RURAL-URBAN DIFFERENCES IN PRE-INDUSTRIAL AND INDUSTRIAL EVALUATIONS OF OCCUPATIONS BY JAPANESE ADOLESCENT BOYS.

Numerous studies of the prestige of occupations have been conducted in the United States. In recent years considerable attention has been directed toward such research in non-Western societies, including Japan. One basic problem of these studies has been to explain why most available data appear to show that there are substantial similarities in the occupational prestige hierarchies of various societies. Several authors take for granted the notion that the prestige hierarchies of many different societies are similar, despite the fact that the evidence is not wholly convincing;then they go on to explain the similarities by means of what they call a "structural" hypothesis. Specifically, they hold that industrialization produces its own characteristic occupational prestige hierarchy, regardless of the cultural milieu in which it is located. Elsewhere it has been shown that industrialization per se cannot be responsible for much of the observed intersocietal similarity in prestige hierarchies; part of the observation is probably an artifact of the research design and part of it is probably due to "structural similarities" in social systems with complex divisions of labor, whether industrial or not.