ABSTRACT
The importance of a person's occupation in determining his social status is increasing in modern industrial society, with its ‘aggregation, differentiation, and rationalisation’, compared with the more traditional status determinants of family and residence. 1 The individual wishing to increase his social standing will change his occupation to one which ranks more highly in the social scale or adopt the alternative of attempting to raise the status of the occupation as a whole while still remaining in it. The motivation for raising status in the case of both individual and group is that society tends to allocate greater economic rewards to high prestige occupations. 2 Status involves the rights accruing to a social position while role is the set of expectations of an incumbent of that position: the obligations. 3 Raising or lowering the status of an occupational group therefore involves an increase or decrease in the rights of the incumbents. Hughes has produced a framework for the analysis of the rights that are claimed successfully by members of an occupation.
An occupation consists, in part, of a successful claim of some people to licence to carry out certain activities which others may not, and to do so in exchange for money, goods or services. Those who have such licence will, if they have any sense of self consciousness or solidarity, also claim a mandate to define what is proper conduct of others towards the matters concerned with their work. 4
