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Cited by 817

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 90 of the 90 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Why Do Some Occupations Pay More than Others? Social Closure and Earnings Inequality in the United States

Weeden, Kim A.·2002·American Journal of Sociology
DOI 10.1086/344121
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Abstract

This article elaborates and evaluates the neo‐Weberian notion of social closure to investigate positional inequality in the United States. It argues that social and legal barriers around occupations raise the rewards of their members by restricting the labor supply, enhancing diffuse demand, channeling demand, or signaling a particular quality of service. Hypotheses derived from the closure perspective are evaluated using new data that map five institutionalized closure devices—licensing, educational credentialing, voluntary certification, association representation, and unionization—onto 488 occupations. Results from multilevel models demonstrate that closure practices, particularly those that generate tangible restrictions on the labor supply, shape the contemporary structure of occupational earnings. Returns to these strategies vary across occupations but are not tightly linked to the complexity of the occupation's knowledge base. If suitably elaborated, closure theory thus offers a promising complement to individualistic explanations of earnings inequality.

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Metadata

Authors
Weeden, K. A.
Venue
American Journal of Sociology
Publisher
University of Chicago Press
Published
2002-07
Volume
108
Issue
1
Pages
55-101
ISSN
  • 0002-9602 (ISSN-L)
  • 1537-5390
DOI
10.1086/344121
OpenAlex
W1489569725
Cited by
817
References
90
FWCI
19.94
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Why Do Some Occupations Pay More than Others? Social Closure and Earnings Inequality in the United States. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1086/344121
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Weeden, K. A. (2002). Why Do Some Occupations Pay More than Others? Social Closure and Earnings Inequality in the United States. American Journal of Sociology. https://doi.org/10.1086/344121

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.