Occupational prestige (also known as job prestige) is a way for sociologists to describe the relative social class positions people have. It refers to the consensual nature of rating a job based on the belief of its worthiness. The term prestige itself refers to the admiration and respect that a particular occupation holds in a society. Occupational prestige is prestige independent of the particular individual who occupies a job. Sociologists have identified prestige rankings for more than 700 occupations based on results from a series of national surveys. They created a scale with 0 being the lowest possible score to 100 being the highest, and then ranked the occupations based on the results of the survey. The top ten occupations with the highest prestige, in order, are physician (1), lawyer (2), computer scientist (3), college professor (4), physicist (5), chemist (6), chemical engineer (7), architect (8), biologist (9), and physical scientist (10).
Read more about Occupational Prestige: History, Calculating Occupational Prestige in America
Famous quotes containing the words occupational and/or prestige:
“There is, I confess, a hazard to the philosophical analysis of humor. If one rereads the passages that have been analyzed, one may no longer be able to laugh at them. This is an occupational hazard: Philosophy is taking the laughter out of humor.”
—A.P. Martinich (b. 1946)
“A bad short story or novel or poem leaves one comparatively calm because it does not exist, unless it gets a fake prestige through being mistaken for good work. It is essentially negative, it is something that has not come through. But over bad criticism one has a sense of real calamity.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)