Class and Hierarchy: The Social Meaning of Occupations

229 Pages·1979·19.536 MB·English

by  Anthony P. M. Coxon, Charles L. Jones (auth.)

CLASS AND HIERARCHY: THE SOCIAL MEANING OF OCCUPATIONS
EDINBURGH STUDIES IN SOCIOLOGY
General Editors: TOM BURNS, TOM McGLEW, GIANFRANCO POGGI
The Edinburgh Studies in Sociology series publishes sociological works from
the Department of Sociology at the University of Edinburgh. The majority
of the books in the series will be founded on original research or on research
and scholarship pursued over a period of time. There will also be collections
of research papers on particular topics of social interest and textbooks
deriving from courses taught in the Department.
Many of the books will appeal to a non-specialist audience as well as to the
academic reader.
Titles already published
Tom Burns: THE BBC: PUBLIC INSTITUTION AND PRIVATE WORLD
Anthony P.M. Coxon and Charles L. Jones: THE IMAGES OF OCCUPATIONA
PRESTIGE
John Orr: TRAGIC REALISM AND MODERN SOCIETY: STUDIES IN THE
SOCIOLOGY OF THE MODERN NOVEL
Forthcoming titles
Frank Bechhofer and Brian Elliott: THE SMALL SHOPKEEPER IN THE
CLASS STRUCTURE
Frank Bechhofer and Brian Elliott (editors): THE PETITE BOURGEOISIE:
COMPARATIVE STUDIES OF THE UNEASY STRATUM
Anthony P.M. Coxon and Charles L. Jones: MEASUREMENT AND
MEANINGS: TECHNIQUES AND METHODS OF STUDYING
OCCUPATIONAL COGNITION
Brian Elliott and David McCrone: PROPERTY AND POWER IN A CITY
John Orr: TRAGIC DRAMA AND MODERN SOCIETY
CLASS AND HIERARCHY:
THE SOCIAL MEANING OF
OCCUPATIONS
Anthony P.M. Coxon
and
Charles L. Jones
©Anthony P.M. Coxon and Charles L. Jones 1979
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1979 978-0-333-21796-2
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
· without permission
First published 1979 by
THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD
London and Basingstoke
Associated companies in Delhi
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Typeset by
CAMBRIAN TYPESETTERS
British library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Coxon, Anthony Peter Macmillan
Class and hierarchy - (Edinburgh studies in
sociology)
1. Occupations 2. Social classes
I. Title II. Jones, Charles L. III. Series
301.44'4 HT675
ISBN 978-1-349-16061-7 ISBN 978-1-349-16059-4 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-16059-4
This book is sold subject
to the standard conditions
of the Net Book Agreement
Contents
List of Figures vii
List of Tables ix
Preface xi
The Social Meaning of Occupations 1
1.1 Social semantics 2
1.2 Meaning and semantic structure 4
1.3 The exploration of occupational meaning 7
1.4 Subjects and objects 9
1.5 Organisation of the book 11
2 Occupational Categorisation: Groups and Classes 13
2.1 Methods 14
2.2 Structural characteristics of individual sortings 18
2.3 Comparing the composition of occupational categories 25
2.4 Collective representation of occupational groupings 36
2.5 Interpretation of the aggregate occupational groupings 39
2.6 Summary 53
3 Hierarchies of Occupations 56
3.1 Methods 58
3.2 Strategies in forming hierarchies 62
3.3 Similarities between hierarchies 65
3.4 Aggregated hierarchy of occupations 71
3.5 Interpretation of the aggregate hierarchy 74
3.6 Summary 89
4 Language and Class in Occupational Judgement 93
4.1 Methods 93
4.2 Contrasting texts: occupations, coal and religion 102
4.3 Level, generality and content 106
4.4 Class language ? . . . 110
4.5 ... And language of class 119
4.6 Summary 127
5 Belief Systems about Occupations 130
Introduction 130
vi Contents
5.1 Occupational descriptions and the contrast relation 136
5.2 Differences in occupational beliefs 152
5.3 Implicative relations and social class 161
5.4 Summary and conclusions 181
6 Subjective Aspects of Occupational Structure 184
Notes 193
List of Computer Program Abbreviations 198
List of Technical Appendixes 200
References 202
Name Index 211
Subject Index 215
List of Figures
Chapter 2
2.1 Characteristics of sortings 19
2.2 Height of a partition 21
2.3 Height ('lumpiness') of partitions of a set of 6 elements 23
2.4 Distance between two sortings 28
2.5 Pairwise distance distributions 34
2.6 2-D Scaling of pairbonds distances between sortings of
occupational titles 36
2. 7 Hierarchical clustering: occupational titles 38
2.8 MDS analysis of sorting data 43
2.9 Hierarchical clustering: descriptions 44
2.10 Descriptions and titles: MDS analysis 52
Chapter 3
3.1 Hierarchical tree with organising features 57
3.2 Representations of a hierarchy 61
3.3 Two subjects' hierarchies 63
3.4 Distance between two hierarchies (trees) 67
3.5 Contrasting hierarchies 69
3.6 Scaling of distances between subjects' hierarchies 70
3. 7 HCS of aggregated hierarchies 73
3.8 Branch One themes 81
3.9 Interpreted aggregate hierarchy 87
Chapter4
4.1 Log frequency of first 100 words (HA corpus) 97
4.2 Class in hierarchies 125
4.3 Class assignment of occupations 128
Chapter 5
5.1 Quillians representation of the meaning of FOOD 134
5.2 PARAMAP representation of cognitive map for 20 occupations 143
5.3 INDSCAL representation of cognitive map for 20 occupations 153
5.4 INDSCAL representation of 15 sentence frames (group space) 156
5.5 Seven extreme subjects in INDSCAL subject space 158
5.6 Belief system ofS013 170
5. 7 Belief system of S220 173
5.8 Belief system ofY006 174
5.9 Belief system ofS166 176
viii List of Figures
5.10 Belief system of Y349 176
5.11 Belief system of S180 177
5.12 Belief system ofY139 178
5.13 Belief system of Y116 178
5.14 An averaged belief system with 29 elements 180
List of Tables
Chapter 2
2.1 Occupational titles used in free-sorting task IS
2.2 Occupational predicate descriptions used in free-sorting task 16
2.3 Example of strong agreement in sorting 30
2.4 Moderate agreement in sorting 30
2.5 Slight agreement in sorting 32
2.6 Intersection table: diameter and connectedness HCS at level34
(descriptions) 46
2.7 Occupational groups: a comparison of components 51
Chapter4
4.1 Distinguishing tags of the three texts 103
4.2 Tags that distinguish the three stages of hierarchy construction 107
4.3 Trend patterns in tags across stages 109
4.4 Bernstein's grammatical indicators of coding by 'class':
Occupational (HACONS) data 113
4.5 Indicators of coding, by occupational group 115
4.6 Contexts of 'I' usage 117
4.7 Differences in Thinking and Stylistic categories 118
4.8 Contexts of class terminology 122
Chapter5
5.1 Ust of 20 occupational titles used in a pilot investigation of
sentence frames with students 139
5.2 Percentages of respondents considering sentence frames
'always' appropriate for occupational titles (50 frames and
20 titles) 141
5.3 Ust of 15 sentence frames used in the main investigation with
adult men 145
5.4 Ust of 25 occupational titles used in the main investigation
with sentence frame data 146
5.5 Expository tabulation of two sentence frames over 25
occupational titles 149
5.6 Pearson correlation coefficients between characteristics of
52 adult male respondents 160
5.7 Expository tabulation showing subsumption in the data of
case S013 165
5.8 Expository tabulation showing positive contrast in case S013 166
5.9 Expository tabulation showing negative contrast in case S013 167
5.10 Tabular presentation of the belief system of S013 168