Life Chances and Social Mobility
What Are Life Chances?
Life chances is a concept associated with Max Weber. It refers to the probability that a person will enjoy the positive outcomes that a society has to offer — good health, educational success, secure employment, satisfactory housing and a long life expectancy. Weber argued that class position shapes life chances because it determines a person’s position in the market. In the UK, however, life chances are not determined by class alone. Research consistently shows that gender, race and ethnicity, sexuality, age, disability, and religion and belief all shape what individuals can realistically expect from life, often in combination.
The specification identifies seven factors affecting life chances: social class, gender, race and ethnicity, sexuality, age, disability and religion and belief. Each can independently and in combination with others shape a person’s access to education, employment, health and other valued resources. A person’s life chances are shaped not just by who they are but by where they are positioned in the social structure.
Social Class and Life Chances
Social class remains one of the strongest predictors of life outcomes in the UK. Children from professional and managerial backgrounds are significantly more likely to attend higher-performing schools, obtain higher-education qualifications and enter well-paid occupations than those from working-class backgrounds. They tend to have better health outcomes and longer life expectancy. This is partly explained by material deprivation — working-class families have fewer financial resources to invest in education, private healthcare or extracurricular activities. It is also explained by cultural and social capital: the values, knowledge and social networks that enable middle-class families to navigate educational and employment systems more effectively.
Private schooling is one of the most visible mechanisms of class-based advantage. Privately educated individuals are over-represented in the senior professions, the judiciary and elected politics. The informal network of contacts, shared school ties and mutual recognition among privately educated elites — sometimes described as the “old boys’ network” — represents a form of social closure that maintains class advantage across generations.
Devine and the Affluent Worker: Class Identity and Mobility
Fiona Devine’s study Affluent Workers Revisited (1992) examined how class shapes life chances and aspirations by revisiting the site of an earlier study. In the 1960s, Goldthorpe and Lockwood studied male manual workers in Luton to test the claim that affluent workers were becoming embourgeoisified — absorbed into middle-class values as wages rose. They rejected that claim. Instead they described privatised instrumentalism — a working-class outlook in which social life turns inward on the family and the job is valued mainly for the wage.
Devine revisited Luton in the late 1980s, interviewing manual workers and their partners. She did not find evidence of full embourgeoisement: workers had not absorbed middle-class values or abandoned working-class identity. Crucially, Devine found that her respondents retained a strong sense of class identity and resentment at extreme inequality, even though many aspired to consumer goods and rising living standards. Many had also lost faith in the Labour Party to deliver greater equality. Devine’s study is significant for the life chances debate because it demonstrates that social mobility — upward movement in the class structure — does not automatically dissolve class identity or awareness of inequality. Rising wages may improve individuals’ material conditions without fundamentally changing the structure of class inequality.
Social mobility is the ability to change one’s position in the class hierarchy. Intergenerational mobility describes movement across generations — a working-class child reaching a professional occupation represents upward intergenerational mobility. Intragenerational mobility describes movement within a single lifetime — a person who starts in a manual role and rises to management through training and promotion. Functionalists see upward social mobility as evidence that the system is working meritocratically: talent is recognised and rewarded. Marxists argue that structural barriers mean mobility is limited and class position is substantially reproduced across generations — the system appears open but the evidence suggests inherited advantage is a powerful predictor of outcomes.
Gender: Women in the UK continue to earn less on average than men — the gender pay gap persists across most sectors. Women are over-represented in part-time and lower-paid work. Life expectancy is longer for women, but women are more likely to experience poverty in old age due to lower pension accumulation from career breaks.
Race and ethnicity: Ethnic minority groups face, on average, higher unemployment rates, lower wages and over-representation in lower-status occupations compared with White British groups. Institutional racism in employment and education contributes to these patterns. Sociologists are careful to distinguish between different ethnic groups and to explain ethnic inequalities using social mechanisms rather than treating ethnicity as inherently predictive.
Age: Life chances vary across the life course. Young people face higher unemployment and are less likely to own their own homes. Older workers may face ageism in the labour market, limiting promotion and earnings prospects in later working life. Elderly people on fixed incomes are more vulnerable to poverty.
Disability: Disabled people have significantly lower employment rates and, on average, lower incomes than non-disabled people. The social model of disability, as discussed in Lesson 4, argues that these inequalities are produced by social barriers rather than by impairment alone — the disability employment gap reflects both employer attitudes and inaccessible workplaces.
Sexuality: LGBTQ+ individuals face higher rates of mental health difficulties, discrimination in employment and housing, and social exclusion in some contexts. Legal protections have increased significantly since the 1960s, but inequalities in life chances persist due to ongoing discrimination and the effects of heteronormativity.
Religion and belief: Religious identity can affect life chances through employment discrimination (Islamophobia documented in hiring studies), social capital (religious communities can provide supportive networks) and cultural expectations. Some religious groups face higher rates of poverty linked to discrimination in the labour market.
Perspectives on Life Chances: Functionalist, Marxist and Feminist
Functionalists, following Davis and Moore, would argue that differential life chances reflect differential rewards for positions of varying functional importance. If some people have better life chances, this is partly because they have worked harder or demonstrated greater talent — consistent with a meritocratic system. Social mobility is evidence the system is working. Marxists argue that life chances are shaped fundamentally by class position and by the structural reproduction of inequality across generations. Material deprivation, restricted access to education and ruling class ideology ensure that class inequality in life chances is reproduced. The system is not meritocratic but serves the interests of the bourgeoisie. Feminist sociologists argue that patriarchy creates systematic inequalities in life chances for women across all class positions — even women in professional occupations face the gender pay gap and under-representation in senior roles, demonstrating that class privilege alone does not protect women from patriarchal disadvantage.
Devine’s 1992 study found that affluent workers had NOT become embourgeoisified: they retained class identities and resentment at extreme inequality, even as many aspired to higher living standards. This challenges the meritocratic narrative by showing that class awareness and sense of structural injustice persist even when wages rise.