Occupational Stereotypes and Prestige

This paper examines occupational evaluation as a behavioral process. First, alternative methods of investigating occupational stratification are distinguished: the socioeconomliic or "objective" approach, the prestige assessment or "subjective" approach, and a "linkage model" that attempts to identify objective characteristics that enter as status-conferring criteria into prestige assessment. The third approach assumes a weighting and combining process according to which prestige assessments are concluded de novo by each person who reviews the occupational structure. Taking account of occupational characteristics may, however, involve response to stereotyped imagery as to what occupations and their incumbents are like, as well as the processing of objective data. Popular stereotypes of occupations are explored through the use of the semantic differential. APPROACHES TO OCCUPATIONAL INEQUALITY wo approaches have donminated the investigation of occupational stratification. One is an effort to establish a relative ordering of occupational categories according to their socioeconiomnic characteristics. First begun by Alba Edwards (1938) in the ordering of census data, this approach has been perpetuated by Otis Dudley Duncan (1961), who * Revision of a paper presen-ted at the annual meeting of the Ohio Valley Sociological Society, 1968. This content downloaded from 207.46.13.193 on Thu, 08 Sep 2016 05:54:42 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms OCCUPATIONAL STEREOTYPES AND PRESTIGE 65 established a ranking of occupations according to the median income and educational levels of their incumbents. The second major approach is to secure a representative sample of the larger population and to elicit from respondents ratings of occupations according to their "social standing" (NORC, 1947; Hodge et at., 1966). Duncan (1961) developed a regression equation using education and income levels of workers in each occupation category that serves to predict their social standing, thus demonstrating that the rankings of occupations obtained in these ways closely correspond. This finding suggests that respondents take account of such factors as income and education in evaluating occupations. A third approach to occupational stratification attempts to link the subjective and objective methods. Assuming that objective characteristics are used to discriminate and evaluate occupations, the procedure here is to ascertain what characteristics are correlated with prestige and may, therefore, be regarded as status-conferring. Garbin and Bates (1961) and Simpson and Simpson (1960) established that a number of variables, according to whiclh occupations may be evaluated, are correlated with prestige. This approach has not been successful in differentiating the characteristics that lead to prestige from those that follow from (or are the result of) prestige. However, as pointed out by Gusfield and Schwartz (1963), this method does provide information about what is being asserted when people grant prestige to occupations. The third method does serve to identify those variables that are taken as relevant and those dismissed as irrelevant to prestige assessment of occupations, and was utilized by the present authors (Thielbar and Feldman1, 1968) in an earlier study. We attempted to link the reputational and the so-called "objective" approach by examining the process through which individuals grant prestige to occupations. That such a process operates may be inferred by examining Duncan's (1961) attempt to predict social standing of occupations from his socioeconomic index scores. For example, Duncan's SET for physicians is 93 and 92 for lawyers. These scores reflect equality as to income and a slight edge in educational level for physicians. Discrepancy in NORC prestige ratings for the two occupations, however, is 8 points. The significantly higher social standing of physicians requires explanation outside of Duncan's framework. In our initial investigation of the prestigegranting process, we distinguished between objective criteria and evaluative criteria of ranking occupations. How prestigious occupations are seen to be, from the perspective of the respondent as well as from the vantage point of sociology, is an objective datum. Similarly, how powerful or privileged occupations are, can be "estimated" independently of one's personal values. Thus, in terms of these criteria, a person may be relatively accurate or inaccurate in terms of some objectively correct information. Wlhether or not an occupation is more important to society than some other(s) is also a matter of objective assessment, as is the question of how "satisfying" jobs are to their incumbents. Similarly, whether or not an occupation is "problematic" in the sense that its functional contribution requires more than the application of routine solutions is at least potentially determinable on other than subjective grounds. Assessments of functional importance-how satisfying, problematic, powerful, privileged, and prestigious occupations are-all require objective judgments rather than evaluations. These criteria may not be relevant to questions concerning how powerful. privileged, and prestigious occupations should be, all of which require respondents to evaluate. If a process of translating objective characteristics of occupations into prestige assessments is postulated, it is obj ective characteristics of occupations that result in differential prestige. Ten occupational categories, assessed in a pretest by student judges as functionally important, were presented to 240 undergraduate students at the University of Washington. The occupations are, in alphabetical order, businessman, carpenter, engineer, farmer, lawyer, physician, policeman, scientist, soldier, and teacher. Respondents ranked these occupations in termis of the nine criteria of evaluation identified above. This student sample, on the average, evaluated these occupations as clid NORC respondents; rank order correlation was .96 (Hodge et at., 1966). Variation in the magniThis content downloaded from 207.46.13.193 on Thu, 08 Sep 2016 05:54:42 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms