Social stratification is interested in unequal life chances and assumes the existence of a hierarchy of more or less advantageous occupations. Yet occupations are not easily translated into a linear hierarchical measure. Influential scales combine multiple indicators and lack intuitive interpretation. We therefore present a new scale based on occupations’ earnings potential (OEP). OEP measures the median earnings of occupations and expresses them as percentiles of the overall earnings structure: if mechanics earn the national median wage, their OEP is 50. We construct national OEP scales using annual microdata pooled over several decades for Germany, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK and the US. Consistent with the Treiman constant, these national scales are highly correlated over time and across countries, justifying the use of one common OEP scale. When applied to another European dataset, the common OEP scale explains a quarter of the variance in earnings—and works as well for men as women and as well for countries used to construct the scale as for other countries. Moreover, it is associated with the causes (education) and consequences (social mobility) that the theory expects. OEP thereby provides a simple and parsimonious indicator of economic advantage that can be meaningfully interpreted.

A dead-end job (DEJ) can be seen as an occupation that does not offer career opportunities: there are no career ladders and few opportunities for wage increments (Bihagen and Ohls 2007). There are several possible reasons for assuming that occupations in themselves differ in career chances and therefore that career chances are not only determined by the efforts and characteristics of individuals, e.g., human capital, but also by the occupation individuals are found in. Bihagen and Ohls (2007) suggest and describe a way of constructing measures of the career chances of occupations from data on the typical wage increments of individuals in different occupations based on the International Standard Classification of Occupations (ISCO-88). Measures related to career chances of occupations can be used for a number of purposes, e.g., to study health and quality of life (QOL) outcomes. There is a vast literature on socioeconomic status (SES) and health/QOL (cf., Elo 2009; Graham 2007), but we do not find any on dead-end jobs and health/QOL. Bihagen and Ohls (2007) used measures of DEJ for shedding light on the question of whether women’s career chances in Sweden are due to an overrepresentation of women in occupations that generally lack career chances. Their results indicate that such an overrepresentation is one factor for women’s lacking career chances in Sweden.

A common assumption in the social stratification literature is that the lion’s share of people reaches occupational maturity quite early in working life, i.e., they end up in an occupation/class position and stay there. The conventional view is that career maturity is reached around the age of 35. By using Swedish longitudinal occupational biographies across six birth cohorts from 1925 to 1984, this study challenges this view. Our findings reveal substantial career transitions throughout working life, an increase across cohorts, and a wide variation in the age of the last class transition. This suggests that careers are not in general static positions from a certain age, but fluctuate over time. There are signs of a general slowing down of career transitions across working lives, but this comes later in life and to a smaller extent than expected. These findings suggest that research often based on cross sectional data, e.g. studies on intergenerational mobility and class differences in health, need to incorporate career mobility data. More research is needed to illuminate if the results of Sweden, in terms of a low and decreasing level of occupational maturity can be replicated in other countries.

There is a conception that contemporary work lives become ever more complex. Pioneering research has indicated that work lives have indeed become more complex, yet at a modestly increasing pace. This paper uses Swedish registry data across an exceptionally long time period, including cohorts born from 1931 to 1983. The following conclusions are drawn using state-of-the-art methods of measuring sequence complexity. For early-careers, an increasing complexity trend is evident between the 1950s and 1960s birth cohorts, yet complexity fluctuates around a stable trend for the 1970s birth cohorts and onward. For mid-careers, which are considerably more stable on average, complexity has decreased among women born between the 1930s and the early-1950s. However, the opposite trend holds true for men, resulting in a gender convergence in work complexity. We observe a subsequent standstill of the mid-career complexity trend across both genders, followed by a modest decline for the last observed cohorts. Analyses point to educational expansion as an important driver of the initial increase of early-career complexity. Taken together, this study affirms an initial shift to more work life complexity in the twentieth century, yet we find no unidirectional trend toward more complexity over the last decades.

From a sociological stratification perspective, we would expect occupationally based measures to be valid proxies for lifetime earnings, but recent research suggests that annual earnings outperform occupational measures. In this article, we examine how class, occupation, education, and annual earnings are associated with lifetime earnings across almost complete working lives, at ages of around 20–65 years for Swedish cohorts born in the 1940s. Our results indicate that while annual earnings are considerably more accurate proxies for the lion’s share of working life, occupational measures are as expected more stable and somewhat better at the start and end of working lives. Our results also support the idea that micro-classes are better proxies of lifetime earnings than big classes. Contrary to some previous research, occupational measures perform better for women than for men in this respect, and occupational measures are better than education. Our main conclusions are that proxies for lifetime earnings have life-cycle biases that should be considered in, for instance, analyses of intergenerational mobility, and that occupationally based measures are more stable than annual earnings but, overall, are not very valid as indicators of lifetime earnings compared to annual earnings.

Tak Wing Chan and John Goldthorpe (CG) have argued that it makes theoretical and empirical sense to use indicators of both class and status in analyses of cultural consumption, political attitudes and labour market outcomes in order to disentangle different mechanisms of stratification. However, we argue that class and status measured by occupationally based stratification variables are too strongly mutually associated for this to be a reliable approach. We provide empirical analyses, using secondary survey data from the UK’s BHPS, that indicate that the measures of class and status largely tap the same form of stratification. It turns out that class accounts for around 75% and more of the variation in status and even more if excluding outliers. Moreover, class and status are similarly associated with earnings, have similar experience-earnings curves, and patterns in relevant model residuals are not consistent with the theoretical differences between class and status. In conclusion we point out alternative and more accurate usages of Weber’s concepts of status and also suggest a more realistic and pragmatic view on occupationally based stratification variables.