ABSTRACT
As we have seen in previous chapters, one important element in the operational definition of ESeC is supervisory status. Supervisors are seen as being somewhere between managers and ordinary employees, but it is notoriously difficult to establish where exactly the boundaries should be set and on what basis. As we saw in Chapters 2 and 3, in the construction of the ESeC class schema supervisory status is used to allocate to class 2 occupations which would otherwise be coded to class 3; and to class 6 those that would be in classes 7, 8 or 9. While detailed measurement instructions exist for occupation, for instance, international manuals describing occupational titles in great detail, the systematic study of supervisory status is much less developed. In this chapter, we examine two basic issues. First, we present findings from a pilot study that examines how the proportion of employees identified as supervisors depends on the operational procedure used. We find that different procedures to assess supervisory status may lead to quite substantial variation in class distributions within the ESeC schema. Second, we explore the procedures used to measure supervisory status in two major European surveys that each aim to provide data at a high degree of cross-national comparability: the European Social Survey (ESS) and the Labour Force Survey (LFS). Our conclusion is that in both surveys there is considerable room for improvement in cross-national comparability.
