The article describes the revision of the original Cambridge scale, a measure of similarity of life-style and therefore of generalised advantage/disadvantage, and compares this new version in a number of areas with other occupation-based measures of social stratification. The revision has been carried out using a much larger dataset, with respondents from a wide range of occupations. Female occupations have been specifically incorporated. Data from several previous studies are reanalysed using the Cambridge score and other measures or class categorisations. Areas considered include income and education, friendship, the occupations of husbands and wives and of fathers and children, and voting. In all cases it is shown that the Cambridge scale gives relationships at least as strong as, and in the great majority of cases stronger than, those found with the alternatives. The significance of this for the issue of the existence of discrete class categories and for the distinction between class and status is briefly raised.
A new occupational stratification scale, "HISCAM" (historical CAMSIS), has been developed to facilitate the analysis of data coded to the Historical International Standard Classification of Occupations. This article describes the derivation and properties of the HISCAM measure. The scale was derived using patterns of inter-generational occupational connections, replicating a method of "social interaction distance" analysis which is widely used in contemporary sociology. Analysis was performed on data for the period of 1800-1938, principally derived from marriage registers covering Belgium, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden, and encompassing over two million inter-generational relationships. Researchers report how several different HISCAM scales were evaluated and show how this approach can explain social stratification and inequality in the past.
There have been calls from several sources recently for a renewal of class analysis that would encompass social and cultural, as well as economic elements. This paper explores a tradition in stratification that is founded on this idea: relational or social distance approaches to mapping hierarchy and inequality which theorize stratification as a social space. The idea of 'social space' is not treated as a metaphor of hierarchy nor is the nature of the structure determined a priori. Rather, the space is identified by mapping social interactions. Exploring the nature of social space involves mapping the network of social interaction--patterns of friendship, partnership and cultural similarity--which gives rise to relations of social closeness and distance. Differential association has long been seen as the basis of hierarchy, but the usual approach is first to define a structure composed of a set of groups and then to investigate social interaction between them. Social distance approaches reverse this, using patterns of interaction to determine the nature of the structure. Differential association can be seen as a way of defining proximity within a social space, from the distances between social groups, or between social groups and social objects (such as lifestyle items). The paper demonstrates how the very different starting point of social distance approaches also leads to strikingly different theoretical conclusions about the nature of stratification and inequality.
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