Social mobility strategies from origins to destinations: A qualitative study on Turkish retirees residing in Turkey and in Germany

This study assesses methodological and explanatory relevance of various approaches concerned with explaining the dynamics of social mobility. This assessment is made on the basis of empirical data collected through an intensive and comparative study of the experiences of Turkish retirees from different occupations whose occupational lives were spent in Turkey and currently residing in Turkey, and those Turkish migrant workers who worked in Germany and currently residing in the same country. The leading argument of the study is that mobility dynamics can best be understood and explained by paying attention to how factors denoting macro-level structural inequalities come together with meso, and micro-level factors in the contingent context of actors. Therefore, it is necessary to problematize the relationship between the origins and destinations of individuals in connection with all the factors that affect the social mobility process and identify how their articulation produces different mechanisms leading to different patterns and different mobility outcomes for individuals starting from apparently the same origins. To this end, the study makes a within-case and between-case comparison of the mechanisms and patterns emerging from the data in the contexts of these two countries and of different occupational origins. The results of the research indicate that the macro-level factors concerned with the cultural, social, and political context of the individuals have an important effect on mobility strategies they employ. Furthermore, the ways individuals make use of their economic, cultural, and social resources and overcome certain restrictions are not only affected by their aspirations for their target destinations but also by their ethnic, religious, political affiliations as well as by their assumed or perceived social roles, responsibilities towards especially the members of their family of origin and the forms of solidarity they have to maintain with these family members. The definitional criteria to classify households or families as nuclear or extended do not make them uniform or identical social units and these criteria are not capable of capturing the diverse ways in which they use and invest their economic, social, and cultural capital for their own social mobility as a social unit and for their members' inter-generational mobility. The results indicate also that all the decisions that the individuals make when planning their mobility trajectories have got nature of a rational evaluation-in-a-given contingent context and mostly rests on a strategy of protecting primarily their current position and moving up one step if possible. Finally, coincidences of events and/or the assistance of "the significant others" may assume causal significance and affect the mobility trajectories in very significant ways.