(a) Explain the concept of social mobility. Describe with suitable illustrations how education and social mobility are related to…

(a) Social mobility, and its relation to education Concept: social mobility is the movement of individuals or groups between positions in a stratification system. It may be vertical (upward or downward) or horizontal, and inter-generational or intra-generational. Sorokin treated it as a measure of how open a society is; open systems have many channels of circulation, closed systems (such as caste) restrict it.

Education as a channel of mobility:

• Functionalists and human-capital theorists (Davis and Moore, Schultz, Becker) see education as a meritocratic channel where skills convert into occupational and income gains.
• In India, access to higher education through competitive entrance examinations and the constitutional provisions for affirmative action under Articles 15(4) and 15(5) has enabled first-generation graduates from disadvantaged groups to move upward.

Education as reproduction of inequality:

• Bourdieu's cultural capital and Bowles and Gintis's correspondence principle show that schools reproduce class advantage. Collins's credentialism shows that qualifications act as a filter.
• In India, the contrast between elite English-medium private schools with expensive coaching and weaker government schools, as shown by ASER learning data, limits mobility for poorer and marginalised groups.

Education therefore creates mobility when access and quality are equal, and reproduces inequality when they are not.

(b) Work from home and the formal and informal organisation of work Formal organisation:

• Work is no longer tied to a workplace and fixed hours, so Weberian co-presence and hierarchy of supervision are loosened (a shift towards post-Fordist flexibility).
• Supervision shifts to digital monitoring, login records and output tracking, a kind of electronic panopticon that can intensify control.
• Costs of space, equipment and connectivity move to the worker, so formal employment becomes more informal in conditions.

Informal organisation:

• The break between work and home blurs. Women's unpaid domestic and care work overlaps with paid work, leading to a double burden.
• Informal ties, tacit knowledge sharing, mentoring and solidarity that arise from shared physical space weaken, which also weakens collective bargaining.
• Workers rely on private networks and online groups, and class and digital divides decide who can work remotely at all (most Indian workers are in informal jobs that cannot be done from home).

WFH therefore requires us to redefine both: formal rules on hours, rights and monitoring, and the informal culture of trust and community.

(c) Merton: how conformity and deviance coexist Merton's strain theory holds that deviance and conformity both arise from the social structure. Society sets cultural goals (such as success) and institutional means to reach them, but access to legitimate means is unequally distributed, which produces strain. Individuals adapt in five ways:

• Conformity (accepts goals and means): the majority, such as a student working for a conventional career.
• Innovation (accepts goals, rejects means): white-collar fraud, corruption or cheating in examinations.
• Ritualism (rejects goals, accepts means): the bureaucrat who follows rules without purpose.
• Retreatism (rejects both): dropouts, addicts and the homeless.
• Rebellion (rejects and replaces both): revolutionary movements seeking a new social order.

Conformity and deviance thus coexist because the same structure produces both.