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Status and Organizations
Theories and Cases

Alexander Styhre
Status and Organizations
Alexander Styhre
Status
and Organizations
Theories and Cases
Alexander Styhre
School of Business, Economic,
and Law
University of Gothenburg
Sävedalen, Sweden
ISBN 978-3-031-09867-3 ISBN 978-3-031-09868-0 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09868-0
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2022
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights
of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
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now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc.
in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such
names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for
general use.
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tion in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither
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The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Preface
Oscar Wilde (2016: 25) once remarked that, “Most people are other
people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry,
their passions a quotation.” Wilde’s observation is that humans are not
only social beings, they are social being to the point where their indi-
viduality almost dissolves in the ambition to adapt to social demands and
expectations. Under these conditions, a human life is barely authentic—in
fact, this issue is beyond the point—as humans actively strive to over-
come their capacity to act with integrity and to instead become part of
what is a shared view of life. Wilde’s capacity to make accurate observa-
tions of human behaviors and all the follies that are part of everyday life
naturally supported his work as author and playwright, and his oeuvre
is an astonishing gift to posterity. Yet, the lingering concern is why
humans are willing to downplay their integrity and their individuality and
instead become part of something larger than themselves. Such questions
are likely to demand a considerable amount of deliberation and include
several complementary conjectures, but there is inevitably a certain attrac-
tion of being part of a social order, and to share a sense of social cohesion
wherein all individuals and artifacts are sorting themselves into neat cate-
gories that are neither questioned, nor subject to critical reflection. Such a
preference for ontological certainty is an irreducible component of what
is referred to as status, a term that denotes how hierarchical positions
in a human community confer authority and privileges to the individual
or groups of individuals. Regardless of whether the individual is ranked
v
vi PREFACE
high or low in the given status hierarchy, this social order is perceived to
be stable and predictable, and such qualities are greatly appreciated in a
world otherwise characterized by its fluid and changeable nature. Status is
what render a cognitively overwhelming social reality understandable and
predictable and thus bearable.
This volume examines the concept of status in an organization theory
and management studies setting. In sociology and in more specialized
disciplines such as marketing research and consumer behavior studies,
status has been widely recognized as a key analytical term when studying
individual or group-based behavior. In contrast, in organization theory
and management studies, other competing terms, such “authority” or
“legitimacy” that are closely aligned with a legal-administrative vocab-
ulary and analytical framework, have been used more frequently. Yet, the
concept of status is helpful when studying organizational practices that
align individual and collective beliefs and preferences (i.e., what people
believe) and their actions and activities (what they do). Furthermore, as
the concept of status, on the one hand, purports to mirror a fairly stable
and predictable social order, while, on the other hand, can be manipulated
and actively shaped, status is an important mechanism in simultaneously
making society both resilient and dynamic. Similar to analytical social
theory terms such as charisma or authority, status is a concept that on a
cursory inspection appears to apprehend the stable and predictable qual-
ities of human societies, while in fact the term itself is malleable and
porous, and subject to modifications and revisions. That means that the
concept of status is considerably more useful in, e.g., organization theory
and management studies than the current literature may indicate.
This volume does not intent to exhaust the topic of analysis but rather
seeks to provide an analytical framework wherein the concept of status is
given some significance. Furthermore, in the second half of the volume,
the concept is used to examine practices in three specific business fields
(urban development, video game production, and life science venturing).
Analytical terms gain their currency on basis of a number of qualities,
i.e., they are perceived to be consistently used, they are intriguing inas-
much as they apprehend some everyday life experience that otherwise
would be left unexplained, or they are applicable when structuring empir-
ical studies. Furthermore, analytical terms display a certain fashion cycle
movement, i.e., they fall in and out of fashion in the same way as the
ebb and flow of the sea changes on basis of astrophysical forces. Whether
status as analytical term is more or less fashionable for the time being
PREFACE vii
is not the key point to make here, the point instead is that in order to
understand a human society wherein its individuals are actively striving to
overcome their genuine beliefs and preferences demands analytical terms
that denote the social mechanisms that are conducive to such accomplish-
ments. As will be stated in this volume, status is one such analytical term
and it arguably deserves a more widespread use than is possibly the case
for the time being.
∗ ∗ ∗
I am grateful for having this book commissioned and thus would like to
Marcus Ballenger, commissioning editor at Palgrave Macmillan. I would
also like to thank all my colleagues at the School of Business, Economics,
and Law, University of Gothenburg, for all intellectually stimulating
discussions over the years, dearly missed during the gruesome COVID-
19 pandemic that lingered on for longer than most people were prone
to believe. A specific thank to the following group of people with whom
I have collaborated with recently: Kajsa Lindberg, Sara Brorström, Björn
Remneland-Wikhamn, Fredrik Lavén, and Ola Bergström.
Sävedalen, Sweden Alexander Styhre
Reference
Wilde, Oscar. 2016. Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast. London: Penguin.
Contents
1 Status as Concept and Social Fact 1
Part I Theoretical Perspectives

2 The Manipulation of Status: Causes and Effects 29
3 Status and Cognition: Decision Making, Policy
Implementation, and Fallacies and Biases in Status
Ordered Fields 61
Part II Empirical Cases of Status Relations and their

Consequences
4 Awards and Prizes as Status-Conferring Devices
in Urban Development Settings 97
5 Attracting Attention in Digital Consumer Markets:
Marketing Indie Video Games Through High-Status
Intermediaries 121
6 Status Relations and Associations in Life Science
Venturing 145
ix
x CONTENTS
7 The Social and Economic Significance of Status

in Organizations 167
Bibliography 175
Index 193
CHAPTER 1
Status as Concept and Social Fact
The Hertz Bankruptcy Case and the Failure

to Evaluate a Status Position
At times, social failures, fiascos, and debacles are excellent exemplary cases
for explaining elementary social mechanisms as they unforgivingly lay bare
in broad daylight how easy it is for actors that on reasonable grounds
can be assumed to be informed about social norms and expectations
fail despite their best attempt. Furthermore, to fail is perhaps the most
human of experiences, and anyone can relate to the sense of failure—
in working life, in the domain of the family, and in the social sphere of
everyday life. On June 11, 2020, the Hertz Corporation, an American car
rental company, suffering the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic
that reduced the demand for their services when travel was largely aban-
doned, introduced a new strategy for bankruptcy financing (Casey and
Macey 2020: 1). In a court motion, the company “asked for permis-
sion to sell up to 246 million shares of authorized but unissued shares
of its common stock for up to $1 billion” (Casey and Macey 2020: 1).
While there is “nothing inherently peculiar about a corporation selling
stock,” Casey and Macey (2020: 1) write, at the time of this request,
Hertz was in bankruptcy. Even though American bankruptcy law is a
fairly complex piece of legislation that most people outside of legal quar-
ters cannot account for in detail, the plan to issue more stock to salvage
what was left of Hertz appeared to be unorthodox: Why would investors
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2022
A. Styhre, Status and Organizations,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09868-0_1
2 A. STYHRE
buy stocks in a company that has recently filed for bankruptcy? The
Hertz decision needs to be understood within the broader legal-financial
context of American market regulation, wherein investors may choose to
buy stock in an insolvent company if they believe that the bankruptcy
will result in the restauration of the business activities under a so-called
Chapter 11 bankruptcy (Skeel 2020; Macey and Salovaara 2019; Altman
and Benhenni 2019). Buying such stock is thus a form of speculation on
basis of an option-pricing model reasoning.
Prior to Hertz bankruptcy filing and the proposal to issue new stock,
the finance market trader platform Robinhood reported that nearly
43,000 Robinhood accounts owned Hertz shares, but in June 2020, that
number “skyrocketed to 171,000” (Casey and Macey 2020: 6). Appar-
ently, the grass-root speculators using the trader platform Robinhood
had a belief in Hertz’s ability to return to business operations after the
pandemic, and the evidence that anyone active in the market was willing
to buy Hertz stock prompted company actors to elaborate on the idea to
issue new stock, even as the company was currently filing for bankruptcy.
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), one of many finance
market regulation agencies, eventually blocked the stock issuance activity
on basis of some legal detail, which undermined Hertz’s plans to capi-
talize on basis of quite curious market conditions. However, as Casey and
Macey (2020: 16) remark, SEC is a primarily a disclosure agency and
does not have the authority to ban a public offering “simply because it
thinks something is a bad investment.” Just like any other market actor or
regulatory agency, SEC officials have a hard time to distinguish between
informed speculation and “irrational exuberance,” and this was also the
case here.
As market analysts will never learn what would have happened if Hertz
would have issued more stock to finance its way out of bankruptcy, it
is hard to tell whether there were rhyme and reason in this financial
offering. What could be said, though, is that Hertz’s top management
team and legal counselors failed to recognize the status of the corpo-
ration. Hertz’s top management team and legal counselors believed they
had robust support among informed traders acting on basis of the Robin-
hood platform, and when their prospect was accepted by a legal court,
they continued the work to recapitalize the company. But this empirical
evidence and legal right to proceed ignored the fact that trade is per se the
outcome from asymmetric expectations or asymmetric tolerance for risk.
This means that it is most difficult for both corporate executives and for
1 STATUS AS CONCEPT AND SOCIAL FACT 3
the judges that made the decision to “[d]efinitively distinguish between

trades that reflect reasonable bets on valuation or low probability events
from trades that reflect a basic misunderstanding of financial markets”
(Casey and Macey 2020: 13). Expressed differently, the Hertz executives
believed the evidence of market trade signaled that the corporation held
a status position that rendered the stock of also a bankrupt corporation
investable in the eyes of a significant proportion of the traders. In an
alternative scenario, the Hertz stock was bought as a cheap bet on the
company’s capacity to reconstruct itself and return to business, and such
bets have nothing to do with any corporate status or traditions. In this
scenario, reasonable bets on corporate valuation ex post bankruptcy and
“basic misunderstandings” are complicated to separate, and consequently
the status of the corporation is likely to explain very little of the finance
trade behavior.
The Hertz bankruptcy event reflects the difficulty involved in assessing
and valuing status. Social status is a widely used common sense term, but
is also being part of an academic vocabulary that describes a variety of
social conditions, practices, and relations. It is also a term that is semanti-
cally fluid and changeable, as it at times is used as a value-neutral meaning
(as in the case of “high-status professions”) while in other cases it has
pejorative connotations (as in the case of status-minded beliefs). Further-
more, the semantic meaning of the term status may shift from case to case.
The term can be both used an absolute term (e.g., as in the expression
status quo) and as a relational term (e.g., when describing a “high-status
actor,” or a “low-status holiday location”). Here, status is simultaneously
a scalar (a measure having only magnitude, but no direction, like weight)
and a vector (having both magnitude and direction, like speed). The
semantic meaning of the term status is thus variable and contingent on
context.
This volume will review the scholarly literature on status and the role of
status as a social mechanism, and, following the work of Émile Durkheim,
as a social fact. Furthermore, in the second section of the volume, three
empirical cases of how status make a difference in the eyes of market actors
will be serve to illustrate the social significance of the term status and
how it can be used to examine social and economic practices in a corpo-
rate setting. Much status research deals with consumer behavior (Askin
and Bothner 2016) or more specific social practices such as recruitment
procedures and decisions (Rivera 2015), and this volume will complement
this scholarly literature by emphasizing status as a more widely applicable
4 A. STYHRE
concept that has the capacity to shed light on, or even explain a variety of
empirical conditions. That is, rather than being a more narrowly defined
term that primarily applies to certain allocation problems and/or decision
making activities shaped by the absence of more robust data or infor-
mation, status is here understood as a term that denotes an elementary
social mechanism, having the potential to better allocate resources in a
more efficient manner, but also to generate the opposite effect, i.e., to
overcompensate certain groups beyond what can be justified on basis of
meritocratic measures and evaluations. Having said that, it is important to
remark that it is reasonable to be agnostic regarding the effects of the idea
of social status: it can cause good and its can cause harm depending on
context and situation, but there are no reason to assume that the concept
of status per se is biased in either direction. This means that status is a
dual social mechanism or a double-edged sword, doing good and doing
harm in proportions that are dependent on how the concept is defined
and how it is enforced and regulated in an actual market context, or an
in wider social domain.
Social status may be associated with social theory and the behav-
ioral sciences, but one of the central tenets of this volume is that status
generates economic (i.e., material) effects, sometimes being favorable,
sometimes being less appreciated. This means that status is an economic
and managerial term that have the potential to explain both successes and
dysfunctions in the economic system. This also means that comparably
weakly defined analytical concepts such as status has a role to play outside
of consumer behavior and HRM studies, regardless of the merits of such
scholarly ambitions. This volume is thus written with the ambition to
explain the concept of status and to make it an analytical term sufficiently
robust to lend itself to empirical studies and substantiations.
The Ambiguous Concept of Status

in Liberal Meritocratic Societies
One of the key features of liberalism and the liberal society is that social
worth should not be inherited and resources should be allocated on basis
of contributions made to society and preferably on basis of documented
market-based transactions. Numerous historical studies have indicated
how, e.g., the aristocracy could previously benefit from their higher-status
position, and how this culture undermined a meritocratic allocation of
resources in the economy. Fontaine (2014: 241) speaks about how “two
economies,” the “aristocratic economy” and “the market economy,” co-

existed side-by-side for a considerable period of time in Europe. Whereas
the market economy was based on prices and transactions and applied to
non-aristocratic subjects, the “aristocratic political economy” was founded
on the language of the gift, Fontaine (2014: 241) writes: aristocrats could
borrow significant amounts of money but without having to worry about
repaying as the social bonds created between the lender and the borrower
were preserved and allegedly benefitted the lender. The aristocracy was
thus operating on basis of market principles that differed significantly
from that of other actors. Needless to say, such privileges and the loss of
self-discipline that this “credit-based” economic system generated (Crow-
ston 2013) was thoroughly criticized by contemporary liberals. Says Alexis
de Tocqueville in his treatise on the new American Republic:
In aristocratic communities, the wealthy, never having experienced a condi-

tion different from their own, entertain no fear of changing it; the existence
of such conditions hardly occurs to them. The comforts of life are not to
them the end of life, but simply a way of living; they regard them as exis-
tence itself—enjoyed but scarcely thought of. (Tocqueville [1835] 2002:
650)
Tocqueville ([1835] 2002: 651) continues: “Amongst a nation where

Aristocracy predominates in society, and keeps a stationary, the people in
the end get as much accustomed to poverty as the rich to their opulence.”
Based on the experience of being ruled by an indolent, yet self-serving,
and, in some cases, blatantly incompetent aristocratic class, the emerging
bourgeoisie embraced the market economy as the pathway to social and
economic reforms as it gradually undermined such inherited privileges
(Fourcade 2017).
In the modern period, the market society has displaced most class-
based privileges and has introduced new mechanisms that regulate social
and economic conditions. Not the least in the USA, once an overseas
colony that fought for its independence, the ideal of the American dream
that stipulate that hard work always pays off has become part of the folk-
lore and public belief. For instance, Adolf Berle, law school professor and
part of President Roosevelt’s New Deal expert advisor team, testified to
his firm belief in the meritocratic order of the American society as late as
in the early 1960s: “Man can in the United States aspire to be President of
the United States, or of General Motors. If the road is impossible for them,
6 A. STYHRE
they can hope that their sons may achieve comparable success. It happens
often enough to underline the possibility” (Berle 1963: 136). The 1960s
became a turbulent decade in the USA, with the assassinations of Pres-
ident Kennedy, his brother, the congressman Robert Kennedy, and the
civil rights activist pastor Martin Luther King, and included considerable
social turmoil as the citizens’ right movement and the women’s libera-
tion movement unfolded side-by-side with the increased (and eventually
failing) military operations in Vietnam. Today, more than six decades
later, few informed commentators would share Berle’s (1963) enthusiasm.
In fact, substantial evidence speaks against the American Dream credo:
social mobility is in decline (Quiggin 2010: 160–161), the middle class is
shrinking (Davidson 2014; Faux 2012; Scott and Pressman 2011; Frank
2007), and economic inequality is growing sharply in the USA (Pfeffer
and Waitkus 2021: 577–578; Berman 2021: 73). However, despite such
evidence of a less dynamic society, there is still a firm belief in the alloca-
tive efficiency of economic resources on basis of merits rather than social
status (and inherited social status more specifically). Newfield (2003: 95)
explains how the value of a meritocratic allocation of resources:
The strength of the concept of meritocracy lies in its core idea that social
position and economic resources should be assigned by merit rather than
by birth, wealth, race, color, gender, national origin, perceived connec-
tions or any other characteristic not tied to actual performance. Since it
opposes power based on such factors, meritocracy has frequently been
a central component of political reform movements. Faced with a rapa-
cious, mediocre aristocracy, a corrupt municipal government, or a captive
insurance commission, reformer may invoke the concept of meritocracy to
replace inherited wealth, political cronies, and incompetent puppets with
people trained to perform a function according to professional standards.
(Newfield 2003: 95)
While a considerable proportion of the population in democratic states,

hosting a liberal economy, would agree on these terms in principle, in
practice there are evidence of less-than-optimal conditions. On the one
hand, e.g., Evans and Rauch (1999: 760) praise the efficiency of state
bureaucracies that are “characterized by meritocratic recruitment and
predictable, rewarding career ladders” as they are associated with higher
economic growth and welfare. On the other hand, many scholars are skep-
tical regarding the actual presence of such exemplary state bureaucracy
practices and in other spheres of society: “[a] core claim of contemporary
sociological theory is that modern institutions often fall short of satisfying

the ideal of meritocratic allocation,” Correll et al. (2017: 297) write. Also
pro-market intellectuals such as the Harvard philosopher Robert Nozick
is skeptical regarding the claim that contemporary capitalism is universally
rejecting inherited or inferred social status when decisions are made and
resources are allocated:
A capitalist society is peculiar in that it seems to announce that it is open

and responsive only to talent, individual initiative, personal merit. Growing
up in an inherited caste or feudal society creates no expectation that reward
will or should be in accordance with personal value. (Nozick 1998: 11)
A few empirical examples may illustrate the claim that contemporary

society is plausibly not cleansed of non-meritocratic allocation and deci-
sion making. Tobias Neely (2018) studies the recruitment of hedge fund
managers, a particularly lucrative niche in the finance industry in terms of
annual compensation, and introduces the term patrimonialism to explain
the selection of fund managers. Patrimonialism refers to “an organization
of authority in which a leader assumes power through networks based
on trust, loyalty and tradition” (Tobias Neely 2018: 366), and the sheer
homogeneity of hedge fund managers is here treated as being indica-
tive of what sociologists refer to as homophily, the preference for (in
this case) recruiting persons with a socio-economic background similar
to your own: “White men make up the vast majority—97%—of hedge
funds managers,” Tobias Neely (2018: 365) reports. In Tobias Neely’s
(2018) view, hedge fund managers are not primarily recruited on basis of
documented merits, credentials, or track records, but are selected from an
inner circle of candidates that are already included in the market niche.
“If you know someone, you get a job. There’s no more meritocracy,” one
hedge fund manager says (cited in Tobias Neely 2018: 372).
Another case of non-meritocratic selection of co-workers is in the
domain of university department recruitment (and more specifically in the
field of the biosciences) wherein the status of the first job landed strongly
correlates with the status of the postdoc position (Long et al. 1979: 823).
That is, elite institutions chose postdocs affiliated with other elite institu-
tions, but they ignore or downplay what Long et al. (1979: 828) refer
to as “preemployment productivity” as such credentials are secondary
to the original selection of postdocs from other elite institutions. This
means that an aspiring scholar cannot “work him or herself” up the status
8 A. STYHRE
hierarchy as few elite institutions care about formal merits, but only as
long as former affiliations are consistent with the status preferences of
the recruiters. These two cases are primarily anecdotal but they neverthe-
less underline how formal and official acclaims of meritocratic selection
mechanisms are easily sidelined when other, potentially less honorable
interests and preferences, say, the ambition to preserve an elite culture,
are considered (Rivera 2015).
The concern is not just that social actors and organizational repre-
sentatives make official declarations, but also adhere to private beliefs
regarding non-meritocratic qualities that undermine the substance of the
official declarations, but also that the gradual decline of meritocratic allo-
cation mechanisms generate externalities. For instance, “in a meritocratic
system,” Hattersley (2006: 5) remarks, “there is always the temptation
to believe that those who fail the test of merit have only themselves to
blame.” Rather than considering two beliefs systems, one premised on
meritocratic allocation mechanisms and one on nepotism, as being insti-
tutionally embedded and consequently generating winners and losers as
a structural feature of these systems, blame is shifted to the actors that
never had the chance to influence how the rules for, e.g., the selec-
tion of candidates were determined in the first place. In summary, in a
historical perspective, meritocratic values have been advanced as being
an elementary selection and allocation mechanism in a market society,
but this mechanism is constantly challenged by competing norms, e.g.,
social norms expressing a preference for social homogeneity in, e.g., elite
institutions, or in professional groups or occupational communities tradi-
tionally characterized by a high degree of homogeneity. In terms of the
concept of status, this analytical concept is riddled by tensions as the
everyday semantic meaning of the term indicates that certain groups or
individuals acquire benefits that cannot be fully justified on basis of their
credentials, merits, or track records. That is, already from the beginning,
the concept of status is burdened by its deviation from social norms
and beliefs regarding the value and fairness of meritocratic selection and
allocation of resources.
The Conundrum of Status

One sociologically significant question is what role the concept of status
has in contemporary society?: if it was totally legitimate, it would not
attract much attention, but if it does not sufficiently denote some social
condition that social actors are concerned with, it would gradually disap-
pear from everyday conversations and scholarly vocabularies. It is thus
plausible that the concept of status is introduced in a society wherein
status, on the one hand, is affirmed as a recognition of personal accom-
plishments, while, on the other hand, such accomplishments must be
genuinely individual (and not supported or assisted by other actors) to
be fully legitimate. Karen Lee Ashcraft (2017), speaking candidly about
her own career and lifestyle choices, says that her acquaintances first
recognize and affirm her success in qualifying as a tenured full professor,
but gradually revalue her accomplishments when they learn that Ashcraft
is unmarried and without children, suddenly questioning not only her
lifestyle choices and career but also diminishing her scholarly credentials
in light of the new information. “How hard can it be then?,” they ask.
This example is illustrative of a commonplace predicament of high-status
actors: on the one hand, certain criteria for professional performance and
career accomplishments are stipulated and applied, but such credentials
are also (or eventually) complemented by additional assessment criteria,
imposed to contextualize their original assessment. Such dual assessment
of merits is potentially more pronounced for women or any member of
an underrepresented community in a specific high-status community. This
is analytically spurious as the analyst associate or even impose a causal
relation between documented credentials and other lifestyle choices.
Ashcraft’s (2017) career and her other lifestyle choices may be totally
separated, but social norms that prescribe that women should have fami-
lies and rear children are introduced as a condition that suddenly cast a
shadow of doubt over documented accomplishments, at the same time
as it is implausible that the evaluator has any meaningful understanding
of, or detailed information regarding how these two spheres of a human
activities are related.
Furthermore, empirical evidence indicates that in many cases, status is
not effectively grounded in, e.g., formal credentials and other objective
measures, which weakens the relation between status and any material
claims. Collins (1979) found a surprisingly weak correlation between the
requirements of educational credentials and the skills/knowledge require-
ments of jobs. From this result, Collins (1979) deduces that the primary
role of tertiary education is to confer authority to individuals with an
education diploma so that they can acquire the professional role confi-
dence to act in their future professional role and to make the hard
decisions needed in that role. Tertiary education is, therefore, largely
10 A. STYHRE
more of a matter of socializing neophytes into a professional role, and

to create the professional role confidence needed to handle the ambi-
guities that professional work of necessity includes (Lamont and Molnár
2002: 178). Schleef’s (2006) study of “elites-in-training” at a law school
and a business school at an American elite university is supportive of
Collins’ (1979) proposition. Over the tertiary education period, elite
students “contest, rationalize, and ultimately enthusiastically embrace
their dominant position in society,” Schleef (2006: 4) proposes:
Far from being unwilling dupes of ideological indoctrination, students are

self-reflective, and they strategically accommodate and resist the ideologies
of their education. During professional socialization, they must confront
and rationalize their future status as a means of facilitating and thus
legitimizing the reproduction of elite privilege. (Schleef 2006: 4)
Another case of how status play a more marginal role than one may
originally believe is in the domain of business venturing and entrepreneur-
ship, where entrepreneurs in, e.g., the fabled Silicon Valley computer
science cluster in the San Francisco Bay Area, are less attracted by
the prospect of making money than by the possibility to make tech-
nological improvements: “Although many Silicon Valley entrepreneurs
became millionaires, most appear to have been motivated less by money
than by the challenge of independently pursuing a new technological
opportunity,” Saxenian (1994: 38) writes. Again, external evaluators may
second-guess why entrepreneurs were attracted to the industry, but the
status that such evaluators associate with economic wealth may have
played only a marginal role for these actors (at least originally), which
means that social norms regarding how status is acquired (e.g., by accu-
mulating personal fortunes) may have limited explanatory value ex post.
In this case, status is a useful analytical term, but it is also deceptive
inasmuch as it may mislead external evaluators to inadequately describe
situations and choices made on basis of their own and others’ social norms
and beliefs regarding how status is acquired. That is, to introduce the
concept of status as a condition that incentivize individual actors may
result in bias, at the same time as status apparently play a key role for
many social actors, it is reasonable to consider status as a social fact in the
Durkheimian sense of the term, e.g., as a institutionally embedded condi-
tion that generate social effects on basis of collective but uncoordinated
actions. Following this introduction, the concept of status can now be

defined and examined in more detail.
Defining Status and Its Use as Analytical Term

Hughes (1958: 102) describes status as “a defined social position for
whose incumbents there are defined rights, limitations of rights, and
duties.” Kemper (1981: 337) adds that the concept of status reflects “the
amount of uncoerced, willing compliance, approval, deference, reward,
praise, emotional or financial support, even love, that actors accord each
other.” In this account, status is associated with a variety of activities and
responses, some emotional in character, and status is understood in volun-
taristic terms, i.e., social actors consciously recognize status as a legitimate
and practical concept. As status is a relational term (when being under-
stood as a vector with both magnitude and direction), it is complicated
to formally define it with precision outside of specific contexts.
An alternative analytical procedure is to examine the consequences or
effects of status, oftentimes understood as benefits and advantages that
high-status actors acquire. Piazza and Castellucci (2014: 289) argue that
status as an analytical concept can be understood in two ways. First, as
a relationship between social groups, as in, e.g., the case of how different
occupations are associated with status. Second, status can be conceptual-
ized as a hierarchical relationship among individuals or other social actors
(say, corporations), which affect how these actors can influence a specific
situation (e.g., as in the case of a diplomat having higher occupational
status than a sales clerk) (Piazza and Castellucci 2014: 289). Furthermore,
as being management studies scholars, Piazza and Castellucci (2014: 290)
distinguish between how the concept of status is used in sociology and in
the management studies discipline. For sociologists, status is construed as
a subjective judgment of social rank, based on a hierarchy of values. Status
beliefs thus contribute to the structuring of an actual social order (Piazza
and Castellucci 2014: 290). In management studies, status is redefined as
a signal of quality, i.e., a claim to status does not require an anchoring in
a social system but is more of an expression of intention or ambition
(Piazza and Castellucci 2014: 291). For sociologists, status is a social
mechanism that contributes to the hierarchical ordering of society; for
management studies scholars, status is a signaling of quality, used in, e.g.,
marketing campaigns, which can be promoted as part of, e.g., a corpo-
rate strategy. “Status carries with it the attribution of superior quality.
12 A. STYHRE
Or, to put the same statement in economists’ terms, status is a signal

of quality” (Podolny and Phillips 1996: 455). Podolny (1993) points at
the economic consequences of status, and examines how corporations can
capitalize on favorable status positions:
The greater the one’s status, the more profitable it is to produce a good
of a given quality. More simply put, whereas the economic view of signals
begins with differences in quality between producers and then derives as
signals whose attributes for which the marginal cost of that signal is greater
for the low-quality producer that for the high-quality producer, the soci-
ological view takes as its point of departure the reality of the signal and
then derives the differences in quality on basis of who possesses the signal
and who does not. (Podolny 1993: 841)
The status effect denotes that the marginal investment done by a high-
status corporation generates comparably higher returns vis-à-vis that of
the lower-status corporation’s investment, all things equal. “[H]igh status
is associated with increased revenue for a given level of performance,”
Sauder et al. (2012: 270) write. This means that originally entrenched
status positions can be self-reinforcing, i.e., more value is acquired by
high-status corporations than would have been the case if status effects
were eliminated. This condition has prompted a series of empirical studies
that underline how already successful corporations (or individual actors)
benefit in excess of what can be justified on basis of actual performance,
referred to as the so-called Matthew Effect (from a passage in the Gospel
of St. Matthew that predicts that those who have shall be given more,
whereas those who have little shall lose their share).
In addition to immediate consequences regarding marginal returns
on investment, Sauder et al. (2012: 270) point at benefits following
a higher-status position. First, status may lower certain input costs as,
e.g., suppliers are willing to lower they margin to supply to high-status
producers. Second, high status tends to increase a corporation’s “access
to survival-enhancing opportunities and assets” (Sauder et al. 2012: 270).
Given these immediate and in many cases lasting effects of status differen-
tials in industries and organizational fields (say, in the domain of tertiary
education and universities), it is important to make a distinction between
status and reputation. Pollock et al. (2015: 484) propose that status
“[p]rimarily reflects perceptions of an organization’s position in a social
hierarchy based on observable patterns of connections.” In contrast,
Pollock et al. (2015: 485) continue, reputation is “[d]erived from stake-

holders’ estimations of organizational attributes that shape expectations
of the firm’s future behaviors.” In this view, status is a positional and
static term, whereas reputation is dynamic and forward-oriented. This
means that status tends to be “stickier” than reputation, Pollock et al.
(2015: 488) write: “[o]nce established, status orders are relatively stable
and self-reinforcing because high- and low-status actors behave in ways
that reinforce the current status order.” McDonnell and King (2018: 64)
argue that status and reputation represent two different forms of “pres-
tige.” Similar to Pollock et al. (2015), McDonnell and King (2018: 64)
use the concept of status to denote “an actor’s ‘relative social standing,’”
which usually denotes an actor’s “position in a hierarchy.” Reputation,
McDonnell and King (2018: 64) add, refers to “shared perceptions of
an actor’s unique and distinguishing qualities,” and these qualities are in
turn based on “audience’s perceptions of a firm’s past actions or perfor-
mance in a particular domain.” In the same vein, Piazza and Castellucci
(2014: 292) propose that reputation is “a signal that allows external audi-
ences to predict the future behavior, performance, or quality of actors
based on their previously observed behavior, performance, or quality.”
In contrast, status captures differences in “agreed-on social ranks” that
generate privileges unrelated to performance (Piazza and Castellucci 2014:
292). Based on these propositions, once formed, the status ordering is
“slower to change, when compared with the actor’s reputation, in the
face of changes in quality or performance,” Piazza and Castellucci (2014:
293) contend. In these three accounts, reputation is a matter of perfor-
mance and track records, whereas status can be preserved without such
evidence of extraordinary, or at least above-normal performances. In other
words, whereas status is unified and univocal (either an organization has
high status, or it does not), reputation is “multidimensional” and can be
“rooted in a variety of different performance criteria” (McDonnell and
King 2018: 64).
In addition to distinguishing between reputation and status, Piazza
and Castellucci (2014) separated status from the concept of legitimacy.
In their view, legitimacy denotes to what degree or what extent “firms’
activities are in line with what are socially constructed as either acceptable
or desirable activities by either industry norms or broader societal expec-
tations” (Piazza and Castellucci 2014: 293). Legitimacy is, therefore, a
measure of conformity, being the capacity, willingness, or strategic deci-
sion to act in ways that are consistent with social norms and expectations
14 A. STYHRE
(e.g., entrepreneurial firms may choose on purpose to act in ways that

violate social norms, as captured by the Silicon Valley dictum, “Don’t
ask for permission, ask for forgiveness”). In contrast, status is premised
on, e.g., social norms and expectations are the very basis for the hierar-
chical ordering of actors. For instance, highly successful entrepreneurial
firms that actively “break the rules” (say, Uber in the era of transporta-
tion services) may have a low legitimacy in certain groups or communities
(say, among conventional taxi drivers or among policymakers), whereas
such firms may have high status on basis of their capacity to provide new
services and inventions.
In these three accounts, status, reputation, and legitimacy are part of
the symbolic economy of prestige, wherein organizations or individuals
(but also communities, professional groups, social classes, and virtually
any meaningful sociological category) are granted a certain prestige that
in turn can be separated into a status position and a reputation. While
both status and especially reputation is a matter of valuation of perfor-
mance and other qualities being considered to be of relevance, status
(which is the central concept in the following) is understood to be a
social fact in Durkheim’s ([1895] 1938) sense of the term. Status may be
a product of a specific society or social relations, but within that society or
social relations, it is an actual condition that generates effects, including,
e.g., the allocation of resources, decision making authority, the ability to
formulate certain problems, and so forth.
Status as Social Fact

In Émile Durkheim’s sociological theory, social fact is a key construct,
similar in terms of its importance to Karl Marx’s capital or Max Weber’s
rationality. “A social fact is to be recognized by the power of external
coercion which it exercises or is capable of exercising over individuals,”
Durkheim (1895] 1938: 10) writes. In Durkheim’s view, the work of
the sociologist is to explain how societies, being coalitions between social
actors, can jointly produce “social things”: “Social things are actualized
only through men; they are product of human activity” (Durkheim 1895]
1938: l7). Furthermore, Durkheim justifies a functionalist view of social
facts, i.e., social facts do not only exist and should be interpreted as such—
“the first and most fundamental rule is: consider social facts as things,”
Durkheim (1895] 1938: l4) writes—but they also have an instrumental
value that should be examined: “[T]o explain a social fact it is not enough
to show the cause on which it depends; we must also, at least in most

cases, show its function in the establishment of social order” (Durkheim
1895] 1938: 97).
The conventional view of Durkheim in Anglo-American scholarship
is that he rejected any cognitivist explanations to underline how society
is constituted on basis of social practices, i.e., psychological explanations
are substituted by sociological conditions, consistent with Durkheim’s
proposed methodology. “Durkheim sought to replace the individualist
approach of traditional philosophy with an approach solidly embedded
in enacted social practice,” Rawls (1996: 431) argues. That is, for
Durkheim, “logic is itself the result of social practices” (Rawls 1996: 447).
Pierre Bourdieu rejects such an Anglo-American reading of Durkheim,
who instead recognizes that social order and the social organization are
embedded in “relations of force,” which in turn are closely bound up with
“meaning” and “communication,” i.e., social structures and cognitive
processes are mutually constituted rather than being separated. “Relations
of force are inseparable from relations of meaning and communication,
the dominated are also people who know and acknowledge,” Bourdieu
(2020: 164) writes. Durkheim was particularly interested in the idea of
a social order, in consensus, and in order to understand how compa-
rably harmonious social relations are established and preserved, cognition
was never excluded, Bourdieu (2020: 164) argues: “Acts of submission
and obedience are cognitive acts, and as such they bring into play cogni-
tive structures, categories of perception, principles of vision and division,
a whole series of things the neo-Kantian tradition emphasizes.” In fact,
Durkheim took an affirmative view of the human cognition as being part
of the social organization: “I would count Durkheim in this neo-Kantian
tradition; he never hid the fact that he was neo-Kantian, and even one of
the most consistent neo-Kantians there has been” Bourdieu (2020: 164)
says.
For Bourdieu, Durkheim is part of sociological theoretical tradition
that recognizes the duality of the social order; on the one hand, it is
formally established as institutional facts (say, as legislation and penal
codes), while, on the other hand, it is premised on the consent of
the members of the specific society. “[S]ociology is in fact a cognitive
science,” Bourdieu (2020: 164) declares: “[T]here is a generic relation-
ship between mental structures, that is, the principles on the basis of
which we construct social and physical reality, and social structures, so
that oppositions between groups are translated onto logical oppositions”
16 A. STYHRE
(Bourdieu 2020: 166). Speaking about institutions (rather than social

facts, or some other sociological analytical category, say, ideology in the
Marxist sense of the term), Bourdieu argues that institutions always exist
in “two forms”: “In reality” in the form of “civil status, the civil code, a
bureaucratic form,” and “in people’s minds”; “An institution only works
when there is a correspondence between objective structures and subjec-
tive structures,” Bourdieu (2020: 166) proposes. Durkheim’s concept of
social fact is thus an institutional fact that is both constituted “in reality,”
and through the beliefs and perceptions of social actors.
Based on these propositions, status is a social fact that not only needs
to be explained in terms of its origin and formation (i.e., what it is),
but also in terms of its effects and consequences (i.e., what it does).
Durkheim is oftentimes associated with a consensus-based view of society
(as opposed to both Marx and Weber), wherein there are more that unify
social actors than what keeps them apart. Furthermore, Durkheim is asso-
ciated with a functionalist social theory that explain, e.g., social practices
in terms of their output or role in the social community. One proposi-
tion suggests that status is conducive to social cohesion, as humans and
communities with diverging interests can co-align their activities on basis
of a shared hierarchical social order. Gould (2002) provides a formal-
ized but dynamic model of how status relations are reproduced are basis
of subjective judgment, yet kept in balance on basis of the individu-
al’s need for recognition when honoring status orders. Gould (2002:
1147) proposes that status rankings are commonplace in everyday life,
and that such status rankings are based on subjective assessments that
are “profoundly socially influenced.” This means that social actors make
subjective assessment regarding, e.g., an individual’s status (based, e.g.,
on merits, popularity, etc.), but such subjective assessments are in turn
premised on previous collective assessments made, i.e., status rankings
are based on “the self-validating character of social judgments,” thus
being a self-reinforcing process (Gould 2002: 1147). At the same time
as individuals who are ranked high in terms of their status benefit from
this self-reinforcing mechanism, the recognition that high-status individ-
uals receive from lower-status individuals also needs to be reciprocated
to preserve and keep the status order in balance. Gould (2002: 1149–
1150) argues that “the displeasure of offering unreciprocated gestures of
approval” means that unless people who affirms status rankings receive
favors in return (no matter how small or significant they may appear
to an outside observer), they are reluctant to signal their approval of a
specific status ranking. This means that high-status individuals need to

signal that they are aware of the “gestures of approval” of the lower-status
individuals, or else the willingness to affirm the status order is impaired.
Gould uses the case of a crowd of royalists gathering outside of Buck-
ingham Palace to see the Queen of Great Britain making an appearance
or just passing by. The individuals in the crowd cannot hope for much
personal recognition from the Queen, but they can at least hope to see
her waving to the crowd and smiling, here being a recognition of the
efforts made by the individuals in the crowd, celebrating the Queen,
the Monarchy, or any value or norms, etc., associated with this social
organization. If the crowd is simply ignored, i.e., no reciprocal bene-
fits are received, the individuals in the crowd may be disappointed and
may even lose some of their commitment to the Monarchy, thus being
less incentivizes to approve the status ranking with grant authority to
the Queen and the royal family. These mechanisms, subjective judgment
being informed by collective beliefs, yet being associated with the individ-
ual’s “displeasure of offering unreciprocated gestures of approval,” both
reproduce status rankings and establish a mechanism that regulate how
high-status individuals need to pay attention to and to recognize subjec-
tive judgments that are supportive of status privileges. In the case of
celebrities who at times instantly become high-status actors (i.e., they
experience a “status shock”), but that disapprove such a social position
on basis of, e.g., their wish to avoid being separated from their peers or
having to fashion a new identity for themselves,1 there is always the possi-
bility of ignoring fans and admirers to reduce their willingness to affirm
the high-status position of the celebrity. On the other hand, to neglect
fans and admirers would then come at the cost of being perceived as
arrogant and even heartless (as in the case of the fans being children),
a social judgment that the celebrity who values egalitarianism may wish
to avoid. This is exemplary of why momentary status shocks that catapult
1 Brown’s (2020) wide-ranging account of the unprecedented career of the Beatles and
its social significance in the 1960s describes for how Ringo Starr (né Richard Starkey) was
concerned with his own family starting to treat him as some celebrity figure during family
events that Starr apparently regarded as an off-stage, back-office situation, and a retreat
from the celebrity circuit; he and the other members of the band were catapulted into.
“Suddenly I was ‘one of those,’ even within my family, and it was very difficult to get
used to. I’d grown up and lived with these people and now I found myself in weirdland,”
Ringo said (Brown 2020: 110). As this was an uncanny situation, Starr kindly asked his
family to stop acting this way.
18 A. STYHRE
individuals into celebrities are such a vexing concern for some individuals:
suddenly an individual can no longer escape social judgment regarding
your performance, personality, lifestyle choices, etc. being passed, and
often in public forums such as news media reporting and in the cultural
circuits of celebrity culture. In the end, Gould’s (2002) functionalist
model of status ordering underlines how status is a relational term and
a socially embedded construct, consistent with a Durkheimian social fact.
To further illustrate the value of the Durkheimian concept of social
facts, McDonnell and King’s (2018: 64) study of how corporate discrimi-
nation cases that end up in court are affected by status is helpful. American
legislation bans discrimination on basis of, e.g., racial, ethnic, and reli-
gious grounds, and if, e.g., an applicant for a position in a company
believes he or she is subject to discriminatory decisions and/or forms of
decision bias, such cases can be determined by a court of law. McDon-
nell and King (2018: 64) propose that actors that have a high status
have an advantage vis-à-vis low-status actors inasmuch as “[p]eople tend
to infer less blame and responsibility for actors’ bad actions when they
have pre-established positive expectations about the actor.” McDonnell
and King (2018) refer to this advantage as the “halo effect,” a form of
status-induced image that makes it more complicated for the plaintiff to
convince judges and juries that an individual has been wronged by the
defendant. In empirical terms, this means that “[p]restigious companies
are less likely to be found liable when discrimination charges are brought
against them” (McDonnell and King 2018: 78). More specifically, presti-
gious companies here mean “larger companies,” and companies domiciled
(i.e., having their headquarter) in the state in which the suit is brought,
two conditions that make it less likely that the court finds them liable
(McDonnell and King 2018: 78). In the Durkheimian sense of the term,
the halo effect is a social fact as it is both grounded in factual conditions
(say, firm size and domicile) and as it generates material and social effects,
i.e., companies with certain qualities are less likely to be found liable for
discriminatory practices.
At the same time as the halo effect protect high-status companies in
the event of actual court cases, this category of companies is exposed to
certain risks as their “reputational standing” make them more vulnerable
to campaigns orchestrated by activist groups if they fail to live up to their
status. A company that markets itself as being a “green company” and
being is concerned with sustainable production, yet fails in its ambition,
it is more likely to be targeted by activists than a company that does not
fashion such an image of itself. McDonnell and King (2018: 64) refer to
this higher risk as a “halo tax,” being the risk of additional costs incurring
the company fails to act consistently with its own stipulated role and its
public image. Taken together, investment in qualities that generate a halo
effect may be justified regardless of the halo tax, but both consequences
of investment in a status position and a reputational capital are social facts
that need to be understood as such.
Sociologists, anthropologists, and other social science discipline
scholars that conduct ethnographic studies in situ have indicated that not
only abstract entities such as corporations or professional communities
are bestowed with a halo: also material things can carry a symbolic capital
that confers authority to the user of the material, tool, or machinery can
benefit from. Fine’s (1996) study of restaurant kitchen work and the work
of restaurant chefs demonstrate that, e.g., knives (a variety of specialized
knives are used for different foodstuff) have a strong symbolic value. A
good chef knows how to handle and to take care of his or her knives, and
there is a fair share of horror stories circulating in the community that
underline the value of handling the knives professionally and carefully.
In short, knives are tools with a certain halo that needs to be explained
on basis of social conditions and relations. Furthermore, Fine (1996: 93)
argues that the stove, being a “sacred place” in the restaurant kitchen, is
associated with more prestigious work assignments, whereas “cold dishes”
such as salads belong to the domain of novices and consequently have
lower status and no halo. In the world of restaurant chefs and other
workers, the kitchen is a spatially structured site wherein specific tools and
machinery serve as material objects that structure the social organization
and signals their status positions. Any violations of the rules imposed by
this social organization may result in additional costs, and/or grievances
from actors who comply with the traditional organization. The halo of
material resources, an expression of their status, is thus best understood
as being social facts that generate material consequences within a domain
of work.
Social Effects of Status Relations

If status is part of the symbolic economy of prestige, also being defined
as what differs from reputation, what are then the social consequences
of society structured around status? Unsurprisingly, the scholarly liter-
ature points at both desirable and unwanted effects. Selznick (1963)
20 A. STYHRE
proposes that an increased emphasis on status is indicative of increased

social dynamics and evaluates such tendencies in positive terms: “[S]tatus-
seeking is a sign of a society on the move. It is a good guess that many
fewer people today than two generations ago ‘know their place’ and limit
their actions and their aspirations accordingly” (Selznick 1963: 82). As
liberal and democratic societies are premised on its members’ willingness
to actively recognize and to participate in competitive games to opti-
mize the use of human, financial, and material resources, status is a key
mechanism that incentivizes social actors to perform at the peak of their
capacity at the same time as the economic and financial benefits gener-
ated can be better shared in the community if high status serves a form
of non-monetary recognition of individual contributions.
Scholars who on empirical and/or theoretical grounds are skeptical
regarding, e.g., market economies’ capacity to allocate resources on basis
of individual contributions, or who otherwise predict that certain groups
may actively protect their inherited privileges, are less sanguine about
“status-seeking.” Maclean et al. (2014) study how French economic elites
actively circumvent the “espoused societal logic of meritocracy” in an
otherwise democratic society. For these groups, not the least protected
by a crony education system structured around the grandes écoles system
that is a French idiosyncrasy (Raynard et al. 2021), meritocracy is “not the
prevailing logic,” Maclean et al. (2014: 845) write. Rather than relying
on merits, economic elite advocates the principle of reciprocity a key orga-
nizing principle as it preserves their privileges and status: “[H]igh-status
agents choose one another, and are chosen in return, forming a corporate
class in their own right” (Maclean et al. 2014: 846). This means that
social class, otherwise regarding as basically being irrelevant as selection
criteria in a meritocratic doctrine, here on the contrary plays a key role as
a primary selection mechanism (Maclean et al. 2014: 847). Social class is
thus granted more predicative value for future performance than formal
and practical merits do.
Another case of non-meritocratic selection is gender-biased recruit-
ment. Ridgeway (1997: 221) refers to “gender status beliefs” as one
mechanism that generates and preserves inequality. Gender status beliefs
denote the assumption that one sex (i.e., men) is generally “superior and
diffusely more competent than the other” (i.e., women) (Ridgeway 1997:
221). When an actor subscribes to gender status beliefs, men’s traits are
“generally viewed as more valuable than women’s,” and men are “diffus-
edly judged as more competent,” Ridgeway (1997: 218) writes. Scholarly
research indicates that such cognitive bias has been complemented by new
selection methods that reduce the influence of unjustifiable gender status
beliefs, but that the outcomes are mixed. In some cases, cognitive bias
cannot be circumvented despite the presence of more robust performance
data (Castilla and Benard 2010; Castilla 2008), while in other cases,
new approaches have been proved to result in improved gender equality
(Rivera and Tilcsik 2019; Goldin and Rouse 2000). Such evidence indi-
cates that status and the effects of status beliefs need to be studied in situ,
and under the influence of specific institutional conditions and organiza-
tional and professional practices. In other words, status is a situated and
contingent on term that is established under local conditions.
Outline of the Volume

This volume is structured into two parts and seven chapters. This chapter
introduces and defines key concepts and terms, and discusses how status
is to be considered from an organization theory perspective, i.e., how
is status and status relations determined by organizational practices
and mechanisms. Chapter 2 examines the literature that demonstrates
that status is a relational term, supportive of social relations that are
constructed on basis of both social norms and social interests, and thus
subject to manipulation. In this view, status relations, defined as a social
mechanism that is more stable and consistent overtime than many other
social relations and conditions are, are still possible to shape on basis of
strategic and tactic interests. Chapter 3 turns from the causes and material
conditions, constitutive of status relations, and instead examines its conse-
quences. By definition, status represents an advantage, all things equal, the
privilege to have certain decisions and activities being assessed in more
favorable terms than would be the case if a low-status agent conducted
the same decisions. At the same time, high status can be predicament
inasmuch as a firm belief in one’s higher capacity to accurately collect and
process information may result in biases in assessment. High-status actors,
therefore, need to be aware of their proclivity to, e.g., underrate risks or
unanticipated outcomes from purposeful action.
Part II of the volume turns from the theoretical frameworks and
instead presents empirical research wherein status relations matter for how
actors and organizations make decisions and interact. Chapter 4 discusses
the role of awards and prizes in the field of urban development projects,
a domain that includes the collaborative efforts of heterogeneous actors
22 A. STYHRE
and that demand considerable finance capital investment, and that are
dependent on stable political relations over at least the project period,
and preferably longer. In this setting, awards being issues by, e.g., industry
interest organizations may serve an active role in conferring authority and
legitimacy to key actors. An award is a field-specific mechanism that gener-
ates more robust and resilient social relations, which also increases the
likelihood that complex and costly urban development projects will be
finalized as planned.
Chapter 5 examines another industry from a status theory perspec-
tive, namely the video game industry, and more specifically how so-called
indie studios are dependent on third parties to better marketing their
new product releases. As indie studios, smaller and more thinly capital-
ized video game developing companies, tend to have limited resources
to invest in marketing campaigns, they seek to build gamer communities
that act as their primary audience and client base. In order to generate
a “buzz” around a new game being released, influencers and YouTubers
are involved in the work so that it generates benefits for both indie devel-
opers (being in demand of a channel to market its games) and influencers
(in demand of qualitative content to attract their current and new “fol-
lowers”). The status of the influencer is thus a resource that the indie
developer actively seeks to exploit to its own benefit.
Chapter 6 discusses how a high-status pharmaceutical company’s
business incubator/accelerator generates positive effects for life science
companies re-located to the incubator. Similar to the case of the indie
video game developers, life science companies in a development phase
are frequently undercapitalized, i.e., they need to commit a considerable
proportion of their resources to raise new funds to finance the develop-
ment work. If being more closely associated or affiliated with a major
market actor, life science companies may benefit from lower thresholds
when raising new venture capital as finance capital investors regard the
selection process as being indicative of the selected life science compa-
ny’s market potential and prospects. That is, the status of the company
managing the incubator serves to signal to venture capital investors that
certain life science companies admitted to the incubator have qualities
that potentially make them attractive investment objects.
The final chapter of the volume, Chapter 7, summarizes the theoret-
ical propositions addressed in the book and discusses their implications
for companies and organization. Status is frequently examined on the
level of individuals (say, executive decision makers, or celebrity figures) or
certain communities (say, professional groups with jurisdictional discre-

tion), but the concept is also applicable when examining corporate and
organizational activities and decisions. Status is thus a social mechanism
that structures human conditions and confers authority to certain indi-
viduals or groups so they can acquire the professional role confidence to
make the difficult decisions needed, also under the influence of scarce
information and uncertainty more widely.
Summary and Conclusion

In liberal societies, a preference for meritocratic allocation of status is
oftentimes expressed: individuals being most qualified should be granted
the authority to make decisions within a specific jurisdictional domain.
Historical societies tended to rely on a social organization wherein
authority, privileges, and status were distributed on basis of social hier-
archies, in turn defined on basis of a stratified social order, being a form
of caste system that provided few opportunities for social mobility and
the dynamics derived from such conditions. To some extent, the concept
of status is a reminiscence from such an historical social organization
inasmuch as status relations tend to be “sticky,” i.e., they are associated
with certain social communities, social classes, and professional groups
overtime. On the other hand, in the highly dynamic and changeable
contemporary society, status is a social mechanism that serves other ends
than to preserve status quo: status may be acquired and earned on basis
of hard work and extraordinary contributions, and is no longer a matter
of birth-right or any other mechanism supportive of a non-meritocratic
allocation of life chances and resources. In an organizational setting, the
concept of status is somewhat understated as the concept is oftentimes
associated with individuals and the personal relations they are involved
in, rather than being an organizational mechanism or device. There is
thus a potential in using status theories to shed light on a variety of
organizational practices, and to show how human actors, despite their
commitment to a meritocratic allocation of resources in principle, are
prone to cognitively the social world on basis of status relations in prac-
tice. This volume provides a framework for such a scholarly program,
locating status at the core of a variety of social and economic relations.
24 A. STYHRE
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PART I
Theoretical Perspectives
CHAPTER 2
The Manipulation of Status: Causes

and Effects
Introduction
As indicated in the Chapter 1, status is a positive concept inasmuch as it
provides actors with distinct and lasting advantages vis-à-vis lower-status
actors, ceteris paribus. At the same time, as status is a social fact and the
effect of institutional conditions that the individual agent cannot fully
control, status is also subject to manipulations, fabrications, and external
status shocks that gradually, or at times monetarily restructure the alloca-
tion of status within a specific field. That means that status, high or low,
can never be taken for granted or be presumed to exist for a predictable
future. On the contrary, status is a social position embedded in nested
institutional conditions that in turn are determined by social actors that
may, or may not, be interested in changing current status positions. This
chapter reviews relevant literature that either theorizes or reports studies
of status disruptions or status changes. The practical and managerial impli-
cations are that actors that rely on a status position that include a signaling
of a commitment to certain social norms (say, a conservative politician
that publically honors a pater familias persona) needs to ensure that
such widely circulating images are not threatened by evidence or rumors
that cast a shadow of doubt over the authenticity and robustness of such
images and roles. Status is thus preferably seen as resources to be managed
wisely, especially in fields where unfavorable reputations are easily and at
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 29

Switzerland AG 2022
A. Styhre, Status and Organizations,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09868-0_2
30 A. STYHRE
low cost used by other contestants to gain personal benefits and advan-
tages. The capacity to influence and shape status positions is arguably
why many people are intrigued, at times even obsessed with high-status
persons and/or organizations. A celebrity who falls from grace and reveals
human weaknesses are in equal proportion (depending on the cause of
the status loss, naturally) likely to receive criticism and reprimands as he
or she will be embraced for being all-too-human in failing in the unfor-
giving light of news reporting and public gossiping. In most cases, the
status-as-social-fact proposition predicts, status is earned as actors behave
in ways that are consistent with social norms, and consistent with the
conceptual distinction made between status and reputation, wherein repu-
tation is more fickle than status is, which means that in order to influence
someone’s status, there is a need for a detailed understanding of how
social status is conferred to individual actors in the first place. How these
mechanisms and devices operate in the domain of status allocation will be
examined in this chapter.
Status Ambiguity, Status

Inconsistency, and Status Anxiety
Jensen and Wang (2018) introduce the concept of status ambiguity and
status inconsistency as analytical categories that inform empirical studies of
how, e.g., certain organizations act to protect themselves against a status
loss that would incur costs. Jensen and Wang (2018: 1022) here stip-
ulate that status is related to perceived quality of the services offered:
“status inconsistency makes status a less effective signal of perceived
quality.” Needless to say, status ambiguity and status inconsistency are
a larger concern for high-status organizations and high-status units that
“that traditionally have benefitted most from their advantageous status
position” (Jensen and Wang 2018: 1022). Using the empirical example
of high-status tertiary education institutions (so-called elite universities)
and more specifically business schools that host comparably lower ranked
departments, and consequently may suffer the consequences of hosting
world-class and less-than-world-class departments under the same roof,
Jensen and Wang (2018) examine the consequences of the predicament
of status ambiguity. Somewhat unsurprisingly, Jensen and Wang (2018:
1043) found that status inconsistency in “multi-unit organizations” tends
to diminish “the positive association between status and performance
because it weakens the effectiveness of status as a signal of perceived
2 THE MANIPULATION OF STATUS: CAUSES AND EFFECTS 31
quality and as an accountability reduction mechanism.” Taken the circular

definition of status inconsistency as what of necessity weakens a market
signal (the semantic meaning of the term inconsistency denotes such
ambiguities), Jensen and Wang’s (2018: 1033) study indicates that the
“cumulative advantage of status” is limited. Expressed in more metaphor-
ical terms, no chain is stronger than its weakest link, and as any statistical
method applied to calculate academic performance and prestige (which
in many cases have been proven to be mutually defined rather than being
independent variables) on basis of numerical data will identify some unit,
department, or individual as being that weakest link. In the end, Jensen
and Wang (2018) may demonstrate the difficulty with calculating status
on basis of numerical data as that data per se (e.g., publishing records)
may itself mirror status positions (i.e., the editors and reviewers that assess
scholarly contributions submitted to journals may themselves have private
and public beliefs regarding what is prestigious and what status means).
Under the influence of such epistemological ambiguities, the key contri-
bution from the study is that status is unevenly distributed across units,
and that in order to optimize the status of the specific business school (in
this case), Jensen and Wang (2018: 1034) propose that non-meritocratic
policies should be endorsed by business school directors: “It might be
more productive for everybody to use extra resources to increase the
status of low-status departments,” Jensen and Wang (2018: 1034) say.
For the status-minded and status-oriented actors, inside as well as
outside of the organization, status ambiguities (on the aggregated busi-
ness school level, in the case above) and status inconsistencies (being an
empirical fact on basis of unit-by-unit analyses) are a concern as it not only
renders the concept of status per se compromised, i.e., it is unclear what
qualities the alleged status position de facto denotes, it also undermines
a variety of ranking and rating devices and tools that use status measures
as input variables. If status becomes fluid and blurred in its contours, the
capacity to signal to market actors that a specific business school provides
the teaching and the research associated with high-status tertiary educa-
tion institutions is reduced. This weakened market signal may, therefore,
result in status anxiety, a predicament that befalls professional and occu-
pational groups that have difficulties to formally substantiate claims of
qualitative output or performance. Jensen (2006: 98) here defines status
anxiety in relational terms (a more general definition of the term follows
below) as “[a] concern about being devalued because other actors ques-
tion the quality of one’s partners, which, in turn, can motivate focal
32 A. STYHRE
actors to disassociate themselves from their partners to protect their own

status position.” For instance, management consultants, being a compa-
rably new professional community (Butler and Collins 2016; Kipping
and Engwall 2002), and frequently subject to popular skepticism or even
ridicule in popular culture, may suffer from status anxiety as they may
face difficulties regarding how to prove a linear causality between their
work and increased client performance. In the arts (e.g., Bourdieu 1993;
Becker 1982), status anxiety derives both from weakly developed perfor-
mance metrics (as it is primarily critics’ accounts of performance and
to some extent box office sales that can substantiate claims of superior
qualitative performance), and from a broader ignorance regarding artistic
ambitions in the wider public. For example, a highly praised collection of
poems, being verified by expert evaluators such as literature critics, may
still attract only limited attention from the public, being of interest only
for a smaller coterie of poetry readers, in many cases themselves writing
poetry. To cope with this predicament, the arts are granting much value
to affiliations including the theater company where an actor is part of the
ensemble, or the art school from which the artist has graduated. In addi-
tion, status anxiety makes track records and portfolios, documents that
captures major events and accomplishments over the career, of central
importance.
Gill (2015) defines status anxiety on basis of his study of management
consultants: “Status refers to the position of a group or an individual
in relation to others within a social hierarchy... Status anxiety there-
fore describes an apprehension or worry about a position or value
in a hierarchy.” While status anxiety can be intuitively understood by
most social actors—either as a personal or a professional experience—the
term arguably needs to be substantiated on basis of empirical evidence.
Ashcraft’s (2005) study of airplane pilots, traditionally being a prestigious
professional community and more or less exclusively including men, but
more recently being affected by the consequences of de-regulatory market
policies, accounts for how this professional group are concerned with a
loss of status:
[Pilots] recognized several threats to pilot prestige, including (a) automa-

tion, (b) decreasing discipline and hierarchy (attributed to social move-
ments, generational shifts, and increasing reliance on civilian flight
training), (c) proliferation or passengers and pilots (thanks to deregula-

tion), (d) publicized contractual negotiations and corresponding percep-
tions of pilots as greedy ‘glorified bus drivers’, and (e) backlash from
the politically incorrect exploits of the ‘jet-sets’ era pilot. A final threat
of decline discourse tended to occupy participants talk: (f) the captains
eroding power. (Ashcraft 2005: 77)
The de-regulation of the international and regional aircraft industry

has generated many effects that pilots are concerned with, not only in
term of status, but also in terms of labor relations and labor contracts
more widely. In this case, status anxiety is for the largest share derived
from policy changes, but status anxiety may also derive from more broad-
sweeping changes in social norms, at times resulting in status anxiety in
unexpected quarters.
A small sociological literature examines how economic elites tend to
downplay their wealth and the lifestyle choices they can afford, and
instead aspire to be part of a “generalized middle class” (Friedman
et al. 2021; Friedman and Reeves 2020; Sherman 2018; Ljunggren
2015). By the turn of the twentieth, Thorsten Veblen ([1899] 1994)
claimed that economic elites participated in “conspicuous consumption”
to signal to audiences that they were part of the upper crust of society.
In contrast, contemporary economic elites endorse meritocratic beliefs
and regard themselves as regular middle class consumers even though
their monthly and annual spending on housing, education, and services
suggests otherwise. Ljunggren (2015: 563) studies Norwegian high net-
worth households and found that this community advocated a lifestyle
that Ljunggren characterizes as “conspicuous modesty.” To signal private
wealth was dismissed as unbecoming, and instead an “elitist egalitari-
anism” norm was advocated. At the same time, this egalitarianism was
based on the principle of personal accomplishments as egalitarian values
still demand that the actor displays self-discipline, work hard, make sacri-
fices, etc., that is, the right to shared resources is earned rather than
being inherited, or protected by some legal rights or normative beliefs.
“[E]galitarianism could also be taken too far—with the consequence
of ‘crippling real culture,’” members of the Norwegian economic elites
clarified (Ljunggren 2015: 567).
A study of economic elites in New York City, an entirely different
institutional setting than Norway, reports similar results. Sherman (2018:
34 A. STYHRE
412) proposes that New York elites tend to construct themselves as

“‘normal’ people with ‘reasonable’ needs”:
Ostentation and excess are morally suspect and thus associated with illegiti-
mate privilege. In contrast, reasonable consumption and being ‘normal’ are
morally upstanding in their association with core ‘values’ such as modesty
and prudence, and thus legitimate privilege. Hard work is one side of
the coin of legitimation; reasonable consumption emerges as the other.
(Sherman 2018: 412)
This attitude or belief in actually leading a life that is more or less

consistent with the majority means that elites are aspiring to be part of
what Sherman (2018: 412. Original emphasis omitted) refers to as “the
symbolic middle.” In an American socio-cultural setting and tradition, to
aspire to be part of the middle class is in a sense to “allude to classlessness
itself” (Sherman 2018: 418), a form of shared ground wherein economic
and social privileges are downplayed as the community share a commit-
ment to certain norms and values that are independent from such material
conditions. Furthermore, Sherman (2018: 418) proposes that the middle
class is “also the morally virtuous class,” i.e., elites signal that they desire
to be “[o]rdinary, prudent, low-key consumers, which can co-exist with
other kinds of motivations for consumption.” Consequently, wealthy New
Yorkers explicitly reject wasteful, materialistic expenditure, or “spending
for its own sake,” as being a frivolous relationship with money and
economic resources that are often associated with the wealthy in the
USA and elsewhere. However, the difference is that for this community,
Sherman (2018: 424) writes, “‘waste’ [is] a moral issue, rather than an
economic one.”
The question is then why wealthy New Yorkers feel they need to signal
their prudence and moderate use of economic resources? In Norway, with
progressive fiscal policies and a political culture that emphasizes economic
equality as a mark of societal resilience, it is understandable that wealthy
individuals would recognize the need for justifying lifestyle choices and
private wealth, but American society has persistently promoted itself as an
entrepreneurial and venturesome society wherein economic inequality is
not so much regarded as a societal failure as it is indicative of the dynamics
of the social order per se. Studies also show that the American public tend
to recognize significant private wealth as being justifiable and commend-
able to a much higher extent than in European states (Bonica et al. 2013:
108). In short, in the USA, conspicuous private wealth is an implausible

concern for economic elites. Apparently, the “inverse status anxiety” of
elites in Norway and in New York city, wherein these communities are not
so much concerned about too little status, but rather too much, needs to
be explained on basis of a variety social, economic, political, and cultural
conditions, entangled in a variety of ways. Kantola and Kuusela (2019:
380) interviewed financially successful Finnish entrepreneurs who created
their own fortunes and not being a bit shy to praise their own efforts
and accomplishments. Kantola and Kuusela (2019) suggest that growing
economic inequality has made elites more concerned with how to justify
their economic resources vis-à-vis potentially critical audiences:
Elites need to be creative to justify their position at the top of an egalitarian

society. Accordingly, they adjust contradictions, such as their own idleness
and exceptional wealth, as they negotiate a moral stance combining their
leisurely lifestyles with the cultural repertoires of the classical Protestant
work ethic and the rags-to-riches stories. (Kantola and Kuusela 2019: 380)
Such stories are easier to sell if you are an example of the “self-made
man” (with “man” here denoting a human rather than a person of male
gender) who has created your own fortune. If wealth is either inher-
ited, or acquired through marriage or through other social relations,
the aspiration to prudence and modesty is perhaps more understand-
able. Nevertheless, under all conditions, status anxiety can work in both
directions: as being a source of self-doubt and grievances on part of the
individual or the community that believe they are underappreciated, and
as a mechanism that incentivizes wealthy households to downplay their
lifestyle choices and its costs to evade the potential skepticism of the wider
public. To be underappreciated is one form of predicament, but to be at
risk to be shamed for inherited or earned wealth is also considered as a
social concern that needs to be handled.
The Manipulation of Status

In democratic societies, egalitarianism is oftentimes advocated as a social
norm that counteract tendencies toward an unsustainable allocation of
social resources, at the same time as policymaking and political deci-
sions are supportive of risk-taking and venturing, activities that generate
economic and social welfare. Therefore, policymakers need strike balance
36 A. STYHRE
between individual incentives (say, to ensure an education premium

for tertiary education) and mechanisms (e.g., fiscal policy) that extract
and transfer economic value to individuals and households that are less
successful in acquiring resources and making money. As economic self-
sufficiency and an independent responsibility for one’s own household
budget and financial situation are politically motivated objectives across
the political spectrum (few policymakers in democratic states consider a
Soviet style centrally organized plan economy as a reasonable alternatively
to the liberal market economy model), economic and social status is both
a benevolent mechanism, supportive of such economic self-sufficiency,
and what can be subject to manipulation through a variety of activities.
In a series of laboratory experiments, Hahl et al. (2017) demon-
strate that elites (i.e., high-status groups) can be primed to act in ways
that downplay their own status to preserve a sense of community with
non-elite groups. The key mechanism being manipulated in such experi-
ments is the sense of authenticity related to the status position acquired.
Hahl et al. (2017: 829) here speak about “the aura of authenticity” that
is oftentimes associated with low-brow culture. In a social class theory
perspective, low-status classes are not aspirational in the same manner as
medium-status classes such as the middle class are. Social mobility and
the virtue of shaping one’s own life and career, and to make a “contri-
bution” are essentially middle-class sentiments or ideologies, whereas the
working class and subaltern classes are basically excluded from such possi-
bilities, Hahl et al. (2017) argue. This fact, the low-status actors’ lack
of incentives to move up the social hierarchy are interpreted as they are
“disinterested” regarding the recognition of others, i.e., they can ignore
the rules of the game and standards defined and imposed by elite audi-
ences and high-brow actors. This means that in lieu of shared standards
that are recognized by both high-, middle-, and low-status actors result
in low-brow culture being regarded as more genuine or authentic than
high-brow culture.
Furthermore, as elite communities with high status tend to be
cognizant of their privileged position, such communities suffer from the
predicament of an endemic “sense of insecurity in authenticity” (Hahl
et al. 2017: 829). That is, high-status actors are more easily manipulated
in terms of, e.g., what culture they prefer, Hahl et al. (2017) propose. To
escape this sense of insecurity, high-status actors may publically appreciate
authentic (i.e., low-brow) culture to signal to audiences that they recog-
nize the contributions of these groups, outside of their own community
(Hahl et al. 2017: 830). In brief, to cope with uncertain status positions,
popular culture and preferably low-brow culture is endorsed.
In the experimental situation, Hahl et al. (2017: 830) participants were
manipulated (on basis of a tournament competition) to “see themselves
as members of a social category that is high-status,” yet the partici-
pants suspected that this classification was inauthentic and not justified on
reasonable grounds. Under these conditions—participants believe they are
assigned a high-status position but are privately not convinced regarding
the authenticity of this social position—Hahl et al. (2017: 830) demon-
strate that these subjects “[e]xhibit greater demand for paintings that
are lowbrow and authentic (relative to those that are lowbrow and inau-
thentic) than do counterparts who either (1) see themselves as low-status
or (2) see themselves as high-status but are not insecure about their
authenticity.” In Hahl et al. (2017: 846) experimental model, the insecu-
rity that high-status actors often “feel about their authenticity” prompts
them to embrace what they themselves regard as being authentic, either
as a private belief or as a public signal to audiences that they believe may
share their own concern regarding the legitimacy of their high-status posi-
tion. While such experimental results are interesting for the analysis of
status as social fact, it still needs to further examine what “authenticity”
denotes in the eye of both the experimental subjects and their audiences:
[I]nsofar as low-status culture is produced without any awareness that it

might impress elite audiences as aesthetically sophisticated, elite audiences
can generally assume it was produced in a spirit of disinterestedness with
respect to highbrow standards, and thus in pursuit of intrinsic rather than
extrinsic rewards. (Hahl et al. 2017: 832)
In this analytical model, disinterestedness is operationalized as

“intrinsic motivation,” a sort of “art for art’s sake” attitude or ideology
that high-status subjects associate with authenticity. However, recent
studies indicate that it is a fallacy to confuse intrinsic and extrinsic
motivation (Derfler-Rozin and Pitesa 2020) as these two classes of
motivation are not mutually exclusive but are mutually supportive and
complementary. Derfler-Rozin and Pitesa (2020) speak about “motiva-
tion purity bias” in the case when, e.g., managers infer that candidates
who “[e]xpress higher extrinsic motivation are less intrinsically moti-
vated” (Derfler-Rozin and Pitesa 2020: 1845). In fact, there is no
evidence of such relationship; on the contrary, what Derfler-Rozin and
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Ohio. From his letters to me he seems the same jolly,
good natured hero as of old. I hope to see him before
many months, for the first time since he shook me by
the hand and passed in and out of his tunnel from the
Marine Hospital and to freedom.
The two cousins Buck, David and Eli S., I last saw
top of some corn in an army wagon I jumped from
when I first encountered the 9th Mich. Cavalry. Little
thought that would be the last time I should see
them. Their command belonged to the Eastern Army
in the region of the Potomac, and when
communication was opened at Savannah they were
sent there on transports. I afterward received letters
from both of them, and David’s picture; also his wife’s
whom he had just married. David’s picture is
reproduced in this book and I must say hardly does
him justice as he was a good looking and active
fellow. Presume Eli is a farmer if alive, and “Dave”
probably preaching.
“Limber Jim,” who was instrumental in putting
down the raiders at Andersonville, was until recently
a resident of Joliet, Illinois. He died last winter, in
1880, and it is said his health was always poor after
his terrible summer of 1864. He was a hero in every
sense of the word, and if our government did not
amply repay him for valiant service done while a
prisoner of war, then it is at fault.
Sergt. Winn of the 100th Ohio, who befriended me
at Savannah, is, I think, a citizen of Cincinnati, Ohio,
and a prosperous man. Any way, he was in 1870 or
thereabouts. Was an upright man and good fellow.
Every one knows the fate of Capt. Wirtz, our prison
commander at Andersonville, who was hung at
Washington, D. C., in 1866, for his treatment of us
Union prisoners of war. It was a righteous judgment,
still I think there are others who deserved hanging
fully as much. He was but the willing tool of those
higher in command. Those who put him there knew
his brutal disposition, and should have suffered the
same disposition made of him. Although, I believe at
this late day those who were in command and
authority over Capt. Wirtz have successfully thrown
the blame on his shoulders, it does not excuse them
in the least so far as I am concerned. They are just
as much to blame that thirteen thousand men died in
a few months at that worst place the world has ever
seen, as Capt. Wirtz, and should have suffered
accordingly. I don’t blame any of them for being
rebels if they thought it right, but I do their inhuman
treatment of prisoners of war.
Hub Dakin is now a resident of Dansville, Mich.,
the same village in which lives Wm. B. Rowe. He has
been more or less disabled since the war, and I
believe is now trying to get a pension from the
government for disability contracted while in prison. It
is very difficult for ex-prisoners of war to get
pensions, owing to the almost impossibility of getting
sufficient evidence. The existing pension laws require
that an officer of the service shall have knowledge of
the origin of disease, or else two comrades who may
be enlisted men. At this late day it is impossible to
remember with accuracy sufficient to come up to the
requirements of the law. There is no doubt that all
were more or less disabled, and the mere fact of their
having spent the summer in Andersonville, should be
evidence enough to procure assistance from the
government.
And now a closing chapter in regard to myself. As
soon as Savannah was occupied by our troops and
communications opened with the North, a furlough
was made out by Capt. Johnson, of our company,
and signed by Assistant Surgeon Young, and then by
Col. Acker. I then took the furlough to Gen. Kilpatrick,
which he signed, and also endorsed on the back to
the effect that he hoped Gen. Sherman would also
sign and send me North. From Gen. Kilpatrick’s
head-quarters I went to see Gen. Sherman at
Savannah and was ushered into his presence. The
Gen. looked the paper over and then said no men
were being sent home now and no furloughs granted
for any cause. If I was permanently disabled I could
be sent to Northern hospitals, or if I had been an
exchanged prisoner of war, could be sent North, but
there was no provision made for escaped prisoners
of war. Encouraged me with the hope, however, that
the war was nearly over and it could not be long
before we would all go home. Gave me a paper
releasing me from all duty until such time as I saw fit
to do duty, and said the first furlough granted should
be mine, and he would retain it and send to me as
soon as possible. Cannot say that I was very sadly
disappointed, as I was having a good time with the
company, and regaining my health and getting better
every day, with the exception of my leg, which still
troubled me. Stayed with the company until Lee
surrendered, Lincoln assassinated and all the fighting
over and then leaving Chapel Hill, North Carolina, in
April, went to my home in Michigan. In a few weeks
was followed by the regiment, when we were all
mustered out of the service. As had been reported to
me at the regiment, I had been regarded as dead,
and funeral sermon preached.
It was my sad duty to call upon the relatives of
quite a number who died in Andersonville, among
whom were those of Dr. Lewis, John McGuire and
Jimmy Devers. The relics which had been entrusted
to my keeping were all lost with two exceptions, and
through no fault of mine. At the time of my severe
sickness when first taken to Savannah, and when I
was helpless as a child, the things drifted away from
me some way, and were lost. But for the fact that
Battese had two of my diary books and Sergt. Winn
the other, they also would have been lost.
I hope that this Diary may prove successful in its
mission of truly portraying the scenes at
Andersonville and elsewhere during the time of my
imprisonment, and if so, the object of its author shall
have been accomplished.
Yours Very Respectfully,
JOHN L. RANSOM,
Late 1st Sergt. Co. A, 9th Mich. Cav.
John L. Ransom.
[From a photograph taken three months after
escape.]
MICHAEL HOARE’S ESCAPE
National Soldiers’ Home. }

Dayton, Ohio, May 5th, 1881. }
Comrade John L. Ransom,
Dear Friend:— * * * * The night I left the
stockade, going within twelve feet of a guard, I went
down to the city. Had never been there before and
did not know where to go, but wandered about the
streets, dressed in an old suit of rebel clothes, until
12 o’clock that night. It was Oct. 18th, 1864, and I
had been captured March 5th, in Col. Dahlgreen’s
raid, the object of which was to release the officers
confined in Libby prison and the privates confined on
Belle Island and Pemberton prisons. * * * * My whole
uniform was disposed of * * * and I had to wear dirty
rebel rags. They marched us to Stevensville. We
remained there but a short time when we were
marched about two miles and into the heart of a
swamp. We did not know what the matter was but
found out that Kilpatrick had turned back to look for
us, the “forlorn hope,” as we were called. If he had
been one hour sooner, he would have released us;
but fate would have it the other way. From the
swamp we were marched to Richmond, surrounded
by the mounted mob. They would not let us step out
of the ranks even to quench our thirst, and we had to
drink the muddy water from the middle of the road.
Every little town we came to the rebels would
assemble and yell at us, the women the worst. * * * *
When we reached the head-quarters of rebeldom the
whole rebel city was out to meet us * * * * and the
self-styled rebel ladies were the worst in their vim
and foul language. They made a rush for us, but the
guard kept them off until we were safely put in the
third story of the Pemberton building, where we were
searched and stripped of everything we were not
already robbed of. * * * * The next morning the
Richmond people cried out for Jeff Davis to hang us,
saying we were nothing but outlaws and robbers, on
an errand of plunder and rapine. The press tried to
excite hostility against us, and succeeded, in a
measure. We were kept by ourselves and not
allowed to mix with the other prisoners. A special
guard was kept over us, and we were allowed but
two-thirds the small rations issued to the other men.
The windows were all out of the room we were in,
and a cold March wind blowing and cutting through
our starving, naked bodies. * * * * In July we were
going to get hanged in Castle Thunder. We were told
the same story every day, and it was getting stale, so
we paid no attention to it; but sure enough, we were
called out one morning and thought our time had
come. They marched us up Casey street toward
Castle Thunder, and as we approached it some fairly
shivered at their promised doom; but instead of
stopping at that celebrated hotel, we were taken
across the river and put in cattle cars. Where we
were going none knew; but we started and the next
day reached Dansville. We were removed from the
cars and put into a tobacco warehouse and were
kept there until the next morning, when we were put
aboard the cars and started south again until we
came to the world renowned hell-hole, Andersonville.
When we arrived several men were dead in the cars,
and the rebels would not let us remove them. The
cars were packed like herring boxes, so you may
imagine our situation. * * * * From there I was
transferred to Savannah, and from the latter place I
made my escape, as previously mentioned.
As I have said, I wandered about until 12 o’clock,
and was then in a worn out condition. Not knowing
where to turn or lay my head, I sat down under a tree
to rest myself, and as I sat there, who should come
along but a watchman. “Hello!” says he, “what are
you doing here at this hour of the night?” I answered
that I was one of the guards guarding the Yankees at
the stockade, and that I had been down to Bryan
street to see my sister. “All right,” said he, “You
fellows have a hard time guarding them d—d
Yankees. Why don’t you shoot more of ’em and get
’em out o’ the way?” I passed on until I came to a
place with a high board fence. I crawled over and
looked around and found a small shed divided by a
board partition. In one end they kept a cow and in the
other some fodder. I went in where the fodder was
and threw myself down and went to sleep, intending
to be up before day; but what was my surprise when
it proved to be broad daylight before I awoke. I lay
there thinking what to do, when I heard the gate of
the fence open. I jumped up and looked through a
crack in the boards and saw an old man enter with a
pail in his hand. Presently he came where I was in
the fodder to get some for the cow. As he opened the
door he started back with fright, saying, “Who are
you and what brings you here?” I saw by his face and
voice that he was an Irishman, and I made up my
mind to tell him the truth. * * * He told me to remain
where I was and he would try and get me something
to eat. He went away and presently returned with a
tin pan full of sweet potatoes and bacon. * * * * He
told me the only way to get away was by the Isle of
Hope, ten miles from the city on the Skidaway shell
road. There was a picket post of twelve men right on
the road, but I started off, and when I reached the
picket put on a bold face and told them I belonged to
Maxwell’s battery, stationed at the Isle of Hope, and
they let me pass. * * * I passed officers and soldiers
on the road, but they never took any notice of me
further than to return my kindly greeting. I finally
reached the outpost on the road, about a mile from
freedom. I had known, even before starting, that to
pass that post I should have to have a pass signed
by the commanding officer at Savannah; but there
were swamps on both sides the road, and I thought I
could swim in the marsh and flank the post. I took off
my jacket and made the attempt, but had to return to
the road. * * * * I saw there was no use trying to
escape by the Isle of Hope. I could not pass the
outpost, and besides, there was great danger that I
should be hung as a spy. So I put back to Savannah
that night. I had to wade the marsh to get by the post
I first passed. I got safely back to my cowshed and
laid there till woke up the next morning by my friend
Gleason. When I told him where I had been he would
hardly believe me. * * * * He brought me something
to eat and went away, but returned at night with two
other men. Their names were Wall and Skelley and
they belonged to the 3d Georgia artillery. They said
they were northern men, but were in Savannah when
the war broke out and had to join the rebel army. I
told them the history of my adventure by the Isle of
Hope and they were astonished. They said the only
way was by the river to Fort Pulaski, fourteen miles
from Savannah. The question was, where to get a
boat. They were known in Savannah and their
movements would be watched. They said they knew
where there was a boat, but it was a government
boat. I said that made it better, and if they would
show me where the boat was, I would do the
headwork. So they showed me and left me the
management. I went when everything was ready, and
muffled the oars and oarlocks, with a sentinel within
twenty feet of me. The boat lay in the river, near the
gas-house and a government store-house, and the
river was guarded by gunboats and the floating
battery, and paved with torpedoes; but there is what
is called “the back river,” which flows into the
Savannah above Smith Island. The mouth of this
stream was guarded by a picket crew, sent from the
battery every night; so when we left we had to lay in
a rice sluice, where we ran the boat in about an
eighth of a mile, and raised the grass as the boat
passed along to conceal our tracks. We heard them
searching the next morning, after the boat had been
missed, but the search was at last given up. About
this time Skelley began talking about being
recaptured, as the shore was picketed all the way.
He said there would be nothing done with me, if I
was recaptured but to put me back in the stockade,
while he and Wall would be shot as deserters. He
proposed returning to Savannah at once. * * * * He
began to win the other fellow over and I saw the
game was up with me. Skelley was the only one of
us who was armed and he had a Colt’s revolver. * * *
* I told him that his plan was the best and that I didn’t
want to be the means of getting him into trouble. I
gained his confidence, but the thought of returning to
Savannah never entered my head. I watched my
chance, and at a favorable opportunity, snatched his
pistol. * * * I rose to my feet with the pistol at full
cock, pointed it at his breast and told him that one
move towards returning to Savannah would end his
career by a bullet from his own revolver. He turned all
colors, but said nothing. I kept my distance, and at
four o’clock in the afternoon told them to get into the
boat. I then sat down in the stern and told them to
pull out, which they did with a vim. Just as we passed
the mouth, we heard the click of oars on the picket
boat; but they were too late, and all the danger we
had to encounter was the pickets on the shore which
we had to hug on account of torpedoes in the
channel. I don’t know how we ever passed safely
over the torpedoes and by the pickets, which latter
were within forty yards of us all the way along until
we reached Pulaski. All that saved us was that the
pickets had fires lighted and were looking at them,
and our oars and oarlocks being muffled, they did not
hear or see us. It was very dark when we struck the
mouth of the Savannah, and whereabouts Fort
Pulaski lay we knew not; but we kept pulling until
halted by a soldier of the 144th N. Y. Infantry, who
was guarding the place at that time. We were
ordered to pull in, which we did, and were taken up to
the commanding officer and questioned. He said it
was the most daring escape ever made, up to that
time, considering the obstacles we had to encounter.
We were kept in the guard house until my statement
was confirmed by the war department, when I was
released and sent to Washington, where I reported to
the Adjutant-General who gave me a furlough and
sent me to the hospital. I remained there until spring,
when I rejoined my regiment and was mustered out
at the close of the war. * * * * *
I remain,
Your true friend,
MICHAEL HOARE.
R E B E L T E S T I M O N Y.
We cannot do better than copy into this book a

very complete description of Andersonville Prison, by
Joseph Jones, Surgeon P. A. C. S., Professor of
Medical Chemistry in the Medical College of Georgia,
at Augusta, Ga., as given at the Wirtz trial at
Washington, D. C., he being a witness for the
prosecution:
“Hearing of the unusual mortality among

the prisoners confined at Andersonville, in
the month of August, 1864, during a visit to
Richmond, I expressed to the Surgeon
General, S. P. Moore, Confederate States of
America, a desire to visit Camp Sumpter,
with the design of instituting a series of
inquiries upon the nature and causes of the
prevailing diseases. Small-pox had appeared
among the prisoners, and I believed that this
would prove an admirable field for the study
of its characteristic lesions. The condition of
Peyer’s glands in this disease was
considered as worthy a minute investigation.
It was believed that a large portion of the
men from the Northern portion of the United
States, suddenly transported to a Southern
climate, and confined upon a small portion of
land, would furnish an excellent field for the
investigation of the relations of typhus,
typhoid, and malarial fevers.
The Surgeon General of the Confederate
States of America furnished me with letters
of introduction to the surgeon in charge of
the Confederate States Military prison at
Andersonville, Ga., and the following is my
description of that place:
The Confederate Military Prison at
Andersonville, Ga., consists of a strong
stockade, twenty feet in height, enclosing
twenty-seven acres. The stockade is formed
of strong pine logs, firmly planted in the
ground. The main stockade is surrounded by
two other similar rows of pine logs, the
middle stockade being sixteen feet high, and
the outer one twelve feet. These are
intended for offense and defense. If the inner
stockade should at any time be forced by the
prisoners, the second forms another line of
defense; while in case of an attempt to
deliver the prisoners by a force operating
upon the exterior, the outer line forms an
admirable protection to the Confederate
troops, and a most formidable obstacle to
cavalry or infantry. The four angles of the
outer line are strengthened by earthworks
upon commanding eminences, from which
the cannon, in case of an outbreak among
the prisoners, may sweep the entire
enclosure; and it was designed to connect
these works by a line of rifle pits running zig-
zag around the outer stockade; those rifle
pits have never been completed. The ground
enclosed by the innermost stockade lies in
the form of a parallelogram, the larger
diameter running almost due north and
south. This space includes the northern and
southern opposing sides of two hills,
between which a stream of water runs from
west to east. The surface soil of these two
hills is composed chiefly of sand with varying
mixtures of clay and oxide of iron. The clay
is sufficiently tenacious to give a
considerable degree of consistency to the
soil. The internal structure of the hills, as
revealed by the deep wells, is similar to that
already described. The alternate layers of
clay and sand, as well as the oxide of iron,
which forms in its various combinations a
cement to the sand, allows of extensive
tunneling. The prisoners not only
constructed numerous dirt houses with balls
of clay and sand, taken from the wells which
they had excavated all over these hills, but
they have also, in some cases, tunneled
extensively from these wells. The lower
portion of these hills, bordering on the
stream, are wet and boggy from the constant
oozing of water. The stockade was built
originally to accommodate ten thousand
prisoners, and included at first seventeen
acres. Near the close of the month of June
the area was enlarged by the addition of ten
acres. The ground added was situated on
the northern slope of the largest hill.
Within the circumscribed area of the
stockade the Federal prisoners were
compelled to perform all the functions of life,
cooking, washing, the calls of nature,
exercise, and sleeping. During the month of
March the prison was less crowded than at
any subsequent time, and then the average
space of ground to each prisoner was only

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Status and Organizations: Theories and

Cases Alexander Styhre

Indie Video Game Development Work: Innovation in the

Commentaries and Cases on the Law of Business

Business Organizations: Cases, Problems, and Case

The Invincible Company: Business Model Strategies From

The Axiological Status Of Theism And Other Worldviews

Artificial Intelligence and International Relations

Nationalism: Themes, Theories, and Controversies 1st

Sports, exercise, and nutritional genomics: Current

Theories and Cases

ISBN 978-3-031-09867-3 ISBN 978-3-031-09868-0 (eBook)

Sävedalen, Sweden Alexander Styhre

1 Status as Concept and Social Fact 1

Part I Theoretical Perspectives

Part II Empirical Cases of Status Relations and their

7 The Social and Economic Significance of Status

Status as Concept and Social Fact

The Hertz Bankruptcy Case and the Failure

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

the judges that made the decision to “[d]efinitively distinguish between

The Ambiguous Concept of Status

economies,” the “aristocratic economy” and “the market economy,” co-

In aristocratic communities, the wealthy, never having experienced a condi-

Tocqueville ([1835] 2002: 651) continues: “Amongst a nation where

While a considerable proportion of the population in democratic states,

sociological theory is that modern institutions often fall short of satisfying

A capitalist society is peculiar in that it seems to announce that it is open

A few empirical examples may illustrate the claim that contemporary

The Conundrum of Status

more of a matter of socializing neophytes into a professional role, and

Far from being unwilling dupes of ideological indoctrination, students are

actions. Following this introduction, the concept of status can now be

Defining Status and Its Use as Analytical Term

Or, to put the same statement in economists’ terms, status is a signal

Pollock et al. (2015: 485) continue, reputation is “[d]erived from stake-

(e.g., entrepreneurial firms may choose on purpose to act in ways that

Status as Social Fact

to show the cause on which it depends; we must also, at least in most

(Bourdieu 2020: 166). Speaking about institutions (rather than social

specific status ranking. This means that high-status individuals need to

Social Effects of Status Relations

proposes that an increased emphasis on status is indicative of increased

Outline of the Volume

certain communities (say, professional groups with jurisdictional discre-

Summary and Conclusion

The Manipulation of Status: Causes

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 29

Status Ambiguity, Status

quality and as an accountability reduction mechanism.” Taken the circular

actors to disassociate themselves from their partners to protect their own

[Pilots] recognized several threats to pilot prestige, including (a) automa-

training), (c) proliferation or passengers and pilots (thanks to deregula-

The de-regulation of the international and regional aircraft industry

412) proposes that New York elites tend to construct themselves as

This attitude or belief in actually leading a life that is more or less

108). In short, in the USA, conspicuous private wealth is an implausible

Elites need to be creative to justify their position at the top of an egalitarian

The Manipulation of Status

between individual incentives (say, to ensure an education premium

[I]nsofar as low-status culture is produced without any awareness that it

In this analytical model, disinterestedness is operationalized as

National Soldiers’ Home. }

We cannot do better than copy into this book a