The Relative Associational Contiguity of Occupations in an Urban Setting

Following a tradition that emphasizes an associational definition of social class, we have applied the new technique of smallest space analysis to the reported informal associations of an urban sample of 422 white men. We defined a social class as a subset of a population determined by partitioning of the total population according to such associational relationships as consanguineal and affinal kinship, friendship, and common residence. Three dimensions suffice to portray approximately the relative degrees of association among 55 groups of occupations; only the first principal axis of the configuration relates substantially to occupational prestige ratings. Clearly a more sophisticated theoretical and empirical approach to the study of occupational interrelationships than that previously presupposed in occupational prestige studies is required in future work.