particularly relevant for our purposes. As Ganzeboom and Treiman put it, ‘... the logic of the
classification is mostly derived from skill requirements at the expense of industry distinctions’ and
the overall effort may ‘be seen as an attempt to introduce more clear-cut skill distinctions into
ISCO88’ (Ganzeboom and Treiman 1996, p. 206). They go on to illustrate this point by noting that
‘whereas in ISCO68 all ‘Textile Workers’ were organized in a single minor group, irrespective of
their skill level (thereby precluding distinctions based on skill), textile workers are now spread out
over three different minor groups, depending on whether they do elementary labor, operate machines,
or perform craft work’ (ibid.). Similar changes were implemented for other manual occupations and,
analogously, for non-manual occupations. While a complex coding scheme of this sort allows for very
fine distinctions between different occupations, we are interested in the four main skill categories
provided by ISCO88. In brief, these are: (1) ‘elementary occupations’ (i..e. ‘manual labor and simple
and routine tasks, involving...with few exceptions, only limited personal initiative’ (ILO 1990, p.7));
(2) ‘plant and machine operators and assemblers; craft and related trades workers; skilled agricultural
and fishery workers; service workers and shop and market sales workers; clerks;’ (3) ‘technicians and
associate professionals;’ and (4) ‘professionals.’ A fifth group, ‘legislators, senior officials and
managers,’ do not have a skill coding under this four-step skill classification and were included as a
separate, fifth, skill category. Finally, we excluded members of the armed forces, since it was unclear
what their skill levels were.
Unfortunately, our use of the occupational coding in the 1995 ISSP survey created a
complication which had to be faced: the survey which we are using coded occupation in three
different ways, depending on the country in question. The ISCO88 coding scheme was used in 12
cases: Australia, Hungary, Ireland, East and West Germany, Czech Republic, Poland, Slovenia,
Canada, Russia, Slovakia, and Latvia. The earlier ISCO68 scheme was used in 5 countries: Norway,
New Zealand, Bulgaria, Austria, and USA. Finally, a further 6 countries (Britain, Italy, Netherlands,
Sweden, Japan and the Philippines) used a variety of national coding schemes. Estonia provided no
occupational coding. It was, however, possible to reclassify the ISCO68 countries’ occupation codes