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This paper focuses on industrialization, development or modernization. The author will start with the division of individual societies into functional sub-systems evolved by various researchers. This is an attempt to categorize aspects of social interaction in terms of the four functional imperatives which, it is postulated, all viable social systems must cater for. In sum, the decade after the end of World War II may be taken as a peak in the prestige-standing of economics. Economists were accorded considerable deference, largely because of the functional emphasis on economic problems in the post-war world; whilst at the same time the strategic status of the economist helped to sustain the narrow economic perspectives of national elites. Some of the most significant early inroads into the domination of economics can be located not so much in existing dissatisfaction with the policy tools of governments as in the academic sphere. The priority of changing emphasis was to a large extent in the hands of academic critics. Notable breaks with the dominance of almost exclusively economic interpretations of the problems of deprived nations occurred during the 1950's.

This paper discusses a problem which lies on the borderline of economics where the economist reaches the limits of his competence and the sociologist or social anthropologist may be interested to take over. In the post-war years, the impact of full employment on managerial policy was particularly marked. British management was confronted with an acute shortage of labour, made worse by what management considered particularly low standards of effort. Many firms found that action was urgently required to deal with the problem of the shortage of labour. Under increasing pressures they tried payment by results as a solution. It appears that in most firms the use of incentive schemes rests on faith in, rather than proof of, the effectiveness of financial incentives, the results expected from payment by results have acquired the status of achieved results in spite of the lack of factual proof of the achievement. Implicit in the belief in the supremacy of the financial motive is the assumption that the worker is always interested in earning more money than he is getting on time-rates. The recurrent wage-claims of the post-war years have helped to strengthen this belief nevertheless in many situations it may be unwarranted.

The article presents data on the social composition of the Royal Economic Society (R.E.S.) in Great Britain from 1890 to 1960 by analyzing a 10 per cent sample of home-based members in selected years throughout the period since the society's foundation in 1890. The R.E.S. membership lists include the names of many subscribers who possess no serious claims to be regarded as professional economists by any normal definition of those terms. Nevertheless, throughout its long life the society's ranks have included the great majority of British professional economists as well as many serious amateur students of the subject and the occupational statistics provide some basis for judging the relative importance of the two categories. The R.E.S. data provided in the paper provides only limited and indirect evidence of this newer type of professionalization, though it is compatible with it. The strongest common link among Fellows of the Society was their subscription to "The Economic Journal," a periodical coverage in 1960 than in the 1890s and although subscribers are not necessarily readers, the subscription lists obviously provide important insights into the journal's audience.

One of the most distinctive occupational groups in modern society is the community of natural scientists. The set of norms characterizing science as a social system, universalism, organized skepticism, disinterestedness, rationality, communism clearly sets it apart from other institutional areas such as economics or politics. The orientation expected of members towards its output or purpose is a reflection of what has been called the ideology of pure science. Unlike other occupational groups where success comes by pleasing administrative superiors and climbing an organizational hierarchy or by doing well economically in the market place, success for the scientist qua scientist comes through various forms of recognition by his peers that he has contributed something useful to the discipline. Furthermore, the contribution is usually a specialized one and whoever lacks the capacity to put on blinders and to come up to the idea that the fate of his soul depends on whether or not he makes a correct conjecture may as well stay away from science. He will never have what one may call the personal experience of science. Scientific careers are pursued in a variety of institutional settings but the preferred one has, of course, been the university and the preferred activity has been to engage in teaching and basic research.

In recent years a certain amount of evidence has been accumulated in the U.S. pointing to the disappearance of the income differential between skilled workers and the lower grades of white collar workers. Given the interrelations between the economic structure and the class structure several sociologists, most notably Kurt B. Mayer, have suggested that this shift in the distribution of income represents the first, but indispensable, step on the road to full-fledged middle class status for a significant group of blue collar workers. This hypothesized process, involving the acceptance of blue collar workers into the existing middle class has been termed embourgeoisement by two British sociologists, David Lockwood and John Goldthorpe, who are also interested in the problem with regard to England. Traditionally, the most permanent and meaningful line of demarcation in the American class structure has been that separating manual from non-manual workers. To suggest that this line is coming to lose its importance and is being replaced by the skilled manual/semi-skilled-manual line is therefore a suggestion of great significance. The implications of such structural change, if it is taking place, are far-reaching for all fields of sociology.

A representative collection of people who profess to study labor problems today would consist of members of almost every social science faculty. There would be economists, historians, philosophers, anthropologists, sociologists, lawyers, political theorists, psychiatrists, psychologists and others. Each would be looking at labor behavior from his specialist point of view; convinced, justifiably, that his view was important, but rarely if ever taking account of the views of others. This state of affairs has evolved because the factors which aroused the interest of academics in labor problems have been many and varied. Early political economists were interested in the wages of labor and in the quantity of labour used in production. Sociologist Adam Smith examined wages as a price but his approach had width as well as depth as befitted a moral philosopher. Political economists who followed paid less attention to wages and more to the quantity of labour in production.