The Explanation of Occupational Prestige Hierarchies

The ranking of occupational prestige in Taiwan is highly similar to that in the United States and the numerous other societies-both modernized and relatively non-modernized-in which such studies have been conducted. Previous explanations of this important cross-societal invariant, occupational prestige evaluation, have emphasized common structuraL features of any complex society, whether industrialized or not. It is not clear how this proposition can be empirically falsified. A more satisfactory explanation is sought in terms of specific properties oj occupational roLes in any society, viz., education, responsibility (or authority), and income. The relationship of each of these variables to prestige is analyzed with data from Taiwan, Denmark, and the United States. The similarity of hierarchies of occupational prestige across societies, both preindustrial and industrial (Hodge et al., 1966a), and across time within individual societies (Hodge et al., 1966b) appears to be one of the great empiri-cal invariants in sociology. There is an averag