Status Strive: Study Of Migrants’ Status Attainment

Because the migration of population brought changes in reconstruction of socialrelations and social structure, immigration problem has been the focus of academicreseach. After the reform and open policy, China’s population flow more frequentlythan ever. In the past10years, the migrants reached millions of scale. With theconstruction of new urbanization in China, there will be more people from thecountryside to the city and small town to big city. But the policy arrangements based ofthe household registration system deprive migrants, making them couldn’t equallyaccess to treatment of locals. Contrary to the principles of social justice, theseinstitutional and policy barriers also set an enormous obstacles on status attainment ofmigrants，which is not conducive to social stability and development.Previous studies have mainly focused on the population from rural to urban areas,lacking of research on the part of the group urban to urban. Therefore, from the aspectof urban and rural household registration and flow or not flow, the author distinctpeople to four groups--rural local population, rural to urban population and urban localpopulation and urban to urban population, then discussing their educational status,occupation status, economic status, power status and subjective status. On research dataand methods, the author uses “China Urbanization and Labor ImmigrationSurvey(2012)” data collected by China Data Center of Tsinghua University. By usingthe methods of quantitative statistical analyses, the author conducts the status situationresearch and the status attainment research of four groups above.This study found that in the same household conditions, migrants’s educationstatus, economic status and occupational status are higher than the local population, butpower status and subjective position are lower than the local population.About the wayof status attainment, previous studies has some flaws that there is no valid distinctionbetween acquired personal efforts from talented factors such as IQ in scope of achievedfactors, and seldome consider unconventional status attainment patterns in addition toconventional achieved factor. So it is difficult to explain the migrants’s status attainmentmechanisms under the existing framework.In China, migrants suffer more exclusion policy than locals, but they still get a certain social status in competition with the locals.Through data analysis，this papershows that the reason of migrants obtained a certain social status is that they payextraordinary effort and more desire to succeed, which could be called "stasus strive",means that some people pay more effort greater effort and have strong achievementmotivations, which lead to a striving mode in status attainment pattern. Through use of"ascription-ascribed" status analysis model, the results show that the migrants are moredependent on ascribed factor in obtaining certain social status relative to the locals. Onthe base of using a traditional status attainment analysis model, the author establishes adissimilarity index between an origin status and a current status. This statusdissimilarity index is more effectively measuring the relative role of “status strive” andbwteen migrants and locals.For the status inconsistency of migrants, the status that migrants still at adisadvantage level such as power status and subjective status contain more specificfactors, leading to the failure of status strive. The areas close to the operation of marketand operate more open, such as education and income. The status attainment pattern ofthese areas can be classified as status strive.