Social Honour: From Status Groups to Status Beliefs and Recognition Gaps

Key takeaways

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Reading notes

Imported on 2024-06-05 23:15

⭐ Important

• & The term seminally appeared in the conceptualization of social stratification from Sorokin (1927) where he distinguishes different horizontal and vertical dimensions economic status, political status and occupational status – of society, conceived as measuring rods so that distance and proximity can be established between social positions. (p. 2)
• & But it is since Weber’s canonical distinction between class and status that status is specifically defined as “social honour”, a theoretical foundation that is still a reference today. Yet, the relationality and the subjective aspects of social ranking implied by this latter approach make it a challenging concept to operationalize in empirical studies and has sometimes led sociologists to ignore or not explicitly acknowledge it, but also favoured the development of conflicting methodological tools. (p. 2)
• & Max Weber’s conceptualization of the distinction between class, status groups and power stems from an unachieved text, posthumously first published in Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft in 1921–1922. (p. 2)
• & A more recent translation, from which this chapter builds on hereafter, has been made available by participants to a seminar at Zeppelin university, where they translated the title of the text as “The distribution of power within the community: Classes, Stände, Parties” (Weber, 2010). This latest translation notably keeps the German word “Stand” (“Stände” in the plural) instead of “status group” as in the most widely known translation. The translators justify this choice because the term “Status” also exists in German but Weber chose not to use it. Instead, “Stand” has a medieval resonance (Waters & Waters, 2010) evoking the French term “état” and refers to the Western tripartition between the nobility, the clergy and the “third state”. (p. 3)
• & status groups may be able to monopolize access to functions and goods, which may be ritual and symbolic but also economic and material. On the other hand, the prevailing social order may be threatened if a given class position manages to acquire the same honour claimed by the member of a high-status group. (p. 3)
• & Status groups introduce a different logic to these objective characteristics, social prestige, that members of these groups claim (Weber uses the term “usurp”) to benefit their social position (Plessz, 2021, p. 63). (p. 4)
• & One needs to turn again to the diachronic dialectic between status groups and class to make sense of the distinction: “Eras and countries in which the naked class situation is of predominant significance are normally the periods of technological and economic transformations; whereas every slowing down of an economic shifting process in a short time leads to the awakening of the Stand culture. As a result, the significance of social ‘honor’ is re-established” (148). (p. 4)
• & Bourdieu’s conceptual approach in Distinction (1979) allows us to grasp the link between status, cultural lifestyles and social distinction. The key Bourdieusian concept of “distinction” may be understood as a trivialized and incorporated (and therefore most often invisible) form of status controversy that occurs routinely in the social realm. (p. 4)
• & Each time someone makes a cultural judgment (whether consciously or unconsciously), he does much more than state his preferences, he also participates in spite of himself either in perpetuating the social order or in contesting it. Social status cannot therefore be solely understood as a characteristic of dominant groups, like Veblen’s “conspicuous consumption” (1899). (p. 4)
• legitimate culture necessarily depends on a caste system, no?:
  • & To illustrate this point more concretely, in the cultural legitimacy model presented in Distinction (Bourdieu, 1984), the upper classes value and are also prescriptors of a legitimate culture (which varies in time and space). It is also imposed on the whole of the social space, sometimes judged as a form of clumsy (according to the upper classes) “cultural goodwill” of the “petit-bourgeois” (petty bourgeoisie). (p. 4)
• & The distinction between class and status, reread from the Bourdieusian theoretical framework of social distinction, thus allows us to fully grasp the salience of status as a dimension of social stratification in the most ordinary events of social life. (p. 6)
• & Although the Weberian class and status distinction is ubiquitous to theorists of social stratification, Sørensen (2001) notes that the operationalization and measurement of social prestige is rather neglected in sociology. (p. 6)
• & this difficulty partly arises from how sociologists ontologically view this distinction, whether as real – i.e., status groups and class correspond to clearly distinguished groups in the social realm – or nominal – i.e., this distinction is an analytical one that should be thought of in terms of processes or mechanisms in the analysis. (p. 6)
• & There is no doubt that caste reflects forms of social prestige. Relying on a criterion of social closure, caste is definitely a social group marked by strong connubiality. Caste is also marked by forms of non-commensality. It is indeed part of a set of social contact avoidance practices called “untouchability” that are related to status assertions (Deliège, 2003) and remain prevalent in the Indian subcontinent (Borooah, 2017). (p. 7)
• & equating caste with status as the scholarship on India has been tempted to do ultimately implies conceptualizing caste as a set of fixed and hierarchically ordered categories according to a ritual principle of purity as criticized by Lardinois (1995). This framework considers in an unsatisfying manner some of the key elements of the Weberian status-class distinction. First, it views caste as ahistorical, therefore building an image of a traditional society as a paradigmatic framework (Lardinois, 1995). In doing so, it ignores the “classification struggles” around caste categories (Lardinois, 1985). Caste boundaries are indeed neither fixed nor always significant in the social realm, as the historiography of caste suggests (Bayly, 2001). Second, this framework views social prestige as based solely on religion and consequently adopts a philological perspective of the study of the Indian society – as founded on Hindu sacred texts – without examining the subjective meanings that are attached to status, ultimately relying on the cognitive structure of Brahmin culture (Lardinois, 2013). (p. 7)
• & Thus, when Weber refers to caste as an extreme form of the Stand, one may understand this equivalence as an ideal typical form of caste (a social group characterized by extreme social closure ensuring its reproduction over generations Social Honour (p. 7)
• & and embedded in a hierarchy in which lower ranked are discriminated against) rather than the social reality of caste (and all the more not to be found in the Indian contemporary one in which notably the idea of a fixed social hierarchy has less empirical ground). (p. 8)
• & a neo-Weberian approach studying European societies has also aimed at drawing a real distinction between class and status by disentangling occupation between its market position and its status situation (Chan & Goldthorpe, 2004; Chan & Goldthorpe, 2007; Chan & Goldthorpe, 2010; Goldthorpe, 2012). In their quantitative work, Chan and Goldthorpe posit class and status as two distinct independent variables. Class gathers occupations into categories according to their market position (employment status and qualifications) and helps understand economic security and prospects, while status is a continuous variable derived from a scale of differential associations between individuals in the same occupation, and is then more directly correlated to lifestyles when both variables are modeled together in an econometric regression framework. (p. 8)
• & This approach is rather seducing for the quantitative sociologist: the conceptual distinction between class and status has a direct operationalized translation. Yet, as argued by Flemmen et al. (2019),4 Chan and Goldthorpe only draw from one characteristic of the Stand (“restrictions on the social ‘intercourse’ with other Stände”, 143) to explain another fundamental key element of it (lifestyles). (p. 8)
• & They assume that differential association solely derives from concerns for equality and inferiority, while differential association also reflects other stratification mechanisms (such as labour market position and spatial segregation in general). (p. 8)
• & The operationalization of status has been the subject of a special issue of The British Journal of Sociology in 2019 (Volume 70, issue 3). (p. 8)
• & status variable may not (only) capture social prestige.5 (p. 9)
• & More problematic (all the more so perhaps for the non-European sociologist), this operationalization ultimately does not allow the study of social prestige for categories other than occupations such as race, ethnicity, caste, but also gender (Hanquinet, 2019), and the authors assume that occupational positions only are the basis of logics of deference in contemporary European societies. (p. 9)
• & Contrary to these real operationalizations, Weber’s distinction may be read as an analytical nominal distinction, i.e., both class and status processes structure categories of the social world. This view is consistent with Bourdieu’s reinterpretation of Weber: Everything seems to indicate that Weber opposes class and status group as two types of real unities which would come together more or less frequently according to the type of society...; [however,] to give Weberian analyses all of their force and impact, it is necessary to see them instead as nominal unities...which are always the result of a choice to accent the economic aspect or the symbolic aspect – aspects which always coexist in the same reality. (Bourdieu, 1966, quoted by Flemmen et al., 2019,p.11) (p. 9)
• & Ultimately, status operationalizations relate to the class operationalization chosen to study the social world. While Chan and Goldthorpe’s conceptualization of social stratification aims to disentangle “net” effects related to labor market position – with the now widely used Erikson-Goldthorpe-Portocarero scheme (Evans, 1992) – from those related to the Stand, Bourdieu’s class perspective sees class as a multidimensional category. (p. 9)
• & Flemmen et al. (2019,p.6)write:“Paradoxically, Chan and Goldthorpe seek to reinstate the distinction between class and status by appropriating a scale of differential association that was actually designed to achieve the opposite aim of fusing material and symbolic forms of inequality”. (p. 9)
• & The motivation for using the Weberian analytical distinction is dual. On the one hand, as sketched out in Weber’s original text, the references to this stratification framework helps understand how non-material inequalities help (re)produce material inequalities. On the other hand, in part stemming from philosophical perspectives on social justice, a more recent trend claiming a Weberian ascendance suggests the importance of status inequality, in the form of recognition gaps. (p. 10)
• & The first motivation to shed light on status as a different stratification dimension from class – or power, as Weber points at the end of his essay – is that material inequality is unstable, as it gives rise to struggles between resource holders and disadvantaged individuals. But categorical differences between people contribute to stabilize them (Tilly, 1998). This consolidation is achieved through “status cultural beliefs” about the dominant people who come to correspond to the “types” of people who are also ranked higher (Ridgeway, 2014). (p. 10)
• & The non-incorporation of cultural dispositions of the dominant classes is also at the core of the explanation of inequalities of access and wages into higher professional and managerial employment in the UK (Friedman & Laurison, 2019). (p. 11)
• & These shared beliefs are also a source of material inequality because individuals belonging to the more esteemed groups come to be advantaged in social settings beyond their own control of resources: “Once such gender status beliefs develop [that men are “better” in a society where they have acquired resource and power advantages], they advantage men because they are men and not because they are richer or more powerful” (Ridgeway, 2014, p. 4). (p. 11)
• & The second motivation stems from the philosophical domain and draws from reflections on social justice from Nancy Fraser (2000, see also Fraser et al., 2003). Her starting point is the observation that collective identity in the public realm no longer Social Honour 1 (p. 11)
• & rests solely on the class interests at the basis of political mobilizations. Social injustices have as much to do with logics of exploitation as with cultural domination. She illustrates her argument with examples from feminist, homosexual or ethnic minority movements. She seeks to articulate a social justice model that rests on two complementary conceptions – redistribution and recognition – associated and entangled with socioeconomic injustice (exploitation, marginalization or economic exclusion) and symbolic injustice (cultural domination by imposition of social models). (p. 12)
• & In her alternative approach, while considering symbolic injustice, she suggests to treat it as a matter of social status instead of cultural identity. In this neo-Weberian conception of social justice, she sees misrecognition as “social subordination—in the sense of being prevented from participating as a peer in social life” (Fraser, 2000, p. 113). In her conception, misrecognition comes from institutionalized processes that prevent status equality, for instance the institutionalization in law of heterosexual but not homosexual marriage, that hence constitutes heterosexual union as normal and homosexual union as perverse. The status model of social justice then tends to find remedies to misrecognition stemming from certain institutionalized arrangements and maldistribution of economic resources. (p. 12)
• & Considering different scales of status also means that they can coexist and not be totally correlated together. Lenski (1954,1956 ,1967 ) notably studied how different institutionalized hierarchical status positions such as occupational class, educational attainment, race and religious groups intersect together (p. 13)