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1 - Introduction: The power of status

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

By
Jone L. Pearce
Edited by
Jone L. Pearce
Jone L. Pearce
Affiliation:
University of California, Irvine
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Summary

My classmates who got jobs at investment banks now don’t like to admit where they work. They’ll mumble, “I work in finance but am getting out …” When they got jobs at Goldman Sachs at graduation, they expected everyone to be jealous, but now they are too embarrassed to tell anyone they work there. (Personal communication, Ivy League university graduate, January 21, 2010)

Status matters to people. The rapid reversal in the social standing of the new financiers in the above quotation in response to the 2008 financial collapse is something they clearly feel. Whether or not it will be enough to overwhelm the riches they were still receiving is an important practical question for their employer, and an interesting intellectual one for scholars of management and organizations.

Status was once a central concern of social scientists. This is reflected in its early prominence in sociology and social psychology (Simmel [1908], 1950; Harvey and Consalvi, 1960; Weber [1914], 1978). Mirroring this early interest, status was also featured in early management and organization theory. For example, Barnard ([1938], 1968) suggested that status (which he called prestige) was an important inducement in organizations, and Vroom (1964) proposed that seeking status is one of the major reasons why people work. Maslow (1943) proposed that the esteem of others was one of the fundamental human needs.

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Status in Management and Organizations , pp. 1 - 22
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2010

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