Am I What I Do? Interaction, Prestige, and the Formation of Occupational Identity

• In Event: Organizations, Occupations, and Work Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 2: Exploring Occupations

Abstract

This paper examines the contemporary salience of occupational identity and the conditions under which work provides an anchor for the sense of self. The shifting centrality of occupation to self-identity has been a core tenet of sociological theories, but contemporary studies in stratification and occupations have largely assumed its persistence or decline without direct empirical validation. Leveraging a novel dataset from the Civic Health and Institutions Project, I find that only about one-third of individuals regard their occupation as a salient identity, lending support to arguments about a broader cultural shift away from institutionally anchored identities. Importantly, there is a significant variation across occupations in the extent to which they provide salient identities. To explain this variation, I test several hypotheses drawn from symbolic interactionist theory and social identity theory that respectively posit role-based interaction and status prestige as a key mechanism for identity formation. By combining occupation-level datasets and estimating multilevel models, I find that within-occupation sponsorship and licensing are significant occupation-level predictors of occupational identification. Substantively, the findings highlight uneven degrees of professionalization as a central determinant of occupational identification. Theoretically, the paper calls for greater attention to studying occupations as institutions with varying degrees of interactional and symbolic properties that structure the macro-level contexts within which individual social psychological processes to unfold.

Author

• Jintae Bae, New York University