A 2024 Saturday Night Live sketch takes viewers to an airplane cabin where a pregnant passenger in labor seeks a doctor, but no one on board is qualified. So, one passenger—a lawyer—volunteers to help on the basis that he has the “second best job” after doctor. Other passengers then jump in with their own claims about engineers, teachers, and mothers being the rightful number two. Debate ensues, leaving both the pregnant woman and the occupational hierarchy in limbo.
Yet previous sociological work on occupational prestige suggests there is one true ladder and ‘everyone’ knows it. If that’s the case, then why does the SNL sketch resonate?
In our recent research, and in previous work, we reconsider how Americans perceive the occupational hierarchy, a concept at the heart of stratification research. We find that the apparent consensus around occupational prestige primarily reflects the views of a small group of highly educated Americans. People outside this group deviate from this consensus, but not in systematic ways, leaving the elites’ consensus to dominate. In the end, there’s much less agreement about the status of occupations than estimates have suggested.
An Apparent Consensus
More than 50 years ago, U.S. sociologists seemingly clarified a central mechanism in the production of inequality—occupations with high social standing according to most people are those that typically pay well and require higher education. Surgeons and judges are on the top rungs of the prestige ladder while ditch diggers and dishwashers are on the lower rungs. In other words, income, education, and occupational prestige reinforce each other.
Donald Treiman’s (1977) Occupational Prestige in Comparative Perspective showed that if you ask people to order occupations according to pretty much any status criterion (“importance,” “prestige,” “social standing,” “desirability”, etc.), their ladders would be positively correlated because higher-income jobs reserved for the educationally credentialled would be closer to the top and non-exclusive, low-income jobs would be closer to the bottom. And this would be true if you asked people from across the U.S., from around the world, or even from different time periods. Taken as a whole, it’s easy to see why the occupational ladder earned the description of being, as Hout and DiPrete noted, “the only universal sociologists have discovered.”
Today, occupational prestige scores are widely available, off-the-shelf measurements. An occupation’s “true” social standing is distilled as the average of everyone’s votes. Social mobility is captured with movement up or down the ladder. In effect, the question of what Americans think of occupations was asked, answered, and black boxed.
Occupations as Cultural Objects
Our work started from a different perspective, namely that occupational titles are cultural objects and that people vary in the meanings they give them. It’s clear that people construct narratives about occupations around their symbolic value, their moral goodness and power, and the types of bodies that are ‘right’ for different types of labor.
Hence our question: who is on the same page about which narratives?
To find out, we analyzed the same 1989 and 2012 GSS occupational prestige data examined by many before us. In both surveys, respondents were asked to pile sort about 100 occupational titles on a 9-rung ladder of social standing. We focused on the 40 occupations in 1989 and 20 occupations in 2012 that all respondents were asked to sort.
Using a distance measure, we track consensus within and between groups defined by the crossovers of race, gender, and educational attainment. We find a cluster of individuals who are structurally advantaged—wealthier, white men and women with college degrees—who tend to sort occupations in much the same way. They are largely in unison because, as expected, they reserve the top rungs of the ladder for occupations associated with higher education.
Non-elites, in contrast, are not nearly as cohesive a group when it comes to how they rank occupations. Their opinions about occupations are highly diverse, meaning there is no critical mass of agreement. Even if each opinion holder feels passionately about their version of the ladder, diversity in ladders at the collective level amounts to blur.
Taken together, our work shows that public consensus is not truly broad but rather highly uneven. It’s not that most people mostly agree. It’s that a select group is in strong agreement while the majority is in mild agreement. As predicted by theories of power and legitimacy, the presence of consensus among elites and the absence of consensus among non-elites allows elites to define the occupational hierarchy in a self-justifying manner.
Lockstep Thinking and Legitimacy
Why does this matter? The empirical twist here may seem subtle, but we believe the lesson is substantial. If as Pierre Bourdieu says, a “vision of the social world, when it is consensual… creates the social world”, why is it that sociologists take the average as the key object of inquiry and mostly ignore spread? Consensus is a legitimizing force, so we should be paying more attention to where consensus burns bright.
By making the distribution of consensus our focus, our study shows that, counterintuitively, the universal nature of the occupational ladder does not mean a uniform level of consensus on which occupations belong on which rungs. By checking under the hood, we find that elites in lockstep are the ones driving apparent consensus in 1989 and 2012.
This is not just better empirical description but also more analytical insight about the mechanisms through which legitimacy is built. If “what is becomes what is right”, then we should want to know who decides and how they enforce “what is”.
If social groups can “fight” to impose a status order by simply being in lockstep about a “correct” order, then we should (re)consider the social forces that produce lockstep thinking and cultural directives. Which institutions are more effective at socializing its members into uniform thinking and why? What nurtures or kills heterogeneity in cultural scripts within social spaces? What happens when groups become extremely homogeneous (or heterogenous) in their thinking? Ultimately, whose visions win in the making of the social world?
The Rise of Contested Narratives
In closing, we believe there is much to be gained from tracking the distribution of a given consensus. In the case of occupational perceptions, we note that this is a particular interesting time to pay attention to the distribution of consensus alongside the content of consensus. Just as the true market value of a home is whatever a buyer is willing to pay, the market value and social standing of an occupation is driven by what people want it to be. Currently, the political left and right are pushing diverging narratives on select occupations.
In 2017, Pew found that Republicans rated Police Officers far more positively than Democrats. It is also well documented that portions of the left started a movement to defund the police in 2020. Conversely, the same survey found that Democrats rated College Professors far more positively than Republicans. Today, it is well documented that portions of the right are actively seeking to defund higher education.
This level of contestation is extreme. It remains unclear how much internal consensus there is within the left and the right to get their respective narratives to stick, or if political power can be used to bypass consensus.
Authors
Freda B. Lynn is Professor of Sociology at the University of Iowa. Her research focuses on status, inequality, and the social construction of value
Yongren Shi is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Arizona. His research focuses on the cultural and social processes of group dynamics.
Kevin Kiley is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at North Carolina State University. His research explores the social and cognitive sources of opinion and belief stability and change over the life course.
Read More
Freda B. Lynn, Yongren Shi, and Kevin Kiley. “Intersectional Group Agreement on the Occupational Order” in Social Psychological Quarterly 2025. https://doi.org/10.1177/01902725241256378.
Image: randa2e via Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)