Occupational Prestige and Distributive Justice

Previous studies have treated occupational prestige as a structural variable and have assumed that subjects asked to rate occupations do so evaluatively rather than cognitively. It has been further assumed that since subjects ostensibly perceive congruency among the various statuses of occupations, positive feelings of distributive justice exist. This study shows these assumptions to be untenable, both for theoretical and methodological reasons. Subjects constructed actual, normative and ideal occupational hierarchies. Incongruencies were discovered, indicating that previous ratings have probably not been evaluative. The relation of these incongruences to feelings of distributive justice were explored. The perception of justice was found to vary not whith incongruence but rather with occupational input/outcome ratios, supporting previous equity research, and disconfirming the assumptions of some students of stratification.