Ascribed Status Research Articles

Wisdom bridge for elderly people: Helpline

Ageing is a universal phenomenon besides an ascriptive status of an individual. Being continuing process, it is characterised by conception and death. Socio-cultural factors play a vital role in determining the status of an individual as an “old”. It is inevitable stage in which majority of the elderly people undergo through numerous economic, social and psychological problems which vary from individual to individual (Kumar, 2016). Furthermore, the determination of elderly age differs from country and society in accordance with the system and its sub-systems. In general, people reached the old age stage by adding the number of years from time of birth. But there is no one-to-one relationship between the age and the characteristics commonly assigned to that age. The problem is compounded particularly in under-developed countries with wide socio-economic differences, by the fact that some individuals are energetic and dynamic even at the age of 75, while some individuals are lazy and have withdrawn themselves from active life even at the age of 50. On the contrary, in developed countries, the aged are very active even at the age of 70 and above, because of special diet, good health care, physical and mental conditions, healthy environment and the cultural aspect of their work mindedness (Sharma, 2009).

Социальные риски студенческой молодежи в условиях трансформации института высшего образования

Higher education transformation creates the basis for the emergence and development of social risks for all its participants, first of all, students. The research aim was to describe the degree of intensity and characteristics of educational, socio-cultural, socio-economic and other risks appearing among students. The results of the extensive survey show that the relevant social risks for students are the risks in education and employment. The author identified three groups of student youth according to the parameters of ascriptive status and analysed the features of social risks in these groups. The measures to minimize social risks among student youth through university organizational and managerial activities are introduced in the article. The author concludes that there is the necessity to search for effective methods of social risk management among young people, as well as in higher education institutions.

Ascriptive Organizational Stigma and the Constraining of Pakistani Immigrant Organizations

Existing research on the incorporation of immigrants generally celebrates immigrant organizations (IOs) as essential conduits for political mobilization, civic integration, and transnational engagement. Less attention, however, has been given to the external contexts or conditions that can constrain IOs. In this article, I introduce the concept of ascriptive organizational stigma (AOS) and examine how domestic and geopolitical contexts contribute to the stigmatization and constraining of Pakistani immigrant organizational capacities. Data come from 59 in-depth interviews conducted with leaders and members of Pakistani IOs in New York City and London. Findings suggest Pakistani IOs in both cities experienced AOS, and that external pressures to prioritize stigma management over core missions, impeded efforts to serve domestic and homeland constituents. Findings also indicate the stigmatization of ascriptive status markers can contribute to the conflation of immigrants’ group and organizational identities. This article contributes to existing scholarship by revealing how external contexts can lead to the constraining of immigrants’ domestic and homeland-oriented organizational capacities.

‘You are the music while the music lasts’: Kwame Tua between the Asante and the British

AbstractThis article is an interpretive biography of Kwame Tua (c.1865–1950), one of millions of Africans born into an independent society that was overtaken by colonial conquest and overrule. Kwame Tua was from Asante, now in the republic of Ghana, and held the ascriptive status of a royal servant (ahenkwaa) who might have expected a specialist career as a royal hornblower. He was musically very gifted. However, after ruinous civil wars in the 1880s, the Asante king was sent into exile in 1896, and from 1901 to 1957 his kingdom was a British Crown Colony. This article discusses Kwame Tua's responses to these radically altered circumstances and his efforts to forge a place and identity for himself between the new imperial order and his Asante inheritance. It is argued throughout that the pursuit of detail is all in such a study so that we can get as close as possible to the personality of the individual in interaction with the times he lived through.

Sociální role chudého stáří

The article deals with poverty in old age, which the author studies through the concept of social roles or social status. She analyses data from a qualitative empirical study in order to understand how various aspects of poverty in old age and the status of being poor impact seniors' performance of social roles. The author approaches poverty and old age as stigmas and looks at the ways in which seniors living in poverty defend their identity against inferior status. The article explains how the role of a poor senior is performed, whether and how poverty affects the roles that poor seniors share with other seniors, and whether the ascriptive status of old age or the objectively low social status of poverty is more significant for the performance of their role. Drawing on the results of her analysis the author describes poverty as the 'master status': poverty is an undesirable status for seniors and strategies for defending their identity against the stigma of poverty pushes the strategies of defence against the stigma of old age into the background. The author argues that setting old age in the context of poverty reveals the limitations of some theories in the fi eld socio-gerontology.

СОЦИОКУЛЬТУРНОЕ ПРОСТРАНСТВО КАК ФАКТОР СОЦИАЛЬНОЙ АДАПТАЦИИ ЛИЧНОСТИ МОЛОДЕЖИ

The article presents the meaning of socio-cultural field of a personality by its ascriptive status, based on social background, economic status, place of residence and territorial belonging. It discusses the opportunity of socio-cultural field study as the factor of youth personalities’ social adaptation on the basis of dichotomy center – province (city – village). It shows that one of the most important differences of a village from a city is that a village subculture primarily remains a classical subculture of village producers – traditionalist, memorial-oriented, while a city one has clear prognostic orientations. The author marks that the process of social adaptation of the city and village youth generally depends on the conditions of socialization (city – village), varying principles of social organization and regulation of life activity of a personality, that leads to actualization of different adaptational mechanisms.

Attachment to Territory: Status or Achievement?

It is by now widely agreed that a theory of territorial rights must be able to explain attachment or particularity: what can link a particular group to a particular place with the kind of normative force necessary to forbid encroachment or colonization? Attachment is one of the pillars on which any successful theory of territory will have to stand. But the notion of attachment is not yet well understood, and such agreement as does exist relies on unexamined assumptions. One such assumption is that attachment is an achievement of some sort, as opposed to some kind of brute ascriptive status that a claimant has irrespective of anything it might do.But achievements do not come for free. ‘Achievement’ is a success term, and any theory predicated on success, no matter how minimal, requires a theory of failure. Yet theorists of territory have not grappled with the problem of failure.

Status in Management and Organizations

List of figures List of tables List of contributors Foreword Preface 1. Introduction: the power of status Jone L. Pearce Part I. How Status Differences are Legitimated: 2. Divergence in status evaluation: theoretical implications for a social construction view of status building Bilian Ni Sullivan and Daniel Stewart 3. Maintaining but also changing hierarchies: what social dominance theory has to say James O'Brien and Joerg Dietz Part II. The Influence of Status on Markets: 4. The importance of status in markets: a market identity perspective Michael Jensen, Bo Kyung Kim and Heeyon Kim 5. On the need to extend tournament theory through insights from status research Michael Nippa Part III. The Role of Status in New Industries and Ventures: 6. The cultural context of status: generating important knowledge in nanotechnology Tyler Wry, Michael Lounsbury and Royston Greenwood 7. Venture launch and growth as a status-building process M. Kim Saxton and Todd Saxton Part IV. When Ascriptive Status Trumps Achieved Status in Teams: 8. Status cues and expertise assessment in groups: how group members size one another up... and why it matters J. Stuart Bunderson and Michelle A. Barton 9. The malleability of race in organizational teams: a theory of racial status activation Melissa C. Thomas-Hunt and Katherine W. Phillips Part V. Status in the Workplace: 10. Resolving conflicts between status distinctiveness in individual identity: a framework of multiple identity displays Kimberly D. Elsbach 11. Organizational justice and status: theoretical perspectives and promising directions Jerald Greenberg and Deshani B. Ganegoda Part VI. Developing Status and Management Knowledge: 12. The value of status in management and organization research Jone L. Pearce Index.

Personal Dignity, Equal Opportunity, and the Elimination of Legacy Preferences

Students with the wrong ancestry are denied equal access to almost all elite colleges and universities in the United States, nearly eighty-five percent of which admit students based in substantial part on whether they are children or grandchildren of the school’s alumni. These “legacy preferences” significantly contribute to the widening and calcifying socioeconomic stratification on elite campuses and in American society. The Supreme Court has held that government’s sorting of persons by “ancestry” is inherently suspect and therefore subject to heightened judicial scrutiny. This article argues that the suspect “ancestry” classification includes not only “race” or “ethnic group” but also descent within only one or two generations -- “family lineage.” The anticlassification principle that drives contemporary Equal Protection jurisprudence protects personal dignity, which arises from making one’s own way in the world based on individual merit, unhindered by inherited or otherwise ascriptive status. In feudal and aristocratic societies, “dignity” was attached to the status or rank that a person inherited through family lineage. The Equal Protection Clause rejects this inherited, status-based dignity in favor of a “personal dignity” that inheres equally in each individual. Elite schools’ use of family-lineage classifications to distribute public goods is incompatible with the personal dignity to which each person is entitled in a democratic society. The inclusion of family lineage within the suspect “ancestry” classification is reinforced by the Supreme Court’s traditional indicia of suspectness. Family lineage is immutable, not merit-based, and has been rejected as a basis for classification in other provisions of the Constitution and in major Congressional actions. Antisubordination values confirm this conclusion: legacy preferences help the elite managerial class replicate itself at the expense of children born to lesser-educated or less wealthy parents. . Lastly, including family lineage within the proscribed ancestry classification is supported by international law. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other international conventions signed by the United States preclude preferences in admission to higher education based on “birth.” The drafters of the UDHR specifically intended to prohibit family-lineage distinctions “in the sense of inherited privileges for the sons of noblemen, capitalists, party leaders and so on.” The United States delegate, Eleanor Roosevelt, asserted that the requirement that admissions be “on the basis of merit” precludes preferences based on “personal... favour.” These principles led to the abolition of legacy preferences and other forms of hereditary distinctions at Oxford and Cambridge. The result is that today the United States is the only nation in the world whose elite universities discriminate in admissions based on family lineage.

Perceiving Discrimination on the Job: Legal Consciousness, Workplace Context, and the Construction of Race Discrimination

Despite the continued importance of discrimination for racial labor market inequality, little research explores the process by which workers name potentially negative experiences as race discrimination. Drawing on the legal consciousness literature and organizational approaches to employment discrimination, we assess the effect of social status, job characteristics, and workplace context on the likelihood that workers perceive race discrimination at work. Analyzing data from the Multi-City Study of Urban Inequality, we find that ascriptive status is associated with perceptions of discrimination, with African Americans, Hispanics, and women more likely to perceive racial discrimination, net of job and organizational controls. Results also suggest that workers with a greater sense of entitlement (as indicated by job authority, promotion experience, and union membership) and knowledge of legal entitlements (as indicated by education level and age) are more likely to perceive workplace racial discrimination. Other workplace conditions can signal fairness and decrease perceptions of racial bias, such as formalized screening practices and having nonwhite supervisors, whereas working among predominantly nonwhite coworkers increases the likelihood of perceiving discrimination. These findings suggest that personal attributions of discrimination vary across social groups and their environments, and demonstrate the importance of workplace context for understanding how individuals apply legal concepts, such as discrimination, to their experiences.

“HIV is irrelevant to our company”: Everyday practices and the logic of relationships in HIV/AIDS management by Japanese multinational corporations in northern Thailand

Multinational corporations (MNCs) are important participants in workplace initiatives on HIV/AIDS as they collaborate with international organizations to globally promote various policies and guidelines. To date, MNCs have enacted the majority of such initiatives in North America, Europe and South Africa, but we have little information on how MNCs elsewhere, especially in Japan, have responded to the issue of HIV/AIDS in the workplace. This study examines the actual on the ground situation of HIV/AIDS management in Japanese MNCs, specifically investigating everyday corporate practices in the context of internal interactions and relationships and the resulting practices and outlook concerning HIV/AIDS. It is based on a secondary analysis of ethnographic case studies conducted in 10 Japanese-affiliated companies in northern Thailand. Japanese managers, Thai managers and ordinary Thai workers all considered HIV/AIDS to be “irrelevant” to their company and/or themselves. HIV/AIDS measures in the companies were limited to provision of information. This perception and management of HIV/AIDS developed from their everyday interactions governed by the logic of relationships in the companies. In these interactions, they categorized others based on their ascriptive status, primarily based on class, ethnicity and nationality. They sought scapegoat groups that were lower than them in the class- and ethnicity/nationality-based hierarchical system, and cast the risk of HIV infection upon the scapegoat groups, thus reducing their own sense of risk. The paper shows that the relational logic, not ideals or principles, influences their views of and actions concerning HIV/AIDS management in the companies. This is why Japanese companies are unable to deal with HIV/AIDS in terms of international policies and guidelines that are based on the logic of human rights and the logic of business principles. The results suggest a need for international policymakers to pay more attention to everyday practices in the actual field of policy dissemination.

Mechanisms of Disability Discrimination in Large Bureaucratic Organizations: Ascriptive Inequalities in the Workplace

Studies of workplace discrimination have typically focused on empirically unobservable motives to explain ascriptive inequalities associated with class, gender, and race. Such studies usually have overlooked disability as an ascriptive status, and have offered little systematic research on the central question of this study: How, through what mechanisms, does disability discrimination operate in large, bureaucratic organizations? The in-depth personal interviews upon which this study is based reveal that interpersonal mechanisms of discrimination manifest as blatant and subtle acts of marginalization, fictionalization, and harassment. However, such interpersonal acts of discrimination would likely be less frequent or less consequential if not for the organizational mechanisms of tolerance and encouragement. The authors conclude that one of the central promises of the Americans with Disabilities Act, full inclusion and participation of people with disabilities in the workplace, is unlikely to be realized without renewed pressure for legislation that explicitly specifies the nature and extent of work organizations' responsibilities for creating a nonhostile environment and the consequences of not doing so.

Evaluation of Grade Distributions: a Comparison of Jewish and Druze Students in Israel

This study examines how students' evaluations of grade distribution in school are differentially shaped by socio-cultural conditions. Specifically, it investigates the extent to which Druze and Jewish students in Israel differ in their evaluations of the types of distribution rules that are actually and ideally preferred by teachers when they assign grades. Findings revealed that in both Jewish and Druze groups the achievement rules were ranked highest in terms of the actual and ideal ways of determining their grades. These were followed by the personality rules, and lastly by the ascriptive/particularistic rules. Thus, students in these groups share to a large extent their view about the actual and ideal grading practices. At the same time, Jewish students, who live in a market-driven society characterized by individual and competitive relations, ascribe stronger importance to meritocratic rules. In contrast, Druze students, who live in a highly homogeneous environment based on ascriptive status and solidarity relations, have a greater tendency than Jews to think that grading should be guided by particularistic/ascriptive types of rules. A structural analysis of grade distribution rule preferences revealed that they were similarly measured across groups.

Hadiboh: From Peripheral Village to Emerging City

Hadiboh is Soqotra Island's main urban formation. It was the capital until 1999, when the island was administratively divided into two districts: the Eastern District (mudîriyya sharqiya) with Hadiboh as its capital, and the Western District (mudîriyya gharbiya) with Qalansiyah as its capital. The article retraces the evolution of Hadiboh from the 1st century BC, when it was named Panara Tamara, as the main settlement of the island of Panchia, one of the many ancient names of Soqotra. Subsequently, the village of Suq (Shiq in Soqotri) became the main settlement as well as anchorage point for all ships until the end of the 15th century. In early 16th century, when the Sultan of Mahra sought to establish a more permanent presence on the island, Hadiboh regained its status as main settlement. Henceforth Hadiboh was commonly known as Tamarida until the end of the British Protectorate in 1967. The constitution of Hadiboh as a mosaic town is discussed through different phases of immigration starting toward the end of the 19th century until the dawn of the 21st century. Its spatial configuration around three formally constituted neighborhoods symbolizing the town's attachment to the major events in Yemen's modern history is discussed. Its social organization into an ascriptive status hierarchy and the subsequent changes are described. The evolution of the economy from autarkic subsistence based on food bartering and minimal external trade to international ecotouristic desti-nation is explained. Finally, the article briefly highlights Hadiboh's pivotal role in the island's political history, and considers the dilemmas confronting its transformation as well as that of the island.

Status Homogamy in the United States

According to classical works on social stratification, status homogamy can be regarded as an indicator of the "openness" of society. In contrast to previous approaches, this article treats marriage choice as a multidimensional phenomenon and makes a distinction between ascriptive- and achievement-oriented characteristics. Ascriptive status homogamy is measured by the similarity of spouses with respect to their fathers' occupational class, while the achieved dimension of status homogamy is measured by the similarity of spouses' educational attainment. Multivariate log-linear models are used to explore the relative importance of these factors for the choice of a spouse, and the article tests the hypothesis that there has been a transition from ascription to achievement in patterns of marriage selection. This study first demonstrates empirically that previously conducted synthetic cohort analyses of educational homogamy suffer from selection biases and then, using the Occupational Change in a Generation (OCG) surveys, analyzes two real marriage cohorts. The analyses show that education is a more important boundary in marriage selection than social-class origins and that educational homogamy has increased over time. At the same time, there is some indication that ascription has become a less important boundary in marriage selection.

Community Segregation and the Costs of Ethnic Subordination

The socioeconomically detrimental consequences of ethnic or religious discrimination in Israel is shown to depend on the degree of community segregation. Part of the low levels of achievement of Jews of Asian or African origin is attributable to a disadvantageous distribution across Israeli communities. However, competing with Jews of European or American origin, Asian-Africans are disadvantaged at every step in the attainment process. The low attainment of Arabs is largely attributable to their low social origins. Their community and institutional segregation from Jews protects them from further socioeconomic subordination. It follows that community, occupation, and religion interact in Israel, while community, occupation, and ethnicity do not. Hence, we reach two general conclusions: (1) Communities within one small country do differ in the way ascriptive status functions in the process of socioeconomic attainment; and (2) what is important about communities for the attainment of subordinate groups is the extent the community segregates the subordinate group from the dominant one.

Community Segregation and the Costs of Ethnic Subordination

The socioeconomically detrimental consequences of ethnic or religious discrimination in Israel is shown to depend on the degree of community segregation. Part of the low levels of achievement of Jews of Asian or African origin is attributable to a disadvantageous distribution across Israeli communities. However, competing with Jews of European or American origin, AsianAfricans are disadvantaged at every step in the attainment process. The low attainment of Arabs is largely attributable to their low social origins. Their community and institutional segregation from Jews protects them from further socioeconomic subordination. It follows that community, occupation, and religion interact in Israel, while community, occupation, and ethnicity do not. Hence, we reach two general conclusions: (1) Communities within one small country do differ in the way ascriptive status functions in the process of socioeconomic attainment; and (2) what is important about communities for the attainment of subordinate groups is the extent the community segregates the subordinate group from the dominant one.

"Ex-Untouchable": Problems, Progress, and Policies in Indian Social Change

INCREASINGLY FREQUENT international press coverage of violence against Untouchables has drawn renewed attention to India's thirty-year-old constitutional commitment to eliminate the centuriesold practice of untouchability and to ensure for its citizens EQUALITY of status and of opportunity.' For international scholars of social and political change, the experience of India's Untouchables (officially, Scheduled Castes) is a test-case of the all-too-common problem of providing equality for once-despised low-status minorities. For Indian policy-makers, it poses increasingly thorny and pressing political issues. There is much that is familiar to observers of developing nations in these political issues: the rising aspirations of a traditionally depressed group, with frustrations rising even more rapidly; the persisting importance of both low ascriptive status and low class status; the emergence of Untouchable organizations aimed at increasing mobility; and the rapidly escalating opposition of fellow-citizens determined that change shall not occur. The case of the Untouchablesand of India's tribals-is distinctive in one important way: policies guaranteeing proportional legislative representation and encouraging

A Clarification of “Ascribed Status” and “Achieved Status”

(1969). A Clarification of “Ascribed Status” and “Achieved Status”. The Sociological Quarterly: Vol. 10, No. 1, pp. 53-61.

A Clarification of "Ascribed Status'and "Achieved Status"

A Clarification of "Ascribed Status'and "Achieved Status"