Les Catégories socio-professionnelles : une nouvelle grille de classement

Introduces a new classification grid of socio-professional categories developed by the interuniversity group based at the University of Quebec at Chicoutimi. The multidisciplinary team aims to create a digitized population register for the regions and subregions of northeastern Quebec from 1800 to the present. The database will include economic, social, cultural, demographic, genetic, and health information. The next step is hierarchization, which consists of classifying the categories on the basis of criteria such as property, wealth, power, lifestyle, prestige, and education. While it will not result in an understanding of social classes as such or the fundamental, structured relationships that perpetuate them, it will shed light, at a first level, on the concrete modalities of the division of labour as well as, at a second level, on the distribution of the attributes that are linked to labour. This approach is therefore preliminary, or at least complementary, to more theoretical discourses on classes and the deep structures in which they are rooted. [Includes two tables.] --From authors' introduction