Testing the universality of historical occupational stratification structures across time and space

In this paper we report on the estimation of a variety of ‘HIS-CAM’ scales of occupational stratification. The scales are estimated from marriage records collected over the period 18001938 in six countries: Britain, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden. A dataset of approximately 400,000 marriages is collated, from which the occupation of the groom, bride, and parents of the groom and bride are given HISCO codes. The analysis proceeds by conducting 'RC-II' association models on cross-tabulations of child-to-parent occupations. These models may be estimated at a ‘universal’ level (a single occupational scale on the entire dataset), but they may also be estimated on subsets of data from different time periods and/or countries (a series of ‘specific’ occupational scales, for different countries). We find that specific occupational scale estimations are statistically favoured, and offer some revealing insights into the structure of occupational stratification in the period. Nevertheless, we also find evidence that universal occupational stratification scales are substantively parsimonious, insofar as they do a fair job of incorporating most, if not all, of the important differences in occupational stratification positions.