy, the OECD published a report in 2018 devoted to exactly this topic, titled A Broken Social Elevator? According to that study, the average OECD country needs roughly four or five generations for children born into the lowest income decile to reach the average income level. The figure, though, varies widely from country to country: Nordic countries need only about two generations, while continental Europe needs between four and six. The gap between a fast social elevator and a slow one separates even economies that share a similar level of wealth.