Keith Hope

The social grading of occupations : a new approach and scale

The authors have obtained popular assessments of the social standing of several hundred occupations and, by a novel application of sampling procedures, constructed a scale upon which the position of any employed male can be determined with a known degree of precision.

Occupational grading and occupational prestige

A cursory glance at the form and content of this paper would suggest that the first part contains a sociological analysis of the concept of occupational prestige and its uses, which generates certain propositions amenable to empirical test, and the second part consists of a small-scale sketch of methods of testing those propositions. However, while such a sequence does occur, it is at the same time important for the reader to recognize that both parts of the paper are intended as conceptual analyses of the field of occupational grading; the one being linguistic in form, based on a reading of previous empirical work, while the other seeks conceptual clarification by imposing

SOCIAL MOBILITY AND FERTILITY

In several recent studies the effects of mobility or status inconsistency on a dependent variable have been quantified by means of an an additive model in which sets of constants have been fitted to two principles of classification. In examining a particular application of this model, the following paper begins by suggesting the possibility that the underlying hypothesis may be more adequately represented by a symmetrical model which fits one and the same set of constants to both principles of classification.

Vertical and Nonvertical Class Mobility in Three Countries

Classes are held to have specific relations to labor and commodity markets, and these relations are thought to constrain the mobility chances of their members. Classes are also held to be unequal, though not necessarily strictly ordered in a hierarchy of advantage. The theorist of class mobility should distinguish between movement attributable to closeness on a vertical dimension and movement (or lack of it) attributable to specific class relations. This paper looks at all four combinations of vertical vs class-specific, and distributional vs exchange mobility, for men in three countries. While there is evidence of some inter-societal differences in both aspects of class-specific mobility, differences in vertical mobility are minute. The outstanding result of the analysis, however, is that 88% of all differences must be attributed to differences between occupational distributions. The analysis employs a structured" approach to modeling which reflects the traditional concerns of mobility analysis.

Methods and Imagination

Quantitative analysis in sociology is a way of representing theories and, properly handled, its techniques may be employed to explore the relations between different theories. This is something which can be conveyed even to beginners by teaching them analysis by means of design matrices. Two examples are given, one an analysis of a table of means and the other a class analysis of a mobility table.

Design matrix analysis

Analysts of social mobility are coming round to the view that it is not enough to find a model that fits the data; it is at least as important to know which bits of the model fit the data, and which are unimportant. The need for this type ofstructuring becomes even more pressing when we seek to determine the dimensions along which societies differ. This paper carries the process of structuring a stage further by proposing an orthogonal decomposition of a mobility model in which each dimension (degree of freedom) can be given a distinct sociological interpretation.In the following paper orthogonal rotation is deployed to uncover the latent dimensions of a mobility table. Relations among different models are established. The paper closes with a response to criticisms published by Sobel (1983).