Consensus and dissensus in occupational prestige.

The aim of this paper on occupational prestige is two-fold. The first part of the paper is devoted to a more general discussion of some theoretical and methodological shortcomings of the sociological literature on occupational prestige. The aim of the second part of the paper is to provide an illustration of one possible approach to the theoretical and empirical analysis of dissensus in occupational prestige which may be able to transcend at least partly some of the suggested shortcomings of the conventional approach. The sample utilized for the empirical analysis is a sample of the West German élite. The findings indicate that the position of an individual in the structure of voluntary interaction and his normative standards have an impact on the prestige assigned to different groups of occupations. Comparing science and nonescience occupations all requiring a university education, it was found that members of the elite who had close, personal interaction with scientists as well as a more favourable attitude towards the consequences of science and read proportionally more science literature assigned disproportionally higher prestige to science occupations in contrast to occupations outside of science.