ABSTRACT
At least in the United States and Australia, the processes of allocation to educational and occupational statuses from social origins (i.e., the process of stratification or of status attainment) seem largely socioeconomic in character (Featherman, Jones, and Hauser, 1975). Put another way, inter- and intragenerational movements of men among categories of their own and their parents’ educations and occupations more closely follow the dimensions of social space defined by the “socioeconomic” distances among occupation groups than by the “prestige” distances among occupations. Evidence for this interpretation is drawn from parallel results for the United States and Australia in which estimates for the structural equations of “status attainment” models with occupations scaled in units of Duncan’s (1961) socioeconomic index (SEI) yield higher coefficients of multiple determination (R2) than do estimates based on occupations scaled in units of NORC prestige (Siegel, 1971) or of Treiman’s (1977) international prestige index. In addition, the canonical structure of generational and career occupational mobility in both societies more nearly approximates a socioeconomic “space,” as the canonical weights for occupation categories correlated higher with mean SEI scores for these occupations than with mean Siegel or Treiman scores.
