Occupations and Inequality: Theoretical Perspectives and Mechanisms

Haupt, Andreas; Ebner, Christian Article — Published Version Occupations and Inequality: Theoretical Perspectives and Mechanisms KZfSS Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie Provided in Cooperation with: Springer Nature Suggested Citation: Haupt, Andreas; Ebner, Christian (2020) : Occupations and Inequality: Theoretical Perspectives and Mechanisms, KZfSS Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, ISSN 1861-891X, Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden, Wiesbaden, Vol. 72, Iss. Suppl 1, pp. 19-40, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11577-020-00685-0 This Version is available at: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/288605 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. 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If the documents have been made available under an Open Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ ABHANDLUNGEN https://doi.org/10.1007/s11577-020-00685-0 Köln Z Soziol (2020) (Suppl 1) 72:19–40 Berufe – Theorien und Messkonzepte Occupations and Inequality: Theoretical Perspectives and Mechanisms Andreas Haupt · Christian Ebner Published online: 24 July 2020 © The Author(s) 2020 Abstract People’s occupations are strongly related to multiple dimensions of inequality, such as inequalities in wages, health, autonomy, or risk of temporary employment. The theories and mechanisms linking occupations to these inequalities are subject to debate. We review the recent evidence on the relationship between occupations and inequality and discuss the following four overarching theoretical perspectives: occupations and skills, occupations and tasks, occupations and institutions, and occupations and culture. We show that each perspective has strong implications for how scholars conceptualize occupations and which occupational characteristics are seen as relevant when explaining inequalities. Building on this, we review and critically examine the relevant theories related to and the mechanisms of the relationship between occupation and wage inequality, as an example. We conclude that there is sound empirical knowledge available on the relationships between occupations and inequality; however, some of the mechanisms are still unclear. Keywords Theory of occupations · Skills · Tasks · Occupation-specific mechanisms · Wage inequality A. Haupt () Institut für Soziologie, Karlsruher Institut für Technologie Geb. 01.96, Campus Süd, 76128 Karlsruhe, Germany E-Mail: andreas.[email protected] C. Ebner Institut für Soziologie, Technische Universität Braunschweig Bienroder Weg 97, 38106 Braunschweig, Germany E-Mail: [email protected] K 20 A. Haupt, C. Ebner Berufe und soziale Ungleichheit. Theoretische Perspektiven und Mechanismen Zusammenfassung Berufe hängen mit verschiedensten Facetten sozialer Ungleichheit zusammen, darunter sind Lohnungleichheit, Gesundheit, Autonomie oder Risiken befristeter Beschäftigung. Theorien und Mechanismen, die Berufe mit diesen Ungleichheiten verbinden, werden teils kontrovers diskutiert. Wir betrachten neuere Erkenntnisse zum Verhältnis von Berufen und sozialer Ungleichheit und nehmen eine Einordnung in vier übergreifende theoretische Perspektiven vor: Berufe und Fähigkeiten, Berufe und Tätigkeiten, Berufe und Institutionen sowie Berufe und Kultur. Wir zeigen, dass Wissenschaftler Berufe je nach Perspektive unterschiedlich konzeptualisieren und jeweils andere Berufsmerkmale für die Erklärung von Ungleichheiten als relevant erachten. Darauf aufbauend veranschaulichen wir anhand des Beispiels der Lohnungleichheiten berufsspezifische Theorien und Mechanismen entlang der vier beschriebenen Perspektiven. Wir kommen zu dem Schluss, dass es fundiertes empirisches Wissen über die Zusammenhänge zwischen Berufen und sozialer Ungleichheit gibt, die Mechanismen jedoch an mehreren Stellen immer noch unklar sind. Schlüsselwörter Theorie von Berufen · Fähigkeiten · Tasks · Berufsspezifische Mechanismen · Soziologische Theorie · Lohnungleichheit 1 Introduction Occupation is a key concept in the social sciences. Its use in explaining the forms and levels of inequality spans over more than a millennium, starting with the early works of Weber, Durkheim, and Marx and continuing to the recent debates about the relationships between occupations and various dimensions of inequality (Avent-Holt et al. 2019; Oesch and Piccitto 2019). Despite some claims regarding a perceived marginalization of occupation in understanding life chances and positions within societies in the past decades (Kim et al. 2018; Beck et al. 1992), occupations and their characteristics persisted as the basis for explaining very diverse dimensions of inequality. Occupations are the basis for various forms of economic inequality (Reichelt and Abraham 2017; Nawakitphaitoon and Ormiston 2015). They also strongly contribute to non-economic kinds of inequality. Depending on the occupation, the school-to-work transition quality differs (DiPrete et al. 2017). Different occupations are associated with upward and downward mobility in the labor market (Menze 2017; Mayer et al. 2010). The risk of temporary employment is distributed unevenly across different occupations (Stuth 2017), as are levels of stress (Johnson et al. 2005), opportunities to participate in continuing vocational training (Ehlert 2017), or short sleep duration risks (Shockey and Wheaton 2017). In comparison to its frequent use in empirical analyses, there is little discussion about the theoretical questions concerning the perspectives of occupation and the theoretical grounds of the relationship between occupation and inequality. The literature provides various, sometimes conflicting, definitions of occupation, which leads K Occupations and Inequality: Theoretical Perspectives and Mechanisms 21 to uncertainties about the use of the concept or to fuzziness in its use (Dostal 2002). Furthermore, in some studies, occupation appears as a predictive variable, but the causal link between occupation or the characteristics of different occupations and the inequality dimension under study remains unclear (Card et al. 2013). In such a case, occupation serves as a placeholder for complex social processes, which link the occupational structure to dimensions of inequality. We believe that the theoretical argument regarding the relationship between occupations and inequality would profit by first examining the theoretical perspectives on occupations. Here, we argue that at least four perspectives need to be distinguished. First, we discuss an individual perspective, which focusses on occupationspecific sets of skills1. Second, we examine occupations, tasks, and jobs,whichis a perspective focusing on demand-side characteristics but not employees. Third, we shed light on an institutional perspective on occupation. Finally, we discuss the relationship between culture and occupation. Our claim is that we need to be aware of all the perspectives to understand the full extent of the possible relationships between occupation and the various dimensions of inequality. For the purpose of this paper, we treat these perspectives as analytically independent, but we are aware of proposals integrating at least two of them (Damelang et al. 2019;Antebyetal.2016). Furthermore, we value the research perspectives connecting occupations with industries or organizations (Janietz and Bol 2020;Auspurg et al. 2017). Within this article, we focus on occupation alone, which abstracts from these connections. We also stress that we do not discuss overarching labor-market theories here. Occupation-specific markets are just one building block within the labor market. They exist in parallel to firm-specific and unspecific labor markets, which can have different logics and mechanisms (Sengenberger 1987). Here, our aim is to focus exclusively on occupation and its relationship to inequality. In the next step, we spell out four perspectives on that relationship. Each one focuses on very different occupational characteristics, which serve as the starting point for the mechanisms generating occupation-specific inequality. It is far beyond the scope of this paper to offer a comprehensive list of them. Our aim is to review and clarify how scholars (can possibly) argue if they want to make a case that occupation relates to inequality. 2 Four Perspectives on Occupations Occupations are social constructs. Societies can create or eliminate occupations within the framework of training courses and courses of study. They can implement them in laws and file them in official classifications. Associations and companies can advertise occupations. In addition, occupations are also parts of concepts, attitudes, and stereotypes. 1We use occupation-specific skills, abilities, and competencies, as well as occupation-specific capital, interchangeably. K 22 A. Haupt, C. Ebner Occupations thus represent an objective reality, even if they do not exist without people. Their existence has a formative effect on society and people. With occupations, societies structure the acquisition of individual skills within the framework of education systems. Occupations enable organizations to structure work activities along specified work tasks. Institutions regulate access into occupations, occupational behavior, and outcomes. Occupations serve as orientations for (potential) employers and employees about necessary skills, the work environment, and people can adapt their identities to occupational cultures. All these characteristics can result in occupation-specific inequalities. The underlying mechanisms or the conditions of these mechanisms may vary between countries, regions, and over time, adding further complexity. 2.1 Occupations and Skills Scholars using a perspective on occupations and skills focus on the occupational specifics of the labor market supply. By using such a perspective, scholars typically abstract from demand-side characteristics such as recruitment into jobs or organizations, the distribution of vacancies, or discrimination. Instead, they focus on the acquisition, formation, heterogeneity, and prices of skills, capabilities, and competencies. Human capital theory, which gained great popularity owing to Mincer (1974)and Becker (1964), is one prominent example of reasoning using such a perspective. In the early stages, human capital theory did not explicitly account for occupational skills but used schooling and on-the-job experience as the measure of skill. Becker’s (1964) notion of specific skills (as opposed to general skills) has usually been referred to as firm-specific and not occupation-specific skills. We also include Bourdieu’s capital theory as an example of this perspective. He claimed that skills take the form of embodied cultural capital, which persons transfer into other kinds of capital, such as economic or social capital (Bourdieu 1986). His theory did not include occupation-specific capital either, but paved the way for studies that did. In particular, human capital theory came under attack for using broad educational categories and experience as skill measures, as well as for abstracting the formation of skill-sets owing to occupations (Blaug 1976). Scholars claimed that theories abstracting from occupational heterogeneity were not sufficient to describe the relevant differences between individuals to understand the dimensions of inequality (Kambourov and Manovskii 2009; England 1982). Thus, social scientists enriched the theories focusing on individual skills referring to occupations. Such enriched theories needed to define the term occupation. A prominent example defines occupations as “complex, institutionalized bundles of the marketrelevant working abilities of persons” (Beck et al. 1980, p. 19; own translation). The emphasis here is the institutionalization of the “bundles” or skill sets. Such a definition has strong implications. First, currently unemployed individuals can have an occupation. For example, people can be “electrical engineers” even if they are not currently employed. Second, it is not important what an individual actually does, only what they are able to do. Third, occupational borders run along skill-sets but K Occupations and Inequality: Theoretical Perspectives and Mechanisms 23 not any other characteristics. Fourth, untypical, non-institutionalized skill-sets may exist, but they do not constitute an occupation. The core assumption of an occupational perspective on skills is that occupations form skill-sets. The theories using such a perspective assume that skills are not atomistic in the sense that individuals supply one particular skill or supply parts of their skills to different firms, which is an explicit assumption in Human Capital Theory. Individuals supply and employers demand typical sets of skills, enabling employees to solve a typical set of problems within the context of paid labor. Thus, both sides have an interest in forming and expressing the expectations of skill-sets to increase the efficiency of matching between the supplied and demanded skills. The types of skills or skill-sets scholars need to distinguish for meaningful modeling is a matter of debate. Databases such as the O*Net offer very detailed skillsets for occupations, but for most empirical analyses, scholars need to categorize skills. Some propose a distinction between cognitive, creative, technical or social skills, whereas others include managerial skills, noncognitive skills, or collapse categories (Cobb-Clark and Tan 2011;LiuandGrusky2013). The scholarly work based on these typologies claims that the differences in the occupational compositions of these skill types are important for various dimensions of inequality. We discuss such theories in Sect. 3.1. 2.2 Occupations, Tasks, and Jobs A second perspective centers on the demand side, focusing on an occupation’s relationship to tasks and jobs. For this perspective, two aspects are essential. The first involves the demand-side structures around jobs, which are not endlessly separable. Thus, if an employee fills a job, other candidates with equal skills cannot sell their skills regarding that job. Second, it is important what people (are supposed to) do at work. What people do is contingent on the workplace characteristics and can be largely independent of the skill-set of employees. A core assumption of this perspective is that employers have typical problem sets within their organizations that are associated with a set of tasks that should solve these problems. Following Acemoglu and Autor (2011, p. 1045), a task “... is a unit of work activity that produces output (goods and services).” A single combination of problems and/or tasks within an organization is a job. The International Labour Organization (ILO) thus defines a job as “a set of tasks and duties performed, or meant to be performed, by one person, including for an employer or in selfemployment” (International Labour Office 2012, p. 11). A corresponding demand-side-oriented definition of occupation captures occupation as a “set of jobs whose main tasks and duties are characterized by a high degree of similarity” (International Labour Office 2012, p. 11). First, it follows that scholars or practitioners need to define the degree of task similarity constituting an occupation. In doing so, they need to decide how fine-grained the comparison should be. The more specific the task descriptions are, the more detailed and numerous are the resulting occupations. Second, the job characteristics but not skills of employees distinguish occupations. Thus, individuals without a job do not have an occupation according to this definition. K 24 A. Haupt, C. Ebner Influential theoretical approaches using this perspective are the job-competition theory (Thurow 1975), the vacancy-competition theory (Sørensen 1977), and the theory of task-biased technological change (Acemoglu and Autor 2011). Early work discussed the consequences of including the existence of jobs, job hierarchies, and vacancies for labor-market outcomes. These theories did not focus much on the role of occupations. More recent theories ask whether broad task types have characteristics connecting them to inequality. These approaches are not necessarily occupationspecific either. Many abstract task types form underlying occupations. There is, however, very good reason to focus on the relationship between occupations, tasks, and jobs. Jobs (as specific sets of tasks) are typically not unique, because the problems associated with the job are typically not specific to a single workplace within a single organization. Most jobs are the result of functional differentiations of organizations or societies. The prerequisite for a successful division of labor is an efficient coordination of activities and jobs that meet the typical demand for skills within a society. Occupation-specific jobs enable organizations to do this by bundling tasks and jobs efficiently and meaningfully at a higher level of aggregation (Abraham et al. 2018). Thus, the requirements for performing tasks successfully and without large training costs can be very occupation-specific (Gibbons and Waldman 2004). Eventually, the analytical separation of tasks from occupations might not always be feasible (Gathmann and Schönberg 2010). Even though scholars acknowledge occupation-specific tasks, how to distinguish task characteristics properly is an open debate. An influential typology of tasks is to distinguish between four types by crossing routine/nonroutine and analytical/ manual tasks (Autor et al. 2003, p. 1286). Examples of routine analytical tasks are record-keeping, calculation, or reviewing forms. Educating others, giving a medical diagnosis, or lobbying are nonroutine analytical tasks. Manual routine tasks are sorting, picking, or rule-based construction. Manual nonroutine tasks include hair cutting, geriatric care, or janitorial services. The newer taxonomy of Dengler et al. (2014) distinguishes analytical nonroutine tasks, interactive nonroutine tasks, cognitive routine tasks, and manual routine/nonroutine tasks. In Sect. 3.2, we discuss the mechanisms relating occupations, jobs, and tasks to wage inequality. 2.3 Occupations and Institutions The third perspective highlights the relationship between occupations and institutions (Damelang et al. 2019). Scholars using this perspective study specific sets of norms about skills, competencies, behaviors, or, more broadly, the institutional linkages of occupations into social spheres, such as the educational system or the labor market. This perspective captures occupational characteristics from the meso- or macrostructural level, which shape both the skill and the task dimensions of occupations. Theories using this perspective claim that we need to take the embeddedness of occupations in institutions into account to understand the relationship between occupation and inequality for two reasons. First, institutions solve a fundamental trust problem in recruitment. Second, occupations differ regarding the distribution K Occupations and Inequality: Theoretical Perspectives and Mechanisms 25 of resources in ways that we are not able to explain with differences in tasks and skills alone. The first point challenges the assumption that employers observe the skills (and productivity) of candidates with educational investment and experience clearly. Recruiters face a huge amount of uncertainty by judging the most productive/skilled candidate based on certificates. Certificates are, in the sense of Bourdieu (1986), institutionalized cultural capital. However, recruiters can rely on the information given by certificates only if they trust that the candidates truly acquired a standardized set of skills, which they associate with the certificate. Only then can recruiters be certain about the competencies of workers to perform the required tasks. However, these certificates can be more or less trustworthy, depending on the grade of institutionalization of occupational training. Recent works show that the level of trustworthiness of occupational degrees is important for recruitment decisions (Columbaro and Monaghan 2009, Stumpf et al. in this volume). The second point focuses on occupational inequalities that are not based on skill and task differentials. For example, in The System of Professions, Andrew Abbott (1988) analyzes how and why occupational groups control knowledge to gain advantages in terms of power, status, and economic resources. He argues that we cannot understand such differences without analyzing how occupations create, shape, and reinforce institutions, such as boards, chambers, associations, or curricula for vocational education. The distinction between a powerful profession and other kinds of occupations is not based on skill or task characteristics alone but also on the relationship between occupations and such institutions. In light of this, scholars analyzed how occupations created or shaped occupationspecific labor market institutions, such as boards and occupational associations, and what they do (see Giesecke et al. in this volume). Boards administer the self-orga- nization of an occupation (Pagliero 2019). Typically, boards issue licenses, create codes of conduct, report misbehaviors, are responsible for examinations, and counsel the government in occupational affairs. An occupational board is the most powerful tool for an occupation as a collective actor to influence the norms, laws, and the market and to build up the occupation as a profession. Occupational associations are, in contrast, clubs for people with an interest in promoting or developing an occupation. A third form of an occupational institution is the occupational union. Typically, unions work on the industry level, but in some cases, occupations found unions to engage in wage bargaining and strikes (Dütsch et al. 2014). In contrast, boards are typically not permitted to engage in strikes. Theories on social closure expand this perspective beyond the profession/ nonprofession distinction and ask which institutionalized rules gain occupations privileged access to resources (Weeden 2002). These rules can be formal or informal. For example, governments can issue formal rules about recruitment through licensing laws. They define which employees are allowed to perform occupational tasks legally (Haupt 2016a). There is no legal ground in Germany that restricts employees from working as data scientists. However, Germans are not allowed to perform heart surgery without a license or to perform the work of physicians—even if these tasks would be performed in private and without pay. A second kind of occupational closure is based on informal recruitment rules (Rohrbach-Schmidt, in K 26 A. Haupt, C. Ebner this volume; Bürmann in this volume). In many cases, recruiters are not obliged to select candidates with particular certificates. However, they do so anyway, leading to the exclusion of equally suited candidates in some instances. Some occupations show a third form of closure, i.e., regulating entry into self-employment (Haupt 2016b). Many governments apply rules for the commerce of weapons and drugs, or services for physicians and advocates. In addition, some countries regulate the selfemployment of crafts (Rostam-Afschar 2014; Damelang et al. 2017). The aforementioned norms target entry into occupations. Some occupations face additional rules for the prices of their services (Rostam-Afschar and Strohmaier 2019; Haupt 2016a). Moreover, some occupations are subject to minimum wage laws—either by defining special minimum wages or by exempting them (Skedinger 2006; Schiller 1994). Our discussion makes it clear that occupations are related to a country’s institutional structure in many ways. We discuss inequality-generating mechanisms with these occupational characteristics as starting points in Sect. 3.3. 2.4 Occupations and Culture The fourth perspective relates to occupations and culture. Within this perspective, we distinguish two lines of reasoning. First, scholars place occupations in a societies’ culture, with its shared attitudes, knowledge, and stereotypes. Second, occupations can form a specific culture, which scholars can analyze and use for explanations of inequality. The occupational knowledge is deeply rooted among the members of a society. In her work Theory of Circumscription and Compromise, Linda Gottfredson (1981) claims that people often share similar images of occupations within a culture (occupational stereotypes). For example, there are ideas about what certain respected occupations are like, the degree to which occupations are “male” or “female”, and what the typical fields of activity are for job holders. Such occupational images are already consolidated in the course of primary socialization via family, friends, educational institutions, or the mass media. In addition, collective actors, such as employers’ associations or trade unions, try to convey certain job descriptions to the population and make occupations visible. Individuals particularly strive for certain occupations when their occupational images agree with their self-concept, i.e., how they view themselves, privately and publicly. Such cultural concepts lead to the group-specific selection of and employment duration within occupations. People shape and consolidate specific occupational cultures. In line with Weeden and Grusky (2005), we describe a three-step process leading to occupation-spe- cific identities, attitudes, perceptions, or preferences but also to occupation-specific segregation. These three steps are as follows: 1) Self-selection. Individuals have certain occupational stereotypes in mind. Mirroring these stereotypes with their own self-concept, attitudes, abilities, and value orientations, individuals strive for occupations that fit their aspirations particularly well. K Occupations and Inequality: Theoretical Perspectives and Mechanisms 33 3.4 Occupations, Culture, and Wages The previous theories about the mechanisms between occupations and wages typically do not take the cultural context into account, which embeds occupations or the country’s labor market as a whole. However, we have strong evidence that culture is very important for hiring, careers, wage setting, or non-economic advantages (Bills et al. 2017;Rivera2012;Hora2020). A variety of culturally induced processes of occupation-specific wages can be demonstrated by referring to the issue of occupational gender wage inequality. The research relying on gender theories of occupational selection and pay analyze the gender-specific attitudes and perceptions of the worth of labor (Busch 2013). Cultures define which occupations or occupational tasks are men’s and women’s work. People typically perceive men’s work as being more skill intensive and of higher economic worth than women’s work (Cohen and Huffman 2003; Charles and Grusky 2004; Hausmann et al. 2015). In light of this, wage offers are not only a result of productivity but also a product of the worth construction that is deeply rooted in the cultural perceptions of occupations, tasks, and gender. For example, Kricheli- Katz (2019) varies the information about the feminization of an occupation in a recruitment experiment and shows that recruiters believing to be in a female-domi- nated occupation devaluate the competencies of female candidates. This experiment complements other research findings correlating (changing) female shares within an occupation with lower wages, which is in line with predictions on devaluating women’s work (Leuze and Strauß 2016; England et al. 2007). However, the relationship between gender, occupations, and wages is much more complex than devaluation. Adolescents have perceptions about occupation-specific stress or competition. Students with a careerist approach to higher education and the labor market are more prone to selecting majors with higher returns (Ochsenfeld 2014). The distributions of careerist attitudes, competition preferences, or the importance of money are gendered themselves, reflecting deeply embedded cultural socialization processes. They result in both occupational sex segregation and wage inequality between genders across occupations (Sinclair et al. 2019; Morgan et al. 2013). Occupations can also form norms about typical working hours. In some occupations, it is acceptable to work part-time, while other occupations demand large amounts of overwork (Buchmann et al. 2010;Cha2013). In combination with a culture attributing family-care work to women, family-friendly part-time occupations are attractive to women, but overwork-prone occupations are not. However, overwork pays off, because firms attribute higher levels of productivity and commitment to workers who work overtime (Weeden et al. 2016). The result is a reinforcement of gender–wage inequality (Cha and Weeden 2014). Goldin and Katz (2016)show that changing norms regarding overwork within pharmacies in the USA resulted in egalitarian gender shares and declining gender–wage inequality. Social networks play a role in these processes too (England and Folbre 2005). Networks tend to develop on the basis of similar personal characteristics (social homophily). Gender-segregated networks strengthen existing views, roles and norms K 34 A. Haupt, C. Ebner through processes of socialization. On the other hand, access to (well-paid) occupational positions takes place informally via networks. Furthermore, occupations can form specific cultures influencing inequality. Traditional gender-dominated occupations can create gender-specific cultures, giving rise to discrimination. Automobile engineering, construction, or crafts show very masculine cultures in many societies, which lead to higher probabilities of conflict with other genders that may be viewed as “not employable” or “not fitting” into the occupation (Collinson 1988; Huppatz 2012). The crowding assumption holds that women are being discriminated against with regard to entering typical male occupations. This results in an oversupply of typical female occupations, which lowers the wages in these occupations. The mechanisms discussed here also work with other categories apart from gender—any cultural shared stereotype related to occupations fit into these. We selected gender as a prominent example here, but stress that gender is, of course, only one out of many possible social categories. 4 Conclusion and Outlook Within this article, we discussed four different perspectives on occupations: their skill set, their associated task set, their institutional characteristics, and their relation to culture. We believe that it is very useful to reflect on the perspective used within our own research to clarify the concept of occupation and to set a starting point for theoretical arguments. Possible misunderstandings between researchers may stem from the parallel use of different perspectives. We do not claim the four perspectives to be the only ones. There may be others, e.g., from other theories, such as structural functionalism, other disciplines, such as theology, or from a practitioner’s perspective outside of academia. Our aim was to reflect the most frequently used perspectives in the social sciences, and we claim that these four are the most important. Further research may add to our list of perspectives to build up our cumulative knowledge of occupations and their relationships with inequality. Given one perspective, we showed a typical reasoning about mechanisms linking occupations and inequality. We argued that occupations are not able to act themselves—even if some shortcut formulations in prominent articles suggest otherwise. Any theory about the relationship between occupations and dimensions of inequality must lay down how occupations or their characteristics influence the opportunities or mental states of people to open the black box. We showed the fruitfulness of each perspective by applying mechanisms stemming from each one on wage inequality. The mechanisms linking occupational skills to wage inequality build on employee or candidate characteristics, their supply, and their prices. Each one can be influenced by occupations, as we showed above. The link between occupations, tasks, and wages is based on job characteristics. If firms or organizations change these job characteristics, occupations and occupational wages are affected accordingly. We further discussed the mechanisms linking the institutional characteristics of occupations to wage inequality. The reasoning about these K Occupations and Inequality: Theoretical Perspectives and Mechanisms 35 mechanisms starts with the identification of institutionalized occupational characteristics and must then show how they affect the selection of the occupational training, recruitment, prices, and wages. That is not always the case in the literature and leaves much room for further research. The mechanisms linking occupations, culture, and wage inequality start with the place of occupations within a culture or the characteristics of the occupation-specific culture and then show how they alter beliefs, attitudes, or opportunities. The research on occupations and inequality is complex, because occupations are part of almost any part of societal life. Our aim with this article was to both show this complexity and discuss how to handle it. It is our hope that further research can build upon the argumentation we proposed here. We have a good understanding of the relationships between occupations and inequality—but we can still dig deeper. Careful theory building along the discussed perspectives can be a very fruitful step toward this future. Acknowledgements We thank Britta Matthes for helpful comments. Funding Open Access funding provided by Projekt DEAL. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4. 0/. References Abbott, Andrew. 1988. The system of professions: An essay on the division of expert labor: University of Chicago Press. 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American Journal of Sociology 111:141–212. Weeden, Kim A., Youngjoo Cha and Mauricio Bucca. 2016. Long work hours, part-time work, and trends in the gender gap in pay, the motherhood wage penalty, and the fatherhood wage premium. The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences 2:71–102. van de Werfhorst, Herman G. 2011. Skills, positional good or social closure? The role of education across structural-institutional labour market settings. Journal of Education and Work 24:521–548. Williams, Mark. 2013. Occupations and British Wage Inequality, 1970s–2000s. European Sociological Review 29:841–857. Witte, Nils, and Andreas Haupt. 2019. Is Occupational Licensing More Beneficial for Women than for Men? The Case of Germany, 1993/2015. European Sociological Review 24:633. Andreas Haupt Dr. phil., 1983. Ass. Prof. (Ak. Rat) at the Karlsruhe Institue of Technology. Fields of research: social inequality, labor market and occupational research, methodological research. Publications: Is occupational licensing more beneficial for women? The case of Germany, 1993 to 2015. European Sociological Review, 2019 (with N. Witte); The Long Road to Economic Independence of German Women, 1973 to 2011. Socius 2019; Erhöhen Berufliche Lizenzen Verdienste und die Verdienstungleichheit? Zeitschrift für Soziologie 45, 2016. Christian Ebner 1978, Dr. phil., Professor of Sociology with a focus on work and organization, Technische Universität Braunschweig. Fields of research: labor market inequality, occupational training and further education, transformation of the workplace, occupations and working conditions. Publications: Weiterbilden und Weiterkommen? Non-formale berufliche Weiterbildung und Arbeitsmarktmobilität in Deutschland, Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie 70, 2018 (with M. Ehlert); Social distance and wage inequalities for immigrants in Switzerland, Work, Employment and Society 30, 2016 (with M. Helbling); Labour market developments and their significance for VET in Germany: an overview, Research in Comparative & International Education 10, 2015. K