Knowledge Bank

Occupational position comes to be the most popular indicator of social status in sociological analyses. In what follows I put forward arguments supporting validity of this approach. I present: (1) theoretical rationale pointing out that occupational divisions determine basic areas of social structuration in contemporary societies, (2) empirical findings showing that occupational status is valid indicator of various attributes of the social status, (3) arguments that occupational data are well manageable in operative terms: i.e. in stage of collection of data during fieldwork and in coding. This paper is supposed to be first from the series reporting on research aimed at improvement of analytical value of occupational status in sociological surveys carried out in Poland.