Since the original National Opinion Research Center study on occupational prestige in the USA, there has been an increasing number of similar studies into the concept. However, before discussing these results in a cross-societal framework, it is necessary to investigate the meaning of these different studies. The operational definitions of occupational prestige cited by Hodge et al. are "social standing," "prestige," "social status," "respect," "admiration," "social prestige," "honor or importance" and "general desirability." Such a diversity leads one to wonder if the operationalizations are interchangeable or whether they are measuring different concepts. The only possible solutions to this dilemma are either to analyze the concept of prestige (a feature generally lacking in the research material) and thereby discern the logical relevance of the various operationalizations or to discover empirically if a given set of respondents treat different operationalizations in the same manner when they are asked questions involving different operationalizations on a questionnaire.
Prestige is a broad conception. In popular usage it refers to notions of esteem, honor, reputation, eminence, renown, admiration and acclamation. In any society, each type of social role will possess more or less prestige relative to other types of roles and it will be accorded its relative position depending on its being generally defined as superior or inferior according to the dominant value system. The basis of these societal definitions of relative superiority has been suggested by Shils in his analysis of the nature of deference behavior. He suggests that there enters into every interaction between an "ego" and an "alter," an element of appreciation or derogation of the partner towards whom the action is directed. The granting of deference in social interaction entails an attribution of worthiness. This notion of the relative worthiness of a social role would appear to signify a notion of relative goodness in terms of the operative ideals of a collectivity-those ideals that are expressed in norms and enforced by sanctions, thereby constituting the ideals by which members of a given society are actually supposed to guide their behavior.
The actual bases of deference are multiple. Shils suggests occupational role and occupational accomplishment, wealth, income, style of life, education, political power, corporate power, ethnicity and the possession of "objective acknowledgements," such as titles and ranks, as all constituting "prestige entitling properties." Yet the prestige of any particular social role is based on a different combination of factors which produce its relative moral worthiness and, consequently, entitle it to the show of deference behavior. These many empirical bases of prestige as an attitude and deference behavior as action only become meaningful in a given societal context if the dominant value system erects such criteria as subjectively relevant. Wealth and power, for instance, only become meaningful symbols of worthiness and, therefore, legitimate grounds for the general allocation of prestige and deference when the dominant value system selects such criteria as acceptable. Prestige as an attitude forming the basis for deference behavior can only be similar in different societies if the accepted criteria of worthiness are similarly alike.
It is evident that all the different operationalizations appear to be related to this broad conception of prestige. Yet, in order to discover whether such an assumption was empirically justified, 120 American college students were asked two different questions about the same set of thirty occupations. The first question was a direct replication of the original NORC questionnaire. The alternative operationalization was to ask the same students to rank the occupations "according to how much you personally esteem and honor that occupation," and was based upon the question used by Brenner and Hrouda in their research on Czechoslovakia that asked "Give the order of the 3 occupations you personally esteem and honor the most." The correlation coefficient of "social standing" and "esteem and honor" within the U.S. sample was .95, which indicates that the two operationalizations measure the same concept. The correlation coefficient of "social standing" in the U.S. student sample and the NORC results was .97, and this suggests strongly that students in the U.S. are typical in their attitudes of the wider population. These two summary measures indicate that the research of Brenner and Hrouda and my research can be compared on the broader basis of a general comparison between Czechoslovakia and the U.S. and that the results can be added to the other studies on occupational prestige.
The increasing number of industrial studies of occupational prestige has led sociologists to investigate the relationship of prestige hierarchies across societies. Inkeles and Rossi present rank-order correlation coefficients for the U.S., U.K., New Zealand, West Germany, Japan and the USSR, all of which are very high, indicating a basic similarity cross-nationally in the respective prestige rankings. Since the six nations were all relatively industrialized, Inkeles and Rossi conclude that "a great deal of weight must be given to the cross-national similarities in social structure which arise from the industrial system." By and large, they found little evidence to support any "culturalist" contention that, "within each country or culture the distinctive local value system would result in substantial-and, indeed, sometimes extreme-differences in the evaluation of particular jobs in the standardized modern occupational system," and much to support the "structuralist" position that "there is a relatively invariable hierarchy of prestige associated with the industrial system, even when it is placed in the context of larger social systems which are otherwise differentiated." Clearly, Inkeles and Rossi's interpretation suggests that Kerr et al.'s theory about convergence is empirically close to the mark and that the "logic of industrialism" produces a relatively invariant popular evaluation of occupational prestige in all industrialized societies.
The extension of the study of occupational prestige to non-industrialized societies has produced evidence that many of these societies have prestige hierarchies very similar in profile to industrialized societies. Tiryakian, in his quota sample of Manila suburban residents and of four rural communities discovered a correlation of .96 between the U.S. and the Philippines. A study of Javanese high school students by Murray Thomas found that the correlation between Indonesia and the U.S. was .94. These results led Hodge et al. to modify the interpretation of Inkeles and Rossi and state that it is "the essential structural similarity shared by all nations of any degree of complexity," rather than simply industrialized social structures, that produce these broadly similar prestige rankings. They conclude, "once again we are led to the same conclusion: gross similarities in occupational prestige hierarchies can be accounted for on the basis of gross un-iformities in social structure across societies." These alleged un-iformities have been specified by Marsh, who explains what he calls "one of the great empirical invariants in sociology" in terms of highly similar role attributes for a given occupation in every society and he claims "a given occupation has highly similar requirements for recruitment (educational level), role functioning (authority and power), and similar relative rewards (income) across societies." The basic similarity of all these explanations is that despite occasional minor discrepancies, the role of distinctive cultural values is relatively unimportant when compared to the necessary structure of both industrialized and complex societies.
Socialist societies, most of which are complex and industrialized social structures, are assumed to fall within this general framework. The evidence for the apparent unimportance of socialist values is based on research on the USSR and Poland. The study by lnkeles of Soviet émigrés forms the basis for a correlation between the U.S. and the USSR of .90. However, the study suffers from two serious methodological problems; first, émigrés are not likely to produce attitudes representative of the Soviet population, and second, only 10 occupations are directly comparable-a number so low that the correlation coefficient of .90 could be very misleading as an indication of a high similarity between the two societies. A Polish study (Sarapata and Wesolowski) permitted a comparison of 19 occupations with the original NORC study and produced a correlation of .87, a figure that suggests strongly that this socialist society falls into the same "logic of industrialism" model.
The comparison between "esteem and honor" rankings in Czechoslovakia and the U.S. student sample produced a correlation of .56. When a direct comparison was made between the 1966 Czechoslo-vakian responses on esteem and honor and the original NORC results on the question on "social standing" the correlation was .30. The reason for the lower correlation was that only 15 occupations were directly comparable with NORC, as compared to 25 in the former correlation.
It would appear as if two distinct but interrelated processes are at work in Czechoslovakia that explain the gross dissimilarities between the Czechoslovakian prestige hierarchy and that of the U.S. The Czechoslovakian respondents seem to have a far more favorable evaluation of skilled manual workers than is the case in the U.S. Yet they seem to view the symbols of the political regime in a far less favorable light. In addition, the main difference between the U.S. sample of students and the main body of the American population, as revealed in the NORC results, was that the students gave occupations like Cabinet Minister and Army Officer far less prestige than the general population. Hence, the lower position of political roles in the Czechoslovakian prestige hierarchy is even more striking. The Czechoslovakian respondents have internalized the values of socialism with its special emphasis on the dignity and worthiness of manual work which is based upon the underlying Marxist philosophical assumption that the industrial proletariat are the universal, revolutionary class that will destroy bourgeois capitalist society and build a new, liberated communist social structure. Yet, they clearly have not accepted the legitimacy of the "new class" of political bureaucrats. The political elite's lack of legitimacy helps to explain how the reform movement under Dubcek became a radical assault upon the totalitarian nature of the Czechoslovakian Communist party and precipitated the Soviet invasion of 1968.
Additional evidence to support the idea of a distinctive and socialist value system within Czechoslovakia can be seen when a comparison is made between the U.S. student sample and Czechoslovakia on the question of the utility to society of the 30 occupations.
The responses to these questions on social utility would appear to indicate an aspect of the moral assessment of the worthiness of the occupational role. The influence of distinctively socialist values on notions of moral worth are clear and consistent with the results al ready analyzed on prestige. A correlation coefficient of 0.42 was found between the U.S. and the Czechoslovakian rankings of occupational utility to society. When the gross occupational groupings were compared for social utility the results were remarkably similar to those on esteem and honor.
The same pattern of values reveals itself once again. The Czechoslovakian respondents evaluated the utility of skilled workers much higher and roles associated with the political regime far lower. The correlation of utility to society hierarchies with esteem and honor in Czechoslovakia was .87 and in the U.S. was .77. It would appear that popular perceptions of utility to society are very dissimilar in the two societies and that these different perceptions of social utility are legitimating factors in the differential attribution of relative moral worthiness to respective social roles. These large differences in popular perceptions are highly significant for the stratification structure in these societies since they involve systematic differences in the feelings of self-worth and self-esteem of large groups of people and, consequently, lead to different occupational roles and different patterns of deference behavior.
The major problem of interpretation is how to explain these systematic differences between Czechoslovakia and the U.S. A possible explanation might be that they are the results of indoctrination and propaganda by the Communist party. Such an explanation might fit the results on manual workers but it fails to account for the low relative position of political roles. If propaganda were the sole reason for the relatively high prestige of skilled workers, then it should also have been successful in prescribing very high prestige for political roles, since this is crucially necessary for the legitimacy of the regime. Another explanation might be that skilled workers are objectively better off relative to other positions in terms of material rewards and consequently they receive higher prestige. However, such an explanation, despite the correctness of its analysis of the structure of material rewards in Czechoslovakia, again fails to explain why political roles fare so badly in their relative prestige. Clearly, roles such as Cabinet Minister, Judge and Army Officer possess more power and more income than skilled jobs like Miner or Locomotive Driver. The most plausible explanation would appear to be that the general population in Czechoslovakia perceives the relative moral worth of occupational roles quite differently than is the case in the U.S. The results on popular perceptions of social utility indicate that different categories of occupations have been differentially defined as usefully contributing to the general welfare of society in the two societies. Popular perceptions of social utility legitimate the distribution of prestige since they crucially define notions of relative moral worth. The distribution of moral worth in the USA has remained almost constant between 1947 and 1963. There is also evidence that the distribution of moral worth has remained fairly constant in Czechoslovakia between 1937 and 1966, despite the structural transformations during the period. Obrdliks in his pre-war research asked a sample of Czechoslovakians to "determine the rank order of the listed occupations according to their importance for the public good." The results clearly reveal a similar pattern to the results of Brenner and Hrouda's research in 1966.
The low position of the priest both in 1937 and 1966 is not surprising in view of popular traditional hostility towards the Roman Catholic Church, a fact intimately tied to the close relationship of Austrian imperial rule and the Catholic clerical hierarchy during Austrian domination of Czechoslovakia. What is surprising is the low relative position of roles associated with the capitalist economic system and the political regime and the high relative position of workers and farmers. The same distinctive socialist value system is evident and it would seem that, given the industrialization of Czechoslovakia between the two world wars, and the vast influx of peasants into the cities-many of which were dominated by capitalists of German ethnicity, these strong socialist attitudes can be explained in terms of Trotsky's notion of the "uprooted." Based on his experience in Russia during the Revolutionary period, Trotsky observed that when peasants entered the industrial working class, they tended to become radical and militant. The sharp discontinuity of peasant life in the countryside and life in the city and the factory was the root of this radical socialist consciousness. The difficulties of the peasant adapting to urban existence was the basis of Durkheim's notion of "anomie." It would appear that out of this situation of initial normlessness felt by peasants entering the industrial work force, there develops socialist consciousness which elevates the worker and the farmer (symbol of a golden age prior to the feelings of up rootedness in the city) and denigrates all roles associated with the political and economic structure of capitalism. It would also appear that these attitudes, associated with the initial dislocation of city life, have persisted over a thirty-year period. This can be explained in part as a result of continued influx of peasants into the cities and also as a consequence of both objective changes in the structure of material rewards and of Communist party propaganda. Nevertheless, this socialist consciousness clearly poses a threat to the stability and legitimacy of the party.
The pattern in Czechoslovakia is very similar to that found by Sarapata and Wesolowski. The correlation of esteem and honor in Czechoslovakia and social prestige in Poland is 0.76, and when Farmer is removed from the original list of 15 comparable occupations, the correlation becomes 0.88. However, the clear similarity of Poland and Czechoslovakia is revealed when Sarapata and Wesolowski's data are aggregated into groupings of occupational roles.
This aggregated prestige hierarchy in Poland is identical to the results for Czechoslovakia, despite the fact that the inter-correlation of individual occupational roles was 0.76. This suggests that it is probably better to look at aggregated groupings of occupations that correspond to the class structure of a society, rather than to focus simply on individual occupational roles if one wishes to make a comparison of prestige hierarchies cross-societally. This is particularly true when the number of occupations compared is small, since the occupations upon which the comparison is made may well be untypical of the overall occupational hierarchy, and hence give very misleading correlation coefficients. The overall stratification system in Poland and Czechoslovakia looks much different than the U.S. In addition to the absence of big business in societies ruled by Communist parties, it is clear that the hierarchies of prestige are very different.
Notions of moral worth embodied in the attribution of prestige and legitimated on the basis of perceived social utility suggest that Czechoslovakia is a stratified society in the sense that there are clear differences in the moral evaluation of occupational roles. These notions of moral worthiness are very different from the U.S. which suggest that the theoretical analysis of Kerr et al. concerning the "logic of industrialism," and the interpretations of previous empirical comparisons of occupational prestige by Hodge et al., Inkeles and Rossi, and Marsh are all mistaken. There is no necessary structure of moral evaluation of occupational roles associated either with industrial society or with complex social systems. The fact that roles may involve similar attributes, like education, in different societies does not mean that popular evaluations of such attributes will necessarily be the same. This is especially true in the case of an attribute like power. Czechoslovakia and Poland possess political regimes that lack the legitimacy of the American political system. The Communist party, which in Leninist theory constitutes the "dictatorship of the proletariat" and the "van-guard of the revolution," lacks the possession of moral worth that is crucial to its own arrogated position. This conflict between the role of the Party as the leading force in society and the fact that, in the eyes of many people in Eastern Europe, the Party lacks the necessary moral worth to possess the moral authority to lead is a dynamic feature of societies like Poland and Czechoslovakia, and is an indication of potential transformations.
The results discussed in this research indicate that the "convergence," "structuralist" explanations of occupational prestige hierarchies are mistaken, partly because they have tended to ignore socialist societies and partly because they suffer from the serious methodological problem of trying to base an inter-social comparison upon a few similar occupational roles, rather than upon an analysis of the stratification profiles in an aggregated manner. Marsh's "great empirical invariant of sociology" is merely a great empirical myth of sociologists.
