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Comparing Social Stratification Schemata:
CAMSIS, CSP-CH, Goldthorpe, ISCO-88, Treiman, and Wright
Manfred Max Bergman
University of Cambridge & SIDOS Neuchâtel
Dominique Joye
SIDOS, Neuchâtel
Cambridge Studies in Social Research, No. 10 SSRG Publications, 2005
Cambridge Studies in Social Research, General Editor: Robert M. Blackburn
Social Science Research Group Social and Political Science Cambridge
Contact Address:
M.M. Bergman Institut für Soziologie Universität Basel Petersgraben 27 4051 Basel Switzerland
[email protected]
Acknowledgements
This paper was produced as part of a research project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (grant number 5004-58473). We would like to thank Bob Blackburn, Kenneth Prandy, and Véronique Mottier for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper. A very special vote of thanks must go to Paul Lambert for the 8 single-spaced pages of highly relevant and incisive comments, some of which will have to wait for another article.
An earlier version of this paper has been made available as documentation on social stratification schemata for the Swiss Household Panel. Parts of this paper have appeared in Bergman, Lambert, Prandy, & Joye (2002) and have been presented in “Stratification et Inégalité” at the Congrès de la Société Suisse de Sociologie, Geneva, 19 - 22 September, 2001.
Contents
- 1 Introduction……………………………………………………….……………….
- 2 ISCO-88……………………………………………….…………………………….
- 3 Goldthorpe’s Class Schema……………………………………….…………...
- 4 Wright II & III Class Structure…………………….…………………………….
- 5 Treiman’s Prestige Scale………………………………………….…………….
- 6 CAMSIS……………………………………………….…………………………….
- 7 CSP-CH……………………………………………………………….…………….
- 8 Summary and Conclusion……………………………………...……………….
- 9 References………………………………………………………...……………….
1 Introduction
Few themes have been as central to the social sciences as the conceptualisation and study of inequality and the distribution of social and economic resources since the inception of sociology as a discipline by August Comte, and Marx’s outline of the exploitative nature of class relations. Based in part on empirical evidence and in part on custom, most contemporary approaches to stratification and mobility within modern complex societies emphasise professional occupational titles as the primary defining criterion of social position. Thus, all schemata described in this text are based largely on occupational titles. Where they differ, however, is in the explanation of how these titles relate to stratification. For example, occupational titles can have stratifying functions due to (a) the socio-economic relations which individuals share with each other on the basis of their occupations, (b) class interests based on the differential relations of occupations to authority and capital, (c) scarce, yet desirable, resources in the form of skills and knowledge that go along with these occupations and that can be transformed into advantage and power, (d) differential social status or prestige that represent the symbolic value of occupations and correspond to variations in advantage and power, etc. Conceptualisations of social stratification or inequality are inseparable from measurement issues, regardless of whether these constructs are conceptualised as subjective perceptions or scarce yet desirable resources, or whether they focus on descriptive, comparative, or mobility questions. Before we can look at the form and function of status or at resource diffusion and its change over time and context, we have to consider, first, what is stratified and, second, how to measure it. Only if we are rigorous in the consideration of these fundamental aspects of the phenomenon can we begin to look at its variations and change. Conceptualisation and measurement of social stratification is at once one of the best established, most complex, and most disputed area in the social sciences. This text aims to explore and compare the main features of some of the more popular international stratification schemes: the Cambridge Social Interaction and Stratification Scale (CAMSIS), John H. Goldthorpe’s most recent class schema, the International Standard Classification of Occupations (ISCO-88), Donald J. Treiman’s prestige scale, and Erik Olin Wright’s class structure. There are good reasons to question the validity of stratification schemata which have been constructed from one specific national context and subsequently applied to others, and thus, national scales may play an important part in highlighting idiosyncratic national stratification characteristics. For this reason, we have included the Swiss Socio-Professional Categories (CSP-CH) as a representative of such schemata, which is designed to a specific set of circumstances in Switzerland. This article is limited to an outline of the key characteristics and theoretical background of some stratification schemes, their key assumptions and structure, a selection of relevant critiques, and references for further study. In no way can this text be considered an exhaustive description and critique of social stratification measures; the complexity of stratification as a whole and the scales described herein in particular transcend the limits of this text. Instead, this article aims to inform social and political scientists unfamiliar with the details of the social stratification literature about social stratification schemes in order to encourage, first, the inclusion of this dimension into their substantive research and, second, further development in this vital area of the social sciences.
Table 2: Major Groups and Skill Levels of ISCO-88. Code Major Groups Skill Level
1 Legislators, senior officials, and managers n/a 2 Professionals 4th 3 Technicians and associate professionals 3rd 4 Clerks 2nd 5 Service workers and shop and market sales workers 2nd 6 Skilled agricultural and fishery workers 2nd 7 Craft and related trades workers 2nd 8 Plant and machine operators and assemblers 2nd 9 Elementary occupations 1st 0 Armed forces n/a
to the unit group 2111 (physicists and astronomers), who are part of the minor group 211 (physicists, chemists and related professions), who belong to the sub-major group 21 (physical, mathematical and engineering science professionals), who are part of group 2 (professionals). A specific set of tasks and duties, in conjunction with a relevant degree of acquired formal and on-the-job skills, form a job. Grouping specific jobs according to similarities in skills and duties, regardless of their output, forms an occupation. Hypothetically, ISCO-88 can be expanded to give up to six levels: major groups, sub-major groups, minor groups, unit groups, occupations, and jobs. In practice, however, occupational titles are coded into 4-digit unit groups, which, due to their nested design, can be collapsed easily into 3, 2, or 1-digit versions.
2.2 Strengths and Weaknesses
ISCO-88 represents an impressive effort to create an international standardised classification system for occupations – a prerequisite for studying occupational structures cross-nationally and over time. To reduce the considerable cost associated with classification and coding of occupational information, a number of shortcuts have been devised, most notably by limiting the classification and coding to a sample of a population, by distributing a self-classification survey, or by computer-assisted procedures or automated coding routines (see Elias, 1997a; 1997b for a discussion). Elias (1997b: 13) summarises problems relating to the validity and reliability of the ISCO-88 classification schema as follows:
- The extent and quality of the occupational data to be coded. The data to be coded may be too brief for application of a relevant occupational code, uninformative or may be ambiguous in its interpretation;
- Instruments for the application of coding rules may be poorly formulated, leading to differences in their interpretation by different coders;
- Poor coder training procedures may lead to errors in the application of coding rules;
- Human error, which may be a result of fatigue and boredom – coding occupational information is usually a difficult and unrewarding task;
- The classification itself may be poorly constructed, or may rely upon distinctions which cannot be readily operationalised in a particular context.
Obviously, the higher the level of aggregation, the less frequent are coding errors since variations in coding are more likely to fall within broader categories. Conversely, however, the more detailed the information to be sorted into occupational groupings, the less individual cases are reliably assigned to categories. Hence, mobility studies or cross-national comparative studies using ISCO-88 coding schemata at the detailed 3- or 4-digit level could be less reliable than usually assumed, since variations across time or space are likely to be biased due to coding errors, which may have consequences on the validity of ISCO-88-based scales. However, using codes at the 1- or 2-digit level, while more reliable than the more detailed levels, would result in a tremendous loss of information, which would compromise the utility of the schema. The critiques above have focused mostly on coding accuracy. However, further examination of the coding frame itself raises questions that have not been considered fully. The creators of this classification scheme implicitly assume that, first, an occupation can be reduced to a specific set of isolated tasks and duties, and that skills can be reduced to formal and informal education and on-the-job training schemes; second, that the tasks, duties, and skills of each occupation have been captured sufficiently for classification; third, that tasks, duties, and skills neither interact nor can each of these compensate for another in the successful performance of a job; and, fourth, that a set of tasks, duties, and skills relating to an occupation are invariant over time and cross-national contexts. In other words, it is assumed, for instance, that disk jockeys, media interviewers, and radio announcers share the same tasks, duties, and skills, as do Porsche factory mechanics in Wiesbaden and Jiffy Lube mechanics in Pecos, Texas. But what information are we losing by deconstructing a job into a set of disparate tasks which we define as relevant to the performance thereof? What criteria are applied in order to cluster jobs according to a so-called general set of skills and levels of formal and informal education? Are the tasks and qualifications behind the occupational codes indeed invariant across national and other contexts and insensitive to interactions between markets, organisational structures, industrial sectors, and national contexts?
Due to the empirical vigour and international acceptance of this classification system, many social stratification schemes use ISCO-88 as a convenient classification of occupational titles, although their authors or those who adapt the authors’ schemata to existing data sets regroup these occupational groups according to rules that reflect alternative theoretical or practical considerations.
3 John Goldthorpe’s CASMIN Schema
3.1 Background and Structure
Despite its paradigmatic dominance of the conceptualisation and empirical application of social class in the late 20th^ century, the Goldthorpe class schema has been through numerous incarnations, starting from the late 1970s to its most recent exposition in 1992. This text will focus on the elucidation and critique of the latest version, the Erikson-Goldthorpe or CASMIN schema. Although Goldthorpe and his colleagues are critical toward neo-Marxist notions of class structure while, also, pledging allegiance to Weberian-inspired theory, their class schema is influenced by ideas that draw on both Marx and Weber (see Marshall et al., 1988 for further elaboration). Central to Goldthorpe’s class schema are employment relations – cast in a functionalist perspective – in industrial societies, i.e. societies, which, according to
Figure 1: Thematic illustration of Goldthorpe’s class structure.
In contrast to the thematic illustration of the class schema (figure 1), Goldthorpe’s class schema consists of four quasi-nested classifications, of which he seems to prefer the seven- class variant. The following figure represents the four class schemata according to Erikson and Goldthorpe (1992: 38-39):
Figure 2: Goldthorpe’s class schema.
The full 11-class version can be collapsed to fit researchers’ needs and data limitations. Because the versions are quasi-nested, they can be simply recoded from the 11 classes into a 7, 5, or 3-class version. The terminology is not always consistent; Goldthorpe and his colleagues often stress that the labels “manual workers” and “non-manual workers” are too simplistic because the fundamental distinction should be understood not in terms of work activity, but rather as a function of employment contract.
3.2 Strengths and Weaknesses
When Runciman (1990) asked “How many classes are there in contemporary British society?,” he received this response: “As many as it proves empirically useful to distinguish for the analytical purposes in hand” (Erikson & Goldthorpe, 1992: 46). In recognising the ideological minefield around a theoretical elaboration of a class schema, especially with regard to the appropriateness of categories and their location, Erikson and Goldthorpe attempt to extricate themselves from the battle thus:
We take the view that concepts – like all other ideas – should be judged by their consequences, not by their antecedents. Thus, we have little interest in arguments about class that are of merely doctrinal value. (1992: 35)
Leaving aside the fact that sound theories go far beyond mere indoctrination, this version of pragmatism may lead to at least two pitfalls: first, one of the goals in the social sciences is to explain social phenomena, including the antecedents, form and function, as well as the consequences of social stratification and mobility. This goal seems difficult to attain by a recitation of statistical coefficients in the absence of explanatory tools in the form of an empirically grounded social theory. Second, an emphasis on the results of a class schema during its construction may seduce some creators into adjusting the class categories post hoc in order to improve the fit to a desired set of empirical results. A construction of a class schema according to such strategies will surely render the current reincarnation empirically impressive, yet force the constructors to reshuffle the classes according to the vagaries of data fluctuations across samples, to fashions, or to pet theories. Furthermore, fitting classes according to a set of a priori expectations may make it difficult to validate the schema or, worse, will invite tautologies: if, for instance, a class schema is based on the degree of occupational authority, economic rewards, or skills, then measures of association between this class schema and measures of authority, economic rewards, or skills cannot be used to validate the schema. Related to this point is the possibility of detecting spurious relations: for example, if a class schema uses ownership as its fundamental component and, subsequently, reveals that education, income, or some form of power are associated with it, then it is not clear which may be the substantive finding: their association with class or with ownership. These pitfalls may be avoided through explicit operational definitions and clear elaborations of the components of a class schema – elements that have been somewhat neglected in Goldthorpe’s work. Obviously, Goldthorpe and his colleagues are far too sophisticated to commit such errors when they apply their class schema. Others, who may not know the exact composition of the Goldthorpe class schema, may be more likely to suffer the consequences. The following quote certainly leaves some cause for concern:
- It is not quite clear why farm workers should be as predominant in his tripartite subdivision (see figure 2), i.e. independent from skilled or unskilled manual workers, while, concurrently, large-scale employers find themselves in the same class as rank-and- file service workers.
- For practical reasons, most users of the Goldthorpe schema collapse it from the 11 class version into either the 5 class version or, after “hiding” the farmers, into 4 classes. Erikson and Goldthorpe themselves even advocate a “threefold hierarchical division” (e.g. 1992: 45-46). The fewer classes, the less likely we find homogeneity within the classes, the more confusing is the meaning of the class schema, and the less convincing a class structure from a theoretical and empirical point of view.
Overall, Goldthorpe and his colleagues have had an impressive influence on the conceptualisation and measurement of social stratification and mobility. Their 5-class version in particular is both parsimonious and has high face validity. Nevertheless, conceptual clarification is needed of its overall theoretical basis as well as of its methodological construction in order to judge the appropriateness of its application to various substantive problems within the social and political sciences. Recent publications relating to the validation of the Goldthorpe class schema (e.g. Evans & Mills, 1998; 2000) have concerned themselves with validity and reliability issues of the Goldthorpe class schema but have ultimately fallen short of rectifying most of the shortcomings listed above.
4 The Wright Class Structure
4.1 Background and Structure
Marxist and post-Marxist writers of late have been struggling to account for a number of incongruences: the difficulty of detecting empirically the presence of, and the antagonistic relations between, classes; the failure of the bourgeoisie to succumb; the growing presence of a strong middle class; and the success of capitalism over socialism. Erik Olin Wright’s model of social stratification can be described as a materialist and neo-Marxist conceptualisation of class structure with occasional Weberian leanings. He offers an innovative attempt to integrate into his Marxist perspective, first, the presence in contemporary capitalist society of a substantial middle class in both size and socio-structural significance and, second, the apparent arrest of the ostensibly inevitable movement from capitalist society through socialism to communism. According to Wright (1985; 1997; 1998a; 1998b), Marxist writers of late have adopted at least four strategies to deal with the middle class, which impinge on one of the central tenets of Marxist ideology – a polarisation of antagonistic class relations between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat: the middle class as (1) an ideological illusion; (2) a segment of another class (e.g. the “new petty bourgeoisie” or “new working class”); (3) a new class, distinct from the bourgeoisie, proletariat, or petty bourgeoisie; or (4) as belonging to more than one class, simultaneously. As we shall see, Wright’s mapping of a class structure clearly belongs to the fourth category.
4.1.1 Theoretical Preliminaries
Wright differentiates two possible ways in which the relationship between the classes can be cast: domination or exploitation. Especially in his earliest writings, Wright argued that
domination is a defining characteristic of the relationship between classes, especially since exploitation presumes domination. In later texts, however, he changed sides and not only agreed with writers such as Roemer (1982) on exploitation as the key feature in the relationship between the classes, but he modified and expanded Roemer’s ideas to develop the latest version of his own stratification model. The rejection of domination as the defining feature was based on two insights: first, he conceded that domination does not automatically include exploitation (e.g. parents often dominate their children without necessarily exploiting them); second, he understood that neo- Marxist models based on domination of one class over another in conjunction with, for instance, gender or ethnicity, become fractured, multifaceted, context-bound, and entangled in complex authority and power relations beyond materialist and realist perspectives (cf. Dahrendorf, 1959). In contrast, he insists, Marxist and neo-Marxist theorisation must remain materialist and realist and, thus, focused on exploitative relations and antagonistic interdependencies of material interests, rather than domination. In other words, opposing material interests must remain at the heart of a Marxist conceptualisation of modern capitalist societies. Two elements had to be elaborated in order to present a map of class structure in contemporary capitalist societies according to these premises: an elaboration of exploitation and an extension of classical Marxist thought that could accommodate the middle class.
4.1.2 Exploitation
Exploitation, according to Wright, who bases this part of his model on Roemer, depends on two conditions: first, the material welfare of one class has to depend on the exploitation of another class. This condition, according to Wright, merely describes economic oppression – a necessary but insufficient condition for exploitation. Second, the material welfare of one class must depend on the efforts of another class, i.e. the wealthy/owners of the means of production/bourgeoisie appropriate surplus value from the labour of the poor/the owners of labour power/workers. This second condition provides the interdependency between the classes and the possibility to appropriate surplus value from labour by owners of the means of production, with the exception of the petty bourgeoisie, which does not have any employees. These two conditions – economic oppression and acquisition of surplus value – constitute materialist exploitation. Accordingly, Wright presents the following definition: classes are “positions within the social relations of production derived from these relations of exploitation” (1998: 13).
4.1.3 Extension of Marxist Thought
Because Wright insists on a materialist and realist exploitation between the classes, he focuses on assets, which are used as tools of exploitation or as commodities to be exploited. Assets that define the bourgeoisie and the proletariat are ownership of means of production and of labour, respectively. So what assets could the middle class have that would either make them exploiters or exploited? Wright suggested two different assets that are prevalent in modern capitalistic societies, especially due to the division of labour: bureaucratically controlled organisational assets and skills. The inclusion of these two additional assets represents a departure from classic Marxism and is quite Weberian in nature. In Wright’s work, organisational assets are often used interchangeably with relationships to authority, and here Wright returns to domination as a defining characteristic of this dimension (especially in
Table 3: Wright II Class Structure. Owners Wage Laborers 1 bourgeoisie 4 expert 7 semicredentialed 10 uncredentialed + managers Nonmanagers Managers 2 small employers 5 expert 8 semicredentialed 11 uncredentialed Management supervisors Supervisors Supervisors Assets 3 petty bourgeoisie 6 expert 9 semicredentialed 12 proletariat nonmanagers Workers -
Skill/Credentialed Assets Source: Western & Wright (1994)
assets in the means of production and are, thus, open to exploitation by the owners of the means of production, who, themselves, extract surplus from the labour of the skilled professionals. Wright employed ideas regarding “contradictory class locations” (Carchedi,
- to describe the mutual exploitation of some classes, thus offering the most pronounced departure from classical Marxism. From this perspective, it could be argued that a society that manages to produce wage labourers who are either marginally skilled or have a minimum of organisational assets will profit from exploiting each other, while, concurrently, being exploited by the owners of production. Such an arrangement is likely to be stable despite its exploitative nature, since the exploited concurrently profit, at least marginally or occasionally, from the labour of their peers. This important insight by Carchedi and Wright, first, accounts for both the relative stability of the social structure in modern complex societies, second, the presence and dominance of the middle class. Thus, Wright provides important answers to critics of Marxist class schemata.
4.1.5 Simplification (Wright III)
Three dimensions form the basis of Wright’s full thesis on social structure (Wright II) from which he derives his twelve (sub)classes: property, expertise, and authority. Although problematic due to its neglect of property not associated with production (e.g. real estate, securities, stocks, bonds, etc.), property is measured from survey questions relating to employment status and, if respondents are self-employed, focusing on how many workers they employ. Educational attainment or occupational codes are often used to determine respondents’ expertise. Authority is the most complicated and contested dimension. This dimension has been constructed from answers to questions relating to self-classification about management tasks at respondents’ places of work, participation in workplace policy decisions, or the ability to impose sanctions on subordinate workers. Mostly due to data limitations, sample size for empirical applications of his class schema, or cross-national comparability, Wright has reduced the 12 “ classes ” to either 8 (Wright & Cho, 1992) or 7 (Western & Wright, 1994) “ locations within a structure of class relations. Some of these are class locations, others are contradictory locations within class relations” (1994: 608). The following table illustrates Wright’s simplified class structure (Wright III; cf. Western & Wright, 1994). Simplifying the prerequisites for the construction of the Wright class structure allows for its construction for a greater number of data sets as well as its wider application in empirical cross-national studies.
Table 4: Wright III Class Structure.
4.2 Strengths and Weaknesses of Wright’s Class Structure
While Wright’s class schemata (Wright II & Wright III) represent the most convincing effort to operationalise and empirically apply (post-)Marxist class theory to the study of social stratification, the following are arguments against his model:
- As with all class-based schemata, it is inherently difficult to locate the line of demarcation between the classes. For instance, what is the cut-off for skill or management assets that allows us to unambiguously assign individuals to a particular class? What, precisely, is the dividing line between small employers and the bourgeoisie? In other words, little convincing arguments have been put forth to justify the chosen criteria that ostensibly demarcate classes. Instead, if continua are suggested by the theory, why not work with continua empirically (cf. Halaby & Weakliem, 1993)?
- In modern capitalist societies, means of production as an asset must be managed with skill because assets of this nature are far more volatile and subject to market fluctuations. Thus, ownership of the means of production cannot be separated from skills or management assets because many owners are also skilled managers. Furthermore, successful managers and experts nowadays acquire ownership of means of production, for example through various stock options, profit sharing schemes, or simply through purchasing a part of the organisation. Hence, the dividing line between owners and wage labourers may be more blurred than suggested by Wright.
- Wright’s class schema is fundamentally based on the classification of economic agents, which may be too narrow in scope with regard to modern societies or phenomena that class-based schemata attempt to explain (e.g. class-consciousness and political mobilisation).
- As with Goldthorpe’s class schema, users tend not to use the full range of classes as proposed by the author. This point is less a critique of the schema itself but a criticism toward many of its applications: a reduced specification of a Wright-derived schema can be found in the literature (e.g. Martin, 1994; Wright, 1979; Savage et al., 1992), which uses only four classes: owners, experts, managers, and workers. A four-class schema, however, does not account sufficiently for the variation in the data nor for the details in the theory developed by Wright.
Owners Employees
manager- professionals Experts employers (^) petty experts bourgeoisie semi- Semi- Experts professionals managers workers (^) Nonexperts
Managers (^) Nonmanagers Managers and Nonmanagers Supervisors Source: Western & Wright (1994)
and Hatt (1947) set out to examine the relative prestige of 90 occupations in the US, which they considered representative of all US occupations. A prestige score (i.e. the NORC score) was calculated from 5-point prestige rating scales, although it was neither clear what the selection criteria for the occupations were, nor what led to the specific algebraic manipulations (e.g. multiplication of percentages; addition of these products; etc.) of these ratings. Mainly for reasons of interpretability and validity concerns, another more simple scoring system, the Prestige Increment (PI) score, was calculated subsequently by taking into consideration only two of the five points of the prestige rating scale: ratings relating to “excellent” or “good” levels of prestige. The idea of applying these PI scores to all occupations in the US Census led Duncan (1961) to estimate the prestige for the missing occupations based on regression weights calculated from the North and Hatt data. The predictors for PI scores were education level and income because, in the original data, these two predictors accounted for an impressive 83% of the total variance in PI scores. Plugging the holes of the occupations listed in the US Census from estimates based on the North and Hatt data produced a more complete list of occupational prestige scores, which Reiss and his colleagues referred to as the Socio- Economic Index (SEI). Despite subsequent failures to replicate similar levels of fit when regressing education level and income on subjective prestige rating (e.g. Featherman & Stevens, 1982), SEI and its derivative, the ISEI (Ganzeboom & Treiman, 1992; 1996), have enjoyed great popularity in the social and political sciences. ISEI, for instance, scores occupations according to their average educational and income levels, reflecting how occupational location influences the ability to convert educational levels into income. In practice, these socioeconomic indexes are closely correlated with the Treiman scale although the former gives primacy to the education- occupation-income relationship, whereas prestige scores give primacy to prestige rankings. Stewart, Prandy, and Blackburn (1980) provide an extensive review of attempts to measure prestige and status by reputational ratings (cf. Stewart & Blackburn, 1975).
5.1.2 Assumptions of Treiman’s Prestige Scales
Treiman’s Theory of Occupational Prestige rests on six implicit and explicit propositions:
- All complex modern societies are organised into similar societal functions in order to maximise efficiency (e.g. production of goods including foodstuffs, transport, surplus management, differentiated education, etc.) (see also Durkheim, 1933; Aberle et al., 1950; Blau, 1964).
- Efficient logistic organisation of these functions is satisfied through a similar division of labour across all complex modern societies (see also Aberle et al., 1950). Thus, due to the similar organisation of functions, modern complex societies divide labour similarly, which gives rise to similar occupational roles across these societies.
- Division of labour creates a form of social stratification due to different degrees of control over scarce, yet desirable, resources (e.g. knowledge and skills, authority or legitimate control over activities of others, property, etc.).
- Differentials in control over these resources produce differentials in power (i.e. the ability to achieve whatever ends are desired; cf. Weber, 1947; Treiman also quotes Shils, 1968: 110-111).
- Differentials in power (i.e. control over scarce and desired resources) result in differentials in privileges for the members of societies. Two processes are in operation to turn
resources (e.g. skills, authority, economic resources, and power) into privilege: first, some resources such as skills are rare and valued, so the value of these skills is increased on the labour market and the price for some work relative to another increases; second, differential control over these scarce resources is bureaucratically enforced through, for example, professional licensing, certification, and accreditation. Such control is wealth- enhancing because it allows favoured (i.e. protected) occupations or skills to maximise their advantage by reducing professional access or acquisition of skills. Due to the first two propositions, differences in privileges within societies are similar across all complex modern societies.
- Power and privilege are highly valued in all societies. Thus, occupations associated with power and privilege are linked with high prestige ratings. Prestige ratings for all occupations do not vary within or between modern complex societies.
In sum, the subjectively attributed prestige of a specific occupation is (a) linked to the privilege and power which individuals enjoy based on their occupational titles, (b) invariant across social and cultural groupings, and (c) similar across all complex modern societies. If, and only if, these six propositions hold, can Treiman propose a single universal prestige scale based on the subjective prestige ratings of occupations, which will be indicative of the relative objective power and privilege of (individuals holding) specific occupations, and which is also invariant across all social and cultural groups, as well as across all complex modern societies. In other words, under these six conditions, the subjective prestige attributed to a dentist or to a welder’s assistant allows for inference of the relative but objective power position and privilege that these two occupational titles enjoy, not only within their society, but also across all complex modern societies. To defend these six claims, Treiman invests considerable effort in reanalysing data, which ostensibly reject the Cultural Hypothesis, i.e. that prestige hierarchies reflect cultural values and thus vary across different value systems and cultures. For instance, Treiman claims that because the prestige ratings of selected occupations across 85 studies within 60 societies correlate at r=.79 (s=.14), the Cultural Hypothesis can be safely rejected. Empirical evidence, again mostly based on correlations, is also offered to reject the Diffusion Hypothesis, i.e. the claim that occupational prestige scores are homogeneous across all modern complex societies because of the spread and hegemony of Western values, especially relating to occupational prestige. A third defence of these six propositions consists of a discussion of “exceptions, which prove the rule,” i.e. of occupations, which obviously do not share the same prestige level across all societies (e.g. clerks, soldiers, police officers, primary and secondary school teachers, etc.).
5.2 Strengths and Weaknesses
While the following points of critique are grouped into theoretical and empirical considerations, it is obvious that, conceptually, they cannot be separated this clearly. This division serves only to classify the different points in order to facilitate discussion.
5.2.1 Theoretical:
- Treiman suggests too many ad hoc explanations for disconfirming evidence. Exceptions to his model fall into at least four categories: (1) if occupational prestige
