The structure of occupational inequality

Conclusions

By examining the interrelationships among the requirements, resources, and rewards associated with occupational positions, we have attempted to construct a preliminary account of the “structure” underlying the process of individual attainment. Using data on 40 occupational groups aggregated from the 1972–73 Quality of Employment Survey, we first described the patterns of inequality for each of the three dimensions and then examined the interrelationships among the dimensions. A discriminant analysis revealed that occupational rewards are differentiated along two dimensions. The first dimension differentiates occupations highly rewared both intrinsically and extrinsically from those having little of either type of reward. The second differentiates occupations according to the “trade-offs” between intrinsic and extrinsic rewards. Assessing the determinants of inequality of occupational rewards, Assessing the determinants of inequality of occupational rewards, we found technical requirements to be strongly related to both intrinsic and extrinsic rewards but with a larger impact on the former. In contrast, occupational groups appear to use resources of authority and organized bargaining intrinsically from the nature of the occupational task. The patterns of determinants of intrinsic and extrinsic rewards are quite different and cannot be represented by a process with a single unobservable mediating construct.

Our analysis has no doubt raised more questios than it has answered. Data limitations precluded exploration of some important issues. For example, it is probably impossible to disentangle the contributions of “technical relations” and “social relations” to reward inequality without longitudinal data. The emergence of such occupational resources as unionized bargaining strengh is probably an outcome of past reward (or deprivation) configurations, and the implementation of technical arrangements such as automation of “deskilling” may in fact be an exercise of occupational resources by management (Braverman, 1974). In short, a complete account of the interplay between positional requirements, rewards, and resources requires historical data and dynamic modelling.

Finally, a more fundamental issue concerns the appropriate positional unit of analysis. While there is a long tradition of theory and research in the study of social inequality that focuses on occupations, jobs are the units by which work is organized in industrial societies. These jobs are structural within organizations, and much recent research suggests that the institutional, industrial, or market sectors within which those organizations are located have much to do with the structure of social inequality (cf. Baron and Bielby, 1980; Kalleberg and Sørensen, 1979). By focusing on the consequences of “structure” for individual attainment rather than on the structure among positions per se, recent research has avoided facing the theoretical issues of an appropriate positional unit of analysis and a complete specification of the structura that so many of us maintain is logially and causally prior to the prodcess of attainment. We hope that research reported here contributes to redirecting empirical research and theoretical debate.