Status

Status, term used to designate social position or rank.

Status has two different origins in the literature of social science. One origin is impersonal, referring to positions in a social structure and describing the rights and duties of those positions as defined by others in the society. It has been shown that individuals have had multiple statuses in society, and have been susceptible, consequently, to strains caused by the inconsistency of each status. A status in this context is the static aspect of a role.

The other meaning is relational and personal and comes in its most developed form from Max Weber, to clarify the language of stratification in society. According to Karl Marx, the main form of distribution of desired but scarce resources was class—the structure of unequally distributed income, wealth, and power in the organization of the economy. Weber insisted, however, that social honour or prestige was also distributed and was not just a simple reflection of class. It was to this origin of human inequality that Weber proposed the concept of status.

The outcome was a more comprehensive or powerful explanation of stratification. Caste, for example, was defined as an extreme form of status arising out of conquest by one ethnic group of another. Moreover, since Weber, the status of citizenship has attracted considerable attention from social scientists. There have been many attempts to classify statuses. Probably the most illuminating has been the distinction between ascribed and achieved status. Ascribed status is involuntary or inherited as a membership of a race, gender, or, later in life, an age set or generation. Achieved statuses by contrast are acquired through individual effort in education, occupation, politics, or celebrity. Social change and modernization distinguishes modern societies that prefer achieved status and tend towards hostility to inherited positions.