The Social Grading of Occupations in Brazil

Abstract

/t S A PRELIMINARY PHASE of a studyl of social mobility and educa> tion among the population of the Brazilian city of Sao Paulo £ X (population 2@25 million) an inquiry is being made into the social grading of occupations, on lines already made familiar by similar inquiries camed out in Britain, New Zealand, Australia and elsewhere. The Brazilian results are of interest in that they emerge from a history and a cultural tradition that are widely divergent from those of the English-speaking societies referred to. In Brazil the cultural tradition brought from Portugal in the sixteenth century and after has been modiSed by the demands of a tropical and semi-tropical environment, by contact with an aboriginal Indian population, by a large slave population brought from Africa, by a large imniigrant population from Europe, the Middle East and Japan, and by widespread mtermarriage between all these groups. In recent decades there has been added the far-reaching influence of industrial development and the increasing urbanization of the population. The city of Sao Paulo is the centre of this industrial development in Brazil, and its population is highly diverse in 'racial' and national origins. As the first phase in the inquiry into social mobility in Sao Paulo, and its association with education, a sample of undergraduates at the University of Sao Paulo was selected for study. Since it is intended to use occupation as an indication of social status, it was necessary initially to discover whether occupations in Sao Paulo are conceived as occupying positions on a scale of social status. A slightly modified version of the method adopted by Hall and Jones in Britain in the study of occupational grading was decided upon. A set of thirty cards, on each of which was the name of an occupation, was handed to the informant. The purpose of the inquiry was explained to him, and he was asked to sort the occupation-cards into six groups of descending social status-using as a criterion the status which the informant considered the community in general would accord to each occupation. When this process was completed the informant then arrayed in descending order of social status the occupations he had included in each of the six class groups. Informants (with certain exceptions) were instructed that they could tie any two or more occupations as of equal status if they found themselves unable to distinguish between them. At the end of each interview, the thirty occupations had been arrayed in descending order of social status.