Creating a Historical International Standard Classification of Occupations:An Exercise in Multinational Interdisciplinary Cooperation

This major international history project succeeded because of the goodwill, commitment, and collaborative endeavor of a team of researchers drawn not only from different countries but also from different disciplines. Its immediate product is a recently published book, HISCO: Historical International Standard Classification of Occupations (van Leeuwen, Maas, and Miles 2002). The authors describe the substantive issues, methodological questions, and practical arrangements behind the HISCO scheme, which is a classification tool designed to enable researchers working with historical occupational titles in a variety of linguistic and geographical contexts to communicate with each other and to make international comparisons across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in social, economic, and other fields of history. HISCO is rooted in the 1968 version of the International Labour Organisation [then known as Office]’s International Standard Classification of Occupations (ISCO68) (ILO 1969). This means that in addition to comparing historical information across national boundaries, we can establish linkages between historical and contemporary data sets. The authors also note some recent developments on the application of HISCO in historical research