Abstract
Durkheim may have been the first sociologist showing serious interest in occupations as social groups. Since his time, there have been many systematic sociological studies of occupations, aiming to understand stratification and to provide a class map in society. In today’s world, there are too many occupation titles in developed societies to get a concise sense of stratification. For example, the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2002 Alphabetic Indexes of Industries and Occupations list over 31,000 occupation titles. Sociologists have made various attempts to come to grips with stratification through classification, such as the Blau-Duncan classification in the United States and the Goldthorpe (or Erikson-Goldthorpe or Erikson-Goldthorpe-Portocarero) classification in the United Kingdom. Once a classification system is established, it is only natural for sociologists to scale the categories with a particular criterion, such as prestige. Prestige scales exist for both classifications above and for other variations and updates.
The Domański, Sawiński, and Słomczyński (hereafter DSS) book proposes a new classification and scales based on occupations in Poland. Polish sociology has a fairly long history of studying social stratification by way of classification. The first classification, known as the Social Classification of Occupations (SCO) came out in 1974. It was revised in 1978 and scaled in 1979; a separate system known as the Polish Sociological Classification of Occupations appeared in 1994. The new classification, or SCO-2009, proposed in the DSS book is a substantially revised and updated version of the 1978 SCO, in response to changes in the job market and social structure in Poland after the regime change initiated in 1989.
The first three chapters of the book set the stage for the introduction of the SCO-2009 and related scales. The first chapter gives a general review of the literature on classification and considers occupation as an indication of social position. The second chapter reviews systematic studies of classification in Poland from the 1970s. The third chapter gives an account of empirically testing the new classification by listening to survey respondents’ reflections of their occupational roles and the roles of others. Chapters Four and Five are the meat of the book. Chapter Four describes the new classification and details some major revisions of SCO-1978. Like SCO-1978, SCO-2009 also has four levels, with 10, 30, 76, and 259 categories in each level (compared with 10, 30, 99, and 400 categories for SCO-1978). Chapter Five presents four scales—two based on investments and two related to rewards—the scales of skill requirements, the complexity of work, material remuneration, and occupational prestige.
The book comes with a CD containing two computer programs, sco2009coder and sco2009index, which are introduced in Chapter Six. The sco2009index program assists a user in preparing a new classification index, and the sco2009coder program aids in coding and scaling occupations. The book claims that the computer-assisted coding and classifying can be done in any language as long as the SCO-2009 system has been translated. Without an actual job title file to test the programs from scratch, this reviewer could only open the programs and load the example files. Things seemed to work in this simple test. The final chapter discusses a 14-class classification based on SCO-2009 and its validity via a correspondence analysis of intergenerational mobility and mate selection among the occupational categories in Poland. The appendix of the book lists the SCO-2009 in its entirety.
Chapters Four and Five contain the major contributions of the book. Chapter Five also has two appendices listing the four occupational scales for all the SCO-2009 codes. It must be an ego-booster for anyone working in academia to read this chapter, for the category of college and university professor holds the highest prestige score in Poland! Chapter Seven is interesting because it deals with a central problem in any classification exercise—the trade-off between homogeneity and specificity on one hand and heterogeneity and parsimony on the other. Such trade-off makes sense both theoretically (in terms of social solidarity) and statistically (in terms of a given statistical distance). There is one puzzling typo: In Chapter Four (p. 135), the numbers of occupational categories in the four levels of the classification are 10, 30, 76, and 259, respectively; in Chapter Six (p.192), the numbers become 10, 30, 75, and 260.
It is not very clear who is the target audience of the book. DSS recommend using SCO-2009 for research on Central and Eastern European societies. Presumably, sociologists of stratification or occupations anywhere in the world would benefit from the book by learning about the new Polish classification. The benefit would be greater for readers either based in the West or Central and Eastern Europe (except Poland as there is a Polish version of the book) who use English as a research language and who will use the computer program for classifying and scaling occupations to understand stratification in Central and Eastern Europe.