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Socioeconomic Status and Structural Change
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 January 2016
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A prominent feature of much of the “new” social history of the past decade is the use of various representations to convey socioeconomic status. Most of these studies have been concerned with aspects of horizontal and vertical mobility, but they include urban and community studies and miscellaneous topics as well. Using scales developed by sociologists in the twentieth century that were initially created to judge a family’s suitability for adoption or to assist the United States Public Health Service in analyses of vital statistics raises interesting problems vis-à-vis current historical applications. One of these problems involves a familiarity with huge theoretical and empirical literature on status of the last half-century. Starting from Counts’ scale in 1925, a sociologist inventorying the literature in 1953 counted some 333 publications on the topic to that year.
With these problems in mind, two objectives are proposed in this article. First, the use of socioeconomic status evaluations will be discussed from an historian’s perspective. This will be done under three general headings: context, ascription, and measurement. Second, having established the necessary critical background, the utility of using socioeconomic status evaluation to characterize and evaluate multidecade and aggregate developments in socioeconomic structures will be proposed.
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22 See Reiss, Occupations and Social Status, 118, 148-50, and Lenski, “Status Crystallization: A Non-vertical Dimension of Social Status,” 407. In criticism see Benoit-Smullyan, Emile, “Status, Status Types, and Status Interrelations,” American Sociological Review, 9 (April 1944), 161CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Watson, W. B. and Barth, E. A., “Questionable Assumptions in the Theory of Social Stratification,” Pacific Sociological Review, 7 (1964), 10–16CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Acker, Joan, “Women and Social Stratification: A Case of Intellectual Sexism,” American Journal of Sociology, 78 (1973), 936–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Studies that include females or female heads of household are very rare. See Miller’s, Roberta Balstad criticism of this custom in “The Historical Study of Social Mobility: A New Perspective,” Historical Methods Newsletter, 8 (June 1975), 96–97Google Scholar.
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24 For 1970, the “occupation not reported” figure for employed persons 16 and over are as follows:
| men | 2,845,222 or 5.9 percent of 48,138,665 |
| women | 1,975,153 or 6.8 percent of 29,170,127 |
From: United States Bureau of the Census, Census of Population: 1970 GeneralSocial and Economic Characteristics, Final Report PC (1)-C1 United States Summary, (Washington, D. C., 1972), 1–375Google Scholar, Table 81.
25 Bernard Barber, Social Stratification, 110-11; Reiss, Occupations and Social Status, chap. 6; Joan Acker, “Women and Social Stratification: A Case of Intellectual Sexism,” 936-45. Even with highly visable occupations, non-recognition is substantial, see Hodges, Social Stratification, 94. For a catalogue of the difficulties of the empirically derived NORC scale see Reiss, Occupations and Social Status, 70-80.
26 Reiss, Occupations and Social Status, chap. 6.
27 Lipset, Seymour Martin and Bendix, Reinhard, Social Mobility in Industrial Society, (Berkeley, 1967), Chaps. 5–6Google Scholar; Davidson, Percey F. and Anderson, H. Dewey, Occupational Mobility in an American Community (Stanford, 1937), 179Google Scholar.
28 Sources: United States Bureau of the Census, Census of Population: 1970, Subject Reports, Final Report PC(2)-8A, Sources and Structure of Family Income (Washington, D. C., 1973)Google Scholar, Table 1, 1, and United States Bureau of the Census, Census of Population: 1970, Subject Reports, Final Report PC(2)-4C, Marital Status (Washington, D. C., 1972)Google Scholar, Table 7, 181-84.
29 Reiss, Occupations and Social Status, 118. In a number of ways the NORC and Duncan-NORC scales are explicitedly male-oriented. Women’s occupations were eliminated from the original list of occupations rated in the effort to reduce the number of survey categories (Reiss, 5, 66). Duncan admits that the semantic connections of certain occupations (like mailman) would complicate the ascription of the status rankings to women (Reiss, 118). Also, male income and educational figures were used throughout the interpolation from the NORC scores to Census Detailed Occupational Categories (Reiss, chaps. 6, 7). Finally, the Duncans hypothesize that the failure of the NORC scale to differentiate by sex in sales occupations where men dominate the upper positions (in advertising, insurance, and real estate) and women in the lower positions (in retail sales clerks) probably caused the elevation of the whole sales group over the higher paying craftsmen-foremen group (Duncan, Otis Dudley and Duncan, Beverly, “Residential Distribution and Occupational Stratification,” in Hatt, Paul and Reiss’, Albert Cities and Society, 283–96Google Scholar.
30 For incongruities in ascription see Watson and Barth, “Questionable Assumptions on the Theory of Social Stratification,” 13-14; for the influence of the working wife on family income see Sweet, James A., Women in the Labor Force (New York 1973)Google Scholar, chap. 6.
31 Reiss, Occupations and Social Status, chap. 8: Peter Blau and Otis Dudley Duncan, The American Occupational Structure, 119; Duncan, Otis Dudley and Hodge, Robert W., “Education and Occupational Mobility: A Regression Analysis,” American Journal of Sociology 68 (May 1963), 630–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Brown, Morgan C., “The Status of Jobs and Occupations as Evaluated by an Urban Negro Sample,” American Sociological Review, 20 (October 1955), 561–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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36 Warner, Social Class in America, Part 4.
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67 Thernstrom, The Other Bostonians, chap. 9; Thernstrom, Poverty and Progress, chap. 8.
68 See: Norval Glenn, “Negro Prestige Criteria: A Case Study in the Bases of Prestige,” 645; Kahl and Davis, “A Comparison of Socio-Economic Status,” 321-322; Kahl, The American Class Structure,. 75, 86; Hatt, “Occupation and Social Stratification,” 533-534.
69 United States Bureau of the Census, Sixteenth Census of the United States: 1940, Population, Comparative Occupation Statistics of the United States, 1870-1940 (Washington, D. C., 1943), Table XXXII, 203Google Scholar; United States Bureau of the Census, United States Census of Population: 1950, IV, Special Reports, pt. 1, chap. B, Occupation Characteristics (Washington, D. C., 1956), Table 3, 1B-29 — 1B-36; United States Bureau of the Census, Census of Population: 1960, Subject Reports, Occupational Characteristics, Final Report PC(2)-7A (Washington, D. C., 1963), Table 3, 21-30; and United States Bureau of the Census, Census of Population: 1970, Subject Reports, Final Report PC(2)-7A, Occupational Characteristics (Washington, D. C., 1973), Table 39, 593-608. Certain discontinuities must be noted. The 1940 data for the employed excluded workers on public emergency work. “Wholesale and retail dealers” were merged with “other proprietors, managers and officials” in 1940 to form a “proprietors, managers and officials” group. “Semiskilled workers” in 1940 were considered equivalent to “operatives and kindred workers” appearing in later classifications. The 1940 version of “social-economic groups” was maintained only by combining the “private household workers” and “service workers” of later versions into the “servant classes” of 1940. Although the nature of much of service work—with the important exception of “protective service”—has remained much the same, this merging conceals an important change, that the bulk of this work is no longer carried on in private environments and that generally wages and benefits, though low, have increased. Beginning in 1950, clerical workers and sales workers were differentiated; for purposes of continuity, they remain merged in the 1940 “clerks and kindred” category. Last, in 1970 a “transport equipment operatives” group was added; for continuity it was merged with “operatives.”