The Heterarchy of Occupational Status: Evidence for Diverse Logics of Prestige in the United States*

How do people perceive the status hierarchy? Stratification and inequality scholars have tended to assume that everyone perceives the status hierarchy the same way, using a single materialist logic-as a homoarchy. However, an emerging perspective from the study of culture posits that our view of the status hierarchy is shaped by our position within that hierarchy, suggesting that people using multiple, diverse logics-a heterarchy. This study provides the first test of these two frameworks using a classic measure of social status, occupational prestige, and new techniques for measuring and analyzing logics from culture and cognition. To do so, I analyze data from the 2012 General Social Survey module on occupational prestige judgments, which I link to individual-level characteristics from the GSS as well as federal occupation-level data. Results provide strong support for the existence of status heterarchy: I find evidence for at least four distinct ways of constructing the hierarchy of occupations in the United States. Furthermore, which hierarchy a person perceives is a function of their location in social space. I argue that this heterogeneity in perceptions of the status hierarchy entails implications for polarization, anti-elitism, and populism in the contemporary United States.