Mobile immobilities: The formation of habitus in 'disadvantaged' families

Sociology has had remarkably little direct impact on the politicians’ rediscovery and reconception of social mobility, and vice versa. While media coverage – an indirect measurement of Whitehall concerns – increased ten-fold between 2000 and 2012, a seminar organised by the Cabinet Office Performance and Innovation Unit in 2001 was the only significant point of sociological input (Aldridge 2001). Civil servants and their masters soon turned to economics (e.g. Blanden et al. 2005) for findings more congruent with what they wanted to believe (Gorard 2008). Great diligence is needed to find the sociology in the many ministerial speeches and government official statements that have since been published (Payne 2017: 30–72). It is only very recently that the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission (renamed in May 2016 as the Social Mobility Commission) has begun to make greater use of sociological perspectives, for example to understand recruitment in the ‘senior’ professions and financial services (SMCPC 2015; SMC 2016).