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Social Stratification

Notes It has five key criteria — employment under contract; control over other workers; ownership
of human capital (educational and technical qualifications or craft skills); the type of labour,
manual or non-manual; and the strength of occupational trade union solidarity.
An important feature of this new schema is that it is a classification of occupations, rather than
of individuals. Stewart, Prandy and Blackburn (1980 : 113) show that it is necessary to distinguish
individuals from occupations when discussing class position. They emphasize that individuals
may come to particular occupations through a diversity of routes and from many different
backgrounds; similarly, there is a diversity of destinations from any one occupation.
Consequently, the meaning of an occupation will not be the same for all engaged in it. For
example, the occupation of clerk is held by individuals with a wide range of experiences and
expectations : the older male worker who has moved into a clerical job from a manual occupation,
the young male worker who is moving through the occupation of ‘clerk’ on his way to a
management position, and the female clerk who is likely to stay within the occupation for most
of her working life. Nevertheless, the occupation of clerk itself can be characterized by the
nature of the work, the work environment, the bureaucratic nature of the employing
organization, and the level of pay, irrespective of the meaning of these and other aspects of the
job for the employee. It is these and other characteristics of occupations which form the key to
the distinctions made in the class schema described below.
The scheme allocates each of the 546 occupations of the KOS classification to one of eight
classes on the basis of the characteristics held by the majority of the respondents in the sample
who follow that occupation. These characteristics were examined in order. Employing others
took precedence over all other characteristics, followed by working on one’s own account,
managerial status, the possession of technical and higher educational qualifications, and the
manual of non-manual nature of the occupation (as defined by OPCS, Classification of Occupations,
1980). Manual employees were then classified according to whether they had served a craft
apprenticeship, their supervisory status and their employment in a highly unionized industry
group.
Class 1 in the schema consists of those occupations in which the majority of members are
employers with employees. The self employed occupations, those in which most members
work on their own account without employees, are placed in Class 2. Class 3 contains all those
who are in KOS occupations where the majority of workers either define themselves as managers,
or have a university degree, a professional qualification or a teaching qualification. Class 4
contains occupations in which the majority hold a technical qualification (HNC or HND, a
nursing qualification, an ONC or OND, a City and Guilds certificate or ‘A’ levels), and is
defined solely on the basis of education. Class 5 contains non-manual occupations whose
members are largely employees not of managerial status and without educational qualifications.
A large proportion are clerks. Class 6, craft, contains those occupations where the majority of
members have served a recognized trade apprenticeship, for example, compositors, carpenters
and joiners, pattern makers and tool makers. Class 7, higher manual, includes supervisors of
manual workers who are not in Class 6; it also includes occupations in which most of the
members are in industries with a strong union structure, such as coal miners, gas, electricity
and water workers, rail workers, and those employed in local government. All other manual
workers are placed into Class 8, lower manual.
The schema reflects the market position of occupations through its consideration of the rewards
and resources which members of those occupations could expect to command. Although the
method of categorization depends upon a hierarchical selection of occupational characteristics,
the resulting schema is only partially ordered with respect to the relative market power of each
class. For instance, the rewards and resources of the clerical occupations in Class 5 may be less
than those of the craft occupations in Class 6.

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