HISCLASS: A Historical International Social Class Scheme (review)

“For the sake of comparability, it is advisable not to develop new class schemes but to use existing ones” (11). Such is the opening of this technical book, which, contrary to the authors’ stated preference, presents, of all things, a newly developed class scheme called hisclass. Why do Van Leeuwen and Maas appear to contradict themselves so blatantly? They felt the need to develop a class scheme that facilitates comparative historical study of social stratification and mobility across both space and time in the Western world. Existing historical class schemes are local, national, or sui generis. Whereas the local/national ones do not allow comparative studies, the third option is a black box of intuitions often difficult to understand. The strength of this book lies in presenting the empirical and theoretical challenges faced by the authors in developing a systematic procedure to translate occupational titles found in historical sources into a universal historical class scheme.

Following the pioneering work of Bouchard and others, Van Leeuwen and Maas considered occupations the building blocks for a social-class scheme, employing the common core of four underlying dimensions—manual/nonmanual work, skill level, supervision, and economic sector.¹ These dimensions allow for a quantifiable construction of a social scheme applicable to many countries and to long periods. In a previous book, Van Leeuwen, Maas, and Miles presented a classification of occupations—hisco—that accommodates the organization of historical job descriptions into 1,675 occupational groups.² hisco is one of the pillars and the Dictionary of Occupational Titles (dot), which provides detailed job information, is the other on which hisclass stands.³ The creation of hisclass required two further elements, which the authors describe in detail—(1) a crosswalk from dot to hisco to link employment information to occupational groups and (2) a ranking of these occupational groups into a class scheme according to the four underlying dimensions using information from dot.

The bridging between hisco and dot proved to be unproblematical for nearly half of the occupational groups; the remaining groups needed rules to enable the bridging (45). One weakness in hisclass concerns the information used from the 1965 dot, which is based primarily on information collected after World War II. Since hisco was especially developed to classify job titles in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the use of these employment characteristics could result in blurred historical ranking. But (collected) historical information about occupations is scarce or selective, anyway; dot was not initiated until 1934. This bridging may well make hisclass invaluable to contemporary historical research.

Finally, the categorization of hisco groups according to the four dimensions and their ranking into hisclass has been subjected to a validity test by a small group of historians with a “working knowledge of the world of work” in different countries (61). These experts were given a selection of occupational groups to evaluate—“difficult cases” or those deemed particularly significant because of how often they were reported (62). Validation of these selected cases might have removed the worst flaws (76), but a random selection of occupational groups might have been a better overall test of hisclass by revealing “hidden” difficulties. Whereas a majority of the experts supported 90 percent or more of the scoring on supervision, manual/nonmanual labor, and economic sector, just two-third of the scores for skill level were supported by the experts (62–72). This disappointing outcome for skill level might be due to inevitable limitations in this dimension, as the authors suggest, but it might also be caused by use of post–World War II occupational information.

When asked to place the occupational groups directly into social classes by intuition, the majority of the experts agreed on the class that the authors proposed using dot in 57 percent of the cases (72). To some, this outcome might support the use of systematic construction over classifications made by intuition, but others might argue that following systematic procedures does not result in a...