PhD Defense Ella Clement
Title: Occupations as Structural and Symbolic Units Computational Approaches to Labor Markets, Culture, and Assortative Marriage
Abstract: This dissertation examines how occupations function as both structural positions in the labor market and symbolic resources in culture. Using Danish population-wide registry data and large-scale analyses of contemporary bestselling fiction, the thesis combines computational methods with social scientific theory to study how work is organized, represented, and paired. The first study maps the Danish labor market into empirically derived occupational communities based on millions of observed job transitions. The second analyzes over 1,000 bestselling novels to investigate how professions are portrayed in popular culture and how these portrayals diverge from real-world employment patterns. The third explores assortative marriage patterns using a novel distance-based measure of occupational similarity. Together, the studies demonstrate how new computational tools can deepen our understanding of the structural and symbolic dimensions of work in modern societies.
Supervisors:
Professor, Niels Richard Hansen, Department of Mathematical Sciences, University of Copenhagen
Associate Professor, Andreas Bjerre-Nielsen, Economics and Social Data Science at University of Copenhagen.
Professor Sune Lehmann, Networks and Complexity Science at DTU Compute, Technical University of Denmark
Assessment Committee:
Chair, Professor, Helle Sørensen, Department of Mathematical Sciences, University of Copenhagen
Professor, Martin Rosvall, Department of Physics, Umeå University, Sweden
Associate Professor, Laura Alessandretti, DTU COMPUTE, Danmarks Tekniske Universitet, Denmark