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1、A short note on HISCLASSMarco H.D. van Leeuwen and Ineke MaasNovember 2005HISCO is an occupational classification system that is both international and historical, and simultaneously links to existing classifications used for present-day purposes. Marco H.D. van Leeuwen, Ineke Maas and Andrew Miles,
2、 HISCO. Historical International Standard Classification of Occupations (Leuven, 2002); eaed., “Creating a Historical International Standard Classification of Occupations: An Exercise in Multinational, Interdisciplinary Cooperation”, Historical Methods, 37 (2004), pp. 186-197. It did not emerge from
3、 nothing, but is a historicized version of a system with proven comparative credentials: the International Labour Organizations International Standard Classification of Occupations (ISCO). Both HISCO and the 1968 version of ISCO upon which it was based have ten major groups; these are divided into m
4、inor groups, which are subdivided into unit groups. HISCO has some 1,600 of these unit groups and is thus a detailed coding system. To give an example, codes 6-xx.xx refer to the primary sector of the economy, with codes 6-2x.xx identifying various types of agricultural and animal husbandry workers.
5、 This last group includes codes 6-22.xx for field crop and vegetable farm workers and these, in turn, include several more specific occupational categories: general field crop farm worker (6-22.10), vegetable farm workers (6-22.20), wheat farm workers (6-22.30), cotton farm workers (6-22.40), rice f
6、arm workers (6-22.50) and sugar-cane farm workers (6-22.60). The tasks and duties of each unit group are described, and occupational titles are coded into the unit group that matches the work its bearer does, the work as defined by the tasks and duties. In addition to the 1,600 five-digit codes, HIS
7、CO has three additional variables (Status, Relation and Product) which are used to store information on social and employment status and product information often found in historical records. Of these variables Status is of most interest here, since it contains information that may be used to code a
8、n occupation into its corresponding social class. The Status variable distinguishes between types of ownership, stages in an artisan career, principals and subordinates, levels of education of persons still in the educational system, and indications of “pure” status, such as nobility.Before discussi
9、ng the transition from code to class, it is useful to know that the coding of occupational titles worldwide is ongoing; the progress so far can be seen on the History of Work Website of the International Institute of Social History. See http:/historyofwork.iisg.nl/ At present the website contains oc
10、cupational titles coded into HISCO from the following countries: Belgium, Brazil, Canada (Quebec), England, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, The Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland. Work on coding occupations in other countries, such as India, Italy, Russia and the Philippi
11、nes, is currently underway. See also V. Vladimirov (ed.), Istoricheskor professiovedenie. Sbornik nauchnikh statie (Barnaul, 2004).HISCLASSHow does one transform 1,600 occupational unit groups into a convenient number of social classes? We cannot go into too much detail here, but we will briefly ske
12、tch this process. First, however, we would like to acknowledge the influence of the pioneering work of Grard Bouchard. G. Bouchard, Tous les mtiers du monde. Le traitement des donnes professionelles en histoire sociale (Quebec, 1996). There are, of course, differences between HISCLASS and Bouchards
13、class scheme, which, in large measure, follow from the fact that we needed a scheme for comparisons not just between time periods but also between territorial units. Thus we used the international HISCO as a starting point, and asked a group of historians from various countries to test the social cl
14、ass scheme. Like him, we wanted a historical social class scheme that is both theoretically grounded in identifying and closely following the underlying dimensions of social class in the past and firmly tied to an empirical body of knowledge on these dimensions. To transform occupations into classes
15、, a set of fixed criteria was necessary; these had to be as simple as possible. Ad hoc decisions were permissible, and sometimes unavoidable, but they could not form the basis of a social class scheme. We did not want to classify occupations using just our historical intuition, although the intuitio
16、n of a good specialist historian has sometimes proven to be rather good. Several studies have shown that there are both high correlations among expert historians as well as between historical intuition and contemporary rankings based on income, education or social prestige. See T. Hershberg, M. Katz
17、, S. Blumin et al., “Occupation and ethnicity in five nineteenth-century cities: a collaborative enquiry”, Historical Methods Newsletter, 7 (1974), pp. 174-216; D.J. Treiman, “A standard occupational prestige scale of use with historical data”, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 7 (1976), pp. 283
18、-304; R.M. Hauser, “Occupational status in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries”, Historical Methods, 15 (1982), pp. 111-126; Matthew Sobek, “Work, status and income. Men in the American occupational structure since the late nineteenth century”, Social Science History, 20 (2) (1996), pp. 186-207.
19、A theoretically, empirically and procedurally grounded class scheme has the advantage that all the cards are on the table, so to speak. Each step is documented, and can be questioned by the community of scholars: they may propose changes, test them, and see what difference these make. Thus a social
20、class scheme becomes a clear proposition regarding the social structure of past societies; one that can be questioned, rejected or refined, and, over the years, modified to take account of its flaws.Our position on the virtues and flaws of any social class scheme is echoed in the following remarks b
21、y W.A. Armstrong:Any process of grouping, whether by age, birthplace, or in this case occupation, inevitably occasions some loss of detail. There are historians who instinctively object to the blanketing effect of all general schemes of classification, and on very much more reasonable grounds, those
22、 who prefer to use simple groupings of occupations, which are neither strictly hierarchical (social ranking) nor yet industrial groupings . They are likely to point to the difficulties of deciding what are the criteria of social classes (and the shortage of information on some of the relevant variab
23、les) and to the various practical difficulties involved. To such historians, there might seem to be virtue in simply considering individual occupations as such, unaffected or uncontaminated by modern systems of classification, and they may well be suspicious of what look like rigid and inflexible ge
24、neral schemes, conjured up without mature consideration.We would not wish to claim that the schemes put forward later are fully comprehensive, entirely logical or perfectly suited to every scholars purpose. Objections may very well be raised to the effect that this or that occupation ought “obviousl
25、y” to have been placed in an alternative group or social class. Nevertheless it would be widely agreed that if research is conducted with some common basis of classification, order and uniformity could be introduced in the field . By following the schemes suggested here, no one need feel that his ha
26、nds are tied. There is no reason why particular occupations could not be singled out for special analysis where appropriate, and alternative schemes can and should be applied according to individual interest. At the same time, if all would consider using these schemes alongside their own, their find
27、ings could be tabulated in forms which would be meaningful to other workers in the field. Anarchy might be avoided. W.A. Armstrong, “The use of information about occupation”, in E.A. Wrigley (ed.), Nineteenth century society: essays in the use of quantitative methods for the study of social data (Ca
28、mbridge, 1972), pp. 191-310, quotation on p. 197.A social class, it can be said, is a set of persons with the same life chances. Historians working with self-construed local class schemes seem to agree that the main dimensions of social class are the manual-non manual divide, skill level, the degree
29、 to which one supervises others, and the economic sector. See the review by Bouchard, Tous les mtiers du monde, pp. 33-60, of major historical and sociological studies. See also the social class scheme developed by a team of German historians (Federspiel, von Hippel, Hubbard, Kaelble, Kocka, Lundgre
30、en, Mocker, Schraut and Schren) in R. Schren, Soziale Mobilitt: Muster, Vernderungen und Bedingungen im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (St. Katharinen, 1989). To the list of main dimensions of class could be added employment status, in the sense of being employed, an employer, or a working proprietor. Empl
31、oyment status is, however, often not given in historical datasets. This severely limits the scope for close matching with the current sociological EGP classification. This is regrettable since this classification is often used today to make international and temporal comparisons. See R. Erikson and
32、J.H. Goldthorpe, The constant Flux. A study of class mobility in industrial societies (Oxford, 1992). The HISCLASS taxonomy will not, however, look entirely strange to users of EGP. A felicitous characteristic of a social class scheme constructed along these lines is that it results in social classe
33、s familiar to historians. It thus seems to conform to the way historians generally have seen society and as a consequence it can draw on the existing literature. Table 1 specifies how the 12 social classes in HISCLASS are derived (in a slightly stylized way) from the main dimensions of class. In ord
34、er to avoid very small numbers in some classes and thus a high volatility due to random factors, the studies in this volume have not used the full scheme but instead a version of HISCLASS condensed into seven classes: 1+2 Higher managers and professionals; 3+4+5 Lower managers and professionals, cle
35、rical and sales personnel; 6+7 Foremen and skilled workers; 8 Farmers and fishermen; 9 Lower-skilled workers; 11 Unskilled workers; 10+12 Lower-skilled and unskilled farm workers.Table 1. Dimensions of social class in HISCLASSIt is one thing to specify the main dimensions of social class; it is quit
36、e another thing to allocate occupations to the appropriate class in a systematic way. This task is now far easier than ever before, however, because much of the work has already been done by the HISCO coding scheme, which reduces the world of work worldwide into some 1,600 basic categories (and some
37、 auxiliary variables), in line with present-day schemes. To allocate the HISCO codes to a social class scheme we processed information from the Dictionary of Occupational Titles (DOT).Research for the DOT was initiated in 1934 by the United States Employment Service “for the use of public employment
38、 offices and related vocational services”. U.S. Department of Labor, The Dictionary of Occupational Titles, 2 vols (Washington, DC, 1939), Part I, p. iii. Prior to that, the various employment offices had their own systems of classifying occupations, and no common scheme existed. In addition, the va
39、rious local schemes were incomplete. This made it impossible to describe the world of work in general i.e. to compile national employment and unemployment statistics and made it more difficult to find jobs for the unemployed:. getting qualified workers into appropriate jobs is a task that can be don
40、e most adequately when the transaction is based on a thorough knowledge of both worker and job. . Thus, it becomes part of the duties of public employment offices to learn as much as possible about jobs and workers in order to be able to act as an effective placement agency. If a foundry superintend
41、ent wants the public employment office to send him a cupola tender, the office must know enough about the work and worker to be able to refer a registered applicant who has previously been classified as qualified and capable of doing the work. Ibid., p. xi.To obtain this knowledge, occupational anal
42、ysts employees from the US Employment Service went to plants and businesses all over the country to observe men and women at work. They collected information on tasks performed, knowledge required, machine equipment and materials used, physical demands and working conditions, and required worker cha
43、racteristics. The third edition of the DOT, for example, was based on over 75,000 job observations relating to over 45,000 job studies. U.S. Department of Labor, The Dictionary of Occupational Titles, 2 vols (Washington, DC, 1965), vol. 1, p. ix.The first edition of the DOT was published in 1939, th
44、e second in 1949, the third in 1965 and the fourth in 1977. In addition, several supplements or revisions to the entire corpus were prepared and published. A much revised edition of the fourth edition was published in 1991, for example, as the “fourth edition, revised 1991”. The coverage of the dict
45、ionary in terms of the number of occupations and the information per occupational category grew over time, and both the structure and the information were modified to accommodate changes in the American economy. The third edition, issued in 1965, was the first to systematically list information on t
46、he nature of the work (working conditions, work performed and industry) but also on the demands made by the work on the workers in terms of training time, aptitudes, interests, temperaments, physical demands. This information extended and replaced the previous classification into skilled, semi-skill
47、ed and unskilled occupations. The completeness of the information contained in the third edition makes it appealing to use this edition rather than previous editions for HISCO purposes. Of course, it remains to be seen to what extent information from the world of work in the USA in the mid-twentieth
48、 century can be used to characterize the worlds of work earlier or elsewhere. This very same problem makes the fourth edition of the DOT which basically contains the same sort of information a less suitable starting point for our purposes.The problem of anachronism remains when using the 1965 DOT to
49、 characterize earlier societies, but from the start it was clear that the problem was not insurmountable. This was evident from Bouchards successful attempt to use information from the French-Canadian DOT to characterize occupational terms from vital registers from the Saguenay region in French Canada in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and to classify these occupational terms systematically into a small number of classes. Bouchards book is extremely well docume