Occupations and Professions

Occupations

People working in the same occupation may have much in common in terms of their education and training, their working conditions, their job tasks, and their experiences. They may have similar incomes and opportunities for advancement. They may even share a culture—a shared outlook and norms about behavior, dress, language, and terminology, and other aspects of their work. This is not necessarily the case, however. Individuals in the same occupation who work in different firms, for different employers, or in different organizational/structural positions may have very different experiences of work. Although we assume that there is some variability within occupations, occupational categories are nonetheless useful, providing a helpful tool for sociological research into people's experiences of working and for research into occupational distributions and trends.

Occupational Classifications and Trends

Occupational categories group together people doing similar work. For instance, in the United States, the most commonly used classification is the Dictionary of Occupational Titles (DOT). This classification system sorts occupations by the nature of the work performed, the industry in which it is performed, training time required to do the job, working conditions, and other factors. Each occupation is assigned a nine-digit code that details its characteristics. The first number denotes the type of work, in the broadest sense. For example, professional and managerial occupations in the DOT begin with a 0 or 1, while occupations in farming, fishing, and other primary industries [Page 643]begin with a 4 and those in manufacturing begin with a 5.

Dr. Raphaela Goldbach-Mansky examines the left hand of a male patient at a National Institutes of Health clinic, May 2012. In occupational prestige scales, professions are typically ranked near the top and include doctors, dentists, lawyers, and judges.

The next two digits refine this categorization more, for instance, to distinguish dentists, doctors, and lawyers within the professions category, or to differentiate farmers from forestry workers. The middle three digits in the nine-digit code provide a rating of “worker functions” in terms of how, and how much, workers in these occupations work with data, people, and things. The final three digits further differentiate similar jobs, so that no two jobs (even in similar fields with similar function ratings) have the same code. Such rating systems provide a useful way of identifying and classifying occupations and can be valuable tools in research, allowing us to make meaningful, but sometimes subtle, distinctions—separating the high-level manager at a multinational corporation from a middle manager at a smaller company, for example. Given that the nature of these occupations as well as job security, authority, and many other factors vary across organizational setting, industry, and a number of other dimensions, it is valuable to have a classification system that makes such distinctions. Nevertheless, it must be noted that few researchers use the full nine-digit codes, generally finding it easier to study occupations at a higher level of aggregation.

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