Sense Of Fairness, Of Social Mobility And Distribution

the perception of income distributive justice was always one of the central themes in social stratification research. Scholars had developed many different theories to explain the mechanism of distributive justice sense, such as self-interest theory, Adams's social comparison theory, Stouff's relative deprivation theory, the attribution theory and the ideology theory. The present research tries to analyze people's perception of income inequality from the perspective of social mobility. The past researches formed three theoretical approaches to interpret the relationship between social mobility and the sense of income distributive justice, that (1)With Parkin and Boudieu as the representative of the mobility determinism, they thought that people's attitudes toward social inequality are determined by their social mobility status, upward mobility brings positive sense of distributive justice, however, downward mobility produces negative attitudes to social inequality. (2) With Swift and Hout as the representative of the mobility irrelevant theory, they thought that social mobility has no relationship with people's attitudes of social inequality. Because social mobility just reflects opportunity distributive inequality per se, this inequality exists in any society, and has differences between different stages of a society or in different societies, which can not reflect the social justice. (3) With Boudon and Wegener as the representative of mobility conditional theory, they thought that whether social mobility can influence people's perception of income inequality depends on mobility situations, which consist of mobility chances and expect interest, in different situations, the results of mobility have different effects on people's perceptions of distributive justice for valuable resources.These theories about social mobility and sense of justice focus on whether social mobility can influence people's perception of income inequality, and how social mobility shapes this attitude. On the background of those explanations, integrate the present research integrates Chinese current social realities and other relative theories, this research supposes that social mobility affects people's sense of income distributive inequality by two mechanisms, firstly, because of the changes of social position, and which brings the changes of subjective identifications, e.g. subjective status evaluation and social mobility, social mobility has a direct effects on people's perception toward income inequality; secondly, in the process of social mobility, people need to resocialize and learn some new social norms about social inequality, e.g. the judges of reasons result in social inequality(attribution references), the perception of distributive rules of valuable resources(whether it is fair play or fair share).These new attitudes or social norms become the mediate mechanism to explain people's sense of distributive justice. Besides, this research agree with the basic viewpoints of mobility conditional theory which emphasizes that social mobility has different effects on people's attitudes to income inequality in different mobility situations. Based on those points of view, this research developed eight basic hypotheses about how social mobility affect the perception of income distributive justice, includes three direct effects hypotheses (directs effect hypothesis, subjective evaluation hypothesis and subjective social mobility hypothesis), two indirect effects hypotheses (attribution references hypothesis and fair play hypothesis) and three conditional hypotheses (urban-rural segment hypothesis, educational different hypotheses and mobility strategy hypothesis).The data used in this research come from Chinese General Social Survey (2005) and Shanghai Citizens' Life Situation Survey (2008), people's sense of income inequality is measured by people's judgment about their own income distribution and social mobility is operated into four dimensions or four types, includes intergenerational occupational mobility, intra-generational occupational mobility, educational mobility(intergenerational) and hukou mobility(intergenerational), and then tests the hypotheses by different Logistical Regression Models and Ordinary Least Squares Models.The results find that, intergenerational occupational mobility has significant influences on people's sense of income distributive justice, supports the mobility determinism partly, those who have upward intergenerational occupational mobility have stronger justice feelings, because upward mobility changes their disadvantage position in the social inequality structure, advance their life chance and these changes was recognized in their subjective identification; furthermore, upward intergenerational occupational mobility also promote a series of attitudes and perceptions about social income inequality changed, for example, those who are upward intergenerational occupational mobility inclined to have much more risk odds to attribute social inequality to inside factors, and agree that modern Chinese is fair play than those who don't change their position. However, even though those who happened to downward occupational mobility fall from the advantage positions, they don't show strongly unfair feelings. Because downward mobility doesn't arouse their subjective identification, although they attribute social inequality to outside factors, they agree that current Chinese society is fair play.Intra-generational occupational mobility has no relationship with people's attitudes toward social inequality, which supports the viewpoints of mobility irrelevant theory, intra-generational mobility hasn't direct effects and indirect effects to people's attitudes toward income inequality, or the effects are tiny.the socialization effects in the process of intra-generational mobility inferior to intergenerational mobility.Educational mobility has similar effects to intergenerational occupational mobility, but these effects were indirect.Although educational upward mobility advanced people's socio-economic status greatly, those changes were not recognized subjectively, so the direct effect was depressed. Educational upward mobility makes people much more inside attribution to social inequality.Hukou mobility has distinguished influence to people's justice feelings, but the relation direction is opposite to the research expectation totally. Those who experience rural hukou to urban hukou, improve their socio-economic status greatly, and also, they changed their reference group from rural residents to city resident, so that their subjective identification and social attitudes didn't change correspond with it, which the author named it upward mobility of objective status with downward mobility of subjective status and attitudes.Furthermore, in the condition of urban-rural segment and educational difference, social mobility has different effects on people's perception of income distribution; support the viewpoints of mobility conditional theory. Relative to rural residents (or lower educated), urban residents (or higher educated) have much more mobility opportunities, thus they would make more extra efforts and investments in order to upward mobility, however, there were few people can get upward mobility finally, so those who don't carry out their goals will give birth to sense of relative deprivation and unfair strongly. In the contrary, because of little mobility opportunities, rural residents (or lower educated) pay no more efforts or investment for upward mobility, and they have lower expectation to it, so whatever the final mobility situation is, they could not feel unfair, instead once they obtain upward mobility, they will generate pleasant surprise justice feelings.Those different dimensions of social mobility have diversity influence to people's perception of distributive justice in the aspect of mechanisms and results. Occupational mobility and educational mobility have similar effects; however, the hukou mobility has an adverse result. This research attempts to generalize these findings to the openness of a society, consider that upward mobility will promote people to think the income inequality as fair in an open society; on the contrary, in a close society, upward mobility will result in unfair feelings to income distributive. Compare with occupation and education, there is a distinguished boundary between the city and village in modern China, hukou mobility was embedded in this close system, which has different result to occupational mobility and educational mobility.