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Routine-biased technological change has emerged as the dominant explanation for the differential earnings growth of occupations at greater risk of automation, such as machine operators or office clerks, relative to less routine occupations. In contrast, this paper finds that the declining earnings returns to an occupation's routine task intensity (RTI) can largely be attributed to the decline of organized labor. Using individual-level data on 3.3 million employed adults across the United States from 1983 to 2017, this paper finds that organized labor has two countervailing effects on occupations at greater risk of automation. First, higher union coverage within a state and industry inhibits the decline in earnings returns to an occupation's RTI. Second, higher union coverage hastens the decline in employment shares of occupations with higher RTI. The result is that occupations at greater risk of automation experience more favorable earnings growth where unions are more resilient, but at the cost of accelerated declines in their employment shares. Counterfactual analyses demonstrate that if union coverage in the United States had remained stable at 1983 levels, the earnings returns to an occupation's RTI might not have declined from 1983 to 2017, and the observed pattern of occupational earnings polarization in the 1990s might not have occurred. However, the mean RTI of occupations might have declined by an additional 21 percent from 1983 to 2017 relative to the observed decline. The findings suggest that the social consequences of automation are conditional on the strength of organized labor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Stratification and inequality are among the most central concepts in sociology, and although related, they are fundamentally distinct: inequality refers to the extent to which resources are distributed unevenly across individuals or between population subgroups, whereas stratification refers to the extent to which population subgroups occupy distinct hierarchical layers within an overall resource distribution. Despite the centrality of stratification in theories of class structure, prior empirical studies have focused exclusively on measures of inequality, which do not accurately capture the degree of class stratification and suffer from a variety of methodological limitations. In this paper, we employ a novel rank-based index of stratification to measure the degree to which occupational classes inhabit distinct, non-overlapping, and hierarchically arranged layers in the distribution of personal market income. The stratification index is nonparametric, both scale and translation invariant, and independent of the level of inequality. Based on this index, our results show that the US income distribution is highly stratified by occupational class and that the degree of class stratification increased substantially from 1980 to 2016. Moreover, we find that this trend is almost entirely due to growing stratification among aggregate occupational classes rather than among the disaggregate occupations nested within them. Finally, a set of counterfactual analyses indicate that the rise of occupational class stratification is driven by increases in the income returns to education, deunionization, and deindustrialization, although the relative importance of these factors varies by gender. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents information regarding engagement of aliens in occupations in the U.S. Throughout the U.S. there is today a consistent attitude among business-men and law-makers alike, that has for its announced purpose the refusal to aliens of the right to engage in certain, and many, occupations. These foreigners are being denied the opportunity to work, despite the fact that they were legally admitted to this country and with the fore-knowledge by the government, in most instances, that they would seek to earn their own living. In May of this year, when the index of employment showed a slight upturn, a very large factory in the Mid-West increased its force by too per cent, but refused to re-employ former workers who were still aliens. In thousands of cases, foreigners are being dismissed because of this "all American" policy. This program has failed however to often produce the compensating factor of employing Americans in the place of these discharged aliens, in altogether too many cases, the alien having been dismissed, none is taken on in his place and as a result there have been found two persons on the breadline in place of the former one.

Utilizing the North-Hatt method, scores for 52 jobs and occupations were calculated from responses of 129 university students in West Pakistan. Where comparisons were possible, these evaluations were examined alongside those reported by U.S. respondents. Ratings of a smaller number of occupations were also compared for Philippine, Pakistan and U.S. samples. The paper proposes that such inquiry can, under certain conditions, provide a useful measure of the relative capacity of an important segment of the population of a developing country to staff and operate a technically advanced, complex, industrial-commercial economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Employing the concepts of "license" and "mandate," this paper explores the implications of lay encroachment upon the presumed autonomy of a professional. A definition of a profession is suggested in terms of the degree to which an aspirant profession tolerates interference on the part of those whom it serves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper criticizes the deskilling hypothesis for temporal change in occupations. Case studies of occupations alleged to support the deskilling hypothesis have typically been insensitive to the internal heterogeneity found within occupations, and to the fact that the boundary between adjacent occupations located on the same functional hierarchy can shift over time. When these factors are explicitly taken into account, it is found that apparently compelling evidence for the thesis of clerical downgrading better supports an alternative explanation, which might be called the process of status redefinition, an aspect of the process of professionalization. The case of clerical workers in the federal government is examined in some detail, Available evidence supports the argument that status redefinition occurred. Status redefinition and des killing are not mutually exclusive explanations for change, though they do conflict in important respects. This paper suggests that case studies of occupations should focus on functional hierarchies, rather than specific occupations, in order to avoid the comparability problems which arise when occupational boundaries change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on relative prestige of twenty professions as judged by three groups of professional students. The paper is descriptive of an experimental study made at the University of Wisconsin during the school year 1934-1935. Objectives of the study were to see whether the method of paired comparisons could be satisfactorily used in measuring the relative prestige of a number of representative professions and to use the method, if shown to be reliable, to study the attitudes of groups of Professional students toward their own future professions as compared with other recognized professions. Under the latter objective it was desired to investigate whether representative samples of students from recognized Professional schools differ significantly in their attitudes toward the relative prestige of their own future professions as compared with nineteen other professions; whether such attitudes in these homogeneous groups are as well defined as researcher L.L. Thurstone found student attitudes to be in heterogeneous groups with reference to nationality preferences and the relative seriousness of various crimes; and whether such a study could provide any objective data on the theories concerning social and occupational distance and on the concept of the social distance margin.

Information on the rural occupational shifts reveals that the shift toward farming has been for the past five years and may continue to be for a number of years to come the most important rural shift, and it is also apparent that this shift is intimately related to rural relief problems. It is pertinent to ask at the outset why there should be a rural relief problem peculiar to this depression and relatively unknown in other depressions. In the past bread lines and soup kitchens were characteristic of cities and rural relief was almost negligible. Although a relatively new phenomenon, rural relief reached distressing proportions at its peak. In March of this year-the high point, there were 2,000000 families on relief and rehabilitation in rural areas. It is the thesis of this paper that this situation, in part, grew out of a back-to-the-land movement and a cessation of the previous movement away from the land. To focus the problem still more clearly the rural relief load was not by any means a farm operator load. There were, in March, 1935, about a million rural non-farm cues, about 300,000 farm laborers and about 700,000 farm operators.

The problem of measuring change has been of continuing interest to sociologists. Changes in the occupational structure, for the most part, have been observed by means of percentage distributions, differences between percentage distributions, comparisons between expected and actual percentage distributions, and percentage change. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the primary advantages and disadvantages of these topics in the study of change and to introduce a new measure, the concept of affinity between occupations and other demographic categories, a measure, which not only overcomes some of the disadvantages of the conventional measures, but also is complementary to them. The measure of affinity can and does provide a simple and yet meaningful measure of changes in social structure over a period of several decades. It measures the extent and direction of changes, and above all, it reflects not only the proportion of workers in the occupational category but also the proportion of persons in the occupational class.

Abstract Promotion within organizations is increasingly recognized as an important mechanism for socioeconomic attainment during the course of individual careers. In addition to the material benefits that promotions convey, they also have symbolic meaning in American society as the principal way that individuals participate in the ideology of success. This paper uses data on production and clerical workers in one manufacturing plant to show that opportunity in work organizations, or the lack of it, explains three categories of promotion attitudes: high expectations and aspirations, low expectations and aspirations, and low expectations and high aspirations. Opportunity is defined as position in the organizational hierarchy and as workers' perceptions of the degree to which the firm's administrative system awards promotions through fair and open competition. The analysis shows that the effects of opportunity variables on promotion attitudes are significant even when age, education, and gender are controlled. This study goes beyond other studies of organizational opportunity structures by showing that both positional and normative opportunity have independent effects on promotion attitudes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract This paper clarifies the relationship between opportunity and mobility: first, by analyzing the ways opportunity differentials are created into three generic possibilities--through positional, historical, and resource variation; and, second, by uncovering certain logical relations that exist between opportunity differentials and differences in the amount of career mobility individuals experience. The first point offers a useful classification for ordering and comparing diverse theoretical approaches to career mobility. The basic conclusion of the second point is that all differences in career mobility between groups of individuals are logically explained by differences in the opportunities to move to which they are exposed and, further, all differences in the career mobility of individuals are due to chance variation within the constraints of the logically true aggregate relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT This paper reports an investigation of the clues which are important in making status evaluations. We take the family as the principal unit in the stratification system and thus the unit which is evaluated. Different types of families are described by their members' occupations, educations, and ages; and by marital status, number of children, and sex. The social standings of 36,000 hypothetical vignette families are evaluated. These evaluations are regressed on household characteristics to determine which clues are important in the attribution of status. We find that occupation is more important than is education, age, or marital status. A number of characteristics are not important in this regard. Finally, we find that each member contributes differentially to the overall evaluation of the family, the relative contribution of each being partially a function of the type of family being evaluated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Observing a plethora of small entrepreneurial activities in the cities of developing countries, this paper examines the social significance of these occupational activities. The data gathered from a Korean city suggest that small entrepreneurship provides occupational niches to marginal migrant workers as well as an alternative to the bureaucratic channel of upward social mobility for a significant proportion of urban residents. These findings are interpreted by using the conception of occupational situs, which promises greater analytical utility in the study of developing societies than the unidimensional conception of occupational structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT This paper reviews evidence concerning intracity trends in occupational status change among adult males from four studies of three cities--Boston, Philadelphia, and Poughkeepsie, New York for the mid-nineteenth century. The quality of the data and problems of cross-study comparability are discussed. Secondary analyses of the data indicate that rates of grossly defined vertical mobility and the transmission of status through adults' careers were stable among the nonmigrant male populations of the three cities for the periods of time in question. Data available for Boston indicate that the level of son's career beginnings had a substantial impact on his subsequent attainments and that the effect of father's occupation was largely interpreted by son's career-entry level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A number of approaches may be used to determine what bearing sociology may have on education for varied professions. This paper is concerned with a brief and partial report of "needs" or "demands" for sociology expressed directly or by implication in some recent professional publications. It will consider the nature of the "demands," the backgrounds from which they arise, the areas of sociology regarded by the professions as relevant to their needs and some of the possibilities of meeting them. For purposes of orientation, it seems desirable to define professions and postulate the major phases or steps in a natural history of professions. Among the many definitions, profession has been defined as predominantly intellectual and varied in character as opposed to routine mental, manual, mechanical or physical work. Persons engaged in the professions enjoy such advantages as choosing and pursuing their own major interests; having the pleasure of creative and rewarding activity; holding public confidence and prestige, doing relatively light work under pleasant and healthful surroundings; having leisure; and being more secure throughout life than other classes.

Sociologists have given a little attention to those occupations which have attempted to become professions, but to some greater or lesser degree have failed. The present paper, employing a Hughesian approach to occupations and work, analyzes pharmacy as an occupation which has taken on some, but not all, of the characteristics commonly ascribed to the professions. Consideration is directed to the factors of recruitment, symbolic social objects, and the achievement of mandate within pharmacy. It is concluded that pharmacy has achieved a state of incomplete professionalization and the similar ties to other occupations such as librarianship, optometry, and chlropractory are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on (1) value orientations associated with status and situs dimensions of occupational choice, (2) sociocultural correlates of occupational values, and (3) empirical interrelationships among these value orientations. Twelve value variables are specified in the research design. Data for the study were obtained from seniors in eight Kentucky rural high schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although we live in an era of rapid industrial change, little is understood of the phenomenology of change in job content. This paper reports a study in which attitudes toward work-related change were found to vary with social class background, social class identification, and position in the status structure of the work organization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ample evidence from a variety of sources demonstrates that the African American in the United States is disadvantaged in occupation and employment. Further evidence indicates that the differential in educational qualification is insufficient to account for the African American-white differential in job position. With some special exceptions, the African American who attains any given level of education is unable to convert his training into as high an occupational position as would a white person. This paper tests two opposing hypotheses, both of which are logically defensible. On the one hand it may be supposed that in those populations with a relative shortage of a certain type of job qualification, the presence (or degree) of that qualification will count more heavily than where it is plentiful. On the other hand it may be contended that the limited range of occupations open to the African Americans and general characteristics of the minority position render such qualifications as educational attainment less relevant to occupational placement than they would be for whites.

Using a set of user-generated data, we examine patterns in the careers of professional chefs. We argue that this is one of many cases in which careers must be understood as shaped by dual structures—the typical occupational structure within a firm, and the organization of firms in a larger field. We then demonstrate how career trajectories may be formalized as movement through a two-dimensional space defined by status in these structures. Building on previous ethnographic work finding that chefs understand the logic of their careers as involving repeated trade-offs between their occupational status (their rank within the kitchen) and organizational status (the status of the restaurant at which they work), we attempt to determine how different trajectories are associated with different outcomes. We find that, despite the somewhat random nature of entrance into the culinary profession, future top-tier chefs disproportionately begin their careers at high-status restaurants. Beyond their auspicious beginnings, these top-chefs-to-be also commonly devote their early careers to maximizing organizational status, forgoing promotions to higher kitchen ranks in favor of low-level jobs at more prestigious restaurants. By comparison, chefs destined to run lower-status restaurants tend to spend their early careers prioritizing rapid advancement within the kitchen, only pursuing jobs at more prestigious restaurants much later in their careers, with limited success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Proponents of the devaluation hypothesis claim that occupations experiencing a significant inflow of female workers are devalued, both in status and in pay. We suggest that devaluation is an essentially cultural phenomenon that can be subject to change over time and that is not constant with varying contexts. Our theoretical model connects changing gender compositions in occupations with the formation of occupational gender stereotypes. In combination with a cultural bias that attributes less value to female work, these stereotypes can lead to devaluation. This is a novel view on the mechanics at play in the devaluation process. With US census data from 1960 to 2010, we show that devaluation was restricted to sometimes very specific contexts. A trend toward declining or disappearing devaluation is observed over the entire time span. Given potential cultural inertia and the stability of stereotypes, this result could, however, be an artifact of a deficient testing strategy that focuses solely on changes in occupational gender compositions without taking into account the normative power of the past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research on birth order has consistently shown that later-borns have lower educational attainment than first-borns; however, it is not known whether there are birth order patterns in college major. Given evidence that parents disproportionately invest in first-born children, there are likely to be birth order patterns attributable to differences in both opportunities and preferences, related to ability, human capital specialization through parent-child transfers of knowledge, and personality. Birth order patterns in college major specialization may shed light on these explanatory mechanisms and may also account for long-term birth order differences in educational and labour market outcomes. Using Swedish population register data and sibling fixed effects, we find large birth order differences in university applications. First-borns are more likely to apply to, and graduate from, medicine and engineering programs at university, while later-borns are more likely to study journalism and business programs, and to attend art school. We also find that these birth order patterns are stronger in high-socioeconomic status families and that differences in college major explain approximately half of the within-family birth order differences in long-term earnings. These results indicate that early life experiences and parental investment shape sibling differences in ability, preferences, and ambitions even within the shared environment of the family. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Women's entry into formerly male-dominated occupations has increased in recent decades, yet a significant outflow remains. This study examines the determinants of women's exits from male-dominated occupations, focusing on the effect of previous occupational trajectories. In particular, it hypothesizes that occupational trajectories in female-dominated occupations are often imbued with meanings and beliefs about the (in)appropriateness of the worker, which adversely affect women's integration and chances when they enter the male sector. Using the NLSY79 data set, the study analyzes the job histories of women employed in the United States between 1979 and 2006. The results reveal a disproportionate risk of exit among newcomers from female-dominated occupations. Also, women who reenter the male field are more likely to leave it again. Altogether, the findings challenge explanations based on deficiencies in the information available to women at the moment of hiring. The evidence points to the existence of a “scar effect” of previous work in the female field, which hinders women's opportunities in the male sector and ends up increasing the likelihood of exit. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

To evaluate a stutter-step model of academic performance in high school, this article adopts a unique measure of the beliefs of 12,591 high school sophomores from the Education Longitudinal Study, 2002-2006. Verbatim responses to questions on occupational plans are coded to capture specific job titles, the listing of multiple jobs, and the listing of multiple jobs with divergent characteristics. The educational requirements of detailed jobs, as specified in the Department of Labor's Occupational Information Network database, are then matched to all jobs that students list within their plans. Students with uncertain beliefs about their occupational futures are then shown to have lower levels of commitment to and performance in school. These results support the conjecture that uncertainty about the future has consequences for the short-run behavior that determines important educational outcomes, beyond the effects that are commonly attributed to existing models of performance. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

What happens to high school youths when they take on jobs during the school year, sometimes working long hours, while trying to maintain the role of student? There is a consensus in the empirical literature that teenage employment, particularly what is termed "intensive" employment, results in a constellation of detrimental consequences: lower school grades, diminished educational ambitions, and emotional alienation from parents. There is even more consensus that work and intensive work puts youths at great risk of committing delinquent acts and other problem behaviors such as smoking cigarettes, drinking alcohol, and using marijuana and other drugs. In our view, the conclusion that either work or intensive work has a harmful net effect on youths is based on a thin empirical base. The problem is that previous empirical work has not adequately addressed the issue of possible selection effects. In this article, we reexamine the relationship between intensive employment and delinquency and problem behaviors using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY). We conduct two general types of analysis. First, we conduct what we term a traditional analysis wherein we employ observed covariates to capture the selection process. Here we find the same positive relationship between intensive employment and antisocial behavior that others before us have. Second, we conduct both a random and a fixed-effect analysis where we adjust for both observed and unobserved sources of population heterogeneity. In this second analysis, we find that the positive association between work and antisocial behavior observed in the traditional analysis disappears. We discuss the implications of these results both for analyses of the relationship between work and crime in general and for criminological theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines whether ethnic concentration in establishments, occupations, and industries influences the authority attainment of white, black, Hispanic, and Asian men and women. Data from the Multi-City Survey of Urban Inequality and the 1990 decennial census indicate that "horizontal" concentration among roughly equivalent coworkers and within local industrial and occupational sectors has little effect on minority chances of accessing positions of authority. However, "vertical" concentration in the form of racial/ethnic matching of supervisors to subordinate work groups exerts a strong and consistent effect among all groups, implying that authority attainment depends a great deal on the opportunity to supervise largely coethnic work groups. We conceptualize this "ethnic matching" of supervisors to subordinates as a kind of "sticky floor" that binds individual opportunity for workplace authority to the structural opportunity to exercise control over members of one's own race and ethnicity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through a case analysis of how medicine's intra-occupational division of labor responded to the development of gastrointestmal endoscopy this article sheds light on how occupational divisions of labor respond to technological innovation. The article proposes that innovations are introduced into such structural in ways consistent with the cultural scripts that regulate relations and work flows between intra -occupational is functional segments. However, these scripts may not be able to regulate effectively subsequent developments, and structural divisions may produce intro-occupational conflict and struggle over market turf: A "Trojan horse" metaphor is used to illustrate this process. The analysis developed here poses questions about the current tendency to extol the virtues of occupational divisions of labor, for such structures may lack effective mechanisms for regulating the unintended outcomes of technological change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What accounts for changes in the social composition of occupations over time? We address this question by adapting an ecological theory of cornpetitions from McPherson (1983). This theory suggests that occupations compete for members in a niche space defined by the social composition of an occupations members. As one occupation successfully acquires and retains new people with different sociodemographic characteristics, other occupations experience shifts in their sociodemographic composition. Using the Current Population Survey Annual Demographic Files (1972-82), we test dynamic hypotheses about changes in the age and education composition of occupations. The data strongly support the theory. We then ask whether the same dynamics apply to the professions and occupations. The data suggest that professional closure limits the movement of professions in the education dimension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we examine women's labor force experience during the early life course in order to assess the conditions conducive to the establishment of stable labor force careers. To represent the complexity of women's work trajectories during young adulthood, we develop a conceptual framework that depicts a broad range of work activity profiles Empirical results obtained using the NLSY show that three aspects of early experience influence mature women labor force attachment, namely the amount of experience accumulated; the timing of work experience; and the volatility of that experience. Above and beyond these experience measures, we also find that background factors influence result women's attachment to the market. The conclusion discusses the policy implications of these results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using data on lawyers in Chicago, we test competing hypotheses derived from three broad theoretical models of gender differences in professional careers: assimilation, choice, and constraint. Men and women begin their careers in different practice contexts and the differences grow over time. The magnitude of these persistent differences argues against an assimilationist view. Some of the divergence in career paths appears attributable to individual chokes and preferences, but these do not fully account for the observed gender differences. Human-capital endowments are significant predictors of career positions but also fail to explain the observed gender differences. Women's over representation in less prestigious and less remunerative settings and their under representation in law-firm partnerships suggest that constraints continue to affect women's professional career opportunities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A state-level index of the conditions that Herrnstein and Murray suggest tightened the relationship between IQ and status in the past century as well as a measure of "credentialing by examination" are used to try to explain interstate variation in the association between IQ and status attainment circa 1990. The results contradict Herrnstein and Murray's interpretation and provide support for an alternative credentialing argument The more a state uses written, IQ-like examinations as screening devices for occupational access, the stronger the relationship between IQ and income. Thus; rather than higher IQ leading to status attainment because it indicates skills needed in a modern society, IQ may reflect the same test-taking abilities used in artificial screening devices by which status groups protect their domains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent scholarship suggests that a new form of low-quality, contingent self-employment is taking hold in postindustrial economies. Using longitudinal data on men from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and the German Socio-Economic Panel, I find that on average men in Germany and the US. do not fare poorly in self-employment, and in both countries a substantial number of new self-employment jobs offer prospects for earnings and stability that rival the wage-and-salary sector. However, there is far more variability in the U.S. with a higher proportion of self-employment jobs ranking among the best and the worst new jobs in the labor market New entrepreneurs benefited more in the U.S. than in Germany from exploiting the demand for skilled postindustrial services in the self-employment market At the same time, loosely structured labor markets and weaker worker protections contributed to a larger proportion of low-paying and unstable self-employment jobs in the U.S. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on the literature on the links between economic resources and the transition to marriage, this study examines the role of economic well-being in the formation of marital and cohabitational unions. I use event history models with data from a large longitudinal data set of young adults. In general, economic well-being has a weaker association with cohabitation than with marriage, but this differs by sex. Further, results suggest that both men and women who are economically unstable are likely to cohabit. The findings suggest that cohabitation may provide an attractive alternative for those who are in romantic relationships but lack the economic well-being required for marriage or lack the occupational stability that would make them attractive candidates for the long-term contract that marriage implies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study conceptualizes artists' careers as transitions through positions within a constantly shifting web of relationships that are without a priori hierarchical demarcations. Network analysis of this shifting web from 1981 to 1992 produces three distinct career paths with differential outcomes in terms of the amount of critical notice received by each artist Those who have had a long history of membership in loosely knit networks receive more critical attention than either artists who have had a long history of membership in tightly knit cliques or those with a history of sporadic connections to the art world. The career ladder is not so much a ladder as it is a sandpile, in which each actor's attempts to reach the top change the shape of the climb. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyzes whether the cognitive skills possessed by an individual affect access to more cognitively demanding occupations and hence to the associated higher earnings and to what extent do differences between African Americans, U.S.-born Mexican Americans, and European Americans (Whites) in average cognitive skills account for the lower-skilled jobs and lower earnings of African Americans and Mexican Americans. Occupations differ in earnings due, in part, to unequal demands for skill. Individuals bring skills to the job that are acquired through previous occupational experience, formal schooling and training, as well as informal experiences with family and peers. Empirical research into the relationship between skills and earnings must address not only the individual skill levels, skill levels demanded. by different jobs, and the rewards for different skill levels, but also how ascriptive traits and other traits not related to job skills affect the relationship. The article concludes that to understand or alter racial or ethnic inequalities in earnings, scholars and policy-makers must attend to social sources of group differences in cognitive skills, such as school, family, and neighborhood experiences.

This study reports on long-range consequences of student political activism. Three groups were selected: (1) former civil rights activists, (2) student government members, and (3) apolitical undergraduates. It was hypothesized that variation in political activism would be linked with differing occupations and political orientations. Former civil rights activists are heavily concentrated in the knowledge and human service occupations and are politically radical to liberal in their attitudes and behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explains paternal status and the economic adjustment of high school graduates. In 1935, an analysis of follow-up records on the graduates of Boston High Schools was begun. The purpose of the inquiry was to study relationships between selected background factors and the graduates' economic status during the first year after graduation. Approximately 25,000 students were studied, although data concerning their fathers' status were incomplete for a considerable number of these. Paternal status was measured purely in occupational terms. All except proprietors were scored in terms of seven criteria; and given a "grade" of from one to five on each relevant criterion. From this operation there was derived a four-class occupational hierarchy, class one being the highest and class four the lowest. Proprietors were kept separate from this hierarchical arrangement. These results are unquestionably consistent with the great body of research demonstrating the tendency toward inheritance of social position, in spite of the fact that we have not measured the social status of the youths' occupations.

Agriculture is an important factor in the economic life of the U.S. It affects directly the 30 million farm population and indirectly all the other 100 million because they eat, wear, process, buy and sell the farm products. In war years the people of the nation, and indeed of the world, look anxiously and hopefully at American agriculture. One of the greatest resources of any industry is its labor force, the people who know the jobs. This is doubly important in agriculture, despite the almost universal illusion that anybody can farm. In agriculture there is not the specialization, of the factory operative, or even the professional man or mechanic. There is instead the constant change in work that follows the cycle of the seasons and is multiplied by the number of crops produced, a procession of jobs each demanding its know-how. Agriculture in the U.S. has a labor force that varies seasonally from some 8 to 12 million. This agricultural labor resource is scattered over every state and indeed over almost every county of the nation, though it is by no means evenly distributed.

The United States Bureau of the Census has recently published some very interesting figures showing the number of births to mothers according to the occupations of the fathers. If these data were the average number of children ever born to all the wives of the men engaged in a particular occupation, they would be a most significant contribution to differential fertility according to social classes. But they are not. They show only the average number of children ever born to that selected group of wives who reported themselves as having a child born in the year 1925. This article measures the relationship between the average number of children ever born and the percentage of wives reporting themselves as mothers. The procedure followed was to estimate on the basis of 1910 and 1920, the number of males, 15 to 24 and 25 to 44 years of age in each of the great occupation classes for the registration states in 1915. These figures multiplied by the percentages married in the same age groups in 1890 gave the estimated number of married men for the year 1915. Corollaries of the study are that age appears not to be a barrier to the spread of birth control within the limits of the child bearing period, and that apparently classes with the greatest use of birth control concentrate their child bearing within the age period 20-29 years, and more particularly in the age period 25-29 years.

The method employed to obtain the information for the analysis of occupational attitude of college students was an adaptation of that used by professor George S. Counts in a somewhat similar study reported in The School Review of January 1925. As the basis of this analysis, twenty-four occupations were selected. Students were instructed to rank these occupations in order from one to twenty-four upon the basis of their own opinion as to how they should rate socially. It was explained that their rating should be based upon their idea of the contribution the occupation made to social well-being. Results therefore show attitudes this group of students hold with regard to the various vocations, based upon their estimate of the contribution made to society. No time limit was set in which the ranking had to be done. All the time necessary was allowed. The business and science students rank the banker second, whereas the other groups place him fourth. The fact, however, that each of these groups place three professions namely, clergyman, physician and professor ahead of their own vocations, indicated the prevalence of the traditional attitude favoring the so-called professions, with the exception of law, which is ranked nine, nine, nine, six respectively or seventh by the whole group.

The story of man's occupation of the earth seems to be divided into two rather sharply marked periods the ancient and the modem world. It is not altogether a distinction of time; somewhat it is of space. For more than half of mankind is living in the ancient world today for all practical purposes. People of Europe and the Western Hemisphere and of certain islands of the Western seas are proud of our modernity. Perhaps the pride is based too heavily upon the modern machinery that people use so universally. The difference between the ancient world and the modern world, wherever those worlds may exist in time or space, is the difference of ideals upon which the two worlds are founded. The ancient world seems to have risen upon the theory that physical force is man's final arbiter, The modern world seems to be growing upon the faith that ideas rule that things of the spirit are unconquerable when they promote broader fellowships, more abundant living, more kindly pace in the works and ways of men.

Studies of adolescent career orientations provide consistent support for the propositions that educational expectations vary positively with the level of parental occupation and education, the frequency of parental educational encouragement, and negatively with family size. Since each of these four variables is intercorrelated it is possible that one or more of the zero-4 order associations may be totally or partially artifactual in nature. The use of Rosenberg's test factor standardization technique to generate third-order partials on survey data collected from 2,852 urban high school sophomore males indicates that this is not the case. From the analysis a provisional causal model is constructed. The roles of parental encouragement and of family size in the model receive particular attention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Self-recruitment to dentistry provides an excellent case of the purposive or negotiated nature of occupational choice, especially of the skilled and professional occupations. Choices were made as compromises between reward preferences and expectancies of access to specific occupations; both of these career perspectives were developed with reference to familial occupational history, especially the occupational status of the father. Evidence is presented which indicates that dentistry was chosen because it combined high rewards with a reasonable degree of access; i.e., a minimax strategy was employed. Medicine, although possessing greater rewards, was rejected because of difficult access; while law, university teaching and accountancy, etc., were rejected because of perceived lower rewards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This report examines the place of Spanish-name personnel in the occupational structure of ten hospitals in four southwestern communities. The report finds that a small number of the Spanish-name population are in high status occupations, a considerable number are in medium status occupations, and as expected the largest number are in low status occupations. Using the employment of these persons in medium and high status occupations as some measure of assimilation, the authors conclude that the predictions of some social scientists, Warner and Srole in particular, concerning the rate of assimilation of this population are too pessimistic. Warner and Srole's prediction failed to take into account such factors as the consequences of World War II, urbanism, population ratios, the influence of the border area, and the potential for mobility provided by religiously-affiliated organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interviews with 380 workers in two cities show that workers who received advice from numerous sources, whose main advisers were outside their families, and who had positive orientations to work were relatively likely to obtain high-status first jobs. These relationships were to some extent independent of each other and of workers' class backgrounds, and for the most part they also applied to the workers' choice of their most recent jobs. However, workers' advice-seeking and values when they chose their first jobs were not related to their later job histories. The findings are examined in the light of alternative theories of occupational choice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The differential characteristics of streams of migration are regarded as consequences of social and cultural constraints upon the head of a household. These constraints are expressed in terms of occupation of head of household, Environmental and structural factors will be mediated by the degree of future orientation and the degree of local orientation characterizing various occupations. Deductions for several characteristics of streams are made and supporting data are included. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the problem of unemployment. Slavery was obviously a system by which the masses were regimented; and so was feudalism. But due to the "hypnotism of the present reality" people fail to see the stark coercion in the present system. Th