Introduction to the Special Issue: Bringing Status to the Table—Attaining, Maintaining, and Experiencing Status in Organizations and Markets

Abstract

Introduction Status issues permeate social and organizational life (e.g., Chen et al. 2003, Fiske 2010, Phillips 2005, Podolny 2005, Ridgeway et al. 2009, Peterson and Harvey 2009). As sociologists and anthropologists have long noted, whenever social actors gather, a status hierarchy among these actors emerges, and through that process, some actors are afforded higher esteem and social worth than others (Blau 1964, Emerson 1962, Homans 1961). The impact of these status differences cuts across all levels of analysis, from an individual actor’s position within a group (Tyler and Lind 1992), to a division’s standing in an organization, to an organization’s network and status position in an industry or a market (Granovetter 1973, Podolny 2005). In each case, the actor’s status influences the opportunities and constraints that the actor experiences (Fiske 2010, Ridgeway et al. 2009). From an investment banking firm seeking to hire star traders in the market, to an executive jockeying for influence in the boardroom, to a senior employee experiencing threat from a highly competent junior employee, organizational actors are deeply concerned with social evaluation and esteem. For this reason, most domains of management research are directly related to the status concerns that individuals, groups, and organizations share in their social contexts (Chen et al. 2003, Pearce 2011). For individuals, status concerns are foundational to issues of one’s standing in the group (Tyler and Blader 2003) and the resources that the individual is able to marshal in aid of a favored cause. For organizations, the concern of decision makers being viewed as legitimate or prestigious actors in their industry or market leads them to strategically display and react to status-related signals that affect their legitimacy and market standing (Podolny 2005, Saunder 2006). Despite its prevalence and importance in individual, organizational, and market dynamics, and its longstanding prominence in disciplinary domains such as sociology and social psychology, the notion of status has not achieved its deserved “status” and attention in management journals. For example, explicit empirical or theoretical examination of the status concept is scant in leading management journals. A search among leading management journals under the keyword of or with a title containing the word “status” at Business Source Premier showed a total of 34 (0.5%) articles in the period of February 2000–February 2011. In contrast, there are 149 (1.6%) and 647 (5.2%) articles examining status in leading social psychology and sociology journals, respectively, in that same period.1 Fortunately, there