The Strategy of Occupational Choice: Recruitment to Dentistry

Abstract

Self-recruitment to dentistry provides an excellent case of the purposive or negotiated nature of occupational choice, especially of the skilled and professional occupations. Choices were made as compromises between reward preferences and expectancies of access to specific occupations; both of these career perspectives were developed with reference to familial occupational history, especially the occupational status of the father. Evidence is presented which indicates that dentistry was chosen because it combined high rewards with a reasonable degree of access; i.e., a minimax strategy was employed. Medicine, although possessing greater rewards, was rejected because of difficult access; while law, university teaching and accountancy, etc., were rejected because of perceived lower rewards. T nhe investigation described here developed from a longitudinal study of the evolution of the professional in dentistry which is concerned with the recruitment, socialization and initial careers of dental students. As a first phase of this research, the process of self-recruitment or the development of a commitment to study dentistry was studied with a sample of predental students. The present paper describes the development of an occupational choice; i.e., the decision to study dentistry.1 In this study two opposing approaches to occupational choice were considered. As an example of the first approach, Katz and Martin conceive of occupational choice as essentially adven-titio,us in nature.2 This approach characterizes occupational choice as nonrational, spontaneous and based upon situational pressures. Con-tingencies and influences external to the occupational world are seen as bringing about a fortuitous choice of one's life work. In their study of career choice among student nurses, Katz and Martin advance the thesis that . the decisions which underlie embarkation on a nursing career for at least somte persons revolve around limited, situational contilngencies-in which the matter of nursing-as-career enters only tangentially or not at all. Thus, rational coInsiderations play a mlinlor or absenIt role. Examples of these contingencies are also given