Status Construction Theory Research Articles

Gender, Race, Ethnicity, and Networks

This study sheds light on the informal mechanisms that contribute to inequality by examining the relationship between gender, race/ethnicity, and networks. Drawing on network theory and status construction theory, the author examines the routes through which employees' sex and race/ethnicity affect the status of their network members. The analyses indicate that women and people of color had network members with lower status than men and Whites because they occupied positions that limited their access to and ability to attract powerful employees. The author concludes that structural rather than personal exclusion explains race/ethnic and sex differences in the status of network members.

Creating and Spreading Status Beliefs

In this article, two experiments support status construction theory's claim that interaction spreads status beliefs through behavior, creating a diffusion process that makes widely shared beliefs possible. The first demonstrates that people who hold a status belief can “teach” it by treating the other in accord with the belief. The second shows that third‐party participants who witness such behavioral treatments also acquire the status belief. The first experiment also verifies a general mechanism by which interaction creates status beliefs: nominally different participants developed shared status beliefs about the difference from the repeated enactment of influence hierarchies corresponding to the difference. This general mechanism suggests that any structural condition that gives one group a systematic advantage in gaining influence over another group in intergroup encounters will foster the development of widely shared status beliefs favoring the advantaged group.

How Do Status Beliefs Develop? The Role of Resources and Interactional Experience

Status construction theory argues that interaction between people with unequal structural advantages is crucial in the development and spread of status value beliefs about people's distinguishing attributes. A central claim is that goal-oriented encounters between those who differ in material resources as well as in an easily observed nominal attribute create status beliefs about that attribute which favor the richer actors' attribute category. The authors conduct an experimental test using dyadic, same-sex encounters between participants who differ in pay level and a mere difference attribute; the claim is supported for males and females. Status beliefs are distinguished from own-group favoritism by their acceptance by those they disadvantage. A second experiment and other evidence suggest that the interactional hierarchy associated with pay and the distinguishing attribute in such doubly dissimilar encounters pressures low-pay subjects to accept beliefs that disadvantage them. This acceptance is key to the power of interaction to transform structural advantages into status beliefs