An old model of social class? Job characteristics and the NS-SEC schema

Abstract

This article explores the relationship between the job characteristics underlying the Goldthorpe model of social class (work monitoring difficulty and human asset specificity) and those underlying theories of technological change (routine and analytical tasks) highlighted as key drivers for growing inequality. Analysis of the 2012 British Skills and Employment Survey demonstrate monitoring difficulty and asset specificity predict National Statistics Socio-Economic Classification (NS-SEC) membership and employment relations in ways expected by the Goldthorpe model, but the role of asset specificity is partially confounded by analytical tasks. It concludes that while the Goldthorpe model continues to provide a useful descriptive tool of inequality-producing processes and employment relations in the labour market, examining underlying job characteristics directly is a promising avenue for future research in explaining dynamics in the evolution of occupational inequalities over time.

An anatomy of zero‐hour contracts in the UK

“…However, the preceding analysis has revealed that ZHCs are strongly tied to other contractual features associated with vulnerability such as part-time and temporary work and are largely concentrated in less skilled occupations. These are all known to be associated with substantially lower pay (Booth et al, 2002;Williams, 2017).…”

“…In these latter occupations, organisations have less incentive to shield employees from the vagaries of the market, and tasks are more easily separable into blocks of work. We therefore expect ZHCs to be much more prevalent in semi‐routine and routine occupations where both human asset specificity and monitoring difficulties are said to be lowest (Goldthorpe, ; Williams, ). Indeed, these expectations are in line with work that finds occupational disparities in working time insecurity (Warren, ) and nonstandard employment (Marx, ) across occupational classes.…”

Moving on up in the information society? A longitudinal analysis of the relationship between Internet use and social class mobility in Britain

“…This would be particularly valuable for unpacking the processes in our current NS-SeC 2 group, wherein employment relations comprise of a mix of service and labour contracts and also include the self-employed. With the rise of selfemployment (Williams 2017) and the "hollowing out" of occupations in this category due to outsourcing or advances in technology (Autor et al 2003;Goos and Manning 2007;Michaels et al 2014) this group requires in-depth attention in future work. Interestingly, in our data set the proportion of people who were self-employed did not increase significantly over the time period (from around 5 to 7 %) but this pattern may have changed since 2014.…”

“…Accordingly, calculating NS-SeC categories is based upon a series of survey questions on people's employment relations and conditions (see Rose and Pevalin 2003;ONS 2017). Despite concerns about increasing wage inequalities, recent analysis of British data shows that NS-SeC remains a very reliable measure of social structure, as inequalities in earnings follow class lines (Williams 2017).…”

“…Goldthorpe 2004Goldthorpe , 2007Goldthorpe , 2016, we utilise an economic approach to measuring social class that focuses on occupational structures and relations (e.g. Clayton and Macdonald 2013;Williams 2017).…”