ABSTRACT
Business firms are discrete units. They have physical, economic and organisational boundaries. Salaries are an indication of occupational standing and we used salary data earlier to support the claim that engineers enjoy higher standing in Germany than in Britain. Taking salary data for early 1977 we may reasonably start at the top and argue that the highest job in the public sector is that of Federal Chancellor. The principal institution for acquiring industrial skills, namely apprenticeship, will first be an institution endowed with much respect and secondly be oriented to the needs of industry. Apprenticeship is quite simply rarer in Britain and apprenticeships are found less frequently in the Production trades as opposed to the Maintenance trades. One way to try to fix the relative standing of industry and the public service is to examine the attributes of an occupational group, homogeneous in terms of training and qualification, who may choose to work in either industry or the public sector.
