The Official Representation of Social Classes in Britain, the United States, and France: The Professional Model and “Les Cadres”

The earliest version of this paper was presented in Madrid in May 1988 to the conference of I.S.A. Research Committee for the History of Sociology as “An Empirical Model of Social Classes in Inter-War Europe and America.” I wish to thank Alain Desrosières (Institut National de la Statistique et des Études économiques, Paris), Margo (Conk) Anderson (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee), and Martin Bulmer (London School of Economics) for their subsequent helpful comments. A second round of debts were incurred to the members of Luc Boltanski's seminar and to Dr. Allan Silver of Columbia University, who attended a presentation to the Groupe de Sociologie Politique et Morale of the École des Haut études en Sciences Sociales in March 1989. I wish finally to thank Hilary Cooper, Libby Schweber, Jean-Pierre Beaud of Université du Quebec à Montréal and the anonymous referee of this journal for their valuable comments. A brief summary of the first part of this essay has been published in Japanese in Kajitani, M., ed., Sociology and Ideas (Gakubunsha, Tokyo 1989), 139–43.

¹ In Britain there have always in fact been five and not six social status gradings in the professional model. In the 1910s and 1920s the graded scheme comprised five categories, with an attempt to keep separate the higher status "non-manual" workers in classes I and II from the lower status "manual" workers in classes III, IV and V. At the 1911 census clerical workers were actually allocated to class I, reflecting the relatively high status of clerks throughout the Victorian era, when literacy skills remained at a premium in a society lacking an effective universal elementary education system until the 1890s. In the 1921 census, clerical workers were removed to class II, still unequivocally of higher status than the skilled manual workers of class III. However, by the end of the 1920s routine clerical work had suffered such an obvious relative decline in both remuneration and prestige that white collar clerical workers were now classed alongside the skilled manual occupations of class III. This practice continued until the 1971 census, when the categorical distinction between manual and non-manual was re-emphasised by splitting Class III into class IIIN and class HIM for non-manual (mainly clerical) and manual (skilled) occupations respectively. Thus, there are now six social classes, exactly as in the United States variant of the professional model, but because IIIN and HIM notionally have equivalent social status, there are still only five grades of social position in the British professional model. On the interwar status demise of clerical workers, see Klingender, F. D., The Condition of Clerical Labour in Britain (1935); Lockwood, David, The Blackcoated Worker (1958).

² The new Standard Occupational Classification was introduced for the 1980 United States census to achieve consistency with the classificatory procedures independently evolved by the Department of Commerce and the Office of Federal Statistical Policy and Standards. Its six summary classes are: 1). managerial and professional; 2). technical, sales and administrative support; 3). service occupations; 4). fanning, forestry and fishing; 5). precision production, crafts and repair; 6). operatives, fabricators, labourers (The 1980 Census of Population: Classified Index of Industries and Occupations [PHC80-R4], [Washington, D.C. 1982]).

³ See, for instance, Conk, M. (Anderson), The United States Census and Labor Force Change. A History of Occupation Statistics 1870–1940 (Ann Arbor, Michigan: UMI Research Press, 1978), 81, for the transfer of the essential characteristics of this model into the United States's “social mobility” research tradition via its enshrinement in the famous National Opinion Research Center of Chicago (N.O.R.C.) occupational status scale compiled by North, C. C. and Hatt, P. K. (“Jobs and Occupations: A Popular Evaluation,” Opinions News, IX [1947], 3–13). An example of equal significance in Britain's case would be the popular market research and political opinion polling classification, “A, B, Cl, C2, D, E,” originating from the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising and strongly derivative from the official professional model (Monk, D., Social Grading on the National Readership Survey [Joint Industry Committee for National Readership Survey, 1970]).

⁴ The changing classification of clerical workers in the British scheme (see note 1, above) perfectly illustrates this aspect of the model's ambiguity. Flexibility to the point of placing nonmanual clerical workers in the same class as skilled manual workers, as in 1931, would seem to breach the terms of the second assumption outlined in the text above. However, it is relevant to note that the contemporary authority on clerical workers in Britain, F. D. Klingender, has argued that clerical work had become completely “mechanised” and “proletarianised” in the modern business office (Klingender, , The Condition, especially p. 94). The implication of Klingender's analysis in 1935 might, therefore, be taken to imply that the Registrar-General's movement of clerical workers out of class II and into class III was a correct attempt to preserve, not confound, a shifting conventional definition of the borderline between the truly non-manual and the manual. Routine clerical labour has, of course, had a marginal status along the highly artificial divide between manual and non-manual throughout this century. For a more recent evaluation of clerical workers class position in inter-war Britain, see Waites, B., A Class Society at War, 1914–18 (Leamington Station, 1987), chs. 1, 7.

⁵ Hodge, R. W. et al. , “A Comparative Study of Occupational Prestige,” in Bendix, R. and Lipset, S. M., Class, Status and Power (2nd ed., London, 1967), 309–21; Treiman, D. J., Occupational Prestige in Comparative Perspective (New York, 1977). For a rather different perspective, see Marsh, C., “Social Class and Occupation,” in Burgess, R., ed., Key Variables in Sociological Investigation (London, 1985).

⁶ Desrosières, A., “Éléments pour l’histoire des nomenclatures socio-professionelles,” Pour une histoire de la statistique I (Paris: Institut National de la Statistique et des Études Economique, 1977).

⁷ Desrosières, A., “Éléments pour l’histoire.” During the second half of the nineteenth century (1851–91), there was a five-fold classification according to the individual's occupation: chefs ou patrons; employeés; ouvriers; journaliers; hommes de peine. From 1896 to 1936 there was a system whereby five positions of “employment status” or working environment (situations sociales) were distinguished: patrons; ouvriers; employés; chomeurs; isolés. Between 1936 and 1954 there were several short-lived classifications until the code socio-professional (CSP) designed by Jean Porte was formulated in 1954, envisaging nine major categories (farmers; farm workers; industrial and commercial employers; liberal professions and cadres supérieurs; cadres moyens; clerical workers; manual workers; personal services; and others). But this only remained in operation until the 1982 census, when the current classification first appeared. For a careful explication of the non-hierarchical principles involved in the 1954 classification, see Desrosières, A. and Thevénot, L., Les catégories socio-professionnelles (Paris: Éditions La Découverte,1988), ch. 1, in particular pp. 24–9.

⁸ Desrosières, A. and Thevénot, L., Les catégories,27. The preparatory work behind the new French classification was recorded in: Desrosières, A., Goy, A., and Thevénot, L., “L’identité sociale dans le travail statistique; la nouvelle nomenclature des professions et catégories socioprofessionelles,” Économie et statistique, no. 152 (02 1983), 55–81. See below, notes 12 and 92.

⁹ Note that the terms professional and minor professions do not, of course, appear in the French specification. They are used here in their Anglo-American sense merely as a translation device to assist the Anglophone reader in appreciating the contents of the French classes.

¹⁰ Desrosières, A. and Thevénot, L., Les catégories, 71–88.

¹¹ The French professions libérales are. strictly speaking, a subset only of the somewhat wider Anglo-Saxon category of the professions, which would also include what are for the French the entirely distinct social categories of cadres superiéurs techniques and certain enseignants (teachers) (Duriez, B. et al. , Des representations des structures sociales: nomenclatures socioprofessionelles au Royaume Uni et en Espagne [Paris: C.N.R.S.. 1988], 5).

¹² Desrosières, A. and Thevénot, L., Les catégories, ch. I, 70–1; and especially ch. V, section 1, entitled “L’éspace des positions professionelles n’est pas une simple échelle” (emphasis added). For a highly compressed and accessible account in English of the multi-dimensional, historicist, and anti-axiomatic principles informing the construction of the French scheme, see Desrosières, A., “How to Make Things Which Hold Together: Social Science, Statistics and the State,” in Wagner, P., Wittrock, B., and Whitley, R., eds., Discourses on Society, XV (1990), 195-–218, especially 207–9. Also see below, footnote 92.

¹⁴ For further information on this, see Szreter, S.R.S., “The First Scientific Social Structure of Modern Britain 1875–83,” in Bonfield, L., Smith, R. M., and Wrightson, K., eds.. The World We Have Gained (Oxford, 1986), 337–54.

¹⁵ The first systematic exposition of this credo was Galton, F., Hereditary Genius. An Inquiry into Its Laws and Consequences (1869; reprint, with an introduction by H. J. Eysenck, New York. 1978). On Galton's notion of civic worth in application to an empirical model of society, see Norton, B., “Psychologists and Class,” in Webster, C., ed., Biology, Medicine and Society 1840–1940 (Cambridge 1981), 289–314.

¹⁶ This paragraph summarises information presented in Simon Szreter, Conceptions and Refutations: Social Class, Social Science and the History of Falling Fertility in Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming), ch. 2.

¹⁷ Szreter, S.R.S., “The Genesis of the Registrar-General's Social Classification of Occupations,” British Journal of Sociology, 35:4 (12 1984), 522–46. T.H.C. Stevenson was William Fair's third successor at the G.R.O. to the key post of Superintendent of Statistics, occupying this position from 1909 to 1931.

¹⁸ Szreter, S.R.S., “The Genesis,” 531.

¹⁹ Mackenzie, D. A.. Statistics in Britain 1865–1930 (Edinburgh, 1981), 78, 86 for numerous examples of Pearson's use of this terminology of brain-workers versus hand-workers from the 1880s to the 1900s.

²⁰ See below, footnote 57 and accompanying text.

²¹ Szreter, S.R.S., “The Genesis,” 540–3.

²² AndersonConk, M., The United States Census; M. (Anderson) Conk, “Occupational Classification in the United States Census: 1870–1940,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 9:1 (1978), 111–30; Anderson, M., The American Census: A Social History (Yale University Press, 1988).

²³ Edwards, A. M., “Classification of Occupations,” Journal of the American Statistical Association, XII (1911), 618–46, 619.

²⁴ Conk, M.Anderson, The United States Census, 11, 72 -–75. General Francis Walker (1840–97) was the foremost United States economist of the post-Civil War era, his main period of influence falling between Henry C. Carey (1793–1879) and John Bates Clark (1847–1938). Walker was founding president of the American Economic Association (1885–92); a president of the American Statistical Association (1883–97); and president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1881–97).

²⁵ Hunt was a former Department of Labor official placed in charge of the occupation statistics at the 1890 and 1900 censuses.

²⁶ Conk, M. Anderson, The United States Census, 15, 75–6.

²⁷ Ibid., 76.

²⁸ Edwards, A. M., “Classification,” 620.

²⁹ Stevenson, T.H.C., “Suggested Lines of Advance in English Vital Statistics,” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, LXXIII (1910), 685–713, especially 700–1.

³⁰ Edwards, A. M., “Classification,” 621–2.

³¹ Edwards, A. M., “Social-Economic Groups of the United States,” Journal of the American Statistical Association, 15 (1917), 643–61, 644.

³² The scheme was formally presented as: I. proprietors, officials and managers; II. clerks and kindred workers; III. skilled workers; IV. semiskilled workers; V. laborers; VI. servants; VII. public officials; VIII. semi-official public employees; IX. professional persons (Edwards, A. M., “Social-Economic Groups,” 645).

³³ This was a concept which did not have a precise counterpart in Britain's official classification scheme until the 1951 census, when the term “partly skilled” was introduced as the name of the G.R.O.'s class IV, which had previously been titled “intermediate” (between class III, “skilled,” and class V, “unskilled”).

³⁴ Edwards, A. M., “A Social-Economic Grouping of the Gainful Workers of the United States,” Journal of the American Statistical Association, XXVIII (1933), 377–87, 386. But note that Anderson has discovered that it was official practice, according to Edwards' own instructions, for the Bureau's clerical staff to routinely classify a very substantial number of imprecise occupational returns on the manuscript census schedules to those kinds of occupations popularly perceived to fit whatever associated ethnic, racial, or gender information could be gleaned alongside the occupational statement from the original schedules! The occupations and classes were therefore constructed in the first place with biased ethnic and racial contents. Apparently, Edwards could never see the consequent circularity in the kind of reasoning contained in this quotation. See Conk, M.(Anderson), “Accuracy, Efficiency and Bias; The Interpretation of Women's Work in the U.S. Census Statistics of Occupations 1890–1940,” Historical Methods, 14 (1981), 65–72, especially 68, 72; Conk, M. Anderson, “Occupational Classification.” 125– 8.

³⁵ Hourwich, I., “The Social-Economic Classes of the Population of the United States,” Journal of Political Economy, 19, 188–215; 309–37 (two parts). I am indebted to Margo Anderson for alerting me to this episode and for supplementary information, drawn from her knowledge of the relevant primary sources and private papers.

³⁶ Conk, M.Anderson, The United States Census, 76–9.

³⁷ Anderson, M., personal communication, 8 07 1988.

³⁸ For an informative recent contribution on demography in the United States at this time, see Hodgson, D.. “Ideological Origins of the Population Association of America,” Population and Development Review, 17:1 (1991), 1–34. On the expansion of other aspects of social and policy science in the United States between wars, see, for instance, Stanfield, J. H., Philanthropy and Jim Crow in American Social Science (Greenwood: Westport, Conn. 1985); and Alchon, G., The Invisible Hand of Planning: Capitalism, Social Science and the State in the 1920s (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985).

³⁹ Ryder, N. B., “Frank Wallace Notestein 1902–83,” Population Studies, 38:1 (1984), 5–20, 6–9.

⁴⁰ Eugenics remains one of the most contested and contestable terms in the lexicon of twentieth-century social, scientific, and political history. The subject is vast, as its meaning, membership, preferred policies, scientific beliefs, and significance have all varied between different countries and over time within each country. Two excellent general studies of particular relevance to the developments related here have recently become available. Soloway, R. A., Demography and Degeneration. Eugenics and the Declining Birthrate in Twentieth-Century Britain (Chapel Hill, 1990) provides a valuable account, inter alia, of inter-war British demographic social scientists. Kevles, D. J., In the Name of Eugenics (Harmondsworth, 1985) very helpfully relates Anglo-Saxon developments on both sides of the Atlantic.

⁴¹ The major publication from this unit's work was Hogben, L., ed.. Political Arithmetic (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1938). For a wider perspective on the politics of sociobiological science in Britain at this time, seeWerskey, G., The Invisible College (1978).

⁴² By the late 1920s there was already a more nuanced intellectual position than that prevailing before the Great War. There was a willingness to countenance the importance of environmental, cultural, and even economic factors alongside the biological, even among those, such as the millionaire patron, Frederick Osborn, who now moderated the extreme hereditarian notions he had inherited (presumably environmentally!) from his die-hard hereditarian uncle, H. F. Osborn (Notestein, F. W., “Demography in the United States: A Partial Account of the Development of the Field,” Population and Development Review, 8:4 [1982], 651–87, 659–60).

⁴³ Census, , 1911, vol. XIII, Fertility of Marriage Report, Part 2 (H.M.S.O., 1923).

⁴⁴ In fact Stevenson's Report of 1923 did not constitute an unequivocal endorsement of the class-differential pattern of fertility decline, even though it was received as such by the international community of demographic social scientists. See Szreter, S.R.S.. “The Genesis,” 530–7; Simon Szreter, Conceptions and Refutations, ch. 6.

⁴⁵ Moore, E., A Bibliography of Differential Fertility in English, French and German (Edinburgh, 1933). Eldon Moore was, from 1927. the first paid editor of the Eugenics Review.

⁴⁶ Maclver, R. M., “Trend of Population with Respect to a Future Equilibrium,” in Dublin, L. I., ed., Population Problems in the United States and Canada (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1926), 287–310.

⁴⁷ Maclver did supply his American audience with his own descriptive gloss on the occupational contents of the G.R.O.'s social classes. His account was inaccurate in one important respect. Maclver gave pride of place in class I to “capitalists, enterprisers, managers” (sic) in addition to “scientists, artists, professional workers, and so forth” (Maclver, R. M., “Trend of Population,” 288). The G.R.O. had specifically pointed out that there were very few employers at all in its elite class I (Census, , 1911, volume XIII, p. lxxvi).

⁴⁸ Carr-Saunder, A. M.s, “Differential fertility,” in Sanger, M., ed., Proceedings of the World Population Conference (Geneva, 1927), 130–45. Carr-Saunders was an acknowledged world authority on demographic issues since his publication in 1922 of The Population Problem (Oxford: Clarendon Press). He went on to succeed W. H. Beveridge as Director of the London School of Economics in 1937.

⁴⁹ Thompson, W. S., Population problems (3rd ed.. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1942), 176.

⁵⁰ Pearl, R., “Differential Fertility,” Quarterly Review of Biology, II (1927), 102–18; Pearl, R., “A Classification and Code of Occupations,” Human Biology, V (1933), 491–505.

⁵¹ Conk, M. Anderson, “The Census, Political Power and Social Change,” Social Science History, 8:1 (1984), 81–105.

⁵² Ryder, N. B., “Notestein,” 7–8. In fact the first report was Sydenstricker, E. and Notestein, F. W. “Differential Fertility According to Social Class,” Journal of the American Statistical Association, XXV (1930) 9–32.

⁵³ The classification employed by Notestein related to two distinct urban and rural samples drawn from the 1910 data. In the urban sample, husbands' occupations were aggregated into four ordinally ranked classes: professional, business, skilled workers, and unskilled workers. In the rural sample, there were three ranks: farm owners, farm renters, and farm labourers (Notestein, F. W.. “The Relation of Social Status to the Fertility of Native-Born Married Women in the United States,” in Pitt-Rivers, G.H.L.F., ed., Problems of Population (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1932), 147–69.

⁵⁴ The prefatory acknowledgements repeated in all the Milbank publications from this project record that Edwards was one of the three named Census Bureau officials most closely associated with Notestein's work while he was in Washington.

⁵⁵ Kiser, C. V., “Trends in the Fertility of Social Classes from 1900 to 1910,” Human Biology, 5 (1933), 256–73, 257. On the Hoover Research Committee in general, see Karl, B. D.. “Presidential Planning and Social Science Research: Mr. Hoover's Experts,” Perspectives in American History, 3 (1969), 347–409; and on Ogburn's role in it in particular, see Bulmer, M., “The Methodology of Early Social Indicator Research: William Fielding Ogburn and 'Recent Social Trends,” Social Indicators Research, 8 (1983). 109–30.

⁵⁶ Ogburn, W. F. and Tibbits, C., “Birth Rates and Social Classes,” Social Forces, 8:1 (1929), 1–10. On Ogburn at Chicago, see Smith, D., The Chicago School. A Liberal Critique of Capitalism (Chicago, 1988); and on the Chicago school in the development of institutionalised empirical social science in the United States, see Bulmer, M.. The Chicago School of Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).

⁵⁷ Conk, M. Anderson, The United States Census, 123.

⁵⁸ For a full exposition of this theme, see Szreter, S.R.S., “The G.R.O. and the Public Health Movement, 1837–1914,” Social History of Medicine, 4:3 (1991), 435–63.

⁵⁹ Desrosières, A., “Official Statistics and Medicine in Nineteenth-Century France: The S.G.F. as a Case Study,” Social History of Medicine, 4:3 (1991), 515–37; Anderson, M., “The U.S. Bureau of the Census in the Nineteenth Century,” Social History of Medicine, 4:3 (1991), 497–513.

⁶⁰ This was the Labour Department of the Board of Trade. See Davidson, R., Whitehall and the Labour Problem in Late-Victorian and Edwardian England (1985); caveat: Davidson's somewhat partisan view of the statistical rivalry with the G.R.O.

⁶¹ Huber, J. H. and Form, W. H., Income and Ideology; An Analysis of the American Political Ideology (New York 1973); Coleman, R. P. and Rainwater, L., Social Standing in America (1979); Katznelson, I., City Trenches: Urban Politics and the Patterning of Class in the U.S. (New York, 1981).

⁶² The United States Bureau of the Census, , Sixteenth Census of the United States, 1940: Comparative Occupation Statistics for the United States, 1870–1940, pp. 179–80 (cited in Conk, M. Anderson, The United States Census, 63).

⁶³ Carr-Saunders, A. M. and Wilson, P. A., The Professions (Oxford, 1933); Parsons, T., “The Professions and Social Structure,” Social Forces, 17:4 (1939), 457–67; Marshall, T. H., “The Recent History of Professionalism in Relation to Social Structure and Social Policy,” Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science, V (08 1939) (reprinted in T. H. Marshall, Sociology at the Crossroads (1963), 150–70. The latter is particularly stimulating. Tawney, R. H.The Acquisitive Society, 106–11, also presented a brief, earlier eulogy of the professions; as did R. M. Maclver on the other side of the Atlantic in “The Social Significance of Professional Ethics,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, CI (1922), 5–11.

⁶⁴ For an accessible introduction, see Teitelbaum, M. S. and Winter, J. M., The Fear of Population Decline (London, 1985), ch. 2. For more detailed analysis, see Tomlinson, R., “The Disappearance of France, 1896–1940: French Politics and the Birth Rate,” Historical Journal, 28 (1985); Spengler, J. J., France Faces Depopulation (Raleigh, NC: Duke University Press, 1938).

⁶⁵ Zola, E., Fécondité (Paris, 1899); Levasseur, E., La Population Française, 3 vols (Paris, 1889–92);Dumont, A., Dépopulation et Civilisation: étude démographique (Paris, 1890); Leroy-Beaulieu, P., La Question de la Population (Paris, 1913).

⁶⁶ Léonard, J., “ premier Congrès international d’eugénique (Londres, 1912) et ses consequences franchises,” Histoire des Sciences Medicatés, 17:2 (1984), 141–6.

⁶⁷ March, L., “The Fertility of Marriages According to Profession and Social Position,” Problems in Eugenics (London: Eugenics Education Society, 1912), 208–20.

⁶⁸ Landry, A., La révolution démographique, études et essais sur les problémes de la population (Paris: Réceuil Sirey, 1934).

⁶⁹ Sauvy, A., “Adolphe Landry,” Population, 10 (1956), 609–20.

⁷⁰ On the peculiarly Lamarckian, hence environmentalist, form of French eugenics, see Schneider, W. H., “Toward the Improvement of the Human Race: The History of Eugenics in France,” Journal of Modern History, LIV (1982), 268–91. For more general surveys, see Clark, L., Social Darwinism in France (Mobile: University of Alabama Press, 1985), especially 154–9 on the French Société d’eugénique; and Schneider, W. H., Quality and Quantity: The Quest for Biological Regeneration in Twentieth-Century France (Cambridge, 1990).

⁷¹ For an excellent new general introduction to the relevant aspects of the vast historiography on British labour history, see Reid, Alastair, Social History and the British Working Class 1850–1914 (London, 1992).

⁷² On the classic example of Taylorisation in the automobile industry, see, for instance, Meyer, S., “Adapting the Immigrant to the Line: Americanisation in the Ford Factory, 1914–21,” Journal of Social History, 14:1 (1981), 67–82, and references cited therein.

⁷³ Figures are fromTrebilcock, C., The Industrialisation of the Continental Powers 1780–1914 (London: Longman, 1981), table 7.5b, p. 435 for France and United Kingdom; Conk, M. Anderson, “Labor Statistics in the American and English Census: Making Some Invidious Comparisons,” Journal of Social History, 16:4 (1983), 83–102, 100 (n. 31) for the United States.

⁷⁴ Desrosières, A. and Thévenot, L., Les Catégories, 16–7.

⁷⁵ Desrosières, A. and Thévenot, L..Les Catégories, 13. For comparison, approximately 7 percent of all adult married males were returned as self-employed (“working on own account”) in the 1911 census of England and Wales (calculation from Census 1911, vol. X, Table 7).

⁷⁶ Desrosières, A. and Thévenot, L., Les Catégories, 13–5.

⁷⁷ March, L., “The Fertility of Marriages.” The English translator's note (p. 208) and March's tentative classification (p. 212) demonstrate March's attention to the problem of drawing a comparison with the English category of the professions.

⁷⁸ This is not to imply that such officials' perceptions can be assumed to be entirely faithful reflections of their societies' characteristics nor that those officials' views were necessarily the most important or accurate evaluations available. For an informative, if brief, discussion of some of the range of official images of class in each of the countries considered here, see Marwick, A., Class, Image, and Reality (1980), ch. 4.

⁷⁹ Desrosières, A. and Thévenot, L., Les Catégories, 12.

⁸⁰ This inference would also find support in the valuable historical study of the occupational classification of the Canadian census recently produced by J-P Beaud and G. Prévost. During the decade or so after the Great War, R. W. Coats and S. B. Smith of the Canadian census bureau were refusing to adopt the new principles of a dual social and economic classification, by personal occupation and by industry respectively, which were heralded at the British Empire Statistical Conference in 1920 and introduced in the 1921 British census. In addition to certain methodological objections, the Canadians remained unconvinced that such a distinction was of any importance or empirical relevance for the characteristics of the Canadian workforce as it was then constituted. See Beaud, J-P. and Prévost, G., “Genèse de la classification Canadienne des occupations: réflections sur un cas d’indépendence statistique,” pp. 5–8, 22–3 (unpublished manuscript, Université du Québec á Montréal); Beaud, J-P. and Prévost, J-G., “La classificationcanadienne des occupations pendant l’entre-deux-guerres: reflexion sur un cas d’indépendence statistique,” Canadian Journal of Political Science. 25:3 (09 1992), 489–512

⁸⁰ The following is a brief summary principally based on A. Desrosières, “Éléments”; and Boltanski, L., The Making of a Class. Cadres in French Society, Goldhammer, A., trans. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). The original publication was: Boltanski, L., Les cadres. Laformation d’un groupe social (Paris: Minuit, 1982). A summary article in English was published as Boltanski, L., “How a Social Group Objectified Itself: ‘Cadres’ in France 1936–45,” Nice, R., trans., Social Science Information, 22 (1984), 469–91. On “planism” and “dirigisme” in the 1930s and 1940s, see in particular: Kuisel, R. F., “Technocrats and Public Economic Policy: From the Third to the Fourth Republic.” Journal of Economic History, 2:1 (1973), 53–100; Kuisel, R. F., Capitalism and the State in Modern France (Cambridge, 1981).

⁸¹ Desrosières, A. and Thévenot, L.. Les Catégories, 15–9.

⁸² Pollak, M., “Paul F. Lazarsfeld, fondateur d’une multinationale scientifique,” Actes de la Recherche en Science Sociales, no. 25 (1979), 45–59; M. Pollak, “Le programme ‘Behavioral Sciences’ de la fondation Ford,” (paper given in Madrid. 26 May 1988, to the first session of the conference of International Sociological Association's Research Committee for the History of Sociology); Boltanski, L., “Visions of American Management in Post-War France,” Russell, A., trans.. Theory and Society, 12 (1983), 375–403.

⁸³ See Drouard, A., “Les trois ages de la fondation française pour l’étude des problèmes humains,” Population, 6, (1983), 1017–37. For a relevant I.N.E.D. document of the period, see Sutter, J., “L’Eugénique,” I.N.E.D. Travaux et documents, cahier 11 (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1950), with preface by A. Sauvy.

⁸⁴ See above, note 3.

⁸⁵ Zeldin, T., “Higher Education in France 1848–1940,” Journal of Contemporary History, 2:3 (1967), 75–6: Citroen, the founder of the car company, is perhaps the most well-known of these interwar entrepreneurial Polytechnicians.

⁸⁶ Boltanski, L., The Making, 68.

⁸⁷ Ibid., 72.

⁸⁸ Ibid., 68–72.

⁸⁹ Ibid., 68–72.

⁸⁹ Ibid., 79–83

⁹⁰ Ibid., Pt. I, ch. 2.

⁹¹ See above, note 7, for full details of the 1954 scheme.

⁹² A. Desrosières, “Éléments” A. Desrosières, A. Goy, and L. Thévenot, “L’identité sociale.” The social categories of the current French official classification scheme reflect a sequence of historical residues, including the craft guilds of the pre-revolutionary past, a distinction between employers and employees (non-salariés and salariés) dating from fundamental labour legislation of the 1890s, and the more recent set of state-sponsored collective agreements on job titles and training instituted since the 1930s (see also note 12).

⁹³ See above, note 7.

⁹⁴ The new United States scheme of 1980 is described above in note 2. In Britain several new official classifications of occupations, such as “Socio-economic Groups” (S.E.G.s) and “Occupation Orders” have appeared since 1945, alongside the professional model, but none have replaced it. At the 1991 census a new “Standard Occupational Classification” designed for compatibility with the International Labor Organization's revised International Standard Classification of Occupations (1988) has been introduced for Great Britain. It comprises a hierarchy of nine major groups of occupations: managers and administrators, professional, associate professional and technical, clerical and secretarial, craft and related, personal and protective service, sales, plant and machine operatives, and other. This is to be another additional classification: the original professional model still continues in use (Thomas, R. and Elias, P., “Development of the Standard Occupational Classification,” Population Trends, 55 [Spring 1989], 16–21).

⁹⁵ On the relationship between official definitions of social categories and more popular perceptions in contemporary French society, see the interesting study by Boltanski, L. and Thevenot, L.: “Finding One's Way in Social Space: A Study Based on Games,” Social Science Information, 22 (1983), 631–80.

⁹⁶ See above, note 1, for the example of the clerical workers.

⁹⁷ Duman, D.. “The Creation and Diffusion of a Professional Ideology in Nineteenth-Century England,” Sociological Review, 27 (1979). 113–38. On the nineteenth-century history of the cprofessions in Britain, see Millerson, G., The Qualifying Associations; Reader, W. J., Professional Men; Perkin, H., The Origins of Modern English Society 1780–1880; Perkin, H., The Rise of Professional Society. England since 1880 (1989). Prest, W. R., ed., The Professions in Early Modern England (1987) provides an introduction to the somewhat distinct earlier history of the so-called status professions. A general introduction to the historical complexities of the idea of the gentleman is found in Furbank, P. N.. Unholy Pleasure. The Idea of Social Class (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), ch. 8. For a more detailed treatment, see Kelso, R., The Doctrine of the English Gentleman in the Sixteenth Century (Urbana, 1929). On the nineteenth-century role of the public schools, Oxford and Cambridge, in welding together the aristocratic and the meritocratic while vigorously excluding the commercial ethos, see Rothblatt, Sheldon, Revolution of the Dons (1968).

⁹⁸ During the Victorian era many of the occupational professions were established in Britain in substantially their modern form through petitioning for royal charters of collegiate incorporation and in a few important cases through parliamentary statute (notably solicitors and doctors). But such restrictive chartered corporations were viewed with great suspicion by the democraticallyminded and libertarian citizens of the New World. Effective national professional bodies only emerged in the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century following a long gestational period of informal professionalisation in the faculty graduate schools which came into existence in many state and private universities in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. On professions in the United States, see Wiebe, R. H., The Search for Order 1877–1920 (New York, 1967); Furner, M. O., Advocacy and Objectivity (Lexington, KY, 1975); Bledstein, B. J., The Culture of Professionalism (New York, 1976); Haskell, T. L., ed., The Authority of Experts (Bloomington, 1984). Important theoretical contributions on the professions include Johnson, T. J., Professions and Power (1972); Larson, M. S.. The Rise of Professionalism (Los Angeles, 1977); Rueschmeyer, D., Power and the Division of Labour (1986); Freidson, E., Professional Powers (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1986); Burrage, M. and Torstendahl, R., eds., Professions in Theory and History (1990); Torstendahl, R. and Burrage, M.. eds., The Formation of Professions (1990).

⁹⁹ There is no shortage of other social groups which might conceivably have been accorded such a pre-eminent position at certain points in the recent history of either Britain or the United States: landowners, capitalists, industrialists, employers, managers are some of the possibilities which would appeal to different schools of thought on the subject. Of course, the authority enjoyed by an official model may itself foster a consequent belief in the professions' significance and powers, an example incidentally of Giddens' notion of the “double hermeneutic” relationship between social science and praxis (Giddens, A., New Rules of Sociological Method [1976]). For an empirical verification of this phenomenon in a French context, see reference cited above, note 95.

¹⁰⁰ This is not to deny the existence and historical formation of les professions libérales inFrance. See, for instance, the collection of essays in Gieson, G., ed., Professions and the French State, 1700 to 1900 (Philadelphia, 1984). But this account has offered reasons for their relative lack of influence over the official model of society, unlike the professions in Britain and the United States.