ABSTRACT
This chapter refers to the subjective significance of occupational membership, and the associated involvement in occupational values, beliefs, definitions and relationships, considers how occupations relate to conceptions of society and of interests within it. Because of the traditional salience of the concept occupational community in considerations of the nature and determinants of types of social imagery, the chapter has attempted to consider occupational communities in terms of their relevance to the development of conceptions of social structure and the distribution of interest within society. But clearly, as recent events and developments have shown, this postulated connection between occupational communities' and radical views is highly problematic. Criticism and anxiety concerning the term occupational community probably stems, in part, from certain misgivings that typically surround the concept community. Within discussions of occupational communities this sort of nostalgia is most apparent in descriptions of traditional, geographically based working-class communities, usually those associated with declining occupations or areas.
