What we think when we speak about stratification

How we measure social position is vital to our ability to account for different aspects – imagined or real – of the stratification order. This research note surveys applied research and quantifies differences in the way researchers study stratification. It analyses all research articles published from 2015-2019 in the five most-cited sociological journals and ISA RC28's official publication. We focus on empirical articles with a substantive focus on occupation-based stratification. Empirically, we observe a dominance of income as a measure for social position. Social class is a close second trailed by status, prestige, and desegregated occupational measures. Among social class measures, researchers prefer EGP-like schemas and apply them as a paradigmatic "one-size-fits-all" measure in diverse fields of application.

Why Has Computerization Increased Wage Inequality? Information, Occupational Structural Power, and Wage Inequality

This article offers a new account of rising inequality by providing a new explanation for the observed correlation between computerization and earnings. The argument is that as computers transformed work into a more knowledge-intensive activity, occupations located at critical junctions of information flow have gained greater structural power, and thereby higher wages. Combining occupational measures for location in the information flow based on the Occupational Information Network with the 1979–2016 Current Population Surveys, the analyses reveal a rising wage premium for occupations with greater access to and control of information, independent of the spectrum of skills related to computerization.

Studying Long-Term Changes in the Economy and Society Using the HISCO Family of Occupational Measures

Occupations are a key characteristic for analyzing momentous changes in economy and society. Classical economists rooted their analyses in occupational divisions, emphasizing the division of work and its continuous evolution. Modern economists and economic historians also debate the wealth of nations by looking at the global changes in the labor force, at changing labor force participation rates, at winners and losers in the class structure, and in variations in this across the globe—stressing the importance of human capital for work and of changes therein for economic growth. To study such momentous changes over past centuries, historical occupational data are needed as well as measures and procedures to work with these data systematically and comparatively. The Historical International Standard Classification of Occupations (HISCO) maps occupational titles into a common coding scheme across the globe. HISCO-based measures of economic sector and economic specialization have been derived. To answer a number of interesting questions, the HISCO family has been extended to include HISCO-based measures of social status (HISCAM) and social classes (HISCLASS). Armed with his toolbox, scholars are able to study the development of the economy and society over past centuries.

Occupational measures and averaged shape optimization

We consider the minimization of averaged shape optimization problems over the class of sets of finite perimeter. We use occupational measures, which are probability measures defined in terms of the reduced boundary of sets of finite perimeter, that allow to transform the minimization into a linear problem on a set of measures. The averaged nature of the problem allows the optimal value to be approximated with sets with unbounded perimeter. In this case, we show that we can also approximate the optimal value with convex polytopes with n+1 faces shrinking to a point. We derive conditions under which we show the existence of minimizers and we also analyze the appropriate spaces in which to study the problem.

Analyses of Intergenerational Mobility

This article reviews the sociological and economic literature on intergenerational mobility. Findings on social class, occupational status, earnings, and income mobility are discussed and discrepancies among them are evaluated. The review also examines nonlinearities in the intergenerational association, variation in mobility across advanced industrial countries, and recent mobility trends in the United States. The literature suggests an association between inequality and economic mobility at the country level, with the United States featuring higher inequality and lower mobility than other advanced industrial countries. However, mobility has not declined in the United States over the recent decades in which inequality has expanded. The inequality-mobility relationship fails to emerge when occupational measures of mobility are used, likely because these measures do not fully capture some mechanisms of economic reproduction.