The Blackwell Companion to Sociology (70 page)

research on the prestige of occupations, which is reviewed below. Some aspects

of privilege, such as wealth and perquisites, also are difficult to study ± wealth because individuals often are reluctant to reveal their wealth, and perquisites

because they are difficult to compare across individuals, much less across societies or over time. Thus, students of stratification often settle for information on education, occupational status, and income, which can be readily gathered in

sample surveys and censuses and which can be used both to compare different

groups within a society and to make both cross-temporal and cross-national

comparisons. Second, in the modern world these three attributes are very power-

ful indicators of the life chances of individuals and families; singly and together, they substantially define the position of individuals and families in hierarchies of advantage, or ``socioeconomic status.''

The field of social stratification is concerned with three central questions:

298

Donald J. Treiman

1 What is the shape of distributions of education, occupation, income, and

other aspects of socioeconomic status in a population. For example, how

much income inequality is there, are most people relatively poor and a few

relatively rich, are most people in the middle of the income distribution, or

does it have some other shape?

2 What factors affect who gets ahead; that is, who acquires high education,

occupational status, and income? This question, in turn, can be divided

into two: (a) what determines to what extent and in what ways socio-

economic advantage is transmitted from generation to generation; (b)

what determines how some attributes are converted into others over the

life course ± for example, what is the relationship between education and

subsequent occupational status, what is the relationship between occupa-

tional status and income, how orderly are careers, and so on? Together,

these two questions constitute the study of ``status attainment'' or ``social

mobility.''

3 What are the correlates and consequences of position in the stratification

system? That is, to what extent and in what ways does socioeconomic

status affect the way people think and act: whether and how they vote,

how many children they have, how often they visit their relatives, how

tolerant they are of other kinds of people and different points of view,

what kinds of life styles they adopt, and so on?

All societies organized above the level of small independent bands are strati-

fied because, as Treiman (1977) has argued, all societies of any degree of

complexity have a division of labor ± that is, the tasks and duties that have to be carried out are done by different people, who specialize in one occupation or another, and differences in tasks, duties, and responsibilities inherently create differences in power, which in turn give rise to differences in privilege, and hence to differences in prestige. Connections between the power, privilege, and prestige of occupations can be found throughout history: in Egyptian and Chinese

dynastic records, in the ordering of castes in India and Nepal, in the marching

order of guilds in medieval Europe, and in modern societies at all levels of

economic development.

Although wealth and power traditionally have been important dimensions of

social stratification, in the modern world two other attributes have come to

assume a central role: how much education people attain, and the kind of work

they do, their occupations. Indeed, wealth and power have come to be dependent

on education and occupational position. In industrialized societies, the primary source of income for most people is wages and salaries. Moreover, in the absence of hereditary distinctions of rank, occupations are the primary basis of both

power differentials and prestige distinctions. Finally, in the modern world, where relatively little wealth is inherited, and income is substantially variable over the life course, intergenerational status reproduction is mostly determined by the

similarity in the educational level and occupational status of successive generations. Thus, educational achievement and occupational status are central to

social status in the modern world, and their determinants, correlates, and

Occupations, Stratification, and Mobility

299

consequences, including their relation to each other, within and across genera-

tions, are the primary foci of social stratification research.

Although there are some important precursors (for example, Sorokin, 1927),

the serious study of social stratification and social mobility is barely a half

century old, dating to the work of the first Research Committee of the then

newly organized International Sociological Association, which promoted a series

of national intergenerational occupational mobility studies (recounted by Gan-

zeboom et al., who in 1991 identified three generations of stratification

research). Over the past half century research in this field has become increas-

ingly sophisticated, as a result of advances in statistical methods, solutions to the problems of measurement comparability, an explosion of new data sources, and

the development of new, multilevel, research designs that have made it possible

to rigorously investigate variations in stratification systems across societies and over time. The result has been a vast expansion of our understanding of how

stratification systems function in the modern world. This chapter reviews devel-

opments with respect to the first two of the three core questions identified above: the shape of status hierarchies (focusing on the measurement of occupational

status) and the process of social mobility and status attainment (with a separate section devoted specifically to educational attainment). Research on the correlates and consequences of socioeconomic status is as yet too fragmented to

permit a systematic review. The chapter concludes with a brief review of the

methodological developments that have lead to these advances.

The Measurement of Occupational Status

In the United States there are about 100 million employed persons and hence

about 100 million jobs ± specific positions in specific enterprises. For these to become tractable for analytic purposes, they must be aggregated into a small

number (no more than a few hundred) of categories. Of the many ways in which

it is possible to aggregate the specific jobs that people do, occupational cate-

gories ± groupings of jobs with respect to the similarity of their content, i.e. the skill and knowledge it takes to do them, their duties, and their responsibilities ±

have the greatest currency in sociology. While economists have tended to aggreg-

ate jobs into industries ± on the basis of the goods and services produced by the enterprises in which people work ± sociologists have recognized that the relative status of jobs is best summarized by attending to their requirements and their

responsibilities, i.e by forming occupational classifications.

There are three fundamental ways of classifying occupations with respect to

their status, and each has culminated in a widely accepted internationally

standardized scale or category system: occupations may be aggregated on the

basis of their prestige, their socioeconomic status, or their class position.

Prestige scales assign scores to occupations on the basis of evaluations by the

public of their relativè`prestige'' or ``social standing'' or ``respect'' ± terms that for practical purposes are synonymous. While prestige ratings studies have been

carried out in many nations since early in the twentieth century, the bulk of the 300

Donald J. Treiman

research has been done since the Second World War. In the USA an important

early study was conducted by researchers at the National Opinion Research

Center in 1947, which was replicated and expanded in the early 1960s in a series of surveys, and still another replication was carried out in 1989 (Nakao and

Treas, 1994); at the same time, similar studies were conducted in a large number of other countries. It turns out that people in all walks of life ± that is, regardless of education, ethnic identity, gender, age, or their own occupational position ±

on average rank occupations in the same way with respect to their prestige, with high government officials and learned professionals at the top and unskilled

laborers at the bottom. Moreover, members of different societies throughout the

world perceive the relative prestige of occupations in essentially similar ways

(the average intersocietal correlation, across 60 societies, is about 0.8), and the prestige ordering of occupations hardly changes over time (Treiman, 1977). In

an important article, Kraus et al. (1978) demonstrate that prestige is not simply an invention of sociologists, since when individuals are asked to group occupations on the basis of their ``similarity'' (not further specified), the principal basis of similarity is how close occupations are with respect to their prestige rankings.

As noted above, Treiman provided a theoretical explanation for these findings,

suggesting that the enormous cross-national similarity in prestige evaluations

reflects cross-national similarities in the relative power and privilege associated with different occupations, which in turn reflects inherent features of the organization of work in all complex societies.

The great cross-national similarity in occupational prestige ratings led Trei-

man to devise an international prestige scale, which has become the internation-

ally accepted standard for occupational status measurement when a prestige

scale is desired.

Socioeconomic Status

Seeking a way to generalize prestige scores from the relatively small number of

occupation categories for which prestige ratings were available to the several

hundred detailed occupations included in census classifications, Duncan (1961)

showed that prestige scores could be quite accurately predicted from the average education and income of occupations. He then used the predicted scores to

construct a Socioeconomic Index (SEI) of occupations. It was subsequently

recognized (Featherman et al., 1975) that rather than serving as simple proxies

for prestige, socioeconomic status scales were valid indicators of occupational

status in their own right. Indeed, for studying social mobility and status

attainment they are superior to prestige scales. There are two reasons for this.

First, as was noted above, prestige appears to be substantially but not perfectly dependent upon differentials of power and privilege, and it is these resources

that promote status attainment; thus, prestige is an imperfect indicator of the

features of occupations that create a transmittable advantage ± their socio-

economic characteristics. Second, prestige scales display one distinctive anomaly with respect to intergenerational occupational mobility: the typical mobility path for those from agricultural origins is into unskilled or semi-skilled

Occupations, Stratification, and Mobility

301

non-agricultural work. In most societies, agricultural work typically enjoys

average prestige, whereas laboring work has low prestige; but both types of

occupations have low socioeconomic status. Thus, movement off the farm,

which was pervasive throughout the twentieth century, is downward mobility

with respect to prestige but not with respect to socioeconomic status, and is

typically upward mobility with respect to income, material well-being, and life

chances ± since otherwise there would be little incentive to move out of agriculture. The result is that when intergenerational occupational status reproduction is measured with prestige scales it is understated relative to the degree of consistency in occupational socioeconomic status across generations.

The need for an occupational status scale that could be used for international

comparisons of occupational socioeconomic status attainment led Ganzeboom

et al. (1992; see also Ganzeboom and Treiman, 1996) to devise an International

Socioeconomic Index of occupations (ISEI); the scale maximizes the association

between the average education of occupational categories and their status, and

between their status and their average income. It is thus conceptually distinct

from prestige scales (although in practice corresponding socioeconomic and

prestige scales of occupations tend to be highly correlated, on the order of 0.8

to 0.9). This scale has become the standard way of measuring occupational

status for international comparisons. Recently, however, Hauser and Warren

(1997) have challenged the practice of combining information on occupational

education and income, arguing (and demonstrating for the USA) that status

attainment depends far more heavily upon the average education of occupa-

tional categories than on their average income. This finding is quite consistent with the growing consensus that the driving force in intergenerational status

attainment is family cultural capital, which is strongly reflected in the educa-

tional requirements of the father's occupation. This point is discussed further in the next section, on status attainment.

Occupational Classes

There is a long tradition of measuring occupational status by dividing occupa-

tions into a set of discrete categories, distinguished on the basis of the type of work performed. Although such classification schemes varied widely, most

incorporated, in one way or another, a tripartite distinction between non-manual work, manual non-agricultural work, and agricultural work, and many schemes