Occupational prestige, status, and social change in modern Ethiopia

Introduction Towns and cities throughout modern Africa have witnessed the emergence of prestige and status groups, principally as consequence of newly developing wage earning opportunities for educated Africans. Like African townsmen almost everywhere, urban Ethiopians now engage in, or aspire to occupations as skilled specialists which carry altogether new social prestige. Old values associated with traditional labour undertakings have undergone adjustment and modification. Because changing patterns of urban social relationships develop in large measure from the diverse ways Ethiopians, or other Africans, make a living, studies of the ranking of occupations by their social prestige value have been suggested as a useful approach to understanding the nature of the urban system of social stratification, on the one hand, and to providing a baseline for determining indices of social change, on the other.