Social class as a method of analyzing fiscal stratification is a relatively recent invention, intruding upon the social fabric in the decades after the Industrial Revolution. Before that social stratification had been based upon class as defined by birthright; either you were a peasant, a lowly merchant, or a member of the nobility. An enduring predicament that faces sociology been to acquire a quantifiable methodology for measurement of class that matches existing theories. All hypothetical constructs necessitate a classification procedure by which an accurate measurement of abstractions can be made concrete and be made to apply to real word situations. When it comes to the measurement of the social classes there has traditionally been only one verifiable means by which class has been measured and that is through comparison of occupational strata. Four somewhat less than utterly distinct methods of quantification of social class as measured by occupational standards are in place: intuitive, relational, constructed, and reputational. The string that binds each of these standards is that they all require the implementation of hierarchy that is unfortunately based upon a too strictly defined correspondence between occupations. The standard for measuring social class based on occupation traces back to the early part of the last century and is known as the Registrar General’s Classification scale. As you may have guessed, the Registrar General’s Classification scale was introduced for the purpose of the census. Although amended many times over the decades, the foundation upon which it was constructed remained untouched; class was arranged according to occupation with little room for divisions of class between the occupations themselves. At the top of the heap were professionals and the standards worked down toward the bottom rung of social standing, the unskilled manual laborer. Remember those four standards? Well, this one used the intuitive method, meaning that it was a pretty basic and simplistic ranking system based entirely upon a completely subjective hierarchy of desirable occupations.
The Hope-Goldthorpe Scale was introduced to increase the range of occupations covered. It began by creating seven specific categories of jobs and then eventually grew to include four more. Sounds like it might have addressed the problem of division within classes, right? Well, not so much. The Hope-Goldthorpe Scale effectively did little more than expand upon the Registrar’s scale while introducing little in the way of innovation. Professionals remained on the top and unskilled labor still lingered on the bottom of the barrel. Defining social class based on occupation, therefore, meant that all professionals had more class than laborers. That would be bad enough, but the real crisis at play in this game is that it doesn’t serve to address sociological theory, but rather exists mainly to facilitate the government in breaking down statistical classifications of class for their own purposes.
Quantifying class hierarchy through the prestige constructed out of a false hierarchy based on occupation simply does not succeed in answering the difficulty that comes with the testing of sociological theory. At heart, occupational status isn’t really so much about the job itself, but the prestige that comes with the job and, needless to remind you, prestige is equal to income. The real problem then is that this prestige has less to do with the actual occupation than the ability to consume at at will and if that is so, then the ugly reality suggests that the highest possible status could be gained through the ease of inheritance. Applying the occupational scale in this way then clearly Paris Hilton would not rank any higher than an unskilled laborer since, well, her income is not based on any actual skills but rather by being born to the right parents. From the viewpoint of prestige, on the other hand, Paris Hilton would be at the top of the scale while the homeless man who also does not work but has no money would be on the bottom. Prestige is bestowed mainly through reification, yet at the same time it can be surprisingly resistant to that effect. What this means is that society over the years reified many occupations to the point of creating a paradox. As an example, lawyers have traditionally remained near the top of the occupational scale and the prestige scale, yet over the past few decades especially have been viewed with ridicule. The ultimate paradox is the politician, an occupation at almost the apex of both scales in deciding social class but who has almost always throughout history been considered less worthy of trust than the lowly unskilled manual laborer.
The perception that a definition of class can be related to occupational hierarchies continues to be a problem for sociologists by virtue that it simply cannot address the primal contradiction that exists in the allowance of testing sociological theories.
