The Meaning and Measurement of Occupational Prestige and Other Ways of Hierarchically Ordering Occup

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The Meaning and Measurement of Occupational
Prestige and Other Ways of Hierarchically
Ordering Occupations

• Donald J. Treiman
• Santiago
• August 2007

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Prestige order

• Omitted here to avoid contaminating the prestige
  rating exercise.

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Four questions about occupational hierarchies

• Why do people all over the world rank occupations
  in (more or less) the same prestige order?
• What is prestige?
• Why is it important to know how occupations are
  hierarchically ordered?
• Are there other (better) ways to hierarchically
  order occupations?

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What is prestige?

• A deference entitlement (Shils 1968).
• Deference is defined by the Oxford English
  Dictionary as a
• courteous regard such as is rendered to a
  superior, or to one to whom respect is due the
  manifestation of a disposition to yield to the
  claims or wishes of another.

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Why should we care about prestige (or
occupational status)?

• Prestige is a marker of social status the kind
  of work people do is central to the way people
  define themselves and are defined by others.
• Work (organized into occupationsjobs with
  similar duties and responsibilities) is the
  mechanism by which resources (education) are
  converted to rewards (income and wealth).

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Is prestige real or an invention of sociologists?

• An Israeli study (Kraus et al. 1978) addressed
  this question.
• People were asked to sort occupations into groups
  on the basis of their similarity.
• It turns out that the similarity criterion most
  people used was prestige.
• The evidence is from a smallest space analysis.

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Is there world wide similarity in the prestige of
occupations?

• Yes.
• The evidence is from my 1977 book, Occupational
  Prestige in Comparative Perspective.
• Average correlation of about .8 over 85 studies
  conducted in 52 nations.
• No systematic subgroup variations, nor methods
  effects. ISCO classification.

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What explains this? The theory

• In all but the simplest societies there is an
  occupational division of labor.
• Differentiation inherently gives rise to
  differential power authority, economic control,
  monopoly of knowledge.
• Power begets privilege (income, wealth).
• Power and privilege beget prestige (recall our
  definition of prestige as deference).

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How to scale/classify occupations to study
inequality, mobility?

• Initially, prestige was thought to be
  fundamental.
• Duncans (1961) SEI weighted occupational income
  and education to estimate prestige scores, as a
  way of getting scores for all 250 occupations in
  U.S. Census.
• Treiman (1977) created world wide prestige scale
  by averaging across countries, to get scores for
  all occupations in ISCO.

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• Then it was recognized that SEI is more
  fundamental (because it measures power and
  privilege, from which prestige derives).
• Duncan SEI became de facto standard for
  occupational scaling in the U.S.
• Ganzeboom, DeGraaf and Treiman (1992) devised
  ISEI (International SocioEconomic Index of
  Occupations) for ISCO68 Ganzeboom and Treiman
  (1996) updated ISEI for ISCO88.
• Hauser and Warren (1997) argue that education
  differences between occupations are most
  important for mobility, status attainment.

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State-of-the art instruments for comparative
analysis

• Treimans international prestige scale (1977).
• Ganzeboom et al.s International socioeconomic
  index of occupations (1992, 1996).
• Erikson, Goldthorpe, and Portocareros
  occupational class categories, known as the EGP
  scale (Evans 1992 Ganzeboom et al. 1992).