Status Why Is It Everywhere Why Does It Matter

Metadata

• Author: Celia Ridgeway

Highlights

Defined simply, status is a comparative social ranking of people, groups, or objects in terms of the social esteem, honor, and respect accorded to them. — location: 210

I also argue that it plays a unique and powerful role in the creation and maintenance of durable patterns of inequality based on social differences such as gender, race, and social class. — location: 228

my account of what status is, at root, helps explain some of its distinctive characteristics: that it is everywhere in social life, affecting individuals and groups alike, and that it is an ancient form of inequality that nevertheless interpenetrates modern meritocratic institutions. — location: 227

our ability to find sustenance, shelter, and a meaningful life is deeply dependent on working with others. — location: 234

Status hierarchies, I claim, are a human invention to manage social situations that are characterized by cooperative interdependence to achieve valued goals and competitive interdependence to maximize individual outcomes. I argue that status hierarchy, as a structural form, is a sociocultural schema or blueprint, a set of learned and shared rules, for organizing social relations in order to manage this basic tension between overarching cooperative interdependence and the competitive interests among individuals nested within it. For clarity, I will call this argument I put forth the cultural schema theory of status. — location: 241

when I refer to the status schema as normative in nature, here and throughout, I use the term in the sociological sense that denotes a cultural rule that is enforced by social sanctions rather than in the more philosophical sense of prescribing an ideal. — location: 255