Please join us for a job talk by Dr. Lauren Valentino, Postdoctoral Associate, Kenan Institute for Ethics, Duke University, NC. Talk title and abstract are below. No RSVP Required.
Title: "So What Do You Do?" How Social Position Shapes Judgments of Occupational Prestige
Abstract: How do people perceive the status hierarchy? Stratification and inequality scholars have tended to assume that everyone perceives the status hierarchy the same way, as a homoarchy. However, an emerging perspective from the study of culture posits that our view of the status hierarchy is shaped by our position within that hierarchy – as a heterarchy. This study provides the first test of these two frameworks using a classic measure of social status: occupational prestige. Through a Latent Class Regression technique, I analyze representative data from the 2012 U.S. General Social Survey module on occupational prestige judgments, linking these to individual-level characteristics from the GSS as well as federal occupation-level data. Results provide strong support for the existence of occupational heterarchy: I find evidence for at least four distinct ways of constructing the hierarchy of occupations in the U.S. Furthermore, which hierarchy a person perceives is a function of their location in social space.
