Jobs and tasks offer very different ways of investigating the nature of work. Jobs or occupations summarize the unique aspects that characterize a person’s overall work activities, while work tasks focus on the everyday constituent activities that make up both an occupation and unpaid work. This article combines occupations with work tasks as ways of measuring structural change in the early modern economy and compares the results with those obtained with a conventional occupation-based approach. Studies of men’s occupations demonstrate a decline in agriculture and increase in manufacturing and services over time. Increased urbanization implies similar structural changes. Evidence of work tasks problematizes the assumption of a perfect match between occupations and sectors underlying these accounts, showing that service tasks in particular were significant also for individuals with jobs in the primary and secondary sectors. Combining the two approaches confirms that significant structural change took place, not least because towns and cities were industrializing, but also reveals that the service sector was far more important than indicated by measures of the occupational structure based on job titles alone.
Aucoin et al. (Sun,) studied this question.