A Social Classification Scheme for Historical Occupational Data

The authors introduce a new directly comparative approach to the coding and classification of occupational data for the purposes of social analysis. The lack of an explicit way of translating historical occupational titles into a meaningful class or social scheme, which can also be applied across national boundaries, has hindered studies of both past and present societies. The authors present a possible solution—the Social Power (SOCPO) scheme—to the problem. To illustrate how it works empirically, they apply the scheme to a comparison of marital mobility in the industrial districts of two northern European countries over the course of the nineteenth century.