The aim of this paper on occupational prestige is two-fold. The first part of the paper is devoted to a more general discussion of some theoretical and methodological shortcomings of the sociological literature on occupational prestige. More specifically, this discussion intends to elaborate on some theoretical and methodological antecedents of the preoccupation with the issue of consensus in occupational prestige by sociologists who have contributed to a theory of occupational prestige. As a consequence of the select focus on consensus, the issue of dissensus, i.e. systematic variation in occupational prestige, has been largely relegated to obscurity and masked in such theories. The aim of the second part of the paper is to provide an illustration of one possible approach to the theoretical and empirical analysis of dissensus in occupational prestige which may be able to transcend at least partly some of the suggested shortcomings of the conventional approach. The sample utilized for the empirical analysis is a sample of the West German elite. At the same time, however, the illustrative example cannot possibly be taken as a solution to all of the problems in the theory and methodology of occupational prestige identified in the first section of the paper.