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The State of Occupational Stratification Studies in Argentina: A Classificatory Scheme

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2022

Mark D. Szuchman  and
Eugene F. Sofer
Mark D. Szuchman
Affiliation:
The University of Texas at Austin
Eugene F. Sofer
Affiliation:
University of California at Los Angeles
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Research in social mobility in postcolonial Argentina has not benefitted from the sweeping changes in methodology and content found in histories of other periods and areas. The question of social mobility receives close attention in these studies partly because it offers such a variety of research opportunities and is measurable in several forms. Usually, the laboratory for these recent studies is the city—the place with the greatest opportunities for self-improvement. Since the nineteenth century, the city has become the locus of concentration for countless native and foreign migrants. With the appropriate data, urban social historians have investigated their spatial and economic dimensions of mobility. In addition, one of the bases of social change most often studied is the shifting within the occupational structure. The ties between occupation and social ranking are intimate. “Thus,” writes Michael Katz, “to trace the movements of a man from occupation to occupation is, to a considerable extent, to trace his vertical movement within social space; the sum of those movements determines the patterns and rate of social mobility, the degree of openness, within a society.”

Type
Research Reports and Notes
Information
Latin American Research Review , Volume 11 , Issue 1 , 1976 , pp. 159 - 172
Copyright
Copyright © 1976 by the University of Texas Press

Footnotes

*

This work forms part of two broader studies on social mobility in Argentina. The authors are deeply indebted to the Doherty Fellowship Committee, Princeton University, and to the Latin American Center, University of California at Los Angeles, for their support.

References

Notes

1. For a review of some titles in this genre for the colonial period, see James Lockhart, “The Social History of Colonial Spanish America: Evolution and Potential,” LARR 7 (Spring 1972), esp. pp. 20-30; Karen Spalding, “Social Climbers: Changing Patterns of Mobility among the Indians of Colonial Peru,” The Hispanic American Historical Review 50 (November 1970): 645-64.

2. Howard P. Chudacoff, Mobile Americans: Residential and Social Mobility in Omaha, 1880-1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972); Stephan Thernstrom and Peter R. Knights, “Men in Motion: Some Data and Speculation about Urban Population Mobility in Nineteenth-Century America,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 1 (Autumn 1970): 7-35; see Peter R. Knights, The Plain People of Boston, 1830-1860: A Study in City Growth (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. xii, for some of the limitations to the gathering of economic data on individuals; see Stephan Thernstrom, Poverty and Progress: Social Mobility in a Nineteenth-Century City (New York: Atheneum, 1969), pp. 262-63, for ways of ameliorating and skirting, with some success, the problem of lack of sources to determine amounts of liquid assets, and pp. 121-31 for some results.

3. Michael B. Katz, “Occupational Classification in History,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 3 (Summer 1972): 63-68. Research on occupational mobility in the United States has emphasized various aspects of work and society. For example, the effects of ethnicity on local labor situations have been the concerns of Clyde Griffen and Stephan Thernstrom; see Clyde Griffen, “Workers Divided: The Effects of Craft and Ethnic Differences in Poughkeepsie, New York, 1850-1880,” Nineteenth-Century Cities: Essays in the New Urban History, eds. Stephan Thernstrom and Richard Sennett (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969), pp. 49-97; Stephan Thernstrom, “Immigrants and WASPs: Ethnic Differences in Occupational Mobility in Boston, 1890-1940,” Nineteenth Century Cities, pp. 125-64. Herbert Gutman has directed his attention to the occupational divisions within the same industry; see Herbert G. Gutman, “The Reality of the Rags-to-Riches ‘Myth’: The Case of Paterson, New Jersey, Locomotive, Iron, and Machinery Manufacturers, 1830-1880,” Nineteenth Century Cities, pp. 98-124.

4. James R. Scobie, “Changing Urban Patterns: The Porteño Case, 1880-1910,” El proceso de urbanización en América desde sus orígenes hasta nuestros días, ed. Jorge Enrique Hardoy and Richard P. Schaedel (Buenos Aires: Eitorial del Instituto Torcuato Di Tella, 1969), pp. 323-38; and “Buenos Aires as a Commercial-Bureaucratic City, 1880-1910: Characteristics of a City's Orientation,” The American Historical Review 77 (October 1972): 1035-73; Carl Solberg, “Immigration and Urban Social Problems in Argentina and Chile, 1880-1914,” The Hispanic American Historical Review 49 (May 1969): 215-32; Jorge Enrique Hardoy and Carmen Aranovich, “Urban Scales and Functions in Spanish America toward the Year 1600: First Conclusions,” LARR 5 (Fall 1970): 57-91.

5. Roberto Cortés Conde, Corrientes inmigratorias y surgimiento de industrias, 1870-1914 (Buenos Aires: Universidad, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, 1964); Gino Germani, Estructura social de la Argentina (Buenos Aires: Editorial Raigal, 1955), chap. 8.

6. Gino Germani, “La movilidad social en la Argentina,” Movilidad social en la sociedad industrial, ed. Seymour M. Lipset and R. Bendix (Buenos Aires: Editorial Universitaria de Buenos Aires, 1969), pp. 317-66; and Política y sociedad en una época de transición: De la sociedad tradicional a la sociedad de masas (Buenos Aires: Editorial Paidos, 1962).

7. Germani, “Movilidad social,” p. 324.

8. Ibid., p. 335.

9. Sergio Bagú, Evolución histórica de la estratificación social en la Argentina (Buenos Aires: Universidad de Buenos Aires, 1961), p. 108.

10. Susana Torrado, “Cambios en la estructura social de la Provincia de Córdoba durante el periodo de la inmigración masiva, 1870-1914,” Jornadas de historia y economía argentina en los siglos XVIII y XIX (Sponsored by the Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Universidad Nacional del Litoral and the Instituto de Desarrollo Económico y Social [I.D.E.S.], Buenos Aires-Rosario, 1964), p. 216.

11. Torrado, “Cambios en la estructura social,” p. 222

12. Among the official published census volumes, some of the most often used are: República Argentina, Primer censo de la Republica Argentina (1869) (Buenos Aires: Imprenta del Porvenir, 1872); Segundo censo de la República Argentina (1895) (Buenos Aires: Talleres Tipográficos de la Penitenciaría Nacional, 1898); Tercer censo nacional (Buenos Aires: L. J. Rosso, 1916-1919); Cuarto censo nacional (Buenos Aires: Dirección Nacional del Servicio Estadístico, 1947); Argentine Republic: Agricultural and Pastoral Census of the Nation; Stockbreeding and Agriculture in 1908. (Buenos Aires: Oficina Meteorológica Argentina, 1909); Censo nacional agropecuario, Año 1937 (Buenos Aires: G. Kraft, Ltda., 1939); Censo industrial de 1935 (Buenos Aires: Jacobo Peuser, 1938); and Censo de comercio, 1954 (Buenos Aires, 1959).

13. A. J. R. Russell-Wood, Fidalgos and Philanthropists: The Santa Casa de Misericórdia of Bahia, 1550-1755 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), offers an example of the bibliographical richness that local sources, such as urban voluntary associations, can give to studies of specific urban groups. For a brief statement on part of the role of immigrants' voluntary associations in Argentina see Gino Germani, “Mass Immigration and Modernization in Argentina,” Studies in Comparative International Development 2 (1966): 175.

14. Some of the better-known occupational prestige scales include: Robert W. Hodge, Donald J. Treiman, and Peter H. Rossi, “A Comparative Study of Occupational Prestige,” Class, Status, and Power: Social Stratification in Comparative Perspective, ed. Seymour M. Lipset and R. Bendix, 2nd ed. (New York: The Free Press, 1966), pp. 309-22; Robert Hodge, Paul M. Siegel, and Peter H. Rossi, “Occupational Prestige in the United States,” American Journal of Sociology 70 (November 1964): 286-302; Alex Inkeles and Peter H. Rossi, “National Comparisons of Occupational Prestige,” American Journal of Sociology 61 (January 1956): 329-39; Albert J. Reiss, et al., Occupations and Social Status (New York: The Free Press, 1961); and the 1947 North-Hatt-NORC occupational prestige study.

15. This decision, admittedly, was subjective, but not arbitrary. There were sound, common-sense grounds that guided our thinking in dealing with this problem. No social structure is so mechanically contrived as to fit perfectly within well-defined social spaces; such imperfections become exacerbated in preindustrial and agrarian societies. One of the ways we found patterns were interrupted was through the listing of a much higher level occupation than the individual actually held; this was the case, for instance, with some hacendados who were, in fact, self-glorified owners of small plots of land with run-down equipment and housing. Another example of deviation from reality were the “empresarios” who were closer to small-time entertainers than to managers or agents. We found that, on the whole, our rule of conformity to seven variables held up quite well the patterns of occupations and their fit in the categories without seriously distorting the results. For a discussion of some facets of orientation to the norms of a nonmembership group, see Robert K. Merton and Alice Kitt Rossi, “Reference Group Theory and Social Mobility,” Class, Status, and Power, ed. S. M. Lipset and R. Bendix.