The Social Standing of the Design Professions: an intercultural comparison

Abstract

With the shift from a production-led to a consumption-led economy, Western industry has sought to increase growth via a constant search for innovation. Key agents in this process are designers, constituting a set of professions that has come to prominence over the past two decades, though one that has received little research attention. Conceived within the tradition of occupational prestige assessment, this study sought to position the design professions in terms of perceived social standing and a range of proximate measures. The subject groups comprised Australians and South Koreans, balanced to include subjects with and without training in design. This enabled both cultural differences and the effects of design training to be investigated. The results revealed only minor differences between the two national groups in the ranking of the various professions employed in the study. As expected, the Australian design trained group rated highly the standing of the design professions, though unexpectedly the Korean design trained group did not. Multidimensional scaling (MDS) revealed the use of more than one criterion when rating occupations on some scales, thereby adding to the body of evidence questioning the validity of the unidimensional scaling of prestige assessment. However, the dimensionality was scale and culture specific, as were differences in the structure of the MDSs. Differences due to training were minimal. The theoretical and methodological significance of these results is noted.