De 'service' klasse in Nederland: een voorstel tot aanpassing van de EGP-klassenindeling

The Erikson Goldthorpe & Portocarero class scheme (EGP) has evolved to the standard indicator of class positions in international research. Critique with respect to the EGP service class is related to criticism regarding `The Constant Flux' (Erikson & Goldthorpe 1992). This work is mainly concerned with the classical theme of the shift from agriculture to industry and it neglects the important `post?industrial' distinction between the industrial and service sector. This criticism particularly applies to the `service class' as conceptualized by the EGP class scheme. It does not take important institutional changes in post-industrial society into account. Consequently, the life styles and beliefs of the 'service class' show a large amount of variation. We therefore propose to modify the EGP-class scheme by distinguishing the `social and cultural specialists' within the service class. Using the Dutch Family Survey (1992/93) we show that this adjustment of the EGP?class scheme is an improvement with respect to the explanation of a variety of attitudes and behaviour. The finding that our results hold after controlling for relevant predictors such as education, signifies the importance of our revision of the EGP-class scheme.