Cross-National Variation in Occupational Prestige

Abstract

This article investigates cross-national differences in occupational prestige amongst French, American and Canadian privacy officers. Privacy officers design and implement programs to protect private information in organizations. As a consequence, members of the privacy occupation serves as key interfaces between organizations and their information environments. The current study seeks to extend structuralist theories of occupational prestige- which suggest that all complex societies engender similar hierarchies of occupations. In contrast, in my chosen empirical case of privacy officers, I find that national contexts accord varying degrees of prestige to the privacy occupation. On the one hand, American privacy officers are upwardly mobile and endowed with the potentiality of being strategic organizational actors. On the other, French privacy officers are low-status actors- largely relegated to documentation and compliance tasks. Using a comparative case study method and a multimodal data corpus (intervi...