Social Mobility Analysis

Understanding social mobility
Social mobility can be defined as the movement of individual or group in social position which may refer to classes, ethnic groups or entire nations. Social mobility may be measurement of an individual’s health status, literacy or education, but most commonly refer to an individual’s financial support of the family (Ducoff, n.d.). There are two types of social mobility, vertical social mobility and horizontal social mobility. Vertical social mobility is the transaction of individuals across the social hierarchy from one social stratum to another; horizontal social mobility is the movement of an individual within the same social stratum ranked.
According to the direction of movement, there are two types of vertical social mobility: upward and downward. As example is when a farmer from a rural area comes to a city and works as a businessman. This is known as upward social mobility because the farmer had changed his position to a higher status in the class stratification system. Oppositely, downward social mobility indicates change of an individual to a lower status than the person begins with. The class stratification refers to a system of ranking different types of people in a hierarchy based on objective criteria such as wealth, power and prestige.

Three years later, a major document “A National Agenda for a Multicultural Australia” was aimed to redefine the rights and freedoms of multiculturalism for all Australian citizens (Castles, 1992). Among the three dimensions of the National Agenda, one of them named the cultural identity on the rights expressed and cultural heritage, including language and religious belief, shared by the Australians. This aspect contributes to an improvement on recognizing the overseas qualifications and skills which results in a formation of a liberal society on