John Goyder, The Prestige Squeeze: Occupational Prestige in Canada since 1965. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009, 236 pp. $34.95 paper (978-0-7735-3611-1), $85.00 hardcover (978-0-7735-3582-4)
The problem John Goyder depicts in The Prestige Squeeze has a long tradition in sociology, going back to Pareto, Sorokin, Marx and Weber: changes in the ranking of occupations and how they come about. With such a lot of historical baggage, new hypotheses are few and far between. Goyder offers some solid and forthright ones, befitting the current state of affairs in this field: 1. education and income are highly connected to prestige, and gender, skills, occupational presentation, and characteristics of the rater influence occupational prestige rankings; 2. higher income inequality disperses prestige ratings (while individualization caps upper echelons); 3. postmodernism has a negative impact on consensus in ratings. … Read more
