Status Construction Theory Essay ⋆ Sociology Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Status construction theory is a theory of how widely shared status beliefs form about apparently nominal social differences among people, such as sex or ethnicity. Status beliefs associate greater respect and competence with people in one category of a social difference (e.g., men, whites) than with those in another category of that difference (women, people of color). When widely shared in a population, status beliefs have consequences for inequality among individuals and groups.

The theory focuses on the aggregate effects that emerge from interpersonal encounters between socially different actors when these encounters have been framed and constrained by macro structural conditions. In interdependent encounters between categorically different people, interpersonal status hierarchies form just as they do in virtually all cooperative, goal-oriented encounters. Since the actual origins of such influence hierarchies are typically obscure to participants while the categorical difference between them is salient, the theory argues that there is some chance that the participants will associate their apparent difference in esteem and competence in the situation with their categorical difference. If the same association is repeated for them in subsequent intercategory encounters without being challenged by those present, the theory argues that participants will eventually form generalized status beliefs about the categorical difference.

Once people form such status beliefs, they carry them to their next encounters with those from the other group and act on them there. By treating categorically different others according to the status belief, belief holders ”teach” some of the others to take on the belief as well. This creates a diffusion process that has the potential to spread the new status belief widely in the population.

Whether the new status belief does in fact spread widely and which categorical group it casts as higher status each depends on the structural conditions that shape the terms on which people from each group encounter one another. Of central interest is whether structural conditions create an unequal distribution between the groups of some factor such as material resources or technology that is helpful in gaining influence in intercategory encounters. The unequal distribution of such a ”biasing factor” means that people from the group with more of the factor are systematically more likely to emerge as the influential actors in intercategory encounters than are people from the group with less of the factor. Thus, the ”biasing factor” shapes intercategory encounters in such a way that these encounters continually produce more status beliefs favoring the structurally advantaged group than the other categorical group. Eventually, opposing status beliefs are overwhelmed as status beliefs favoring the structurally advantaged group spread to become widely shared in the population.

The theory’s arguments about how encounters between socially different people create and spread status beliefs have been tested and supported in a series of laboratory experiments. Computer simulations of the diffusion process also support the theory’s arguments about how structural conditions shape the aggregate consequences of encounters and cause widely shared status beliefs to emerge. The theory has been applied to explain the persistence of established status beliefs, such as those about gender, as well as to the emergence of new status beliefs.

Bibliography:

Ridgeway, C. L. (1991) The social construction of status value: gender and other nominal characteristics. Social Forces 70: 367—86.
Ridgeway, C. L. (2006) Status construction theory. In: Burke, P. (ed.), Contemporary Social Psychological Theories. Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA, pp. 301—23.
Ridgeway, C. L. & Erickson, K. G. (2000) Creating and spreading status beliefs. American Journal of Sociology 106: 579—615.