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This paper argues that the existing sociological literature on the learned professions and on scientific occupations has developed in ways that are now theoretically unproductive. One symptom of this dead-end is the failure of sociologists of the professions to include research on scientists in their discussions and vice versa. A second symptom is the lack of attention to the implications of the work of Jamous, Peloille, and Bourdieu in both the sociology of scientists and of professions. The third symptom of the malaise is the failure to generate sociologically plausible explanations for the marginalisation of female entrants to science and the professions. The paper argues that a novel direction for sociological argument can be derived by remedying the three symptoms simultaneously. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the impact of a new IT system on the knowledge claims and occupational boundaries made by professional groups within a hospital laboratory setting. Within organizational settings professional groups enjoy considerable power and status through the specialised knowledge claims they make, deploying a variety of material and discursive resources to secure these. However, when organizations introduce new technologies to manage information needs, professional boundaries and claims to expertise may be threatened. This paper examines the strategies deployed by two key professional groups -- Medical Laboratory Scientific Officers and medics -- to secure their knowledge claims and statuses within the new organizational context shaped in part by an IT system. Though medics were more successful here, they had to accommodate to new demands within the organization. The professional identity and organizational space of the MLSOs were also redefined but, in contrast, by being narrowed. The different experiences and strategies of the two groups reflect their unequal holding of cultural capital and their differential capacity to define their status relative to the organization itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to illustrate the utility of regarding the census more as a 'narrative source'[10] than as a statistical one. Attention is paid to the character of the classificatory devices employed, not for the ambiguities contained in them and consequent levels of error, but for their substantive character and what they reveal about the contemporary social setting. The paper starts from the assumption that the census is a social product, both arising from and reflecting the social concerns of an era. As such it may be said to mirror the dominant values of the time, among which will be values concerning occupations, their legitimacy, their boundaries and their social worth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is concerned with the ideologies which surround one form of property ownership--the ownership of agricultural land. Least attention will be devoted to the extent to which owning land is to hold an economic power resource--in rural areas, where the range of occupational choice is almost by definition restricted, this may be treated as 'given'.[1] More specifically, this paper will be concerned with data on landed property collected in East Anglia.[2] The central concern will be to illustrate how justificatory theories concerned with the legitimacy and the domain of the distribution of property, once they have entered our stock of knowledge and vocabulary of understanding, retain their essence and are transmitted down the generations and across classes, to reappear as unthinking common-sense 'statements of fact' decontexmalised from the initial situation in which they originated, and to which they were originally addressed. For example, those who have never heard of Hume and never paid heed to the writings of Locke, nevertheless pay such philosophers tribute when unknowingly they. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whether stereotypical perceptions of part-time workers’ commitment to work are accurate is a matter of contention. Commentators such as Hakim (1996 ) suggest that full- and part-time workers have qualitatively different orientations to work, while others ( Fagan 2001 ) argue that, as most women work full- and part-time over the life course, such a view is overly static. This paper investigates firms’ structuring of part-time work, focusing specifically upon the processes through which part-time work becomes marginalized. It is argued here that the organisational context and use of part-time work mediate managers’ and full-time workers’ perceptions of part-time workers’ commitment to work and together, these factors structure part-time workers’ selection for career development. The paper argues for making conceptual distinctions between legislation, organisational policies and workplace practices in understanding patterns of change and, more importantly, continuity in the use and structuring of part-time work. Furthermore it is argued that the stratification of part-time work can be explained through processes of informal occupational closure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is concerned with the ways in which sociologists select the occupational titles which they desire to scale, according to the meanings people give them. Studies of the perception, cognition and evaluation of occupational titles have often taken considerable pains over `the sampling of persons who are requested to judge the set of stimuli under investigation. Sociologists who have tried to investigate the social meanings of occupational titles, have worked with lists of pre-specified titles. Again, there has been a tendency to shorten occupational titles and to make them less specific, in the course of inheriting them from other workers. Most have tried to retain some degree of comparability with the work of their colleagues by deliberately "inheriting" certain of their occupational titles. The choice of occupational titles for a scaling study is severely limited by the number that can be handled by the respondents chosen for the investigation. This in turn is determined by the scaling method used and whether each respondent is to be asked to make all the judgements, which are required by the scaling method, or only a subset of them.

In this paper, I examine differences in political engagement among an elite segment of the British population: GBCS respondents who are college-educated, non-routine workers making over £100,000 a year. I show that even though everyone in this group ought to have more than sufficient skills and resources for political engagement, there are still substantial differences by social position. Specifically, postgraduate degrees and higher incomes still differentiate political engagement, and cultural and social capital (as indicated by cultural activities practised, and the occupations people report knowing) differentiate elite political engagement even more strongly. This indicates that social position qua social position - that is, connection to dominant and legitimated ways of being - contributes to a sense of the 'right to speak' that matters as much as or more than costs and resources for facilitating political involvement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we use the unusually large sample size of the Great British Class Survey to compare rates of social mobility into different elite occupations. We find a distinction between 'traditional' professions, such as law, medicine and finance, which are dominated by the children of higher managers and professionals, and technical or emerging high-status occupations, particularly those related to IT, that appear to recruit more widely. Second, we find that even when the upwardly mobile are successful in entering elite occupations they invariably fail to accumulate the same economic, cultural and social capital as those from privileged backgrounds. While many such differences may be explained by inheritance, we also find that the mobile tend to have considerably lower incomes. Investigating this further we demonstrate that even when controlling for important variables such as schooling, education, location, age, and cultural and social capital, the upwardly mobile in eight occupations - located largely in the business sector - have considerably lower incomes than their higher-origin colleagues. These findings underline the value of analyses of mobility into specific high-status occupations as well as illustrating how, beyond entry, the mobile often face considerable disadvantage within occupations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines technological curricula in terms of their potential to be realized in occupational roles. The more the curriculum is oriented towards roles (as opposed to skills or pure knowledge), the greater the probability that it will be articulated in the labour market and the greater its efficacy and legitimacy.
The concept of role has been analytically divided into six components: value commitment, normative, communicative, interactive, role intelligence and proficiency components.
Theoretically, the more components are present in a given curriculum, the higher the probability that a given occupational role will be effectively articulated. However, their presence is a necessary but insufficient condition for effective role performance; their integration is of equal, if not greater importance, and the latter is meaningful only when the social context of the articulation is taken into account.
It was found that the role components do not appear in a balanced manner in technological curricula investigated in Israel, and some hardly receive any attention. Those that are present are weakly linked to actual economic contexts. Thus, it appears that students in technological education, are socialized to minimal role articulation; ie, they are more likely to implement decontextualized tasks than to assume integral occupational roles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a critique of the tradition of sociological writing which has emphasized the ability of occupations organized on the professional principle to gain for their members an occupational monopoly and a position in the division of labour which provides them with autonomy to determine occupational tasks and functions. It is argued that theories which seek to account for the conditions which provide the framework for successful resistance to rationalization and codification in professional work have not adequately articulated the concept of power. The theoretical discourse on professional and managerial power has therefore tended, with few exceptions, to locate the determination and exercise of power as though it were a zero sum commodity deriving from social relations or organizations. Theories predicting the emergence of professional rather than mangerial forms of control therefore have little explanatory ability other than for a particular mode of rationality within a limiting theoretical framework. This analysis represents an attempt to propose a mediation between structuralist theories of power and organization and those theoretical reflections on the professions which locate the determination of occupational authority in a broader matrix of social processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the most curious omissions in the sociology of work and occupations is what would seem to be one of the most basic questions: When is an occupation an occupation? While there have been recent attempt to explore the issue by examining the history of census categories,[1] these represent the end-point of the process at which new occupations receive official recognition and legitimation. My purpose in this paper is to discuss how occupations form and come to be recognized as such. The creation of health visiting between 1850 and 1919 will be taken as a case study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social inequality has been overwhelmingly studied from the perspective of those who are deprived and disadvantaged. The emphasis, accordingly, has been on lack of wealth, status and power. However, social inequality equally implies privilege and this has received little serious attention. Indeed, in the literature of sociology there are relatively few extended references to it.[1] With few exceptions those that exist tend to treat it unproblematically and often pejoratively. Thus the possessors of privilege are frequently cast as the villains of the piece and, even where the underdog has privileges in the sense of legal rights, these are commonly exposed as illusory or detrimental to his interests.[2] In order to contribute to the understanding of privilege in general, and thereby social inequality, this paper will consider the privileges of the professions.[3] This is because professions are examples of privilege not only in the sense of being privileged occupations, but also in the sense that the elites of professions are an integral part of the dominant elites of society.[4]. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Those people who constitute the subject matter of sociological research are rarely in the position of being able publicly to comment on or criticise the research findings. In a society characterized by divisions based on class, education and occupation, such a reaction is in the main only likely to spring from the academic world itself. People living in a working-class community, or fixing speedometers to dashboards, or leading sporadic attacks on rival supporters on the way to the match do not generally have an opportunity to articulate through published material their feelings regarding what a sociologist has written about them. No Bethnal Greener has published an article entitled, say 'Family and Kinship in East London: Some Comments from a Resident'; no Luton assembly line worker has entered into a polemic with Goldthorpe and Co. via a book on 'Working for Vauxhall'; and no adolescent Oxford United supporter has written a critical review of Marsh's books for New Society.
This situation can, apart from anything else, serve to protect the research from direct criticism. We might speculate that in some instances the research findings would suffer more from a direct attack by one of the observed than by all the sociological critiques combined (though I do not wish to suggest that the examples referred to above are in this category). This paper is an attempt marginally to redress the balance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of redundancy has in the past mainly concentrated on the way in which redundants have fared in the labour market after they have been dismissed.[1] There has also been an overemphasis on male manual workers. Consequently, there is a tendency to abstract individual redundancy from other means of coping with job redundancy, such as natural wastage and early retirements;[5] to stress large-scale redundancies and closures;[6] to neglect the process and management of redundancy; to ignore the repercussions of redundancies within the enterprises making them, and in certain cases, to treat redundancy as inevitable, albeit as a response to crisis situations.
The bulk of this paper reports a case study which is especially interesting in the light of these past failings. It concerns a division of a large multi-national company in which managerial job redundancies were handled largely through an early retirement scheme, and concentrates largely on the reactions of personnel who had not at the time of the research been asked to leave the firm. Prior to presenting this research I shall briefly discuss some of the literature specifically concerned with managerial staff. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the conspicuous trends in the sociology of professions is an increasing stress on relating professions broadly to their social context and, more specifically, to their state connection. This has led to a growing disquiet with the traditional view of a professional continuum, i.e. from 'established' professions to non-professions. Our own originally independent researches into two occupations which have undergone processes of professionalization, namely college of education lecturers and ophthalmic opticians,[1] led us to appreciate the significance of this trend. It became apparent to us that the state could be regarded as the key variable in any contemporary analysis of professions in Britain. Thus the main objective of this paper is to examine more closely the profession-state relationship, using an elaboration and re-definition of the concept of bureaucratic profession. Our contention is that such an analysis will not simply deny several aspects of the traditional view of a professional continuum but will instead suggest a new perspective on typologies of professions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I shall pursue a rather different line of argument in an attempt to establish the theoretical and substantive interest of a sociological analysis of the detective thriller. More particularly, I want to suggest that the work of at least one writer who exerted an important influence on the development of the genre, Dashiell Hammett, can be read as supplying a salutary corrective to current sociological discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The idea of combinations or irregularities of job, occupation and income is represented in a variety of colloquial phrases, such as 'moonlighting', 'jack of all trades', 'holding down two jobs', 'bustling', 'living by my wits', 'self-employed', and so on. The concept of pluralism has been applied to a variety of conditions, but is confusing because it covers many kinds of social patterns, as varied in social consequences as simultaneous versus sequential jobs or occupations. This paper attempts to describe and explain types of occupational pluralism in one highly stable and enduring occupation: barbering. The barber is characterized as an entrepreneur whose role stresses flexibility and adaptive strategies which readily accommodate changes in technology, setting, fashion, social relations and organizational environment. For analytical purposes two main kinds of occupational pluralism may be identified from among many possibilities. The first involves a person who occupies two or more recognized and established occupational statuses. The second type, activity pluralism, is concerned with the worker as entrepreneur.

It is suggested that the entry into employment embodies two major social processes. Firstly school-leavers must be differentiated and placed in their various roles within the occupational system, and secondly they must be induced to accept their new roles as workers in the specific occupations to which they must have been allocated. These processes must take place during the entry into employment in any society with a complex division of labor and in which childhood roles are not precisely articulated with the specific adult destinations of the young. The sociologist's interest in the entry into employment should be focused upon these two processes of occupational role allocation and socialization. The paper sets out to obtain an accurate description of how these processes take place, and to explain why they take place in the manner that they do.

Recent controversy about embourgeoisement seems to have paid scant attention to the possibility that there are also influences within some occupations in the manual work sector liable to increase working class consciousness. To help in the study of such influences, the present article proposes the well-established concept of proletarianisation and applies it to the manual work occupation of cooking. For sociologist Karl Marx, the concept of proletarianisation expressed his that part at least of the "petit bourgeoisie" would sink into the working class. He was thinking particularly of groups on the fringe of the class of owners: tradespeople, small-holding peasants and the like. Proletarianisation was denoted both by structural influences and a growing realization of where class interest really lay, leading to the gradual emergence of working class consciousness. However, the present article wishes to use the concept to refer, not to any movement between the middle and the working class but rather to mark a trend within the working class stratum itself.

In advanced industrial societies, young people spend between ten and fifteen years in educational organisations, isolated from the world of work. With reference to the transition from school to work, this experiential perspective can be very useful. It can help us to understand how, through their interaction with others, certain types of youth who enter middle class occupations come to perceive work as a means of 'self-improvement' and 'self -advancement'. At present this problem is usually resolved by stressing the importance of structural factors or attributes, such as social class, type of school or type of occupation. The frame of reference characteristic of many young people who enter careerless occupations is distinguished by its perceptual immediacy, a central concern with the concrete, the here and now, and the absence of any short or long term planning. For these young people then, their experience of work reinforces the image of themselves transmitted at school: that of young people of limited ability destined for semi-skilled and unskilled jobs.

How did I come to embody and then ultimately reject the idea that periods, and period stains, are inherently dirty? How did I get from scrubbing period stains off my clothes at age 12 to crowdsurfing with a stain at a period demo in front of Parliament nearly 30 years later? Who influenced me and how have I influenced others to reject the idea that menstrual blood stains make us dirty? This article traces my 30-plus-year history of adventures in menstruating and my trajectory from embodying shame to thinking critically about how periods are presented to people of all genders – whether we menstruate or not – and trying to move the discourse through art and comedy, menstruating with pride and encouraging others to join me. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Qualitative research has generated important insights into the intersection of social class, parental values and children's experiences of education and their role in the reproduction of inequalities. There has been less analytic engagement with parents' expectations and aspirations regarding their children's future occupations. Such expectations and aspirations have attracted much research and policy interest. Typically, analyses have been quantitative and focused on outcomes for children. Whilst parental expectations are deemed very influential for children's future occupational outcomes, there is relatively little evidence on the shaping of such expectations, or the ways in which future work and occupations are discussed between parents and children. This article reports on an analysis of parents' ideas about their children's future occupations and the contexts in which these ideas accrue meaning. Drawing on primary data from interviews with parents we explore diversity within, as well as across, social classes. First we explore parents' expectations and aspirations for their children's future occupations. Secondly we consider how parents see their own role in shaping such futures. The evidence highlights the salience of parents' own biographies and class backgrounds in shaping their orientations to, and manner of engagement with, their children's futures. Thirdly we briefly explore how parents' expectations and engagement with their children play out in class differentiated ways as their children approach early adulthood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines a contemporary trend in the sociology of work that is labelled here the ‘end of work’ debate after Jeremy Rifkin's book of the same name. It explores this trend, suggesting that marked similarities exist between a range of authors in Europe and North America who propose that work regimes and the meaning derived from them are changing fundamentally. This literature is then placed in the context of an older canon on decline in work and employment. Using the insights of newer qualitative studies that have emerged over the last decade it is suggested that much of the ‘end of work’ type of writing over-generalises a complex situation, suggesting that sociology needs to incorporate macro theorisation with detailed empirical research if it is to properly understand changes in the contemporary world of work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the professionalization of financial advice in Great Britain. The very success of the professions which established themselves on the classical model of the liberal or free profession by the end of the nineteenth century, epitomized by law and medicine, alter the conditions for least some of their aspiring successors. The substantial autonomy achieved by law and medicine laid down a marker for other occupations, not least because it was based on the claim that their remits concerned areas of life of vital importance, in which the expertise necessary to deliver a service that could protect citizens now existed. As established well funded and substantially autonomous occupations the clergy and academics arguably predate law and medicine. The constant advance of knowledge, scientific and otherwise, and the concomitant ever changing division of labor have given rise to a steady flow of aspirant professions. And, it should be said, the longterm growth of industrial economies, accompanied by social democratic politics and welfarism, has resulted in substantial portions of populations having the incomes and expectations of security which might form the basis for the patronage of additional professions.

The article focuses on the association of membership in "new social movements" (NSM) with employment in the educated service class, particularly in the state sector. The nature of the employment experience is often said to be generative, in some way, of radical activism, even if only, in much modified versions of such theorizing, through the reinforcement provided from the presence of networks of like-minded colleagues. Those commentators who emphasize the instrumental functions of the movements for cultural workers refer to the way in which they help to mobilize resources through pressing both for the strengthening of the state sector and for an increase in the number of professional jobs, as well as through the creation of wider networks among people working in related occupations. On the basis of intensive biographical study of both environmentalist and feminist activists in a large industrial city, it has been argued that though they are indeed located in the occupations referred to in the literature, their membership of NSM cannot in general be attributed either to their experience of employment or of higher education. The propensity to radical activism is clearly established at an earlier date. It emerges from the intersection of socialization within the family and personal life experience.

Occupational redundancy is affecting a wide range of workers including those with careers. This challenges assumptions of the inviolability of professional careers and views of careers as steady progress. Individuals' experience of redundancy shows that careers can be very disadvantageous for those who have invested in and become committed to them. Recent changes in society thus call for a revision of the existing sociological concept of career and its use in the analysis of social institutions and processes. These issues are examined by reviewing sociological references to, and analyses of, the concept and by studying the effects of redundancy on a particular group of professionals. It is argued that redundancy compels an approach which treats seriously the capacity of 'careers' to inflict psychological and social harm and to involve career holders in political struggle. The concept should retain its place in the sociology of occupations, but to realise its analytical potential, it must be firmly related to political conditions and consequences. This may justify following the commonsense rather than the sociological view and restricting its use to high-status occupations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A survey was undertaken of the way in which Careers Officers rank occupations according to their social standing. It was found that there was a high level of agreement about what the social standing of occupations is and also about what it ought to be.
The degree of discrepancy perceived between an actual and an ideal situation was found to be unaffected by sex, number of years service as a Careers Officer, possession of a university degree, intention to vote in a forthcoming general election and newspaper reading habits.
Subgroups who saw the least amount of discrepancy were successful young Careers Officers, older Careers Officers, those without experience of other occupations and those who would vote Conservative in a forthcoming general election.
This research does not support the criticisms now being put forward of existing research within this area.
There have been a large number of studies of occupational prestige undertaken. The tenor of much of this research has been to show the high level of intra-and inter-societal agreement. Indeed Marsh[1] called it 'one of the great empirical invariants in sociology'. Hodge, Treiman and Rossi[2] reviewing case studies from 24 countries concluded that 'ratings from a few respondents, however chosen, duplicate very well those obtained from larger and more representative samples'.
In spite of this consensus there have been doubts expressed by various writers. Gerstl and Cohen[3] in a study of 977 engineers and 1063 members of the general public noted a high degree of agreement about the relative positions of the occupations ranked, but they. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My intention is to being the professions on to centre stage and to examine their development as a distinct and self-conscious social category, within the context of the evolution of the larger society. Central to this process was the formulation and diffusion of a unique ideology based on the concept of service as a moral imperative. This provided doctors, lawyers, clergymen and the members of an ever growing number of other occupations with an article of faith with which to justify their claim to superior social status and special privileges, such as self-discipline. The ideal of service allowed the professions to reconcile the concept of the gentleman with the necessity to work for a living and to formulate a definition of their relationship with clients and with society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deferential traditionalists typically live in local status systems based on interactional, rather than attributional, criteria. Status is distributed not according to a single attribute of an individual--typically his income--but through interaction with the individual in a wide range of social settings. On this analysis one would most certainly expect that agricultural workers in the north-east of Scotland between 1840 and 1914 would have been deferential traditionalists. Among the farm servants, unmarried men were usually lodged in a "chaurner" in the farm steading and received their food, as part in their wages, in the farm kitchen. Married men received a cottage on the farm, rent free, as part of their fee/wages and customarily defined allowances of oatmeal, milk, potato ground and fuel as well as a sum of money. The ratio of unmarried to married male farm servants varied from parish to parish, depending largely on the willingness of landlords to invest considerable sums of money for poor returns in building cottages, but in general unmarried men heavily outnumbered married men.

In this article, authors' wish to argue that the individual's attitude towards his work and the problems he faces in redundancy are structured to a great extent by the relationships that he experiences at his workplace and in his worklife. They found that the response to redundancy and the subsequent jobs search of their sample of redundant workers could be most usefully understood in terms of the groupings formed on the basis of the technological or organizational system operating in a particular firm and, more generally, in a industry. Entry was obtained to a aircraft firm located in the Midlands which was due to close down at the end of 1970. A systematic, one in three, sample of male manual workers and weekly staff was drawn. Respondents were interviewed in the firm during November 1970 and re-interviewed in their homes approximately six months later. The total sample was 124, which reduced to 112 at the second interview.

Although in general terms there is a close relationship between men's work and out-of-work life, the exact nature of this relationship varies enormously. A number of possible work/ leisure relationships have been suggested and described.' One recently described case occurs where people attempt to enforce a thorough separation of their work and leisure lives. An entirely different type of work/leisure relationship is represents ed by the occupational community, in which work relationships, activities, interests and values permeate people's out of -work lives. Instead of separating their work and leisure friends and activities, members of occupational communities display a remarkable fusion of their work and leisure lives. Because of limitations of time and finance it was not possible in the research to test rigorously the propositions set out in the earlier article. Rather the investigation should be seen as a large-scale pilot study into one type work/leisure relationship. The data on the components of these two communities will be set out under the three headings described in the previous article: self-image, values and associations.

The purpose in contributing a further conceptual approach to the multiplicity already existing in the area of first job choice is to suggest an alternative to variable analysis and thus one which is more firmly rooted in current sociological theory. Whereas researchers E.T. Keil, and P.W. Musgrave utilized a role theory approach to occupational choice and thus emphasized the importance of examining the way in which status attributes influence the channels through the social structure which particular groups follow, they gave little attention to the way in which these factors influence the actual process of choice. It is therefore proposed in this article that the concept of awareness contexts provides not only a practically useful but also a theoretically fruitful means of representing the definitions of situations carried out by acting individuals, because they can be related to different processes of choice. Whether a choice is involved in job entry, and if so when, must be treated as empirically problematic if any meaningful explanation of why particular individuals find themselves in various jobs is to be made. The influence of social class on measured intelligence and thus on the type of schooling, academic achievement and level of job entered, has been given considerable attention in research.

Much discussion at present surrounds the relationship between those sections of society concerned with the supply and demand elements of manpower: the educational system and the world of work. The concern has been with the wider needs of society and the more specific needs of organizations on the one hand, and the freedom of individual choice on the other. It has been noted that the educational and occupational systems are very closely related in industrial societies, and that the fit between them is very close. Most theoretical discussions of occupational choice refer to the entry into employment as part of a process. Ensuring the best possible fit between the educational and employment systems is a manpower planning problem at both organizational and national levels, a problem of matching the supply characteristic of the labor force with the demand feature of employment opportunities. This article is concerned with the effectiveness of the flow of personnel from the school sixth form into the higher education and employment systems, and represents an attempt to examine the aspirations and expectations of sixth form leavers, the information which influences their career perceptions and their image of industry.

The article presents an insight to the sociological theory of occupational choice. It is now possible to locate occupational choice firmly in sociological theory, more specifically in that part of secondary socialization that deals with producer roles, though primary, tertiary and other types of secondary socialization may have latent relevance. Much anticipatory secondary socialization occurs in the family. Thus an important part of economic socialization at the peerwork stage is the move from viewing one's future occupation in a spirit of fantasy and idealism to taking a realistic view of one's potentialities. The field of anticipatory economic socialization is an important one in practice. The pathway of roles available to the child, and hence his choice of occupation, is narrowed by the experiences that he undergoes, more particularly at the hands of three of the main agents of socialization, namely, the family, the school and the peer group. For the child his parents are the main point of juncture between two important systems-the family and the economy. At each stage of economic socialization roles may be rehearsed in such a way that transition to the next stage is more easily accomplished.

The article presents an evaluation of occupations by English speaking refugee and local Hong Kong adolescents. The respondents are 16 to 17 years of age in the tenth and twelfth grades of three high schools in Hong Kong. The occupations, though not identical, do possess persuasively parallel components such as demanding skill requirements, remunerations and training required. The hypothesis includes the notion that elements of socio-economic status from prior occupations are being carried over into the new cultural setting, a fact that would contribute to the increased achievement motivation. The results show that the motivational components of occupational and family role units are somewhat homologous. Occupations normally are oriented towards instrumental, universal and effectively neutral characteristics. Heightened emphasis of familialism may tend to prevent the segregation of family roles from occupational roles thus making the social emotional patterns sufficient for both spheres.

The article presents information related to kinship and occupational succession in mid-nineteenth century England. The author discusses whether there were "definable descent groups" in mid-nineteenth century England. Marriage was one mechanism used among certain families of the upper middle-classes in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to maintain and reinforce kin and affinal connections with other patrinominal families. The occupational patrinominal kin nucleus was another. The research data reveals that while the maternal kin played an important role in the life of any individual as they do in most societies, the important structural principle was patrinominal and it was with the patrinominal family that the individual identified himself. Women after marriage still retained dose ties with their patrinominal family owing to the system of marriage settlements, trusts and jointures. Ties with the female patrinominal families were preserved by means of family names, but these again, after the first generation from the original alliance, were usually transmitted through the paternal line and trusts created on behalf of daughters generally expired with their issue. Some families in both professions and commerce tended to form occupational patrinominal kin nuclei some of which appear to have been exclusive in the sense that non-patrinominal kin and non-kin were excluded.

This article presents views of several professionals regarding their respective occupations. Studies of a leisure which have hitherto focused on social class differences are now developing the theme that there are occupational differences within class and status groupings which play a large part in determining the style of leisure, family behaviour, political orientations, as well as more general values. Respondents were also asked to say how they would spend a hypothetical extra two hours each day. The answers to this open question were coded into a number of categories. Many respondents gave multiple replies and these were apportioned among the categories to give percentages of time preferences stated by occupational and others. Some interesting differences were observed from notably the greater preference of bank people for relaxing and sleeping and their lesser preference for reading. The married youth employment officers predictably opted for more time for home, garden and family, at the expense of most other things except work and study.

In this article, an analysis is offered of some approaches, which have been made to the study of play as a form of social behavior, and the relationship of play to leisure is discussed. Moral value is commonly attached to different types of play, and may be attached to play as a whole. The developments which have given rise to extended leisure for virtually all groups in the population, have also brought about considerable ideological ambiguity between values which are oriented towards stressing the value of work and those which emphasize the potential satisfactions of play. People in those occupations-the professions, for example, where the division between work and leisure is not stringently defined, may be in an indeterminate position between values oriented towards work and others directed towards play. Values, which have stressed the central importance of work in life have, of course, gone hand in hand with a comparative lack of interest in the analysis of leisure in general. But the ever-decreasing length of the average working day suggests that problems of leisure will increasingly come into the forefront of both theoretical and practical interest.

This article embodies the results of an investigation which had been undertaken to test under Indian conditions some of the important findings of the various studies of social grading of occupations conducted in different parts of the world. The investigation had been aimed at finding answers to three broad questions. Firstly, whether persons in India tend to grade the different occupations in a generally agreed hierarchy of social prestige. Secondly, whether the different occupations may be divided into a few broader prestige categories. And thirdly, whether the social grading of occupations in India is comparable with similar gradings in other countries, particularly England. The analysis makes it clear that the questions have all received positive answers. By and large the different sections of the sample have shown a high degree of agreement in grading the various occupations in a hierarchy of social prestige. The gradings by different sections show that with regard to prestige the various occupations more or less automatically group themselves into certain clusters which serve as a basis for classifying them into a smaller number of prestige categories. Finally there is a high degree of similarity between social grading of occupations in India and England.