By Sally Raskoff
Occupational prestige is a concept we sociologists use to better understand our society. Occupational prestige is measured by a scale created from the aggregate opinions about the status and perceived worthiness of an occupation.
In American culture, we assign a high value to those occupations that use mind-work over body-work and that have high financial rewards. For example, a doctor has more social esteem and occupational prestige than the maintenance worker. If we work in an occupation that has low social esteem, we don’t announce it when we first meet people, especially if those new people inhabit occupations with higher prestige than our own.
A report from the New Economics Foundation (NEF) in the United Kingdom uses a new way of gauging the social value of occupations. The BBC recently reported that hospital cleaners have more value to society than bankers.
The NEF is a self-described “think and do tank” or advocacy organization focused on local and global ecological sustainability issues. Their study, titled A Bit Rich, has many important aspects, yet its newsworthiness is sociologically interesting.
The NEF’s goals in writing and releasing the study is to point out the societal and economic impact of occupations which are often the opposite of the way we tend to think about occupational prestige.
Their case studies of the hospital worker, banker, advertising executive, tax accountant, childcare worker, and waste recycling worker use a modified Social Return on Investment (SROI) method and illustrate the cost and benefit to the UK of these different occupations. Thus, their findings indicate that bankers “destroy £7 of social value for every pound in value they generate” and with respect to hospital cleaners, “for every £1 they are paid, over £10 in social value is generated.”
While their modification of the SROI methodology isn’t exactly mainstream, and they aren’t publishing their findings in a peer-reviewed journal, their findings are interesting. Even more interesting to me is their attempt to change the way the public thinks about the relative prestige of various occupations.
Will they be successful at reframing society’s perspective on occupations? Will their ultimate goals of reforming economic pay scales and societal values towards ecologically sustainable hierarchies be achieved?
I have no answer for that. This study was released at the same time as an international summit on global ecological issues: their timing is perfect and, I assume, calculated.
Will their study help people feel more kindly towards hospital and child care workers and less supportive of bankers and tax accountants? Not likely.
Even in the wake of the recent economic meltdown, the capitalistic values that imbue our society with a focus on competition and “more is more” are still in place. We still value those occupations that make tons of money, even at our own expense, and ignore those occupations that involve physical labor (except for sports) and do the embodied dirty work of society.
Now that we assume we’ve moved through the worst of the global economic recession, the urge to restructure economic aspects of society is no longer deeply felt.
The NEF’s call to restructure society towards equal pay hierarchies is not new, nor are they alone in the call. I would imagine that Marx would be supportive of their goals as the current state of global economics aligns very well with his theory of the last stages of capitalism. What do you think Marx would say?
Of course, Marx would agree with them. It may be unbelievable for us that "leading City bankers destroy £7 of social value for every pound in value they generate". But Marx would tell the causes of this fact. He would explain that the contradiction between the productive forces and productive relations has reached to its ultimate level, so the capitalism is no longer a profitable system.
Posted by: Behrouz Safari | December 17, 2009 at 05:52 PM