Events

(includes work undertaken in collaboration with Jon Mellon, Department of Systems Engineering, West Point & Jack Bailey, Department of Politics, University of Manchester)

Abstract: Historically a core concept in the study of stratification, social status has recently seen a resurgence of interest with many scholars arguing, for example, that low social status is an important influence on support for radical right politics. Unfortunately, contemporary studies typically use ambiguous and unvalidated measures of social status, or proxies that fail to demonstrate they are measuring status. I will therefore present a new, direct and comprehensive evaluation of the status structure of Britain, in which we investigate the factors that shape social status judgments using conjoint survey experiments with 7,680 respondents making 30,720 status assessments in multi-wave surveys.

In an advance on previous sociological research, which primarily examines just occupational sources of status, we examine the role of economic (occupation, income, wealth, education, class background), cultural (leisure activities and supermarket choice), and ascribed (gender and ethnicity) factors as determinants of social status. We also examine differing indicators of perceived status, demonstrating the robustness of our instruments. We find that among economic factors, income has a substantial positive effect, as do pro-social occupations (teaching and healthcare), and that cultural capital (leisure activities, consumption) housing wealth, private schooling, higher education, and being White British all increase perceived status.

We then combine experimental estimates with data on the prevalence of status predictors in the population to examine which factors are most predictive of status. We find that economic factors, particularly income, occupation and wealth, have by far the largest impact on the distribution of status. Cultural factors have a smaller effect, with ascribed characteristics like ethnicity and gender distributing the least status across the whole population, although with sizeable individual-level effects for ethnic minorities. Further ongoing analyses decompose group status penalties into ascribed (direct) factors and achieved (indirect) status; examine the evidence that the status hierarchy is shared across society; and whether the predictors of status are the same for different groups.  In general, our findings demonstrate the importance of occupation, economic resources, cultural capital and racial hierarchies in status judgments. However, economic factors dominate the distribution of status across society.

The Sociology Seminar Series for Trinity Term is convened by Bess Bukodi.  For more information about this or any of the seminars in the series, please contact sociology.secretary@nuffield.ox.ac.uk.