12 - The value of status in management and organization research

Summary

Status does matter. All the authors in this volume have demonstrated its value in advancing our understanding of current problems in management and organizational scholarship, and in furthering our understanding of how status affects workplace, organizational, and marketplace actions. In this concluding chapter I highlight a few of the contributions their work on status makes to their fields, address their contributions to our understanding of status more generally, and highlight a few practical implications of their work.

Strategy scholarship

All of the authors help to illuminate the developing consensus that the absence of attention to status can lead to impoverished theories. For example, these authors note that an overemphasis on individual firms as isolated utility maximizers in markets has led to incomplete understandings and possibly misleading theory. This point certainly has been made before. However, most of those making it have sought to emphasize pro-social, cooperative motives in interaction. Scholars of status enrich strategy theory by emphasizing that the social environments of firms are as much arenas of competition as they are for cooperation.