Occupational Prestige

I'm just reading some bits and pieces on occupational prestige. There tends to be pretty good consensus around which jobs are most prestigious, and there is a surprising degree of stability in rankings of occupational prestige, across time and culture. Doctors, for example, have held a high occupational status for centuries, in more or less all culture. But identifying what factors make one occupation more prestigious than another have been surprisingly hard to pin down.

There have been theories that suggest that key factors are influence and money - jobs which have a wide ranging influence, and those which are linked to financial power houses (NB I don't here mean high salaries, but people who have influence on how money is spent - budget holders and the like) are more likely to be prestigious. So power is usually important, but there are those who think that the causal relationship is the other way round - ie people in high prestige jobs are powerful, rather than that power leads to high prestige. I was thinking that academics are often asked to take on powerful roles (advisory committees, influencing policy etc) even though their jobs in themselves are neither powerful nor in charge of large sums of money.

Education and skill are other factors that are frequently mentioned. Most high prestige jobs require extensive training and / or high levels of education to enter.

So, I can reveal that the most prestigious occupations are:

1. Physician
2. Lawyer
3. Computer systems analyst 
4. Post-secondary teacher
5. Physicist or astronomer
6. Chemist 
7. Chemical engineer
8. Architects
9. Biological or life scientist
10. Physical scientist
11. Dentist
12. Judge
13. Engineer
14. Chief executive
15. Geologist
16. Psychologist
17.  Manager, medicine
18. Aerospace engineer
19. Clergy
20. Civil engineer

I think this is quite an interesting list. I can see that these professions all deserve a place here. It's all rather science-heavy (14 out of the 20). I think my personal list might include a musician or an author, although as one of my students pointed out to me recently, with the rise of e-books and self-publishing, anyone can be an author now, so that perhaps reduces the prestige that comes from a hard to attain job.

 Zhou, Q. (2005) The Institutional Logic of Occupational Prestige Ranking: Reconceptualization and Reanalyses American Journal of Sociology 111 (1) 90 - 140