Status - Turner, Bryan S

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Status
Concepts in Social Thought
Series Editor: Frank Parkin

Magdalen College, Oxford
Democracy Anthony Arblaster
Bureaucracy David Beetham
Socialism Bernard Crick
Liberalism John Gray
Ideology David McLellan
Conservatism Robert Nisbet
Property Alan Ryan
Status Bryan S. Turner

Status
Bryan S. Turner
University of Minnesota Press
Minneapolis
Copyright © 1988 Bryan S. Turner
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be

reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
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without the prior written permission of the publisher.
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Published simultaneously in Canada
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Printed in Great Britain
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Number

88-27717
ISBN 0-8166-1722-8 (hardcover)

ISBN 0-8166-1723-6 (pbk.)
The University of Minnesota

is an equal-opportunity
educator and employer.
OCT 3 0 1989
To working-class academics
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Contents
Preface ix
1 The Controversy over Status: Marx and Weber 1
2 From Status to Contract: Historical Change and Social

Stratification 17
3 Status Politics in Contemporary Society: Citizenship and

Inequality 42
4 Mass Culture, Distinction and Lifestyle 65
Bibliography 79
Index 89
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Preface
This study of status was written during a period of study at the

University of Bielefeld (West Germany) where I was a guest pro¬
fessor in the Sociology Faculty from 1987 to 1988. This period of
research in West Germany was made possible by the Alexander von
Humboldt Foundation, which was generous in its support of my
research activity. I am particularly grateful to my hosts in the
Sociology Faculty, especially Georg Stauth, Claus Offe and
Johannes Berger. The ideas represented in this study however
derive from a much longer period of academic research and teach¬
ing in a variety of universities, namely Aberdeen, Lancaster and
Flinders. Aspects of this study are also derived from collaborative
scholarship with Nicholas Abercrombie and Stephen Hill. Many of
the historical and analytical features of this study result from de¬
bates with my former colleague Robert Holton. A version of
chapter two was originally presented at the Max Weber Colloquium
at William Paterson College, New Jersey where Professor Ronald
Glassman acted as host and organizer. A version of chapter three
was originally given as a seminar at the State University of Utrecht;
I am grateful to Professor David Ingleby and Dr Chris Baks for their
critical commentary. I would also like to thank Mike Featherstone
of Teesside Polytechnic who, as Editor of Theory, Culture and
Society, first forced me to confront and come to terms with the
theories of Pierre Bourdieu, whose analysis of distinction has
played an important part in the development of this book. Some
features of the final chapter were explored at the Pierre Bourdieu
conference at Vlotho, Westfalen in 1987. My new colleagues in the
Faculty of Social Science at the State University of Utrecht also
provided support for an interdisciplinary approach to the analysis of
social stratification. I am particularly grateful to Dr Lieteke van
X Status
Vucht Tijssen for her help during my transition to Utrecht and for
her boundless intellectual enthusiasm. I would also like to thank
Professor Roland Robertson, University of Pittsburgh, who gently
but persistently persuaded me to focus on culture as a crucial
feature of sociological understanding. Frank Parkin offered in¬
sightful and sharp criticism of the original proposal which proved
invaluable in reorganizing this inquiry. Finally I would like to thank
my wife (another working-class academic) for her incalculable
intellectual and emotional contribution to my work.
Bryan S. Turner
1
The Controversy over

Status: Marx and Weber
Any student starting a course on sociology will quickly encounter

the concept of status, alongside many applications of the notion
such as status inconsistency, status crystallization, status group and
status panic. The student will also discover that a great deal of
controversy surrounds the notion of status stratification, that the
very concept of status is vague, and furthermore that in the view of
some sociologists the concept of status has little or no real analytical
value. The situation is further confounded by the fact that there is
hardly any textbook available in contemporary sociology on the
notion of status and status hierarchies. This book has been written
with the intention of clarifying the notion of status, demonstrating
the historical and analytical importance of the concept and restoring
the concept of status to its proper place in sociology as a major
perspective on the more general issues of social stratification.
The student should be aware that in this study I shall approach the
problem of social stratification from the perspective of the German
sociologist Max Weber (1864-1920). Since this is a study of
stratification rather than a commentary on the work of Weber, the
student may wish to consult a general commentary on Weber’s
sociology in order to acquire a wider framework within which my
analysis of status can be located (Antonio and Glassman 1985;
Bendix 1960; Collins 1986; Parkin 1982; Turner 1981; Wiley 1987).
The controversy which provides the core of this study can be
briefly stated as originally a conflict between Weber’s sociology and
the political economy of class in the work of Karl Marx (1818-83).
For Marx, the ultimate divisions in society, and therefore the basis
of all forms of social stratification, are economic in character: that
is, related to the ownership of private property. For Marxist
sociology, the inequalities, divisions, hierarchies and distinctions
2 Status
within societies can be traced back primarily to economic relations.

Furthermore, these economic relations can only be understood
through historical analysis. It is for this reason that Marxist
sociology is often defined as ‘historical materialism’. By contrast, it
is often assumed that following the work of Weber we can identify
many dimensions of social stratification (for example, power,
economic and cultural differences), and that therefore we need a far
more complicated and complex picture of social stratification.
The controversy surrounding status is related to differences of
theoretical approach in sociology. It is a controversy that is
concerned with the dimensions of inequality in human societies and
the relationship between these dimensions. While this might seem
quite innocuous, the difference of perspective in fact involves
differences in the view of human history. In short, the tensions
between Weberian and Marxist sociology are focused on the
problem of whether economic classes or status groups are the most
significant features of social stratification, and thus around the
character of political conflict in modern societies. Whereas classical
Marxism anticipated the disappearance of economic classes with
the erosion of private property in socialism, Weber anticipated the
continuation of status differences and status-group conflicts under
both capitalism and socialism. The controversy about status is
therefore about the possibility of undermining inequality in human
societies.
Before I can present my own view, it is necessary to provide a
number of definitions of status to illustrate the complexity of the
concept and the varying approaches to its application. I shall start
with some of the more simple notions of status before proceeding to
the more complicated analytical issues in the relationship between
status communities and economic class (Bendix and Lipset 1966).
In its everyday usage, the notion of status is derived from the
Latin for ‘standing’ and relates simply to one’s position in society.
The word also had a more technical and legal meaning, namely the
rights and obligations related to a position in society. We can see
immediately that the notion of status involves ideas about the
political and legal rights of persons within a socio-political com¬
munity, and as a result the issues surrounding status are closely
related to the issues surrounding citizenship (Turner 1986a). We
may provide a preliminary definition of status as a position in
society, conferring rights and obligations upon a person as a citizen
within a political community.
The Controversy over Status 3
Within sociology, the notion of social status is often connected

with the concept of social role. A role is a set of expectations which
define the position of a person in society. Roles may be defined as
the bundles of socially-defined attributes and expectations associ¬
ated with social positions’(Abercrombie eta/. 1984, p. 180). Within
this terminology, social status is, as it were, the static side of role.
One of the most influential schools of sociology in the United States
- the structural-functional perspective - took the status-role unit as
the basic element of social stratification (Davis and Moore 1945).
This theory was concerned to explain how individuals are motivated
to fill these positions within the social structure (Wesolowski 1962).
This descriptive account of status is however not particularly
interesting from a sociological point of view; status becomes
important for sociological analysis, because status positions within
society are typically hierarchically ranked in terms of greater or
lesser privileges and prestige. Furthermore, the dimensions upon
which one’s status in society can be determined are multidimen¬
sional and the relationship between the dimensions may itself be
variable and complex. For example, my status in society may be
defined simultaneously by my income, my educational attainment,
my ethnic background and my gender. When these various
dimensions are coherent, sociologists often talk about the presence
of status consistency or status crystallization (Lenski 1961). This
idea of status coherence has produced some interesting sociological
research on the emergence of political radicalism in social groups
characterized by the absence of status crystallization; this involves
certain psychological assumptions about levels of frustration ex¬
perienced by individuals whose position in society is characterized
by tensions or contradictions between the various dimensions in
their status position. For example, in American sociology right-
wing and reactionary political movements have often been associ¬
ated with the anxieties, tensions and frustrations of those social
groups who experience ‘status panic’ over their unstable position in
contemporary society (Bell 1963; Lipset and Raab 1970). These
status anxieties are characteristic of social groups whose position in
society is threatened by profound social and economic change. For
example, shopkeepers in traditional business are threatened by the
development of the supermarket which may undermine their
businesses, and consequently their prestige in society (Bechhofer et
al. 1983).
Two further distinctions are important in the literature on status.
4 Status
First, it is common to distinguish between ‘ascribed status’ (which

refers to certain attributes of persons over which they have little or
no control, such as race, gender or age) and ‘achieved status’
(which refers to the position which a person may achieve, for
example through educational competition). It is often argued that
whereas ascribed status is common in pre-modern societies,
achieved status plays a far greater role in contemporary industrial
society, where certain values or norms follow from a general
commitment to equality, especially equality of opportunity for
citizens (Parsons 1951; Turner 1986b). For example, in contem¬
porary America many employers are compelled by law to adopt
positive or affirmative action programmes for the recruitment of
women, on the grounds that it is no longer tolerable to discrimi¬
nate openly on the basis of gender.
For some sociologists, the development of modern society can
be viewed in terms of a transition from particularistic-ascriptive
standards or values to a social system based upon universalistic-
achievement values, because contemporary societies place a
greater emphasis on individual social mobility than upon defer¬
ence or traditional standards of prestige and honour (Parsons
1942; 1953). Because modern societies place this emphasis on
personal achievement, educational success and the acquisition of
credentials become crucial in the distribution of prestige and
rewards; indeed this has led some sociologists to describe modern
society as a ‘credential society’ (Collins 1979).
The second distinction is between subjective and objective
status, or between self-perception of status and externally-defined
status positions. The notion of subjective status, as we shall see,
became particularly influential in the American sociological tradi¬
tion. Thus, following one aspect of Weber’s analysis of status,
S. M. Lipset (1968, pp. 301-2) defined status as ‘the positive or
negative estimation of honor, or prestige received by the indi¬
viduals or positions. Thus it involves the felt perceptions of
people’. Within the American system, the emphasis on con¬
sumerism, social mobility and personal achievement created a
cultural environment in which self-perception of rank became
particularly important. This feature of American life was reflected
in the study of social stratification by sociologists, who became
particularly interested in self-perception of prestige. This tradition
was prominent in the community-studies tradition from the 193()s
onwards (Lynd and Lynd 1929; Lynd and Lynd 1937; Warner and
Lunt 1941). The importance of this argument can be explained in

the following way;
prestige is a social-psychological category: an individual or social

group cannot enjoy it unless their prestige claims are recognized by
others willing to give them deference. Hence the existence of status
differences depends upon awareness of prestige rankings.
(Mayer 1955, p. 66)
As I shall indicate later, it is important to recognize that this
American approach to individual prestige represented a departure
from the European tradition in which status referred to an objective
position in the social order, which conferred rights and privileges
rather than merely self-perception. Within the community-studies
tradition of W. Lloyd Warner, status often became equivalent to
personal prestige rather than equivalent to the notion of social
obligations, duties and rights (Littlejohn 1972, p. 48).
To summarize, a status is a position within the social structure by
which an individual, according to various ascribed and achieved
criteria, is evaluated by reference to prestige or honour (Parsons
1970). This evaluation will be both personal and objective, in that
one’s self-evaluation is closely related to the external evaluation
that one receives from significant others according to one’s location
in a social hierarchy. Within the sociological literature, we have
identified a ‘subjective’ dimension of status (individual perceptions
of prestige) and an ‘objective’ dimension (the socio-legal entitle¬
ments of an individual).
Status groups and lifestyles
In reviewing various definitions of status, I have so far focused upon

status as the position of an individual in society. However, status
from a sociological point of view becomes more interesting as the
attribute of social groups or collectivities. We need, therefore, to
turn from definitions of individual status to the notion of status
groups, status communities and collective lifestyles. Whereas the
American sociological tradition was often preoccupied with the
issue of individual status, the tradition which derives from Weber
has been more interested in the origins, maintenance and social
consequences of status groups and status communities as integrated
and combative social collectivities. In Economy and Society, Weber
(1968) recognized various meanings of the concept of status and
6 Status
prestige, but in my view he only took two aspects of status

particularly seriously. The first is the notion of status as a system of
‘estates’, whereby a society (particularly a feudal system) is divided
by legal, social and cultural privileges which generate separate,
distinct, caste-like groups. Status groups become estates when their
privileges are crystallized into a system of legal and economic
immunities from external control or regulation, protected by
custom, religion and law (Bush 1983; Keen 1984).
Secondly, Weber was concerned to analyse the historical and
social functions of status groups or status communities which are
collectivities enjoying a similar lifestyle, a unified moral system, a
common language or culture, or religious differences. The result of
these common cultural features is to produce separate, solidaristic
communities which are organized to protect or advance their
enjoyment of cultural and social benefits and privileges. Within this
perspective, social stratification concerns the creation, mainte¬
nance and distribution of various forms of power within society via
the mechanisms of political monopoly, cultural reproduction and
social exclusion. The idea that status distinction is maintained by
cultural exclusiveness has been an idea developed particularly in
cultural sociology by Pierre Bourdieu (1986). From these sociologi¬
cal approaches, we can derive two related notions of status, namely
status as lifestyle (cultural status) and status as politico-legal
entitlement (the citizenship component of status).
Weber defined status position {Stdndische Lage) as the effective
social claim to honour or esteem in terms of both positive and
negative privileges. Status is normally based upon a specific style of
life, a formal education, or the formal prestige following from
certain occupational positions within society. Status is furthermore
maintained and expressed through commensality (that is through
shared living and eating arrangements), the monopolistic enjoy¬
ment of privileged access to power and wealth, connubium (that is
the social solidarity which is brought about by marriage alliances),
and finally upon certain customary or status conventions. By status
group, he meant a plurality of social actors who within a larger
social environment successfully claimed a specific social honour and
enjoyed certain social privileges. Status groups are communal
groups which have privileged access to scarce resources, especially
where these resources entail a cultural, moral or symbolic attribute.
Following the work of Frank Parkin (1979; 1982), we can note
that status groups or communities typically have their origin in a
process of social and political usurpation involving a collective

struggle to enhance access to scarce resources and thereby to
improve the collectivity’s position within the system of honour.
Weber went on to compare economic classes and status communi¬
ties in terms of their solidarity and combative character. By
comparison with economic classes, status groups are character¬
istically social collectivities of a communal nature which require the
reproduction of a typical lifestyle and cultural inheritance. By
contrast, economic classes are merely aggregates of individuals
linked together by exchange or other economic relations (Weber
1968). Status communities are therefore organized communally
both for the defence and enhancement of their social privileges and
entitlements.
The point of these formal definitions was to permit Weber to
undertake a series of comparative, historical studies of social
structure and social change. Weber wanted to argue that economic
wealth was not the only criterion of social power and influence. He
furthermore wanted to examine societies in which prestige through
education or culture was more significant than power based upon
the ownership of the means of production. For example, in his study
of Chinese society, Weber gave a particular prominence to the
political and cultural status of the literati. He wrote that
for twelve centuries social rank in China has been determined more
by qualification for office than by wealth. This qualification, in turn,
has been determined by education, and especially by examination.
China has made literary education the yardstick of social prestige in
the most exclusive fashion, far more exclusively than did Europe
during the period of the humanists, or as Germany has done.
(Weber 1951, p. 107)
In Weber’s comparative argument, this cultural stratum con¬

tributed to the social stability and traditionalism of ancient China,
because there was an affinity between the Confucian ethics of this
stratum and the lifestyle of the civil service. In his The Religion of
India, Weber (1958) showed how religious beliefs about pollution
played an important role in the organization and continuity of the
caste system. One further point about these examples is that they
underline the fact that Weber was engaged in a historical study of
power relations in human society as opposed to the formal
development of conceptual distinctions between class, status and
party. In much subsequent sociology, Weber’s historical emphasis
8 Status
has been lost. The static categorization of various strata or segments

is no substitute for historical sociology.
Weber’s development of the idea of status groups was employed
to provide an alternative to and contrast with Marxist analysis of
economic class. Weber wanted to show that status groups are more
integrated, communal and politically conscious than economic
classes, which Weber defined as aggregates within the market.
Status groups depend crucially upon the maintenance of a lifestyle
that is exclusive and directed towards the preservation of certain
cultural monopolies. Status groups seek to reproduce themselves
through educational mechanisms, in order to prevent the social
mobility of outsiders and to emphasize their exclusiveness and
particularism. It is instructive to compare Thorstein Veblen’s The
Theory of the Leisure Class (first published in 1899) with Weber’s
treatment of status groups:
For Weber, as for Veblen, the function of conspicuous consumption

- that is, an emphasis on pragmatically useless styles of consumption
that take many years to learn - was to prevent mobility and to
institutionalise the privileges of those who had risen to the top in
previous years or epochs. Status groups are therefore identifiable by
specific styles of life.
(Lipset 1968: p. 302)
A status group is therefore a collection of individuals who are

organized to maintain or expand their social privileges by a
mechanism of social closure to protect existing monopolies of
privilege against outsiders, and by usurpation to expand the
benefits by reference to proximate or superior status groups. The
existence of status groups inevitably involves social conflict and
social struggle, although these forms of social struggle may be
frequently disguised or hidden.
Conflict sociology
One major debate in sociology has centred on whether social

relations are more predominantly characterized by consensus or by
conflict. Theories of social consensus seek to explain how social
order is possible, and they typically assert that social stability is
brought about by sharing common values and expectations (Par¬
sons 1951). By contrast, so-called conflict sociologists have been
impressed by the extent and the pervasiveness of conflict, tension
and disorder rather than by areas of agreement and consensus (Rex
1961). In retrospect, many of these debates now appear somewhat
unproductive, since it is clear at a commonsense level that all social
relations simultaneously involve both consensus and conflict
(Alexander 1987a). However, in the analysis of status groups and
status struggle there is a strong argument to be made for a conflict
sociology approach, since in this study I argue that status by its very
character involves endless struggles over the allocation of scarce
resources, especially scarce cultural resources. The conflict so¬
ciology approach in its more sophisticated form provides for a
general and theoretically significant approach to social relations
(Collins 1975).
In this introductory commentary on status, I have placed
particular emphasis on the idea of status as a feature of more
general social conflicts in society. In particular, it has been argued
that social groups attempt to monopolize the advantages of group
membership through a process of social closure to exclude competi¬
tors from the enjoyment of privileges. We can underline this notion
by arguing that, from a rational-choice approach to social science,
individuals expect that their loyalty to a social group should be
reinforced or rewarded by the benefits of membership. That is,
social solidarity depends upon the distribution of rewards and
privileges to members in exchange for their continued membership.
While group solidarity depends upon the sharing of certain values
and general culture, we can also argue that group membership is
part of a calculated choice on the part of members. There is an
exchange between the members of a social group in which
continuing membership depends upon continuing rewards (Blau
1964; Hechter 1987; Hirschman, 1970; Homans 1984).
The distribution of rewards within a social group is an aspect of
social control bringing about enhanced commitment to the conti¬
nuity of the group itself. This approach to prestige as a feature of
social regulation has been developed by W. J. Goode (1978) in his
The Celebration of Heroes. Goode has claimed that these social
processes whereby prestige is conferred upon members are a crucial
feature of social stability within social systems. In particular, formal
awards which are issued through a public procedure are a measure
of respect for commitments and contributions to a social institution
or a social group. The status of an individual within the group
therefore can be in part measured by the formal prizes and the
rewards which he or she has received. However, these status
10 Status
honours also symbolize or indicate the general ideas and values of a

social group, providing some legitimization of the ranking process
within an institution. Honours indicate the dominant values of a
society. Formal competitions for status rewards are in addition
significant because they underline the fairness of the system in
bestowing prizes for competitive contributions. Goode has argued
that formal honours also re-affirm the importance of the activity in
itself. The existence of formal honours confirms the notion that the
organization has authority to give rewards. Finally, he has argued
that honours contribute to social commitment by securing the
allegiance of individuals to a group, institution or wider status
community. The social drama which surrounds the rituals of
prize-giving dramatically contributes to the group’s sense of inte¬
gration and identity, while also reaffirming the value of commit¬
ment to the group.
The existence of competitive formal prizes within a given society
has also to be seen within specific comparative historical contexts.
For example, in the case of the United States, the absence of a
feudal tradition meant that there were no traditional or aristocratic
rewards and honours which could be distributed. Furthermore,
since the United States gave special emphasis to democratic
egalitarianism, a system of formal, competitive prizes became
particularly important for the American polity. In America, the
military hero rather than the aristocratic court official was crucial in
the dramatic display of political values (Mills 1956). While status
rewards are part of the conflictual and competitive relationships
between social groups, the general system of formal rewards within
a society can play an important part in establishing national unity
and legitimizing the nation-state (Taylor 1987).
We can see that the historical development of status stratification
in the United States was different from the development of class
systems in Europe in a number of important ways. In particular, the
United States did not inherit a feudal nobility, and migration played
a critical role in creating both a sense of individual achievement as a
major component in its value system and a social system organized
into separate, competitive ethnic communities. These historical
differences partly explain the very different approaches to social
stratification in American and European sociology. While
European social theory has been overwhelmingly preoccupied with
the role of economic classes in industrial society, American
sociologists have been more interested in studies of social mobility
(of individuals), with the analysis of the occupational structure

(Blau and Duncan 1967) and with subjective feelings about prestige
(Burris, 1987; Pease eta/. 1970; Wenger 1987).
In the American context, Weber’s conflict perspective on status
privilege was transformed and submerged by the ‘Warner School’ of
sociology (Gordon 1950). The concepts of ‘status’ and ‘class’ were
conflated and the importance of conflict in shaping consciousness
was ignored. Social stratification was now viewed as a continuous
gradation of positions which were equated with prestige ranking.
Individuals were thought to move through these graded positions as
a consequence of their personal effort; the notion of status groups
exercising social closure to monopolize resources was abandoned in
favour of an image of America as a classless society where
opportunities for social mobility were very great (Rinehart 1971).
The focus on class conflict and status-group competition as essential
elements in the dynamic process of historical transformations of
society which we have noted in the sociology of both Marx and
Weber was replaced by an emphasis on consensus in the community
studies of the Warner School and in the structural functionalism
theory of stratification of K. Davis and W. E. Moore (1945). Of
course, these approaches to social stratification in American
sociology were eventually subject to extensive criticism on the
grounds that, for example, the functionalist perspective on status
neglected the profound inequalities, the role of vested interests, the
monopilization of resources, and the pervasiveness of inter-group
conflicts in American life (Bendix and Lipset 1966; Tumin 1970).
Having outlined various definitions and approaches to status, I
now wish to state more clearly my own perspective. First, I give a
particular emphasis to the politico-legal features of the concept of
status. I have already noted that from its Latin roots the word
originally referred to a legal position or standing within society by
which a citizen could claim various forms of immunity from many
political or fiscal obligations (Bush 1983). Therefore, by status I
mean firstly a bundle of socio-political claims against society which
gives an individual (or more sociologically a group) certain benefits
and privileges, marking him or her off from other individuals or
groups. These socio-political claims are to scarce resources, especi¬
ally to educational, cultural, or symbolic resources. This cultural
aspect of status gives rise to a second dimension, namely the notion
of status as a cultural lifestyle which distinguishes a status group
with a special identity in society. In feudal societies, access to
12 Status
privileges was organized in terms of exclusive estates (the clergy,

the nobility and the common people) which had their own culture
and value system. In contemporary society, the struggle over social
privileges and symbols of distinction is more fluid and open,
involving an infinite range of groups, collectivities and strata.
By emphasizing its socio-political aspects, it is easier to maintain
a sharper division between status and the idea of economic class,
where economic class refers to the system of economic inequalities
in society in terms of production, ownership and consumption. I
would prefer therefore to use ‘economic class’ as equivalent to
‘social class’. It is clear that the idea of economic class is itself highly
complicated, and it is possible to identify various types of class
within a Weberian tradition by reference to different markets
(labour, credit and commodity markets) (Wiley 1967). However, I
do not wish in this study to enter too far into the debate over Marxist
analyses of class. On the one hand I want to distinguish economic
classes from status communities, and on the other I want to argue
that class analysis and status analysis, far from being mutually
exclusive, are most productively used in combination; that is, we
should seek to understand how status and class operate together or
in opposition in societies, alongside the cultural distribution of
prestige through such institutions as the school or the university. My
analysis of social stratification examines economic structures
(classes), the distribution of legal rights (citizenship) and the
organization of prestige and honour in terms of ‘cultural capital’
(status as cultural lifestyles).
While the reader may by this stage feel that there are enough
terminological complexities surrounding the idea of status, for the
purpose of analysis in this study I need to introduce yet a further
distinction: between status communities and status columns or
blocs. A status community is, so to speak, a genuine form of
enduring community (or in the sociological parlance a gemeinschaft
relationship); these are communities of individuals enjoying, over
relatively long periods of time, certain broad attributes, such as
language, culture or ethnicity. For example, the Welsh community
of South Australia, or the Irish community of New York would
constitute in my terminology status communities of established,
solidaristic collectivities. By contrast status columns or blocs are
more like associations or organizations (ge.ve//5c/?fl/r relationship) in
which individuals form organizational structures for specific pur¬
poses, such as claiming welfare or tax benefits. An example of a
status column would be all persons belonging to single-parent

households who claim tax benefits or other privileges within the
welfare state. Other examples would include pensioners’ associ¬
ations, consumer-protection groups, charitable organizations for
disabled soldiers, rate-payers’ associations or ad hoc committees for
the protection of an urban amenity. These are lobby groups which,
often in the name of citizenship rights, form associations to lobby
local or national governments. Thus, status columns come together
for rather limited and possibly short-term political or social
objectives, while status communities tend to be long-enduring,
multidimensional, complex, primary groups.
Status columns or blocs become involved in status politics, which
involve the assertion of claims for social rights or entitlements
against the state by aggregates who experience some form of
discrimination by reference to modern, universalistic legislation.
Insofar as egalitarian universalism is a major criterion of contem¬
porary democracies, citizens will experience various forms of
inequality in terms of particularistic status attributes, such as age,
gender or ethnicity. Where these status colums become welfare
clients of the modern state, we have status politics. In discussing this
aspect of contemporary status, I follow the arguments of Daniel
Bell in The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976) where he
discusses status in the modern polity as a form of entitlement. The
analysis of these claims against the state involves what Bell has
called ‘fiscal sociology’. In this legal-political sense, by status (a
bundle of social claims against the public household or the state) I
mean modern citizenship. This concept is important in contem¬
porary sociology, because in the current context of economic
recession and monetaristic politics, we may expect citizenship to be
eroded and status politics to remain a crucial feature of political
struggles over the future of the welfare-state system. These political
conflicts between status groups may be appropriately referred to as
‘the politics of resentment’.
Towards a comparative history of status and class

In this introduction to a controversy in sociology, I have argued that
we can distinguish two related but distinctive principles of social
stratification in human societies. Societies are either dominated by
economic relations through the market-place, which produce
14 Status
predominantly economic forms of inequality, or they are structured

around certain legal-political definitions of privilege, which are
articulated through cultural systems of distinction. Where the
market predominates in society, social actors are connected to¬
gether overwhelmingly by the equalities or inequalities of economic
exchange. This is what Marx in Capital (1970) referred to as ‘the
cash nexus’, whereby human agents in the market-place are united
by predominantly naked economic connections. Alternatively,
social relations may be heavily mediated by legal, cultural and
educational barriers which structure resources in terms of processes
which within Weberian sociology are called processes of social
closure. While this analytical distinction is useful, it is empirically
and historically the case that class and status as axes of inequality
and stratification are usually mixed within social systems. The
character of this mixture can only be ascertained by empirical,
historical and comparative analyses; it is not a question of a priori
theoretical stipulation alone, although of course the analytical
relationship between class and status will depend on the particular
definitions we ascribe to these terms.
Given the nature of the sociological controversy over social
stratification, it is clear that any text on status will also involve to
some extent a study in the history of sociological theory and of
political ideology. A study of status requires an evaluation of the
development of certain theoretical frameworks for the study of
industrial society. In this particular text I am concerned to compare
and contrast the idea of status with economic contract: that is, I am
particularly concerned with the emergence of economic markets
and their analysis in economic and sociological theory.
The role of sociological theory is to provide sociological expla¬
nations by which we can better understand the society in which we
live (Alexander 1987a). In this study I argue that modern societies
are best understood as a conflict or contradiction between the
principles of democratic politics (which emphasize equality and
universal rights), and the organization of economic systems (the
production, exchange and consumption of goods) within which
there is empirically considerable inequality. Modern societies are
structured by contradictions between the political and economic
processes, and we can best understand the dilemmas of our times
through this theoretical viewpoint of the central problematic of
democratic industrial civilization. To anticipate later discussions, I
shall focus on status as a political-legal entity which legitimates and
facilitates welfare claims, or ‘entitlements’ (within the terminology

of Bell) against the state in the name of a universal principle of
welfare as the central component of modern citizenship. Modern
societies are organized around a set of conflicting relations between
class (with special reference to the capitalist economy) and citizen¬
ship (with special reference to democratic political systems). While
some authors (Offe 1985) have treated contemporary capitalism as
disorganized, because there are unresolved contradictions between
politico-legal and economic organization, in this study I argue that
the contradictions between status and class (between political
culture and economic organization) are more or less permanent
features of all modern industrial societies.
I also believe that the concepts of status, status blocs and status
struggles provide a useful perspective for analysing state-socialist
economies, although in this study I am primarily concerned with
capitalism. However, I should also note that, for reasons outlined
by Bell in various publications, the concept of capitalism is now
open to much theoretical dispute, so much so that it is not entirely
clear that ‘capitalism’ is adequate as a description of modern
societies: however, I cannot within the limited nature of this study
provide the theoretical basis for regarding capitalism as inappro¬
priate or inadequate as a description of contemporary industrial
society (Cutler et al. 1977). Finally, it will become evident in this
study that my perspective owes a great deal to the tradition and
legacy of T. H. Marshall, who provided an elegant framework for
the analysis of the tensions that exist between the empirical reality
of economic inequality in the market-place and the principles of
democratic citizenship, grounded in certain notions of universalism
and entitlement (Marshall 1977; 1981).
Because I approach status through a conflict sociology perspec¬
tive, this study takes a distinctively anti-evolutionary position
towards the development of modern societies. By emphasizing the
role of social conflict in social change, I regard the outcome of social
struggles as contingent and historical: that is, social consequences
are the contingent, unpredictable and unanticipated outcome of
endless forms of social conflicts. While it is clear that social
hierarchies must be based upon certain common assumptions about
desirable goods and attributes, it is also evident that all societies are
sites within which people (typically organized into groups, classes or
other social collectivities) struggle to expand or maintain privileged
access to resources, which as we will see following Weber can be
16 Status
generally distinguished in terms of economic, political and symbolic

resources. These competitive struggles are often (perhaps always)
hidden or masked by certain norms of etiquette, fair play or good
manners, but these ideologies of fairness are also constantly
challenged by the prevalence and ubiquity of endless confrontations
over the inequalities in the distribution of resources.
My approach to social status, while depending heavily on the
work of twentieth-century authors such as Weber, Marshall and
Bell, also derives in considerable part from the philosophy of
Friedrich Nietzsche, who had a sharp and distinctive perspective on
power conflicts in social life and on the central role of resentment in
human relations (Strong, 1975). This emphasis on social conflict
derives therefore from a number of basic presuppositions in my
sociology. In addition, I want to emphasize status conflicts because
I am particularly concerned to analyse the problems of status
politics within a period characterized by rapid and profound
economic decline in the Western democracies. I am ultimately
concerned with the moral problem of citizenship within democra¬
cies experiencing economic recession.
2
From Status to Contract:

Historical Change and
Social Stratification
Two models of society
Sociologists often attempt to develop their arguments about society

by developing abstract models-‘ideal types’-of social relations. In
order to develop explanations or theories about particular events,
Weber (1949) suggested that social scientists should produce
general, abstract types of social processes and social relations.
While these ideal types have been criticized on philosophical
grounds (Watkins 1953), the ideal-typical method is a useful
procedure in attempting to conceptualize social processes and
structures. In this chapter, therefore, where I am concerned with
the historical development of different types of social stratification,
I shall begin with an outline of two ideal-typical forms of social
organization, which I shall call a ‘Pure Capitalist Society’ and a
‘Pure Traditional Society’. These ideal types or models are intended
to indicate contrasted (but exaggerated) forms of social inequality
or stratification, and their related political, cultural and legal
institutions. I start with an account of a Pure Capitalist Society,
which is a theoretical description familiar to both economists and
sociologists.
In Pure Capitalism, the economic base of the society broadly
determines the political, cultural and legal relations which bind
individuals together within a civil society. The power, wealth and
esteem of individuals is overwhelmingly defined either by their
ownership of the means of production or (in its weaker version) by
the economic abilities or skills which they bring to the market-place.
Personal prestige (or individual status) is in theory entirely
explained by the possession of economic power. While individuals
or households attempt to conserve their economic wealth by
18 Status
ensuring that their own offspring inherit the entire assets of the
household, there is considerable social mobility both within and
between different generations. Individuals or groups may move up
and down the social ladder, regardless of their cultural or other
attributes, because membership of affluent groups is not based on
exclusive religious, legal or ethnic criteria. Within this society,
economic class dominates and, as it were, exhausts the entire range
of possible forms of inequality. Social stratification simply is
economic class and economic class conflict.
This type of society was analysed in Marx’s Capital (1970) where
he argued that in capitalism the economic is both dominant and
determinant. The economic determines the character and place of
various institutions within the entire social formation, while also
dominating the cultural, legal and ideological relations of society.
Thus, individuals experience social relations as purely economic
relations and the entire structure and character of the social system
is explained by and seen in terms of economic reality.
In such a society, we would expect social relations to be
characterized by a high degree of interpersonal and inter-group
conflict and competition, as people struggle to master and control
the economic resources of society unmediated by cultural or other
restraints. Society would be nothing other than the endless struggle
between individuals for survival; it was for this reason that in the
nineteenth century, in the heyday of capitalism, many social
commentators compared human society with the animal world as
described by Charles Darwin. The notion of ‘the survival of the
fittest’ became a popular slogan of political and social observers as a
‘scientific’ description of the highly competitive world of capitalism
(Hofstadter, 1955). Alongside these parallels between the animal
world and human society, there developed various theories of
society which emphasized the idea of the isolated, lone individual
who, without the support of social relations, lived a life of pure
competitive struggle and hedonistic enjoyment. Writers came to
interpret human relations through the legendary picture of Robin¬
son Crusoe, who encapsulated the virtues and principles of
individualistic utilitarianism, isolation and achievement (Aber¬
crombie c/a/. 1986).
In such a society, we can argue that social relations are reduced to
their most elementary forms. There is little space for etiquette or
cultural distinction, since a person’s value is simply economic.
Indeed, human beings can be described as homo economicus - that
From Status to Contract 19
is, their entire personalities are overwhelmingly or exclusively

defined in terms of economic rationality and economic exploitation.
In The Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels (1968) described the
elementary, indeed naked, character of the relationship connecting
the employer and the employee in terms of a ‘cash nexus’. In Pure
Capitalism the only tie between the worker and the capitalist was
the payment of wages for labour-power; in ideal-typical terms, the
cash nexus means that industrial relations are not based upon
loyalty or other forms of moral commitment, but simply upon an
economic relationship of exchange.
It is clear that Pure Capitalism is a highly competitive and
conflictual society, involving unstable social relations in which we
might expect social actors to resort frequently to force and fraud to
achieve their ends. How, therefore, would such a society cohere?
How might social conflicts be minimized? One solution to the
so-called ‘problem of order’ was proposed by seventeenth-century
philosophers in England like Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. This
theory is referred to as ‘the social contract theory’ of political
authority. Faced by the threat of constant violence and conflict in
which according to Hobbes human life would be nasty, brutish and
short, rational human agents perceived the value of a social contract
by which a third party (for example the state) would regulate and
monitor the interactions between isolated economic agents. By
renouncing a certain amount of their individual freedoms, human
agents buy social stability and political order by creating contracts
which are enforced by a political authority which has supreme
power (Wolin 1961).
Social contract theory is typical of societies in which individua¬
lism and individual rationality are given a particular emphasis over
and against social relations, communal ties and general values
(Macpherson 1962). It is of some interest therefore that social
contract theory has been much criticized by conservative writers
(such as Sir Robert Filmer in the seventeenth century) on the
grounds that social contract theory perceives society as constructed,
as merely the effect of individual actions and intentions. By
contrast, conservative theories typically see society as an organic
whole which has, as it were, an existence of its own, independent of
individual actors. The conservative tradition has been critical of the
cash nexus, aggressive individualism and Pure Capitalism, because
conservative writers were very much aware of the revolutionary
implications of social contract theory which ignored tradition and
20 Status
conventional criteria of authority (Nisbet 1967). The contrast

between these two views of society (competing individuals con¬
nected by a social contract versus organically united social com¬
munities and traditions) helps us to understand the contrast
between Pure Capitalism and Pure Traditional Society.
In a society based upon tradition rather than upon the market,
the standing or status of the person depends not upon what they
happen to own, but upon what they are as defined in legal or
cultural terms. What a person does (for a living) is less significant
socially than what he is (in terms of birth). A person’s standing in
the community is defined by whether they have honour, not by
whether they have money. A person’s honour depends upon birth,
membership of particular families, education and training in
appropriate cultural patterns, and the acquisition of respected and
respectful attitudes and dispositions (Bourdieu 1986). The posses¬
sion of honour may be frequently indicated by the possession of
heraldic devices, proper costumes and the insignia of social prestige
(Berger 1974). In a Purely Traditional Society, the dominant
authorities attempt to regulate and control entry into the leading
social strata by legal, cultural, ritual and other means. There is,
therefore, in principle little or no social mobility between social
strata. As a result, traditional forms of stratification tend towards
closed social ‘orders’ or castes.
Where honour and ‘breeding’ are predominant criteria of perso¬
nal value, there is an emphasis on training and education to acquire
the appropriate dispositions of social value and worth. However,
there is an ideological contradiction between the idea of breeding
(which suggests almost a genetic theory of cultural excellence) and
the principles of training and cultivation for membership of the
civilized strata (which suggests that the correct dispositions can be
acquired). In a society where the nobility (especially a militarized
nobility) is dominant, we may expect an emphasis to be placed upon
the notion of birthright, such that birth in a particular family is an
essential feature of social excellence. Basically, a noble man is born,
not cultivated.
The emphasis on hereditary status may be emphasized by the
adoption of a critical attitude towards any form of wealth based
upon personal achievement, or any ideology giving an emphasis to
hard work, saving and restraint as virtues. In a Purely Traditional
Society, the aristocratic nobility tends to regard acquired wealth as
simply ‘dirty’ money. In a society which places an emphasis on the
concept of aristocratic honour, those social groups which depend

upon trade are rejected as vulgar and uncouth. As Weber noted in
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1930) an emphasis
on hard work, labour and asceticism is characteristic of an emerging
bourgeois social class and by contrast the aristocracy are committed
to a concept of honour as the principal basis of social distinction.
Indeed, leisure and consumption rather than hard work and
production are characteristic of social strata which do not depend
upon an earned income (Veblen 1899).
In order to legitimize and confirm its authority, an aristocratic
nobility within a Purely Traditional Society has to assert the
importance of tradition, continuity and the stability of culture.
Authority rests upon the illusion of timeless continuities of practice
which deny any critical evaluation of a traditional nobility. Re¬
ligious values are an essential element of the social cement of this
type of social stratification system. By contrast, a Purely Capitalist
Society may well place greater emphasis on the importance of
innovation, change and the disruption of traditional relations.
Because capitalist society rewards risk and innovation, capitalism is
inimical to traditional patterns of behaviour and to convention as a
value (Goldstone 1987). Within a traditional society by contrast,
the sacred plays an essential role in legitimizing the whole social
system.
Sociological theory and social change
In the nineteenth century social theorists were overwhelmingly

concerned with the description and explanation of rapid social
change, given the impact of the industrial revolution on the culture
and social structure of West European societies (Hearn 1985).
England in particular went through a period of intense urbanization
and industrialization between 1750 and 1840, but by the time of the
outbreak of the First World War France, Germany and Italy had
also been profoundly influenced by the emergence of an urban,
industrial capitalist system. While these developments were very
uneven in character and while many aspects of traditional, rural
society survived the emergence of an urban culture, the leading
social commentators of this period were impressed (indeed ob¬
sessed) by the speed of social change and concerned with the
implications of a new industrial civilization. This general concern
22 Status
for the promise and problems of social change gave rise to many
different theoretical traditions, but behind these variations in the
theory of social change there was a unifying assumption based upon
a view of the inexorable quality of social transformation (Nisbet
1986).
Major changes in society - associated with the urbanization of
Europe, the increase in population, the transformation of agricultu¬
ral production and the dominance of industrial technology - were
characteristically perceived in terms of a series of dichotomous
models which as ideal types attempted to pinpoint essential features
of social change. For example, Herbert Spencer’s (1820-95)
distinction between militant society and industrial society optimis¬
tically identified an expectation that an advanced industrial society
could be based upon cooperation, industrial wealth and interper¬
sonal control rather than upon military aggression and group
conflict.
Less optimistically, Ferdinand Tdnnies (1957) in 1887 published
his famous study of gemeinschaft and gesellschaft {Community and
Association) in which he noted the decline of communal relations
involving mutuality, naturalness and affectivity. The emergence of
associational relations was a consequence of the growing division of
labour, the development of individualism and industrial competi¬
tiveness. Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) made an equally famous
distinction between mechanical and organic solidarity in his The
Division of Labour in Society (1960). In this model, Durkheim
attempted to contrast mechanical solidarity in primitive societies,
which was based upon general beliefs and the absence of the
division of labour, with organic solidarity in industrial society,
which involved a shift away from moral integration (the conscience
collective) towards a system based upon individual differences and
individual consciousness. Societies based upon organic solidarity
would derive their social integration from the interweaving of
cooperative dependencies within the division of labour.
These complex and variable forms of social change were perhaps
most succinctly summarized by the great English jurisprudential
thinker Sir Henry Maine (1917) in terms of a contrast between
status and contract. In Maine’s terminology the historical develop¬
ment of human societies was seen to be a consequence of the
changing nature of the law of persons and of the increasing
dominance of the market-place and commercial contracts. He
wrote that
all the forms of status taken notice in the Law of Persons were
derived from, and to some extent are still coloured by, the powers
and privileges anciently residing in the Family. If then we employ
Status, agreeably with the usage of the best writers to signify these
personal conditions only, and avoid applying the term to such
conditions as are the immediate or remote result of agreement, we
may say that the movement of the progressive societies has hitherto
been a movement from status to contract.
(Maine 1917, p. 100)
With the emergence of contractualism, the individual is torn

from the all-embracing network of community, and emerges as the
bearer of separate and individual rights within the public sphere of
commercial contracts. Whereas in status relationships the indi¬
vidual is embraced by multi-faceted, magical relations, binding the
person to the collectivity whose boundaries are dominated and
defined by a broad conscience collective, in contractualism the
separate individual is bound to other individuals by a unidimen¬
sional legal tie.
While these nineteenth-century theoretical accounts of the
transition from Pure Traditional Society to Pure Capitalist Society
had many differences in epistemology, ontology and historical
perspective, we may detect certain underlying features of these
arguments which suggest a common view of historical trans¬
formation. In a society based upon contract, an increasing empha¬
sis is given to the rights and autonomy of the individual as against
the community; individualism as a doctrine gains increasing promi¬
nence over more traditional views of the religious coherence of the
community. There is in addition an erosion of the feudal or
military nobility, in favour of more open-ended social relations in
which in principle social mobility becomes possible. The exploi¬
tation of subordinate classes by the mechanisms of social closure
(mainly by legal and ritualistic means) gives way to the naked
exploitation of individuals through the market mechanism and the
cash nexus. A society based upon economic class and the cash
nexus liquidates traditional cultures and sacred values, promoting
a general process of secularization and religious pluralism. These
general features of social change were clearly and neatly summar¬
ized in Weber’s formal account of the social relations in the
opening sections of Economy and Society (1968). As a conclusion
to this commentary on models of social change, I shall turn to
Weber’s analysis of social relations, which is particularly useful as
24 Status
an overall perspective on the problems of status, economic class and

social change.
Weber, following the distinction drawn by Tonnies between
gemeinschaft and gesellschaft, argued that social relations may
either be communal or associational. For Weber, a communal
relationship is based upon the subjective attitudes of the interac¬
tants where social relations are either affectual or traditional. By
contrast, associative relationships involve an orientation towards
action based upon a rationally calculated interest or utilitarian
motive. More precisely, Weber argued that
a social relationship will be called ‘communal’ if and insofar as the
orientation of social action ... is based upon the subjective feeling
of the parties whether affectual or traditional that they belong
together.
(Weber 1968, Volume 1, p. 40)
By contrast, Weber proposed that

A social relationship will be called ‘associative’ if and insofar as the
orientation of action within it rests upon a rationally motivated
adjustment of interests or a similarly motivated agreement, whether
the basis of the rational judgement be absolute values or reasons of
expediency.
(Weber, 1968, Volume 1, p. 40)
Communal relations involve the binding together of individuals

in terms of affectual attraction and traditionally held values whereas
associative relations are based upon instrumental calculations of
benefit or profit, which would be suitable for a society dominated by
the market. Secondly, Weber drew a distinction between closed and
open social relations, which broadly speaking expresses the idea of
relations which are closed or open to outsiders or strangers. Weber
wrote that
a social relationship which is closed or limits the admission of
outsiders will be called an organization when its regulations are
enforced by specific individuals; a chief and, possibly an administrat¬
ive staff which normally has representative powers.
(Weber 1968, Volume 1, p. 48)
This distinction between closed and open relations merely gives an

expression to an enduring aspect of Weber’s historical inquiry,
namely his investigations of the conditions for social closure
whereby members of social groups attempt to preserve or maximize
the benefits of social membership within solidaristic groups.
Open Closed
church village Communal
market political party Associative
Figure 1. Weber’s typology of social relations
By combining together these two principles (open/closed and

communal/associative), we can produce a 2 x 2 box to illustrate the
theoretical possibilities within Weber’s formal theory of social
relations (Figure 1).
Closed communal relations may be illustrated by such institutions
as the family or the village in which membership is closed to
outsiders and the predominant forms of social relations are
communal, emphasizing traditional and affectual ties between
individuals. An open communal relationship might be illustrated by
the institution of the church which, while in principle being open to
all members of society, gives a special emphasis to traditional
communal relations between members. The idea of closed asso¬
ciative relations might be illustrated by the political party in which
membership is restricted to those who own a card or who express
formal commitment to party principles and in which the relation¬
ships between the members involve associative rather than com¬
munal ties. Finally, the idea of an open associative relationship is
best illustrated by the market itself, where a multitude of anony¬
mous individuals meet in a rational, neutral way to achieve rational
goals such as profit-making.
While Weber’s model is particularly useful as a description of
different social relations, the model is also important as a perspec¬
tive on historical change and with some degree of simplification we
can argue that Weber’s historical sociology is based upon the notion
that Western societies have been transformed from systems based
upon closed communal relations to systems based upon open
associative relations. Thus, Weber’s historical sociology follows the
account of legal change provided by Flenry Maine, namely a change
26 Status
from status to contract. In Weber’s analysis of the process of

rationalization, for example, there is the idea that charismatic,
traditional and affectual elements in social relations give way to
rational systems of calculation and control. The model in which
social relations change from status to contract also gives expression
to the underlying theme of Weber’s sociology of religion, namely
that the emergence of modern societies involves a profound
historical process of secularization. Finally, the model provides one
analytical tool for understanding the change from feudal estates
based upon traditional values to a society organized around the
market and economic class, in which sacred values play a relatively
small role in the organization of inter-personal behaviour and
cultural relations.
By drawing attention to this feature of Weber’s sociology, it is in
addition possible to draw out a parallel between Marx’s analysis of
the emergence of the cash nexus and capitalism and Weber’s view of
the emergence of open associative relations within the market¬
place. For both Marx and Weber, contemporary capitalism is
dominated by these associative, rational systems of behaviour
which in principle liquidate traditional values, religious systems and
conventional culture. The transition from closed communal to open
associative relations therefore gives a more complex account of
Maine’s legal theory of the change from status to contract.
Rules for the analysis of social stratification
In the introduction to this chapter on historical developments in the

nature of social stratification, I have attempted to draw attention to
two principles of social differentiation and stratification, namely
between societies based upon status (or more precisely social
orders) and societies based upon economic class. The point of this
procedure is to outline for heuristic or exploratory purposes two
features of social stratification which involve either legal-political
distinctions (as in the case of status) or the ownership and control of
economic forces (as in the case of economic class). Of course, the
very notion of an ideal type implies that in reality status will always
be closely interwoven with class. However, for the sake of
theoretical clarification we may start with the notion that all systems
of social stratification will involve relationships between a status
variable (that is, forms of legal-political power) and a class variable
(that is, the possession of economic assets and the use of economic
power). Legal-political forms of social stratification and economic
and market features of stratification should be treated as two
separate and relatively autonomous variables of social inequality.
Existing theories of social stratification are faced with a number
of perennial problems. These include how to relate the existence of
economic classes, based upon differences of ownership or market
capacity, with the on-going reality of legal and political inequalities
in terms of authority, power and entitlement. In addition, any
theory of social stratification will have to consider the questions of
ideological justification, political legitimacy and cultural defence of
basic inequalities in the social system. We have already seen that
Marxist approaches to social stratification typically give a primacy
to economic class relations by defining economic processes as the
most significant feature of all societies. Marxist theories therefore
have problems in accounting for such phenomena as ethnicity, age
distinctions and gender relations. While Weber himself wanted to
place a particular emphasis on power, sociology came subsequently
to see social stratification in terms of three separate dimensions,
namely class, status and power. In this study of social status, I am
primarily concerned with three dimensions of social inequality:
economic differences in terms of class, legal-political differences in
terms of status relations, and finally forms of cultural distinction
which in everyday life mark off human beings in terms of their
lifestyles, attitudes and dispositions.
These three dimensions of social stratification will be fully
explored and elaborated in Chapter Four. At this point in my
argument, I draw attention to these three variables in order to
establish a framework for the historical analysis of various forms of
stratification. It is important to state a number of principles or rules
which govern the analysis which is to follow. The first principle is
that there is no strong theoretical warrant for treating any one of
these three dimensions as invariably causally prior; that is, this
study attempts to avoid what is known in sociology as a reductionist
position in which the various features of social stratification are
reduced to a single dimension, such as the economic relations of
production. I avoid giving any privileged position to either
economic relations, legal-political relations or cultural relations of
distinction in advance of an empirical inquiry into actual societies.
Furthermore, whether these various dimensions of society in fact
cohere to produce a social system is a matter for empirical inquiry
28 Status
(Turner 1987a). The various relations between economic, political

and cultural phenomena are historically variable, and therefore
essentially a matter of historical-empirical inquiry (Hall 1986;
Holton 1985; Mann 1986).
My second principle is one of empiricism which states that, while
sociology is a theoretical inquiry into social phenomena, this
theoretical inquiry must be carried out in terms of actual empirical
social circumstances. I take the view therefore that, even for an
orthodox Marxist, it should still be a matter of empirical inquiry to
discover whether and under what circumstances economic class is
the primary feature of social inequality or the basis of social conflict
within a given society. For various reasons outlined in this chapter, I
argue that historically speaking the dominance of economic class
within a system of social stratification has been confined to the early
stages of the formation of a capitalist system in Western Europe,
and was specifically characteristic of early English capitalism.
My third rule for the analysis of social stratification is simply that
sociology is necessarily an historical and comparative inquiry into
social formations or social systems. Sociological inquiry character¬
istically proceeds by comparing and contrasting different forms or
relations of inequality through historical processes. In somewhat
oversimplified terms, sociologists explain phenomena by noting
different variations over time and space. This study of historical
variations in systems of stratification has been profoundly influ¬
enced by the sociology of Norbert Elias whose studies of civilization
and court society are exemplary illustrations of the significance of
an historical sociology of social transformations (Elias 1978; 1982;
1983).
In summary, I am concerned to explore the relations between
three dimensions of the social structure: cultural relations, legal-
political relations and economic relations. These relations vary over
time and the connections between them within different societies
can only be understood by empirical and historical analysis. In this
chapter, I consider chronologically the formation of slavery, the
development of feudalism and finally the emergence of early
capitalism. To anticipate my argument, in slavery legal and class
relations were fused to create a stratified system in which there were
very limited possibilities for social mobility. In feudalism, legal-
political relations are dominant in the creation of social orders or
estates, and economic class relations were subordinate to these
juridical and ritualistic principles of stratification. Finally, in
capitalism class relations of an economic character become domi¬
nant and status differences are weakened because of the primacy of
the cash nexus and the market.
Slavery
In his classic study of Power and Privilege, Gerhard Lenski (1966)

argued that slavery typically emerges with the development of
advanced horticultural societies where people become a form of
property, often as a result of inter-societal conflict and violence.
Moses Finley (1980, pp. 84-5) argues that slavery in early Roman
times depended on the existence of an external reservoir of slave
labour. However, conquest had a ‘peculiar importance’ for the
specific character of Roman slavery, namely for the development of
large agrarian estates as the basis of elite wealth. Classical slavery
was therefore also associated with the growing despotism of
political power, especially when exercised over conquered peoples
(Finley 1974). We may initially define slavery as an institution in
which human beings are simply the property of other individuals or
groups within a society. As a system of unfree labour, the slave is
merely a thing; that is, simply an aspect of the means of production.
While slaves may be recruited by birth or by capture, slavery
involves an ascribed status system, in principle precluding any form
of social mobility. Classical Greek and Roman society depended
extensively upon slave labour for both domestic duties and direct
production; the dominant social class was an urban population of
legal citizens who depended on the exploitation of agrarian estates
within the countryside by the use of a slave population. In these
societies, slaves were acquired largely through military conquest
and as a result every citizen was in fact threatened by the possibility
of personal servitude. This anxiety about the loss of status shaped
the attitudes and culture of classical society, finding an inspirational
outlet in epic poetry and classical tragedies (Gouldner 1965).
In classical civilization, slave status was closely bound up with
early notions of citizenship, which defined membership within a
public space which was the exclusive site of rational men (Turner,
1986a, 1986b). Social divisions within the classical world were
sharply defined by the presence or absence of legal privileges. In
principle, aliens had no social standing because they lacked the
distinction of birth, character and office. Rationality, exhibited by
30 Status
the capacity to hold discourse in public (that is within the polis),

became the political and symbolic dividing line between slave and
non-slave status.
The existence of slavery as an institution in classical society raised
certain tensions or problems within political philosophy and
political practice, because these societies were democracies but also
authoritarian slave systems. Full citizenship conferred upon mem¬
bers of the polis the right to speak and to govern. Within political
philosophy therefore it became necessary to explain or to justify
why women, children and adult slaves had no rights to talk; that is,
no rights to citizenship. Women and children were regarded as too
emotional or inexperienced to hold public office, but their lack of
public office helped to explain their lack of rationality. The picture
was of course complicated by the presence of adult, able-bodied
men who were slaves as a result of conquest. There were fewer
ideological problems with chattel-slaves (who were obtained by
conquest) and debt-bondsmen (who were constrained to provide
compulsory labour to pay off debts). Since all members of classical
society were exposed to the threat of conquest and hence to the
threat of slavery, the problem of justifying on moral or intellectual
grounds the existence of slavery dominated much of the core of
classical philosophy (Finley 1960).
I have so far suggested that slavery was a distinctive institution
dividing classical societies into the free and the unfree. In fact, the
social structure of the classical world was far more complex. In early
Republican Rome, for example, there was a major division
between the patricians and plebeians. The patrician class was
composed of landowners who enjoyed the right to hold political
office and played a crucial role in the direction of the army. By
contrast the plebeian class was composed of landless tenants who
worked on patrician property, but this class was not allowed to enter
into political life and they did not form part of the Roman army
(Darnsey 1970). While they were not citizens of the polis, they
cannot be regarded as staves. Although they were in official terms
powerless, they formed an important part of the system of
patron-client relations, which in turn was a crucial feature of the
political organization of the Roman state (Littlejohn 1972, p. 51).
The socio-political status of the plebeian class was unstable and
insecure. Through credit relations, a plebeian debtor could be
forced down into the status of a debt-slave. On the other hand, the
plebeians struggled to achieve citizenship rights, for example, the
right to join the army. While plebeian status was partly defined in
terms of the lack of ownership of land, it was also closely bound up
with the right to serve within the army, which was in turn, as we
have seen, one mark of citizenship. It is interesting therefore to note
that it was precisely in this situation that the word classis was first
developed, since members of the polis were called to army in
divisions or classes.
As the Roman Empire evolved it became more decisively an
estate society (that is a society based upon social order clearly
demarcated by legal distinctions relating to questions of personal
status). While there were many cross-cutting distinctions between
citizens and non-citizens, between chattel-slaves and debt-
bondsmen, between the very rich and the poor, there primarily
emerged a sharp and enduring distinction between the humiliores
(lower class) and the honestiores (who were the top privileged
group). The honestiores were composed of the senators who
controlled the political system, the equites (an equestrian stratum)
and finally the decurions and legionaries, who served in the imperial
army. Within the lower groups of humiliores, there were the urban
plebs and the rural peasantry, and below this group the stratum of
slaves and ex-slaves (Hopkins 1974).
The problem which has, as it were, plagued the analysis of
antiquity is the question whether these ‘groups’ were constituted as
classes (in a primarily Marxist sense) or as estates (social orders
within a Weberian tradition)? We may note at the outset that Marx
and Engels were themselves somewhat undecided over this issue. In
the Communist Manifesto of 1848, they (1968) wrote about the
history of all societies as the history of class struggle involving in the
ancient world free-men and slaves, patrician and plebeian. By using
this categorization, they directly implied that the ancient world
could be understood in terms of economic classes. However, in the
Preface to the Second Edition of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis
Bonaparte, Marx (1934) saw the primary class struggles of Rome in
terms of the rich and the poor who were freemen, in -which the
slaves were merely passive observers of the political struggle. In
addition, this conceptual uncertainty in Marx and Engels is related
to a deeper problem, namely whether there was such a thing as ‘the
slave mode of production’ or, more contentiously still, an ‘Asiatic
mode of production’ (Turner 1978). What we might call the ‘strong
position’ in Marxism, however, argues for a class analysis of
classical antiquity, in which legal-status differences are regarded as
32 Status
either irrelevant or secondary to the primary cleavage in society

between those who own and those who do not own the means of
production. Those writers who follow the works of G. E. M. de Ste
Croix (1981) have argued that Marxist class analysis is perfectly
appropriate for the understanding of the classical world, whereas
those writers who follow the lead of Moses Finley have argued that
the classical world should be understood in terms of estates or
orders. Ironically, Weber in The Agrarian Sociology of Ancient
Civilisations (1976) tended to adopt a Marxist framework seeing
slave society as characterized by a class struggle between the free
and the unfree (Turner 1981).
Much of the problem with the analysis of the stratification systems
of the ancient world hinges upon conceptual and terminological
looseness and confusion. However, what is not at issue is the central
importance of juridical, legal, political and ritualistic criteria for
defining membership within strata within the system of social
stratification in the classical world; that is, there are very strong
historical and theoretical reasons for regarding the classical world as
a world of estates. Finley’s work is of critical importance in
understanding these issues. Finley’s basic position is that the classical
world cannot be understood in terms of economic class differences.
For example, referring to the problem of the classification of slaves
he wrote that the slaves were ‘a logical class and a juridical class but
not, in any usual sense of the term, a social class’ (Finley 1980, p. 77).
Instead he proposed that we should think of ‘ancient society as
made up of a spectrum of statuses, with the free citizen at one end
and the slave at the other’ (Finley 1981, p. 98). The ‘social class
struggles’ of the ancient world were not therefore conflicts between
economic classes defined in terms of their relationship to the means
of production, but ‘conflicts between groups at different points in
the spectrum disputing the distribution of specific rights and
privileges’ (Finley 1985, p. 68). In Finley’s terms, therefore,
Roman society was an estate society based upon social orders
arranged in a hierarchical relationship; in particular, it was divided
between two orders, namely the patricians and plebeians. How¬
ever, Finley is perfectly aware of, and indeed insists upon, the fact
that estates and orders change over time as the consequence of
endless struggles and disputes over rights and privileges. For
example, a plebeian victory in 445 BC removed the prohibition on
marriages between the social orders, thereby permitting in principle
some degree of social mobility.
While Finley’s account is clearly authoritative, it is possible to
maintain the general thrust of his argument, but to modify it in order
to bring out the complex relationship between economics and legal
categories in ancient civilizations. While in formal terms, the division
between plebeians and patricians was clearly set in a series of
complex legal, political and ritualistic structures (achieving a certain
degree of social closure as we have seen), the wealth of the patrician
order was solidly located in the great agrarian estates of the
countryside. There was, therefore, as Finley himself shows, a strong
interpenetration between the economic criterion of property owner¬
ship and legal relations, closing off membership of the patrician class
to people of plebeian or slave origin. Rather than seeing economic
criterion of class and legal criterion of social orders in a relationship
of conceptual antagonism, it is possible to bring these two criteria
together, leaving the legal-political still in a state of dominance. That
is, it is possible to see legal and economic criteria of classification
fused in the classical case. This way of viewing the ancient world was
discussed by Georg Lukacs in History and Class Consciousness
(1971) and commented on by Finley in The Ancient Economy (1985,
p. 50). Writing on the problems of status consciousness and class
consciousness in the ancient world, Lukacs noted that
the structuring of society into castes and estates means that economic
elements are//jcxtr/cfl6/y joined to political and religious factors . . .
economic and legal categories are objectively and substantively so
interwoven as to be inseparable.
(Lukacs1971, pp.55-9)
The solution to the problem of classes in the ancient world appears

to lie in this notion of interwoven relations (or in my terminology,
fusion). Legal-political criteria fundamentally defined the primary
divisions of classical civilization into social orders, but interwoven
with these divisions were important economic relations of ownership
and production. In empirical and historical terms therefore, we must
regard the ancient world as one in which the major divisions of
inequality were structured inseparably by these legal criteria of social
closure, economic criteria of ownership and cultural criteria of
lifestyles, specifically a cultural notion of the virtues of the free man.
Feudalism
Any social or historical discussion of the system of stratification in

34 Status
feudal societies runs into the same conceptual difficulties en¬

countered in the analysis of slave societies in the ancient world. The
problem is now familiar, namely the tensions between an analysis in
terms of economic classes and one in terms of status orders. Once
more, Marx himself was uncertain in his approach to this issue.
While wishing to consider feudalism as a class system, Marx was
also committed to making a sharp contrast between feudalism and
capitalism; one way of achieving this contrast was precisely to draw
a line between ‘estate’ and ‘class’ (Giddens 1973, pp. 83-5).
Whatever the reasons for Marx’s theoretical orientation, he failed
to make a clear differentiation between a class of warriors and a
class of merchants in the development of Western societies from
militarized feudalism to industrial capitalism:
Marx saw more clearly what feudal and entrepreneurial groups had
in common and he saw the structural differences. He noted that,
since both could monopolize the economic means of production,
both acquired power chances that allowed them to exploit other
groups. Yet he failed to ask, and therefore found no reason to
explain, why those in possession of power monopolies consisted of a
nobility of warriors in the one case and relatively pacified merchants
in the other
(Elias 1987, p. 232)
In this discussion of the stratification system of feudalism, I shall
argue that feudal societies were indeed based upon estates and we
should therefore concentrate on the emergence and development of
an estate of militarized nobility. However, with the slow and
uneven development of a capitalist economy, there emerged a
predominantly urban economic class of merchants and bourgeois
who carried with them, as it were, an entirely new principle of
stratification - the dominance of economic class and the emergence
of a market-dominated society.
Within the literature on medieval Western feudalism, it is
common to find a distinction between the three great estates or
orders of feudal society (Duby 1980). These were the clergy (the
first estate), the nobility (the second estate) and the common
people (the third estate) (Barber 1957, p. 55). How did this society
emerge? With the collapse of ancient civilization based upon
slavery, European societies could, as Weber (1976) noted, have
moved directly towards a capitalist mode of production, based upon
exploitation of ‘free’ labour power; instead European society
evolved towards a manorial system, which was rooted in the
countryside, where there was an authoritarian regulation of prod¬

uction, binding the peasant to the soil. While feudalism based upon
manorial production varied significantly from one location to
another in the Middle Ages, feudalism had five primary character¬
istics (Prawer and Eisenstadt 1968), namely the predominance of a
lord-vassal relationship, a localized form of governmental authority
centred on the personality of a king, the distribution of land through
the granting of fiefs in exchange for services, the presence of
privatized armies in local regions dominated by a regional nobility
and the social rights of landlords over their peasants who were serfs.
To understand the development of this system, we need to pay
particular attention to the development of a militarized nobility
with its own ethic and code of behaviour.
Men-at-arms have been characteristic of almost every known
human society, but the interesting feature of the Middle Ages was
the transformation of the man-at-arms into a chivalrous knight,
whose lifestyle was fixed by a code of behaviour centred on the
notion of chivalry (Keen 1984). From the second half of the
eleventh century in Europe, written codes describing the life and
cultivation of a knight became more numerous and more important
in the shaping of the feudal nobility (Bloch 1964, Volume 2).
Membership of a militarized order of knights was increasingly
defined by a highly ritualistic ceremony, namely the dubbing of a
knight by the stroke of a sword. The performance of this ceremony
came eventually to demarcate sharply between the noble and the
vassal. Thus, ritualistic and legal means came together to establish a
distinctive social order or estate. Knighthood was eventually
transformed from a merely secular occupation into a religious
vocation by the intervention of the Church, which sanctified
knighthood as a sacrificial vocation. An indication of this sacred
status can be found in The Canterbury Tales where Chaucer painted
an idealized picture of the ‘perfect knight’. This tale can be seen as
one illustration of a new genre of romantic literature of chivalry,
namely courtly love poetry (Abercrombie etal. 1980).
The more knighthood was hedged around by ceremonial rights,
codes of behaviour and religious prescriptions, the more the
militarized men of the early Middle Ages developed into a closed,
organized and distinctive social order:
Thus the Church, by assigning to it (knighthood) an ideal task, finally
and formally proved the existence of this ‘order’ of warriors which,
conceived as one of the necessary divisions of the well-ordered
36 Status
society, was increasingly identified with the whole body of dubbed

knights.
(Bloch 1964, Volume 2, p. 319)
Between 1130 and 1250, a significant change took place in the
character of knighthood: its development into a hereditary status.
This change can be seen in the new rules regulating entry to the
order of knights, which came to emphasize the importance of
descent from a household of knights, in addition to the ceremonial
and religious culture which surrounded knightly practices. The
development of knighthood thus provides us with a perfect
illustration of the Weberian notion of social closure, since the
regulations of the twelfth century, for example, forbade peasants to
bear knightly weapons (such as the lance and the sword). While
there was a clear distinction between noble status and the position
of the common people, within the noble stratum there were
significant variations of power and status, along with important
differences between England and Germany. Within the category of
knights we also find less prestigious military roles such as the
Sergeants and serf-knights, who were often recruited from lower
orders. Regardless of these variations, this stratum of militarized
nobility as a whole came to shape much of the ethos and culture of
the European Middle Ages; the idea of fealty perhaps best
expressed in cultural and emotional terms the complicated
hierarchy of privileges and duties which characterized feudal
society.
Within this feudal system, the emergence of the burgher who
lived by commerce and trade is of particular importance in
understanding the transformation of this system towards an urban
and capitalist culture. The word ‘burgher’ is derived from ‘burg’ or a
fortified area, and the concept of the burghers gave rise in France in
the eleventh century to ‘bourgeois’, to distinguish merchants from
other strata. While it is conventional to identify the emergence of
agrarian capitalism in England in the seventeenth century following
the Civil War, it is important to bear in mind the long historical
development of trade, of the bourgeois class, of a wage-labour
market and geographical mobility, of favourable attitudes towards
money and exchange, and the evolution of institutions necessary for
banking, trade and exchange (Pirenne 1937). There were clear signs
of feudal crisis as early as the fifteenth century, when feudal
regulation of peasant labour became increasingly difficult, itself in
part an effect of the Black Death in the fourteenth century:
Merchants were buying land; estates were being mortgaged; and a

kulak of improving peasant farmers were becoming serious competi¬
tors in local markets and as rural employers of labour.
(Dobb 1963, p. 65)
The decline of the militarized nobility was associated with the

increasing indebtedness of the nobility to urban merchants, the shift
in political power from the countryside to the town, the develop¬
ment of overseas markets with the expansion of early colonialism
and international trade, and finally the enclosure of land and
development of an early woollen industry based upon the expansion
of sheep farming in England.
The court society was eventually replaced by bourgeois institu¬
tions (Elias 1983). These complex social, economic and cultural
changes did not, however, lead to a smooth or as it were
uninterrupted transition to a capitalist mode of production, but
rather to a period of increasing political regulation and centralized
dominance, which is the period of absolutism.
Throughout Europe, the seventeenth century was a great period
of social crisis, giving rise to a new cultural response which can be
generally called ‘baroque culture’; baroque culture, while recog¬
nizing the great power of merchants, city officials and rich farmers,
attempted to reassert the importance of a monarchical principle in
response to the growing political and social instability of the great
cities of European civilization:
Thus the absolute monarchy was converted into the foundation or,
rather, into the key stone of the social system: in the absolutist
regime of the baroque, the monarchy capped off a complex of
restored seignorial interests, supporting itself on the dominance of
land ownership that became the base of the system.
(Maravall 1986, p. 27)
While the absolutist states of the baroque period have been the
topic of considerable sociological and historical dispute (Anderson
1974), the baroque era is of special interest here, because it was a
period in which the centralized authorities attempted to reassert,
and indeed restore, the social closures of estate society in a century
in which the bourgeoisie within the cities were acquiring increasing
social influence, especially in England where the monarchy was
temporarily destroyed under the military regime of Cromwell. The
height of baroque culture in European absolutism was achieved in
the reign of Louis XIV of France whose court at Versailles was
38 Status
controlled by a dense etiquette which identified infinite grades of

social distinction and was ‘regulated with an oriental precision’
(Oggl965,p. 313).
Absolutism and baroque were very general features of the
political and social life of the seventeenth century; they were
particularly important in the crisis-ridden kingdom of Spain among
whose ruling elite was an all-pervasive sense of melancholy and
social crisis. It was in Spain that monarchical absolutism, with the
greatest possible rigour, ‘had to maintain the system of estates,
whose ordered stratification guaranteed the defense of tradi¬
tionally organized society’ (Maravall 1986, p. 130). While baroque
culture desperately sought to bolster conservative society through
the elaboration of a whole new culture of display and gaudy
ornament, there was no adequate solution to the growing pressure
of bourgeois individualism, which was antithetical to much of the
traditional order of decorum, privileges and hierarchical values.
By the end of the seventeenth century, individualistic values were
in full force in political theory, in literature with the development
of the novel, in the new genre of portraiture which celebrated
bourgeois civic virtues and in the erosion of abolutism signalled
above all else by the Glorious Revolution of 1688 in England.
Baroque absolutism has to be regarded in retrospect as a desperate
attempt to preserve the old regime with political and cultural
techniques, which in fact anticipated (even prepared the way for) a
new society.
Capitalism
Of course, nowhere in Europe was there ‘any royal road’ from
feudalism to capitalism (Poulantzas 1973). The development of
capitalism was uneven and assumed distinctive characteristics in
different nation states. As a generalization, Engels identified an
important feature of this change when he noted that ‘the political
order remained feudal, while society became more and more
bourgeois’ (Engels 1947, p. 126). The bourgeois class within the
urban centres of capitalist development was increasingly able to
secure social and cultural influence, while much of the political
apparatus of European government remained firmly in the hands of
a traditional landowning aristocracy; this feature of social change
was particularly prominent in the case of Germany and France. The
class character of capitalism depended on the special combinations
which emerged in class alliances between the new bourgeoisie, the

traditional rural peasantry and the aristocratic nobility (Moore
1968). For example, one of the peculiar features of English
capitalist development was the absence of a genuine, traumatic
revolutionary struggle between a traditional aristocratic landow¬
ning class and an emerging urban capitalist class. The Civil War of
the seventeenth century was not primarily a confliet between
landlords and capitalists, but a struggle within the traditional classes
against the assertion of absolute monarchical principles by James I
and Charles I. In the English case, capitalism developed in the
countryside through the enclosure of land which forced the
peasantry to become a wage-earning class of agricultural labourers
on rural enterprises whose produce was destined for European
markets. The industrial revolution of the late eighteenth century
therefore took place in a society which already had established most
of the critical elements of a capitalist infrastructure. English social
history, especially in class terms, has always been characterized by a
certain gradualness, class cooperation and social compromise.
The English case can be contrasted with the revolutionary
conflicts within French history where the landowning aristocracy
was preserved with both social and political power until the French
Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century. However, the
Revolution had the peculiar consequence of reinforcing peasant
rights to small bundles of land and French industrialization was
delayed until the end of the nineteenth century; the French urban
bourgeoisie was relatively small and disorganized by comparison
with both the English and North American capitalist classes. The
development of German capitalism and industrial society presents
yet another contrast to the classical development of competitive
capitalism in England. In Germany, the legacy of Lutheranism was
crucial in defining and structuring social attitudes towards public
life, social hierarchies and economic activity. Furthermore, in
Germany the bourgeoisie did not play the crucial economic and
social roles which it assumed in Holland, England and the United
States, being defeated along with German liberalism in 1848.
Capitalism developed, so to speak, from above in Germany through
Bismarckian, authoritarian, political reforms. Instead of an in¬
dependent bourgeoisie, a stratum of civil servants (Beamten) came
to monopolize social power. German capitalism developed under a
system of authoritarian rule from above, with bureaucratic regula¬
tion by civil servants in combination with a weak bourgeoisie and a
40 Status
politically disorganized working class (Epstein 1977; Kalberg 1987;

Kocka 1981; Veblen 1966). These features of German social history
were the basis of Weber’s highly pessimistic views on the stultifying
influence of bureaucracy in German life and the decline of
individual autonomy.
Conclusion: economic class and market society

Using various illustrations from European history, we have seen
that there was no pure or ideal-typical historical transition from a
set of societies based exclusively upon status (emphasizing legal-
political-religious criteria of membership) to a set of societies based
upon contract (emphasizing purely economic connections between
agents in a market-place). In slavery and feudalism, there were
various combinations of economic, political and cultural dimen¬
sions of social stratification, but in general we can regard these
traditional societies as structured in terms of estates or social
orders. Similarly, in the transition from feudalism to capitalism,
many features of traditional status ranking were preserved (and
indeed emphasized during the baroque period). One illustration of
these continuities would be the maintenance of a monarchical
system in the Dutch and English cases in which, while the various
royal families have lost effective political control, the social and
cultural ethos of the old monarchical system continues to pervade
most of the Establishment. For example, royal ceremonial (such as
coronations and weddings) has a significant symbolic function in
British culture and is a crucial link in the distribution of privileges
and rewards (Shils 1981).
Thus, while the transition to the modern world was uneven,
unstable and unpredictable, the sharp contrast between a ‘Pure
Traditional Society’ and ‘Pure Capitalist Society’ is a significant
framework within which to understand the essential and paramount
changes in the social stratification of West European and North
American societies. For example, there has been a long debate in
social history and sociology over the question of whether capitalism
functions most efficiently with various forms of ‘unfree’ labour
(such as a plantation system) or whether capitalism is most
efficiently served by the development of a free wage-labour market
(Alexander 1988; Moore 1968; Rex 1986). From the point of view of
the classical model of capitalism, the plantation systems of the
southern states of America, the labour camps of Nazi Germany and
the apartheid system of South Africa represent deviant cases. In

general terms, the development of a capitalist mode of production
appears to destroy traditional status orders (noble estates and other
forms of ritually defined social stratification) in favour of a ‘free’
labour market, and a culture which emphasizes achievement,
individualism and an ideology of personal success. As a general
observation, by the beginning of the twentieth century the major
capitalist societies of the Western world were organized primarily in
terms of economic class divisions, most notably between the urban
wage-labourer and the capitalist entrepreneur. The cultural (life¬
styles) and legal-political (status) features of social stratification
were less significant politically and socially than the major cleavage
between those who own the means of production and those who
provide labour-power. In the following chapters, I wish to show
how this system of class relations has in turn been changed in the
post-war period by major developments both in the nature of
industrial production and in the character of political represen¬
tation. In order to understand social stratification in modern
societies, we need to turn to the issues of welfare, social reformism
and the extension of social citizenship.
3
Status Politics in
Contemporary Society:
Citizenship and
Inequality
Status politics
The aim of this chapter is not so much to develop an interpretation

of Weber’s theory, but rather to explore the idea of status politics as
a perspective on political life in democratic societies. I can at the
outset present my argument relatively directly. Following the work
of T. H. Marshall (1977) on the origins of citizenship in contem¬
porary societies, a number of social theorists (Parsons 1970;
Praeger 1985; Turner 1986b) have argued that the notion of equality
has become a crucial feature of modern societies and in particular
the principle of equality is employed to legitimize both government
action and the moral validity of society. Modern governments
typically claim to be just insofar as they provide an extension of
social rights, for example by guaranteeing equality of opportunity in
health and education. It is somewhat paradoxical that both
so-called state socialist societies (for example, the Soviet Union and
China) and liberal democracies (such as the United States and
Great Britain) claim to promote some form of equality as a basis of
citizenship rights and social membership. The Soviet Union
attempts to guarantee egalitarianism through the regulation of
economic exchanges and the market-place by the imposition of
political controls, whereas the United States attempts to promote
egalitarianism through expanding individual opportunities to
achieve wealth, success and prestige.
While governments in liberal democracies officially claim to
promote social rights, it is clearly the case that these societies are
Status Politics in Contemporary Society 43
massively unequal. Because nation-states are now simply one com¬

ponent within the world economic system (Wallerstein 1976),
national governments in any case often have little room for political
manoeuvre, especially if they are relatively peripheral to the core of
the global economy. Any attempt, for example, at improvements in
welfare payments, may produce an adverse reaction against their
currencies, resulting in economic instability. While governments
may seek to promote equality of opportunity, they do not within a
liberal political framework generally seek to guarantee equality of
outcome. There is therefore a contradiction or tension between the
ideology of equality and the experience of inequality. For example,
the educational system in Britain continues to reinforce underlying
social inequalities within the wider community. It has been found
that, holding educational achievement constant in terms of the
attainment of pass grades at matriculation, there continues to be a
substantial over-representation of pupils from higher socio¬
economic groups in higher educational institutions and especially in
terms of entrance into Oxford and Cambridge (HMSO 1987). Be¬
cause of the continuing experience of inequality in terms of particu¬
laristic features (such as age, gender and race), social groups
organize themselves to redress and change existing patterns of
inequality. The political organization of social groups in pursuit of
welfare, social and educational benefits under the banner of
equality leads to the formation of status blocs which often cut across
social class allegiance. These status blocs, when they are relatively
successful, may well become clients of the state; they are then, as it
were, administered by the state. Thus, status politics becomes a
major feature of contemporary political life.
The aim of this chapter is to utilize Weber’s perspective on power
to describe and understand the role of status inequalities (with a
case study of ethnic inequality) within societies with ideologies
which typically claim to support some notion of equality. However,
it is also the case that liberal democracies combine some notion of
social equality with a strong emphasis on individualism and indi¬
vidual rights (Abercrombie et al. 1986). These two features - egali¬
tarianism and individualism - tend to reflect the rather incoherent
political and social environment of modern industrial societies,
especially in a period of global economic recession. In general
terms, modern societies have supported some notion of equality of
opportunity, while also recognizing individual differences, especi¬
ally in terms of individual attainment. The combination of these two
44 Status
emphases permits the promotion of equality, while also recognizing

and partly explaining the continuity of individual differences in
terms of wealth, status, power and lifestyles.
Contemporary societies are often seen metaphorically in terms of
a competitive game, in which a team of individuals, starting at the
same point in a race, will eventually be categorized into winners and
losers (Turner 1986b). Equality of opportunity allows individuals to
enter a race at the same point, but does not guarantee equality of
outcome; indeed it partly requires significant inequalities in terms
of ultimate benefits. Social groups which experience major dis¬
advantages will seek to achieve greater equality of conditions,
which will compensate for differences in their individual capacities.
Employing the analogy of an athletic race, we can say that elderly
participants within the game will seek some compensation (such as
starting the race in advance of younger competitors). Status politics
emerges out of these struggles over different notions of equality,
individualism and socio-economic conditions, whereby social
groups seek through government intervention some compensation
for their de facto inequalities.
To understand contemporary social movements (such as femin¬
ism, gay politics, animal liberation, the politics of ageing, or
movements relating to children’s rights) we need a theory of status
groups and status politics, because the conventional Marxist
emphasis on economic power and economic classes is inadequate.
However, I wish to propose a more controversial position than
simply a defence of Weberian notions of status. An additional
feature of my argument is the proposition that in social, cultural and
political terms it is empirically the case that economic class is
declining in importance as the primary or leading division in
socio-political life. That is, I aim not only to defend the concept of
status, but to argue that economic class has become less rather than
more important in the historical experience of contemporary
industrial societies. The reason for this claim will be explored in
more detail later, but at this point I simply note that my argument
assumes a major transformation in the nature of capitalism in the
second half of the twentieth century, especially away from competi¬
tive capitalism which was the dominant model (especially of Great
Britain) in the nineteenth century (Schmitter and Lembruch 1979).
On the one hand, the size of the employed working class, producing
commodities for a free market, has declined with the gradual
erosion of labour-intensive private capitalism. On the other hand.
because of institutional and legal changes, the private individual

capitalist has also declined in relation to the emergence of large,
institutionalized owners of capital.
At least one empirical consequence of these social changes is the
gradual decline of trade-union density (the proportion of the
workforce in trade unions) in the major industrial societies. For
example, while trade-union density has always been low within the
United States, it has declined steadily from its peak in 1955 to
around 15 per cent in the late 1980s. In Great Britain, trade-union
density has declined steeply from around 50 per cent in 1975 to
approximately 35 per cent in 1986. These changes in the character of
the workforce are also associated with changes in the character of
modern politics, which no longer clearly reflects the politics of class
in terms of a struggle between the owners of capital and the owners
of labour power within a classical Marxist economic framework.
The decline of trade-union influence, especially in the traditionally
heavily unionized areas of industry, is further associated with a
transformation of British industrial relations from multi-unionism
to single unionism within the plant (Roberts 1987). By contrast,
sectional status politics has become more characteristic of the
everyday political process. These empirical developments under¬
line the need for major theoretical revisions within the traditional
Marxist paradigm of economic class, but more broadly within the
sociology of social stratification.
To argue that status rather than class may be the crucial axis of
contemporary politics is of course to enter yet again the complicated
debate between Marxist and Weberian sociologies. Clearly in his
empirical commentaries on capitalism and in his fragmented
critique of state socialism, Weber attempted to provide implicitly or
explicitly a radical alternative to existing Marxist positions on the
character and development of European capitalism (Turner 1981).
While Marx’s own analysis of the class structure has been a topic of
extensive dispute (Abercrombie and Urry 1983; Cottrell 1984;
Elster 1985; Przeworski 1985), Marx’s analysis of class can be stated
in terms of a number of basic propositions.
Marx believed that the principal divisions in a capitalist society
were between the owners of private capital (the means of prod¬
uction) and the owners of labour power (the working class). While
politics and culture in capitalism might be presented in terms of
alternative or different social divisions, Marx claimed that the
underlying cause of social inequality in capitalism was the product
46 Status
or effect of these profound conflicts between the two major classes.

Although Marx referred to a number of other classes (such as the
petty bourgeoisie or the lumpenproletariat) these fractions of
classes or class sectors were relatively unimportant in comparison to
this major division between the owners of capital and the workers.
Marx also claimed that, with the development of capitalism, there
was a tendency for greater proletarianization and pauperization of
the class system as economically unsuccessful capitalists and petty
bourgeois groups were forced down into the working class. Marx
also believed that with the development of mechanized production,
there would be a gradual pauperization of the working class.
These economic changes would result eventually, partly through
the political organization of the working class by a revolutionary
party, in the collapse of the capitalist system. Marx distinguished
between a class-in-itself (that is a class defined primarily by
economic relations) and a class-for-itself (that is a class possessing
an awareness or consciousness of its historical possibilities within a
given political context). Although Marx recognized the importance
of cultural, ideological and educational features of class relations,
he gave particular prominence to the economic organization of
capitalist society and the economic definition of classes as such
(Carchedi 1977). In general, Marx treated status differentiation
within classes as unimportant, transitory or economically produced.
While this set of propositions can be regarded as the core of
Marx’s class theory, subsequent Marxist theory has developed these
notions into more elaborate versions of the nature of class relations
in contemporary society. In particular, in order to explain the
absence or weakness of revolutionary consciousness among the
working class, various writers (following the Italian philosopher
Antonio Gramsci) have developed a notion of hegemony (to
account for the acquiescence of the working class) by suggesting
that capitalists have enjoyed a cultural and educational regulation
of subordinate classes (Hoffman 1984). It is claimed that there is a
dominant ideology within capitalism which legitimizes the inequali¬
ties of capitalist society by inculcating individualist, bourgeois
values in subordinate groups through the capitalist ownership or
regulation of the mass media and other components of the ‘culture
industry’ (such as the cinema) (Adorno 1984; Miliband 1969;
Therborn 1980).
The classical Marxist analysis of both class structure and ideology
has in recent years been attacked from a variety of theoretical and
empirical positions (Abercrombie et al. 1980; Giddens 1973; Mann,

1973; Parkin 1971). The principal feature of the critique of Marxist
theory is that inequalities in contemporary society are not exclus¬
ively or predominantly explicable in terms of economic class
membership, and furthermore that the coherence of capitalist
society is not to be explained simply by reference to the presence of
a dominant ideology or political repression but rather that the
continuity of capitalism depends on more complex and historically
variable features (Giddens 1981). It has also been forcefully argued
that the social movements of modern society (such as the Green
Movement or the Peace Movement) cannot be understood as
collectivist attempts to achieve power with the aim of redistributing
wealth and destroying the state (Cohen 1983; 1985; Touraine,
1981).
While the contemporary critique of Marxism is diverse in its
intellectual and historical origins, many of these objections to
Marxist doctrine can be traced back to the works of Weber. We
should note, however, at the outset that Weber’s view of Marx was
coloured by his analysis of institutionalized Marxism in the shape of
the Social Democratic Party in Germany in the early years of the
twentieth century, rather than simply by his appreciation of Marx’s
work as such.
Weber had a very high regard for the scientific (not to mention
the moral) value of Marx’s analyses, and Weber is alleged to have
once declared that whoever wished to be a serious scholar in the
contemporary period had to come to terms with the work of both
Marx and Nietzsche. Having said that, there are clearly major
differences in the general approach of Weber and Marx to social
stratification.
First, Weber rejected the Marxist approach to the issues of
proletarianization and pauperization, by arguing that in fact the
standard of living of the German working class had increased during
the latter half of the nineteenth century, and that the hypothesis of a
process of pauperization could not be empirically sustained.
Secondly, whereas Marxist writers tended to emphasize the politi¬
cal and cultural solidarity of the working class as a consequence of
conflicts with the owners of capital and as a result of the large-scale
organization and discipline of the working class in factories, Weber
noted the increasing fragmentation and internal diversity of the
working class, partly as an outcome of the expanding technical
division of labour; he was also conscious of the continuities of ethnic
48 Status
and religious differences within the working class. We should note

in passing that Marxist writers typically perceive the working class
as a form of gemeinschaft (community) relationship, whereas
Weber correctly saw the working class as a gesellschaft (associ-
ational) relationship. Whereas radical writers have typically looked
towards the emergence of national and international forms of
working-class solidarity, in practice local varieties of class solidarity
(deriving from neighbourhood and occupational ties) are more
common. The solidarity of the Welsh miners, Scottish fishermen or
Scandinavian timber workers would be examples. Local solidarities
typically preclude the development of a national class identity
(Westergaard 1972). Thirdly, Weber pointed to the emergence of a
new class (the new middle class) which had developed in association
with the emergence of new service functions for capitalist prod¬
uction. This particular criticism of Marx is of course contentious,
since Marx himself recognized the growing importance of what he
referred to as the middle classes, namely the emergence of scholars,
school teachers, entertainers, lower officials and white-collar
workers within the European social structure in Theories of Surplus
Value (1963 and 1968). For Weber, the emergence of this influential
group of professional and semi-professional workers was closely
associated with the increasing rationalization of capitalist prod¬
uction and distribution, which in turn were associated with the
increasing bureaucratization of capitalist production systems. This
difference between Marx and Weber points to a further conflict
between their perspectives around the issue of capitalism and the
rationalization process (Brubaker 1984).
Weber went on to criticize the Marxist analysis of capitalist
society in terms of the relationship between politics and economics.
As a general point of interpretation, we should note that Weber
gave far more prominence to the role of politics and power in the
analysis of social life than was the case for Marx, for whom the
economic was always dominant. Weber’s sociology can be seen as a
study of power (Herrschaft) and power relations (Herrschaftsbe-
ziehungen)-, the analysis of domination in its cultural, political and
social manifestations pervaded his whole view of history and social
life. For example, Weber noted that the state (which is that
institution enjoying a monopoly of violence within a given terri¬
tory), intervened extensively in both the market-place and prod¬
uction systems, and that the continuity of capitalism depended on
some aspect of state regulation to cope with the problems of the
business cycle (that is, the instabilities of demand and supply which
are manifest in cycles of high employment and inflation, and
declining employment and stagnation). The intervention by the
state in capitalism was a further illustration of his notion that
capitalism became more rather than less organized, and that the
state was required to provide some stability for capitalism.
In contemporary capitalism, the state in most societies is involved
in the regulation of wages and prices so that it becomes difficult to
argue that market-demand determines commodity prices and wage
levels. In Great Britain, for example, during the Labour Govern¬
ment of Harold Wilson, various attempts were made to achieve the
regulation of wages and prices through the development of a new
accord or contract between trade unions, employers and the
government. However, even under the monetarist policies of Mrs
Thatcher’s Conservative Government in the 1980s, it was still the
case that the state regularly intervened to influence wages, prices
and currency values. Given the extent of state intervention in
contemporary societies, a number of social theorists have suggested
that the post-war period should be referred to as ‘monopoly
capitalism’ rather than ‘competitive capitalism’, because the social
and economic features of contemporary societies are not deter¬
mined by market forces alone (Poulantzas 1973). We can express
this argument in a less complicated form by suggesting that the
capitalist family has ceased to be the main institution for the
creation and transmission of wealth, because individual ownership
of capitalist enterprises has been replaced by larger institutions such
as corporations, insurance companies and the banking system (Bell
1960). These corporations, interacting with national governments,
determine the principal features of economic life.
Weber, by drawing attention to the increasing importance of the
political management of the economy, also wanted to argue that the
transition from capitalism to socialism, rather than involving a
major structural change, in fact could be achieved as the result of a
gradual, peaceful process from state-regulated capitalism to state-
regulated socialism. Weber did not see the emergence of socialism
as necessarily a revolutionary transformation, since socialism
involved an extension of the rationalization process in capitalism to
another type of social system. Socialism demanded a further
rationalization of economic production, bringing about an increase
in the social domination of a bureaucratic state with centralized
powers and a party machine. Socialism would result in the growing
50 Status
dominance of the state, the increasing surveillance of populations

and ultimately the decline of individualism in the faee of bureaucratic
regulation. This Weberian view has laid the basis for the argument
that whereas in capitalism economic differences (associated with the
market and ownership of the means of production) dominate stratifi¬
cation, in state socialism political differences (associated with
membership of the party) determine the character of social stratifi¬
cation. In capitalism, inequality is produced by economics; in state-
socialism, inequalities are the products of politics, in particular of the
domination of the social order by the party bureaucracy.
The point of these comments is to reaffirm the idea that the con¬
trast between economic class and social status is not simply a matter
of theoretical nicety or merely analytical distinction; these two con¬
cepts reflect contrasted, and to some extent oppositional, paradigms
within sociological theory, namely a conflict between Marxist and
Weberian sociology (Antonio and Glassman 1985; Wiley 1987).
Given the ideological turmoil which surroundsthese twoconcepts,
it is important to make my own position quite clear. I have tried to
suggest that Marxist and Weberian analyses are different and
distinctive. Secondly, I have argued that status has become more
rather than less important as a conceptual tool for the analysis of
contemporary capitalism. Thirdly, I do not want to argue that one is
forced to abandon class analysis by adopting a status perspective, but
rather that these two paradigms can at the empirical level be used
fruitfully for understanding contemporary societies. Finally, by
drawing attention to the conflict element in Weber’s analysis of
status, I have indicated various aspects in which Weber’s analysis
overlaps with that of Marx. I do not agree consequently with those
writers who, in an attempt to defend Marx’s class analysis, reduce
Weber’s concept of status merely to empirical descriptions of socio¬
economic differences which are stripped of their historical dynamic.
Like Marx, Weber was essentially interested in the study of the social
processes which have produced the world in which we live. The con¬
cept of ‘status’ was not intended to be a formal, descriptive and static
classification of individuals in a hierarchy of prestige.
The state, welfare and status politics
I have already distinguished between status communities and status

columns. The former include ‘naturally occurring’ social communi¬
ties based upon a variety of extensive common characteristics (such
as language, religion, locality and occupation); status communities

are relatively long-lasting, well-established, primary groups in
which membership is traditionally guaranteed by family and
education. By status columns or blocs, I mean aggregates of social
actors who are politically organized around some social or cultural
particularity (relating, for example, to unemployment or ageing);
status columns are typically self-consciously organized to protect or
enhance interests vis-a-vis other social groups. Status columns are
in the first instance associational rather than communal.
Following the work of Frank Parkin (1982), it is conceptually
useful to differentiate between status groups which emerge histori¬
cally within social classes (and are consequently closely related to
the economic division of labour and the system of property), and
those status groups that cut across existing social classes (and are
related to the general distribution of honour within a society).
Employing a somewhat different terminology, status blocs or
columns cross-cut social classes and are organized as political units
which do not necessarily draw their support solely from class
phenomena. Thus,
communal status groups that cut across class lines show no signs of
diminishing - rather the reverse. They draw upon sentiments and
identities that owe little to the vagaries of the division of labour, and
their impediment to pure class formation and action is likely to be all
the more formidable for it.
(Parkin 1982, p. 99)
It is here that the notions of egalitarian citizenship are of

particular significance, because given the continuities of de facto
inequality, large sectors of the population experience particular
inequalities and appeal to the abstract (de jure) notions of universal
citizenship in order to promote their own interests (Turner 1986a).
Because of electoral pressures and the need to secure clients,
modern governments are generally forced to respond to such
pressure-group activity and pluralistic interests in order to placate
social demands for change by certain reforms of the conditions
which produce inequality. Of course, governments have available
to them many counter strategies by which they attempt to avoid the
full burden of such demands; prevarication, obfuscation, deception
and delay. However, in exchange for electoral support, govern¬
ments may respond by reformist measures to preserve and expand
their political clientele. In short, the very success of citizenship as a
52 Status
political criterion of membership tends to produce inflationary

demands on the part of social classes, interest groups and status
blocs which demand an expansion of existing political and social
rights, along with certain material benefits (such as taxation
reform). The political result of these social movements is to
generate status columns which are held together both by the
existence of particular interests and by the response of the state to
their political requirements. As a result, status columns are
generated by a political consciousness of privilege and disprivilege,
by the response of governments to these sectional demands, and by
the complex interaction between governments, economic classes
and status blocs.
On the basis of this argument, it is possible to conceptualize
modern politics in terms of struggles by interest blocs and communi¬
ties for political recognition of their needs and interests. The precise
terms in which governments respond to demands for social and
economic change will vary according to local circumstances.
Governments may decide to respond only immediately prior to
elections or they may attempt to reorganize the system of voting (by
changing electoral boundaries). They may prefer to ignore short¬
term electoral victories in the interest of long-term objectives.
Governments may, as in the case of Mrs Thatcher’s government in
Britain, be able to stay in power with reduced electoral support
because of the peculiarities of the electoral system. These circum¬
stances are matters for empirical research. The theoretical point is
that in liberal democracies governments are exposed to the problem
of electoral pressures which reflect both class and status interests
(Connolly 1983). It is for these reasons that one can refer to the
existence of ‘administratively-determined status blocs’ and to
modern political life as ‘administratively-determined status bloc
politics’. I regard both aspects of status bloc politics as a modern
form of political clientelism.
The historical development of the notion of equality in liberal
democratic systems generates a crucial condition for an explosion of
social expectations, because the claims of one status group for social
preferment generate additional expectations by related or adjacent
groups for equal terms of treatment. For example, in the United
States the social improvement in the condition of blacks has
produced demands from other ethnic and migrant groups who, in
terms of the general criteria of egalitarianism, feel discriminated
against or disprivileged. In addition, political movements for
preferment tend to be reflexive, since pressure groups employ

models from previous struggles for social change. For example,
feminist politics has provided a model for gay politics as much as for
Green politics. Status politics therefore involves a form of political
leap-frogging, where expectations assume an inflationary char¬
acter. Bell (1976) has argued that if we accept the idea of
egalitarianism as one of the principal features of modern society,
then we may expect an inflationary outcome, because the delivery
of these social entitlements itself gives rise to a considerable
expansion in social services which in turn involves an increase in the
tax burden on the general population. The expansion of the ‘service
sector’ in contemporary capitalism can be explained in terms of the
rising expectation for social services, the particular interests of
professional bodies who provide these services, the political
response of the state to public pressure groups seeking to secure
their interests, and finally to the expansion in the nature of human
wants and needs (Gershuny 1978; Offe 1985).
Against these rising demands for redistribution to compensate
for inequalities experienced by groups defined in terms of particular
characteristics, privileged social groups typically seek to constrain
or reduce welfare expenditure, in terms of the standard of real
wages, to impose more stringent criteria for the distribution of
welfare and to stigmatize welfare recipients as parasitic drains upon
the national economy (Pinker 1971). Resentment against the
recipients of welfare tends to be organized around the idea of
dependency as an unequal exchange relationship between the
‘needy’ (the unemployed, the aged and the sick) and the tax-paying
community. This resentment against the welfare system is
expressive of the cultural anxiety felt by the privileged that any
welfare system will tend to erode traditional hierarchies of privilege
and power. Those who are dependent upon welfare are typically
criticized as ‘dole-bludgers’ and ‘scroungers’ whose predicament is
the outcome of personal moral turpitude or laziness (Spicker 1984;
Turner 1987b). In these terms, charity is often a form of disguised
violence.
The changing character of capitalism
The central thesis of my study is that the classical conflict between

the working class and the bourgeoisie (which represented the
central motif of Marx’s writing) has disappeared with the relative
54 Status
decline of the urban, industrial working class, the restructuring of

ownership of capital in the twentieth century and by an expansion of
the formal entitlements of citizenship within a liberal-democratic
framework. The simple divisions between classes have been
replaced by a much more complicated and complex social structure
involving, as I have argued, the endless struggle of status communi¬
ties and status blocs for access to the welfare cake under the
auspices of the state. In this chapter, I wish to defend this assertion
in order to lay the basis for a new approach to social stratification in
contemporary societies, the main contours of which are finally
elaborated in the concluding chapter. To justify the claim that the
working class has experienced a relative decline in importance, it is
necessary first to provide a definition of the working class.
Unfortunately, this apparently simple operation turns out to be
quite complex.
There is no substantial consensus within Marxist theory over the
definition of classes (Carchedi 1977; Cottrell 1984; Elster 1985;
Przeworski 1985; Wright 1985). Of course, part of the problem with
a classical Marxist theory of social class is that Marx and Engels
themselves did not systematically define the notions of class, class
situation and class struggle. The absence of a definition (or more
fully a theory) of class in Marx is related to the historical fact that the
proletariat was a visible, obvious and prominent feature of the
urban landscape within which Marx and Engels worked. For
Marxists and other radical writers
in the middle of the nineteenth century the theoretical connotation of

the concept the proletariat, defined in terms of separation from the
means of production, corresponded closely to the intuitive concept of
the proletariat conceived in terms of the manual, principally
industrial, labourers. No ambiguity had yet arisen because material
conditions closely corresponded to their theoretical description.
(Przeworski 1985, p. 57)
The working class was that group of people whom Engels visibly
experienced in Manchester as the down-trodden, exploited and
brutalized sector of society who were forced to labour in order to
live. This exploited class was described in great detail in 1845 in The
Conditions of the Working Class in England (1958). It was only later
that a more precise and technical definition of the working class was
required as the social structure of actual capitalist societies became
more complex and differentiated, especially with the emergence of
white-collar, professional and other service workers. The develop¬

ment of a new middle class is technically important because of the
problem of drawing a boundary around the core of the working class
(Abercrombie and Urry 1983; Burris 1986).
There appear to be three problem areas. First, there is the
question of authority relations, since lower managers may exercise
control over the workers without either owning productive property
or having significant authority over the enterprise as a whole.
Secondly, there is the problem that managers may exercise daily
control over the means of production without enjoying the benefits
of effective ownership. Thirdly, there is the issue that the middle
class may identify intellectually, culturally and politically with the
dominant class against subordinate social groups, because in their
everyday lifeworld they constantly mix with and live in the culture
of dominant groups (Lockwood 1958; Poulantzas 1973). A variety
of solutions have been offered to overcome these technical and
theoretical difficulties in the traditional corpus of Marxian analysis.
Flowever, the general trend of these solutions is to propose that
classes are determined through the process of social struggle and
that these social struggles are not simply economic, but political,
cultural and ideological. Thus,
classes are not given uniquely by any objective positions because they
constitute effects of struggles, and these struggles are not determined
uniquely by the relations of production . . . class struggles are
neither epiphenomenal nor free from determination. They are
structured by the totality of economic political, and ideological
relations; and they have an autonomous effect on the process of class
formation.
(Przeworski 1985, pp. 66-7)
This particular definition is valuable because it draws attention to

the historical processes of class formation and destruction, and
thereby emphasizes the notion of classes in process and relation¬
ship. However, these solutions in practice tend to draw covertly
upon the type of analysis presented by Weber in his historical
studies of social groups and social classes. Neo-Marxist definitions
of class tend either to give greater importance to power relations in
the constitution of classes, or to the role of authoritarian domi¬
nation in the enterprise, or to the notion that classes are defined by a
variety of dimensions, or place an emphasis on historical conflict
and struggle in the formation of social groups. These aspects of the
neo-Marxist definition of class are in fact covertly elements of a
56 Status
Weberian historical and comparative approach to domination

(Burris 1987, p. 80; Parkin 1979, p. 25; Turner 1981, p. 356). While
Weber presented his formal analysis of class, status and power in
Economy and Society (1968), he approached social stratification in
empirical and historical terms through a variety of comparative
studies of different classes, social groups and estates. In these
studies of China, India, the United States and ancient slavery he
explored the interaction of political power, economic dominance
and culture.
While recognizing the technical problems of the Marxist defin¬
ition of ‘working class’, for the purposes of my analysis I shall treat
the working class as that sector of society which does not own the
effective means of production, which does not exercise authority
within the workplace, which is forced to sell its labour-power in
order to survive and which, through a labour process which it does
not control, produces commodities which are sold by capitalists on a
market. Within European history this social class had its origins in
the expulsion of peasants from feudal estates in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. With the industrial revolution, the working
class emerged as an urban class finding employment in the newly
created industries of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
The rise of the working class was connected closely with the
emergence of heavy industry (such as the production of textiles,
mining and timber production, ship-building, the tobacco industry,
steel production and in the twentieth century the car-manufacturing
industry). Therefore, the decline of the working class as the most
significant component within the class system and as the crucial
component of the political process is connected directly to the
transformation of the economic structure of capitalism, especially
the dispersal of production within the global system, with the
relative decline of heavy industry within the developed capitalist
world, and more recently with a world recession in industrial
production.
These social and economic changes can be described within the
conventional terminology of economic history as a proportional
decline in agricultural and industrial employment with the growth
of a new service sector (Gartner and Riessman 1974; Gershuny
1978; Singlemann, 1978). Within the capitalist world, there has
been a decline in the significance of the extractive occupations in the
economy (such as mining) and transformative occupations (such as
manufacturing). The extractive and transformative components of
the economic structure have declined with the growth of tertiary or

servicing sectors. The service sector can be divided into distributive
services (for example, transportation), the producer services
(banking and insurance), social services (such as medical and health
services) and finally personal services (such as domestic service)
(Browning and Singlemann, 1978). In terms of these categories, the
United States was the first service economy to emerge in the
capitalist world, and by 1980 two-thirds of employment was in the
tertiary sector, predominantly within the distributive and social
services. By 1977, more than half of the employment in the
European Economic Community was in the tertiary sector (Ger-
shuny and Miles 1983). A recent review of changes in the class
structure of the United States has shown that between 1960 and
1980, while there was an increase in managerial, supervisory and
‘expert’ classes, the working class declined from 54.3 per cent to
50.5 per cent (Wright and Martin 1987). Here again, there are
major problems in the definition of ‘workers’, but the study does
confirm the relative and absolute decline of the working class. The
growth in the service sector, the increasing importance of know¬
ledge and information processing systems, the growing dominance
of the computer, and the social prominence of professionalization
within the labour force led some sociologists to argue that we were
moving towards a post-industrial society (Bell 1974).
Race, ethnicity and status
Having discussed a number of broad structural changes in modern

capitalism, I now wish to present a specific example of status
politics, namely the issue of race relations and the welfare state.
While ‘race’ in sociological theory is theoretically and ideologically
problematic, we can note that from a biological point of view it is
possible to classify the human species into various groups distin¬
guished by skin colour, hair type and nasal index, but race as such is
not relevant to the explanation of differences between human
beings in terms of intelligence, skill or ability. However, racial or
phenotypical differences between social groups become important
for the sociologist, because they ‘act as markers for the assignment
of rights to individuals’ (Rex 1986, p. 19).
John Rex treats ethnic differences based upon culture as separate
from status differences based upon an estimation of honour. Since
in this study I have treated status as primarily an entitlement to
58 Status
privileges, reinforced by and reflected in cultural differences, I see

no difficulty in treating ethnicity as a particular instance of status
differences. Ethnic groups are simply status groups in which
descent, culture, ethnic identity and other commonly-shared
characteristics are socially prominent. The stratification system of
modern societies is composed of a variety of separate elements:
groups based upon physical (phenotypical) characteristics, status
groups based on social differences (of which ethnicity would be a
major element), strata organized around cultural lifestyles and
finally economic classes.
Clearly this fusion of ethnicity and status goes against Rex’s own
position, since he wishes to argue that ethnicity and status are
separate and independent variables. He claims that status groups
are not based upon a hereditary principle and their members do not
necessarily claim common descent as the basic feature of group
membership. By contrast, ethnic groups depend upon hereditary
principle and common descent. However, ethnic groups as solida-
ristic communities also depend upon cultural differentiation and are
clearly ranked in terms of status and prestige. I see therefore no
great analytical value in regarding ethnicity and status as separate.
We can treat status as a general category, of which ethnicity would
be one illustration. One additional reason for my position is that I
want to treat ethnicity as a key feature in the question of citizenship
rights and to argue that what is important about ethnicity is the
enjoyment of or exclusion from various social rights in contem¬
porary metropolitan societies. It is interesting therefore that Rex
himself wants to consider the problem of ethnic groups in capitalism
with regard to what he calls the ‘welfare state deal’.
When considering the problem of ethnic minorities in contem¬
porary capitalism, Rex refers to them as ‘an underclass’ who do not
fully enjoy the benefits of citizenship which had been more
successfully acquired by an indigenous working-class movement.
The problem in the British case is that ethnic minorities only
partially enjoy the benefits of the welfare-state deal which depends
upon - in Rex’s view - class politics. In his collaborative work with
Sally Tomlinson, they wish to point to
the situation of immigrant minorities, who do not share in this

welfare deal, but who, instead of forming an inert or despairing social
residue, organise and act in their own ‘underclass’ interest often
relating themselves to colonial class positions.
(Rex and Tomlinson 1979, p. 328)
While in general ethnic minorities within the British welfare state
have not fully enjoyed the full range of citizenship rights, there are
important differences between ethnic groups. A number of factors
appear to influence the success or failure of migrant integration.
These include the proximity of the minority culture to the host
society, the length of stay, and the ability of some migrant groups to
integrate into the business community by finding a niche within the
market. Whereas the migration of southern Europeans to the more
industrial areas of northwestern Europe is one of ‘migration only’,
the migration of Turks, Asians, West Indians and North Africans to
Europe ‘is one of immigration and race relations’ (Rex 1986, p. 74).
Importantly, Rex draws attention to the fact that disadvantaged
ethnic minorities do not simply or necessarily acquiesce in their
subordinate position but clearly organize themselves to promote
and improve their position in society. That is, minority groups
appeal to citizenship rights in order to draw attention to their
disadvantage on the basis of their ascriptive ethnic status. Migration
and assimilation (or at least cultural recognition) have to be seen
within the context of the debate about social involvement and
political participation (which I have defined broadly as the key issue
of citizenship). Thus Rex notes that
governments in the democracies are always to some extent motivated

by universalistic values, and this is particularly true in the United
States where the Supreme Court acts, albeit imperfectly, as the
guardian of such values. There is, therefore, likely to emerge in such
a society some kind of critique of racism and racial discrimination.
(Rex 1986, p. 78)
Ethnic status involves an appeal to citizenship rights which are

regarded as universalistic, and therefore it is perfectly appropriate
to regard ethnicity as an illustration of status. I see no theoretical or
conceptual difficulty therefore in regarding ethnic poltics as simply
a form of status politics.
In an important analysis of the problems of ethnic outgroups and
social solidarity, Jeffrey Alexander (1988) has through an elabo¬
ration of Rex’s position argued that the emergence of nation-states
through territorial expansion and immigration involves the
development of new notions of social solidarity whereby riew ethnic
groups can be successfully incorporated within what he calls ‘the
terminal community’ of a society. From this perspective, the
modernization of society requires the growth of an expanded notion
60 Status
of civic membership, universalistic solidarity and social member¬

ship based upon general criteria of citizenship. Of course, this
development is not a necessary or evolutionary progress, since the
achievement of social integration would always be highly uneven
and contingent.
Alexander argues that in principle there are two crucial factors
which may influence the inclusion of an ethnic group within a wider
communal solidarity. This is the external factor (namely the degree
of differentiation within a social system in terms of its economic,
political, integrative and religious systems) and the internal factor,
that is the degree to which a core group regards an outgroup as at
least complementary in terms of cultural and other factors. If an
outgroup is seen to be incompatible with the core value system and
if the social system is highly undifferentiated, then the chances of
successful integration and incorporation are limited. The relative
success of European migrants in finding an adequate location within
the American social system can be explained by the relative
openness of the economic environment and the sense of proximity,
in cultural or primordial terms between migrant and host communi¬
ties. By contrast, the black American found both the external and
the internal environments opposed to successful incorporation on
the basis of equal citizenship. Alexander goes on to argue that the
struggles between ingroup and outgroup can give rise on the part of
outgroups to three typical strategies, namely assimilation move¬
ments which appeal to the idea of equal opportunity, nationalist
movements which seek ethnically based inclusion, and finally
nationalist movements which may seek ethnic secession from the
core system.
In this illustration from the sociology of ethnic group conflicts, we
can see that within a democratic framework outgroups which
experience discrimination on the basis of ascriptive criteria seek to
achieve either an improvement in their position or assimilation
through political mobilization. I also want to suggest that this
illustration fits perfectly into my notion of status politics and
state-administered status groups. For example, in the United States
blacks were politically mobilized to bring about an improvement in
their social circumstances by an appeal to their constitutional rights.
While this status community of blacks was organized to achieve an
improvement in their position, the changes in the law which gave
them a civil status have in a paradoxical way reinforced the principle
of colour as an aspect of social stratification by simply recognizing
colour as an issue in law. In addition, there are certain unintended

benefits associated with the disprivileged circumstance of race now
that the law recognizes discrimination against blacks. That is, when
the law has recognized the disadvantages of race, there may be
certain circumstances where race now becomes the basis for
achieving benefits. This paradox has been noted by Nathan Glazer
who in comparing the new system of legal relations between blacks
and whites with the previous southern system has argued that
it is a law designed to achieve equality and not to ensure dominance.

But it shares one thing with that earlier law: it names groups and
because groups are named, individuals inevitably become bene¬
ficiaries or non-beneficiaries of law specifically because of group
membership.
(Glazer 1983, p. 318-19)
This illustration is a particularly good example of what I mean by

status politics in which the state, responding to a disadvantaged
status group, unintentionally reinforces ascriptive differences
which now become the markers of some (however limited) benefits.
The history of aboriginal groups in white-settler societies would
further illustrate the drift of my argument.
Aboriginal groups under the first impact of colonialism typically
experience devastating consequences from white aggression,
especially the loss of their land and traditional hunting rights.
However, where these aboriginal groups can appeal to certain legal
traditions (namely citizenship), they may be able to mobilize their
aboriginality to seek compensation for previous deprivations. For
example, the native Americans may now enjoy certain privileges
for the legal compensation of the loss of their traditional lands.
While ethnicity, racial differences and aboriginality may in the early
stages of colonial domination be the basis for savage and punitive
forms of discrimination and exclusion, the successful appeal to the
notion of universal participation through political conflict may in
the later stages of ingroup and outgroup relations promote the idea
of aboriginality or ethnicity as a positive attribute. The status
politics of black/white relations led eventually to the idea that ‘black
is beautiful’. Through this process outgroups become the new
clients of the state and the welfare system, mobilizing their
previously stigmatic features as the basis for welfare claims. In
white-settler societies, the maintenance and continuity of ethnic
and cultural differences have been recently institutionalized
62 Status
through political policies encouraging and facilitating multicultural-

ism as the basis of social order and political solidarity (Glazer and
Moynihan 1963). Pressure from ethnic minorities for cultural
recognition and social integration produces eventually a govern¬
ment policy of ethnic differentiation, involving educational and
language programmes to facilitate the maintenance of cultural
difference. I should however reinforce the qualification to this
argument: to claim a benefit is not to be guaranteed instant success.
Effective political pressure from outsiders may only be successful in
times of national crisis, such as warfare.
Conclusion: the politics of clientelism

One of the paradoxes of the emergence of the welfare state in the
liberal democracies is that ascriptive criteria not only continue to be
important features of political life, but the intervention of the state
may have the unintended consequence of reinforcing particularism
as the basis of claims against society for reform. Within a
democratic political system, these disprivileged status groups
become the new clients of the welfare state and become the focus of
a large bureaucratic apparatus which is part of the state’s response
to political pressure to redress the disadvantages of status discrimi¬
nation.
Of course, privileged status groups, communities and blocs
attempt to prevent any real re-distribution of privilege, honour and
wealth by threatening to withdraw support from the system (by
re-investing their wealth outside the nation-state or by re-allocating
their political support, or by arguing that economic redistribution is
counter-productive by reducing economic efficiency). An ‘invest¬
ment strike’ may prove to be a very successful weapon against the
usurpatory tactics of subordinate or aspiring social groups. The
state is caught in these cross-pressures. For some social theorists,
the inability of the state and the dominant classes to resolve these
problems (in a context where the working class is itself weak and
divided) creates socio-political circumstances which are conducive
to fascism (Poulantzas 1974; Laclau 1977).
The ideological problem of equality in modern society is to be
located in the conflicts between egalitarianism and individualism,
especially where social movements or governments embrace the
goal of equality of outcome. To guarantee equality of condition or
the equality of outcome requires political intervention, which may
involve the increasing surveillance and subordination of popu¬

lations to government regulation. However, it would be foolish to
argue that there is an inevitable contradiction between freedom and
equality, but there are certainly tensions and contradictions be¬
tween these two values. The paradox is that almost every attempt to
expand social rights brings with it the potential for wider, more
effective state regulation. The only alternative would appear to be
voluntary, charitable agencies which seek to institutionalize al¬
truism in non-profit organizations (Alexander 1987b). However, it
is not clear that even these independent sectors would avoid more
detailed regulation of the individual. These sociological issues lie at
the core of the liberal tradition.
Status politics as the expression of competitive struggles within a
market-place in pursuit of cultural, legal and political privileges is
unlikely to produce equality of condition and it is probably
incompatible with equality of outcome. Status struggles are,
however, bound up with claims by citizens to be treated equally
without regard to race, creed and colour. There is a radical edge to
the individualism of status politics in terms of its incompatibility
with aristocratic distinction. However, it is also clear that in the
modern world ‘liberalism’ and ‘individualism’ are frequently em¬
ployed as ideologies to defend highly reactionary political regimes.
Political appeals to the liberal tradition can often mask quite cynical
attempts to redistribute ‘the common good’ in an inegalitarian
direction (Raskin 1986). An attempt to defend aspects of a
liberal-democratic system through a study of Weber’s sociology of
status politics does not, however, commit one to a neo-conservative
position. On the contrary, arguments in favour of liberalism and
market competition are radical both in relationship to the bureau¬
cratic centralism of state socialist societies and to authoritarian
regimes in the capitalist world.
Another aspect of my defence of Weberian sociology is the
argument that there is in Weber’s analysis of power an important
note of realism in his recognition of the inevitability of social
inequality. By ‘realistic’, I mean that all sociological theories wilt
have to come to terms with the inevitability of social stratification
and therefore of social inequality. There is empirically no known
society in history which was not inegalitarian. There are in addition
cogent theoretical reasons for arguing that all human societies must
be inegalitarian, or at least stratified. Of course, to recognize the
inevitability of inequality is not to provide a moral justification for
64 Status
it, or to commit one to economic programmes which promote

further inequality. Indeed there are strong arguments underlying
this analysis of status supporting universalism as a value and
equality of opportunity as a political objective. However, this
general commitment to social reformism does rule out any utopian
commitment to absolute egalitarianism.
A further ‘realistic’ requirement is a theory of economic wealth
within sociology. While many radicals within and outside social
science advocate economic redistribution through progressive
taxation and a generous welfare system, these theorists often fail to
provide the supporting arguments which will demonstrate how
economic accumulation can take place in order to provide the
surplus which is to be redistributed.
Any contemporary defence of individual rights will have to be set
within these realistic assumptions about continuing inequality and
stagnation as more or less permanent features of Western econ¬
omies for the remainder of this century. The implications of these
economic restraints for political stability are relatively depressing,
because the competitive struggle between status groups and classes
will have to take place in the context of economic recession; the
possibility of achieving any major improvements in the conditions
of politically marginal groups such as the elderly and ethnic
minorities is indeed limited.
4
Mass Culture,
Distinction and Lifestyle
The three dimensions of stratification
In modern sociology, it is conventional to discuss social stratifi¬

cation in terms of three dimensions which have been derived from
Weber’s sociology of domination, namely class, status and power.
In Weber’s original formulation of this paradigm, the distinctions
between class, status and politics were in fact all facets of power
itself. In other words, because status and class represented for
Weber the capacity to mobilize and enjoy certain resources such as
honour or wealth, these dimensions of stratification had to be
regarded as simply manifestations of power. This treatment of
stratification represented a significant departure from the Marxist
approach; whereas Marx emphasized economic resources, Weber
regarded all social relations as power relations, or more precisely
relations of domination. While in this textbook I have followed
Weber’s general approach in order to restore the notion of status to
the centre of sociological analysis, it is now appropriate to formally
state the theory of stratification which emerges from this study,
which will in turn involve an explanation of how my own approach
represents a fusion of a Weberian analysis of status, a Marxist
analysis of class and an anthropological approach to culture or
status as lifestyle (that is, an approach which is derived from the
work of, among others, Pierre Bourdieu).
In this study social stratification has been conceptualized in terms
of three primary dimensions. First, I have approached status as a
legal-political notion, referring to various entitlements within a
nation-state; within this perspective the argument is that status has
to be seen as the core element within the political notion of
citizenship. This approach to status depends heavily upon Weber’s
66 Status
views on the notion of social orders, but this concept has been
amplified or developed by appropriating the perspectives of
Marshall on the historical expansion of citizenship and Bell on
entitlements by making claims against society. This notion of status
is closely tied to the emergence of the modern state in relation to
civil society. Status as entitlement is the outcome of social struggles
and social conflicts whereby various groups attempt to monopolize
or enhance their privileges and entitlements. The benefits of social
membership are normally invested in various legal, ritualistic or
political regulations, whereby social groups exercise social closure
as a strategy of status politics. Any further elaboration of Marshall’s
concept of citizenship would, however, have to take into account
the problem of locating legal rights within the nation-state, given
the rise of a world system in both economic and cultural terms
(Robertson 1987; Robertson and Lechner 1985). Modern govern¬
ments are under most circumstances globally constrained, such that
they are not free to determine social policies respecting welfare and
other rights.
Secondly, we can identify a cultural dimension to social stratifi¬
cation in which we can conceptualize status not as political
entitlement but as lifestyle. The ‘anthropological’ approach of an
earlier generation of American researchers (Warner, Lunt and the
Lynds) is now discredited, partly because it failed to analyse social
conflicts and the struggle over economic resources, merging and
confusing status differences with economic class differences (Burris
1987; Parkin 1978; Trimberger 1984). While the original formul¬
ation of the cultural dimension of social status was inadequate, this
anthropological tradition nevertheless recognized important
elements in stratifieation: social status involves practices which
emphasize and exhibit cultural distinctions and differences which
are a crucial feature of all social stratification. The idea of cultural
practice is an essential feature of Bourdieu’s perspective on
distinctions (Bourdieu 1977). Status may be conceptualized there¬
fore as lifestyle; that is, as the totality of cultural practices such as
dress, speech, outlook and bodily dispositions. We can refer to the
life-world as a habitus, which is structured and constituted by the
whole panoply of practices, dispositions and tastes which organize
an individual’s perception of social space (Bourdieu 1986). While
status is about political entitlement and legal location within civil
society, status also involves, and to a certain extent is, style. The
location of a group within the social system is expressed by their
Mass Culture, Distinction and Lifestyle 67
Culture
taste, which is as it were the practical aspect of lifestyle. Social

groups distinguish themselves from competitors by their ‘superior’
dispositions, bodily gestures, speech, and deportment.
Thirdly, I have, following a Marxist tradition, identified
economic class as an independent dimension of social stratification.
Class refers primarily to the effective ownership, control and
possession of economic resources, and economic class position is
exhibited in observable differences in income, wealth and other
material benefits (such as pensions, insurance schemes and taxation
benefits) (Wright 1979; 1985). Whereas status groups and social
orders bound together by a common lifestyle and habitus are
typically integrated, communal groups (that is gemeinschaft rela¬
tionships), economic class refers to large aggregates of individuals
defined and determined by their relationship to the means of
production. However, within a Marxist tradition economic classes
are also defined by their struggle for control of economic assets, and
through class struggle Marx argued that economic classes would
achieve class consciousness of their interests within fhe social
system.
We can conceptualize these three dimensions (politics, culture
and economy) in terms of a triangle (Figure 2). This model,
expressed diagramatically as a triangle, attempts to illustrate the
autonomous position of the three dimensions of social stratifi¬
cation, while also fundamentally indicating their intercon¬
nectedness. For example, we can approach cultural lifestyle as the
effect of both citizenship and economic class position, since cultural
68 Status
dispositions are the emblems of one’s location in the political and

economic system. Dress symbolizes and states one's wealth and
political power by indicating one’s superior sense of taste and
distinction. However, we have seen that in feudal society the
cultivation of the noble and the appropriation of the correct lifestyle
were crucial in solidifying the nobility as a stratum. Honour was not
simply an effect of membership of a social order; it constituted one’s
position within a social order. It was culture which became critical
for the social closure of feudal estates in order to bind members
together into combative, closed groups. In this sense, culture
became constitutive of status entitlements while also expressing
them.
It is in practice often difficult to separate out empirically
legal-political features of status from economic class position. We
have seen how, in both slavery and feudalism, class and status were
closely interwoven; I have, however, argued that the extent of this
fusion varied from one social system to another.
Another illustration would be the problem of authority.
Authority refers to the legal and political structuring of a system
whereby individuals or groups can successfully issue commands and
orders. Therefore, authority looks like a feature of the status order,
whereas many sociologists often see authority as a feature of social
class, especially in the enterprise and in the work situation
(Dahrendorf 1959).
Finally, there are also close connections between cultural lifestyle
and economic class position. Indeed, following the work of
Bourdieu (1973), we can refer to the interaction between cultural
capital and economic capital as two independent structures within
the dominant class. While economic wealth plays a crucial role in
determining access to educational institutions, educational
attainment and class position are never entirely identical. Within
the dominant class, there will be an important cultural division
between those with a higher educational attainment and those who
are merely wealthy. Thus, while culture, politics and economics are
empirically inter-related and inter-dependent, it is important for
analytical purposes to conceptualize these as three separate dimen¬
sions of the system of social stratification.
The model also attempts to express my criticisms of reductionism
in the analysis of socal stratification, since I have given no causal
primacy or theoretical privilege to any of the three dimensions of
stratification. Cultural lifestyles cannot be regarded simply as an
effect of class position, and status as citizenship does not determine

directly or exclusively economic power within the market-place.
This anti-reductionist treatment of stratification has been illus¬
trated in this text by a historical analysis of the development of
various systems of stratification. In slavery, legal-political forms of
status were fused with economic class structures; in feudalism, I
argued that social estates (organized in terms of lifestyle and
privileges) were more significant than economic class; with the
development of competitive capitalism, we saw that economic class
became increasingly dominant as the basis of all forms of cultural,
political and legal differences within capitalist societies. Finally, by
examination of the welfare system, I argued that a new form of
status politics had emerged and that the importance of economic
class was declining with the growth of a service sector, the
expansion of citizenship, the ageing of the populations of the
developed societies, and the political organization of minorities in
terms of egalitarianism. Citizenship (status as entitlement) and
economic class (as determined by the relation to the means of
production) were in a state of contradiction or tension. Welfare-
state capitalism is organized in terms of a set of unstable relation¬
ships between culture, citizenship and class.
While I have organized this discussion in terms of a historical
account of the development of European and North American
societies, I do not wish to suggest that this account is an evolu¬
tionary perspective of social development. Two important issues
indicate this rejection of evolutionary theory. First, we noticed the
very uneven development of capitalist societies, which in turn
involve complex and contingent inter-relationships between cul¬
ture, status and economic class. For example, I commented on the
very late development of capitalism in Germany and the absence of
a politically dominant bourgeois class. Secondly, while I have
suggested that economic class is in decline in relationship to status
differences, this does not imply that at some future point class will
not return as the principal dimension or determinant of the
stratification system. In addition, my argument does not assume
that capitalism will necessarily be the predominant system of
production in the future. The emphasis on conflict and struggle in
this account of status implies quite the contrary - that the future is
an open-ended and unpredictable scenario. For example, we could
imagine a post-nuclear society in which feudalism replaced capital¬
ism as the primary political and economic system. In a post-nuclear
70 Status
world following the collapse of nation-states, local bands of

organized men would attempt to regulate local supplies of food,
water and land through violent means, creating eventually a feudal
system of decentralized dynasties rather like the world presented in
such films as Mad Max.
Mass culture, lifestyle and status
Throughout this study I have been particularly concerned with the

tensions between legal-political status and economic class. As a
conclusion to this study, I wish now to turn to a different set of
contradictions, namely the possible tensions between the emerg¬
ence of a mass culture (which implies the possibility of reducing
status differences between individuals and groups) and the persis¬
tence of ranking through distinction, expressing preferential evalu¬
ations of behaviour, practice and artefacts. There is an interesting
argument that the growth of mass consumption and the develop¬
ment of a mass society necessarily brings about an egalitarian
lifestyle and the erosion of cultural hierarchies. Within the socio¬
logical tradition, there has been an implicit critique of mass society
as a social relationship which destroys not only individual differ¬
ences, but the primary ties between persons, leaving an apathetic
political mass open to the manipulation of bureaucracies and mass
culture. Mass society brings about the lowering of taste and creates
a society which is seen to be artificial and superficial (Ferrarotti
1979). The theory of mass society can be traced back to the work of
de Tocqueville and Tonnies who thought that the industrialization
of society and the growth of democracy would create a mass society
open to commercial and political manipulation (Giner 1976). In the
twentieth century, the character of mass society has been criticized
by an influential group of theorists within the German social
theoretical tradition, namely the Frankfurt School. It was Theodor
Adorno who in Aesthetic Theory (1984) referred to the contem¬
porary production of art as a culture industry which converted art
into merely a comfort for the masses who were manipulated by new
systems of mass media, advertising and consumption.
This critique of contemporary society as a mass society is however
a one-sided, uni-dimensional evaluation of major social and
political processes which have transformed Western societies in the
last century. The Marxist and other radical critiques of mass society
neglect the liberating and radical implications of modern systems of
communication, transportation and consumption. We need a theory

of mass society which will adequately recognize and explore the
dialectical contradictions between the levelling, democratic impli¬
cations of mass consumption, and those aspects of mass society which
lead to conformity and apathetic political withdrawal; it is this
unstable mix between the liberating and the repressive aspects of
modern consumption which conventional critiques of mass society
fail to develop. For example, one feature of a mass society is the
development of a mass system of education and communication
making available to the general public the advantages of (minimal)
literacy and numeracy. The expansion of mass education, however
elementary in its forms and objectives, is a crucial basis of modern
citizenship and democracy. To argue that mass education is a
liberating and life-enhancing set of institutions is not to ignore the
fact that educational institutions also reproduce and reinforce
existing class and educational disadvantages (Halsey 1978). Despite
continuing inequalities, mass education, mass transport and mass
production in the twentieth century brought about radical changes in
individual expectations, social evaluations of egalitarian values and
cultural lifestyles, which made available to the masses experiences,
outlooks and aspirations which were impossible in traditional society
(Gellner, 1979; Turner, 1986b).
While there is in the world of culture and consumption the
development of a mass market which is global, there is also the
persistent reassertion of hierarchy and distinction, as elite groups
and privileged consumers attempt to distance themselves from the
vulgar world of the masses. As the common mass of the population
moves into previously privileged worlds of consumption, dominant
groups attempt to establish new tastes and new lifestyles which
preserve and develop existing differences and distinctions
(Featherstone 1987). Dominant groups attempt to establish ‘posi¬
tional goods’ (Leiss 1983) which, because of their artificial scarcity of
supply, achieve a prestigious position within the consumption
market. We can see the cultural field as a place of symbolic struggles
which has a logic of its own, but which also in certain respects mirrors
the political and economic struggles within the economy and the
state. An adequate sociology of consumption must however develop
a perspective on the dialectical relationship between the positive and
negative, liberatingand repressive features of modern consumerism.
We can elaborate this notion by briefly considering the development
of mass transport and consumption over the last hundred years.
72 Status
The development of the railways in the late nineteenth and early

twentieth centuries laid the foundations for a mass market in
tourism and leisure pursuits. In Britain, for example, the seaside
holiday became an important feature of working-class culture and
recreation, creating new industries in leisure pursuits and artefacts.
While radical critics would perceive the working-class holiday as
simply one dimension within a system of cultural manipulation, we
also have to recognize that working-class tourism arid recreation
were also a positive enhancement of everyday experience and
enjoyment. However, in the British case, as the working class
moved onto the beaches of Morecambe and Bridlington, ‘trend
setters’ in elite culture sought holiday locations in the more distant
and exotic havens of Europe and later in South-east Asia and the
Pacific. Mass tourism brings an equalization of experience; in
response holidays of distinction have to be constructed.
The revolutionary implications for social equality of mass trans¬
port and tourism, which had been made possible by the develop¬
ment of a national railway system, were further consolidated by the
emergence of personal systems of transport with the development
of the automobile. In North America the Ford motor company and
in Germany Volkswagen produced cars which by the 1930s were
available to a mass market. The motor car, which had been the
plaything of the rich, now became an essential feature of modern
democracies; home-ownership and the motor car became the new
symbols of twentieth-century prosperity and twentieth-century
democracy. These complex and radical changes have been perfectly
summarized by Bell in The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism:
mass consumption, which began in the 1920s, was made possible by

revolutions in technology, principally the applieation of electrical
energy to household tasks . . ., and by three social inventions; mass
production on an assembly line, which made a cheap automobile
possible; the development of marketing, which rationalized the art of
identifying different kinds of buying groups and whetting consumer
appetites; and the spread of instalment buying, which, more than any
other social device, broke down the old Protestant fear of debt.
(Bell 1976, p. 66)
Bell’s view of mass consumption is an important antidote and

corrective to the criticisms of the left, who normally focus on the
trivial and repressive features of modern consumption. For Bell,
mass society and mass consumption legitimized the idea of personal
enjoyment, individual change and social development; the automo¬

bile is the major symbol of twentieth-century mass consumption,
sweeping away many of the old sanctions of small-town society and
rural America.
This view of the automobile in the work of Bell contrasts sharply
with the usual criticisms of mass transport, in particular the motor
car. For radical critics, the automobile represents a commodity
which distracts the working class from their alienation and exploi¬
tation, contributing to the fetishism of commodities which at the
level of consciousness is the counterpart of alienation in the
workplace (Ewen 1976; Flink 1976; Yago 1983). However, to see
mass consumption within this uni-dimensional framework is to
ignore the profound social transformations of society brought about
by the automobile in particular (Berger 1979) and by modern
consumerism in general. These negative criticisms are also in many
ways a paradoxical departure from Marx’s own view which was to
emphasize the revolutionary and transformative features of capi¬
talist technology and market relations, which liquidated and
destroyed the stagnating environment and conventional culture of
pre-modern societies (Berman 1983). In conclusion, the motor car
is not simply a means of transport, but has become a feature of male
fantasies, a sign of social prosperity, a lifestyle, an aspect of
suburban architecture and finally a symbol of American progressive
culture and democracy (Moorhouse 1983).
We can see the growth of mass transport as simply one facet of an
expansion in distribution, consumption and finance which was
created by a series of technological, economic and social changes.
New systems of banking, loans and credit made possible an
extension of mass consumption based upon personal indebtedness.
Again we find contradictory interpretations of these developments
in consumption, between Marxist criticisms of the creation of‘false’
needs in the working class and liberal interpretations which see
these developments in consumption as making possible an enhance¬
ment of personal enjoyment through leisure and extended con¬
sumption. In particular, radical critiques see the development of
contemporary means of advertising as both creating a world of false
needs and of pampering and pandering to male sexual fantasies,
egoistic competitiveness and aggressiveness (Kellner 1984). On the
one hand, advertising creates a false world in which the socially
deprived, through fantasy, project themselves into a world of
consumption, leading eventually to a ‘desperate search for real
74 Status
people, real values, real sex’ (Kroker 1985, p. 80). On the other
hand, the creation of this fantasy world of consumption leads to a
false egalitarianism, in which mass consumption disguises the
continuities of major economic differences and political inequali¬
ties. The contemporary fascination for the world presented in the
TV series, Dallas and Dynasty, has to be seen
within the context of a consumer society which asks individuals of all

classes, within different targeted-markets, to harness their rising
expectations to venture along the road to self-improvement and
stylisation.
(Featherstone 1987, p. 66)
Mass society and mass consumption therefore are social fields

within which the struggle for cultural distinction is pursued through
the establishment of distinctive tastes and lifestyles, separating
status groups in terms of a structured world of judgement.
Lifestyles: from mass society to post-modernism
I have argued that, examining status differences in terms of cultural

lifestyles, the emergence of a mass society had major implications
for social differences in status terms; in particular, mass consump¬
tion brought about a levelling and democratization of behaviour,
self-image and taste. However, as previously privileged and presti¬
gious cultural items became available to a mass-market, elite
leaders and cultural, avant-garde groups were forced to create new
forms of taste, difference and distinction to preserve their cultural
superiority over the aspiring masses. However, given contemporary
means of mass cultural production, changes within the cultural field
are so rapid that it becomes increasingly difficult to identify the
leading edge of either the art-world or the market-place of
consumer goods. The existence of an avant-garde implies some
consensus amongst dominant groups as to what would count as
'high culture’ in order to preserve some sense of distinction. We live
in a world in which the signs and symbols of the cultural sphere are,
as it were, over-produced, leading to an explosion of cultural
meaning and cultural significance. These changes have very impor¬
tant implications for style, lifestyles and fashion, since in a world
dominated by cultural pluralism and the pluralization of life-worlds
it may be that we can no longer speak of fashion but only of
fashions. Indeed, Jean Baudrillard (1975; 1981) has written about
an implosion of signs in a system of mass communication, an

over-supply of floating signs.
To this theory of over-production, we can add the earlier
arguments of Bell (1976) that the cultural sphere has become
somewhat detached from the economic and political structures of
contemporary capitalism, becoming increasingly an autonomous
and separate area of social interaction and production. Metaphori¬
cally speaking, the cultural system is over-heated, producing an
inflationary spiral of signs which cannot be adequately assimilated
or regulated in the social system. These contemporary develop¬
ments in mass consumer society have led a number of writers to
suggest that we have moved from a modern to a post-modern social
order (Lyotard 1979).
Originating as a term in architecture, post-modernism came
eventually to describe styles in literature and more recently became
a perspective on the condition of contemporary consumer society
(Jameson 1984). Sociologically, a post-modern society is one in
which, amongst other things, cultural styles become mixed, inter¬
woven and flexible, precluding any clear maintenance of hierar¬
chical distinctions. Post-modern culture is self-reflexive, playful
and opposed to th^ standardization of lifestyles and cultures. The
traditional divisions between high culture and low culture (and
therefore the divisions between the elite and the mass) are,
according to post-modern theorists, beginning to collapse:
the implication is that we are moving towards a society without fixed

status groups in which the adoption of styles of life (manifest in
choice of clothes, leisure activities, consumer goods, bodily dispo¬
sitions) which are fixed to specific groups have been surpassed. This
apparent movement towards a post-modern consumer culture based
upon a profusion of information and proliferation of images which
cannot be ultimately stabilized or hierarchized into a system which
correlates to fixed social divisions, would further suggest the
irrelevance of social divisions and ultimately the end of the social as a
significant reference point.
(Featherstone 1987, pp. 55-6)
Whereas in feudal society, cultural differences (education,

language and training in noble arts) were jealously guarded as
essential barriers to maintain social closure (thereby bringing
about a hierarchical division of society into estates), in the modern
period with the development of mass consumption, styles and
76 Status
cultures become mixed into a pot pourri or medley of tastes and

cultural practice.
The end of status?
As a conclusion to this study of status, I wish to explore the

long-term implications of modern culture and post-modernism for
the system of social stratification. By an examination of post¬
modernism, we have already identified the possibility that, especi¬
ally in terms of cultural status and lifestyle, the explosion of signs
and symbols in consumer culture may bring about in the long-term
an erosion of status hierarchies, because lifestyles become inextri¬
cably interwoven within a global mass culture. While these debates
in sociology are clearly of critical significance for the future of
industrial capitalist societies (especially with the emergence of a
powerful leisure sector, a service economy and an industrial system
based upon information technology), I argue in this conclusion that
social differentiation and social evaluation will not be eroded by
these developments, but we may well move towards a social system
based upon somewhat different principles of stratification, which
will render much contemporary sociology redundant. The impor¬
tance of post-modernism is not that it points towards an egalitarian
society, but rather that post-modernism suggests that the conven¬
tional hierarchies between high and low culture will be eroded by
the expansion of mass culture and by the interweaving of high and
low cultural styles. Of course, this possibility of fluid cultural styles
and the decline of conventional hierarchies raises a more interesting
question in sociological theory: is it possible to conceive of a society
in which status hierarchies and status differences have disappeared
entirely?
Most sociological theories of social stratification suggest that the
disappearance of social stratification is not possible in any human
society. For example, in his classic study of stratification, Bernard
Barber (1957) argues that stratification is the effect of role
differentiation plus evaluation. Even in the most primitive society,
there is considerable differentiation of social roles and social tasks,
and it is, on logical grounds alone, impossible to remove the
evaluation of role performance. Therefore, while social stratifi¬
cation could be reduced, it could never be eliminated. A similar
argument might be directed towards the elimination of cultural
hierarchies in a post-modern society, namely that it is difficult to
Mass Culture, Distinction and Lifestyle /■/
imagine how cultural differentiation and cvalualion umUi fx;

entirely eroded. In fact, an alternative interprclati(»n is (o set: tie:
tensions between modern culture and post-modern culture taud
therefore modern and post-modern lifestyles) as a competitive
struggle between an established status elite f managing the remnants
of high culture) and various emergent social groups, asviciated witfi
the new middle class of the service seettir, wlui seek virne position
within the cultural market-place fl eatherstorie IW), 'I he post
modern movement in art and lifestyles can therefore be uiterprcterf
as a subversive movement seeking to penetrate the cultural
Establishment by appearing to celebrate the artistic merits of
popular culture, the mass market and kitsch.
Even if we were to accept the arguments about post-morlcrn
culture which are gaining currency in social theory, we need alv> to
recognize that, given the global recession within the world
economy, we are living in capitalist economics characterized by
high rates of unemployment. There are sharp differences in lifestyle
and expectations between the employed and the unemployed;since
monetaristic policies have become dominant in the developed
economies, we also live in a world of declining welfare provision.
The fate of the unemployed will not depend simply on government
policies towards welfare, because the political capacity to resfvmd
to these ‘local’ problems will be primarily determined by global
money markets, world commodity prices and international conflicts
over interest rates. In short, post-modern culture exists alongside a
dual economy, in which the major economic, political and v^cial
benefits are skewed heavily towards those in f ull-time employment.
These social and economic developments lend further supp^^rt to
this interpretation of post-modern culture, namely that it is the
product of a cultural leadership which appeals to the new middle
classes of the service economy, whose lifestyles and attitudes arc
quite unlike those of either the traditional, high-culturg elite and
the dominant classes or the communal and local cultures of the
working class.
In conclusion, we appear in the final decades of the twentieth
century to be moving into yet another complex of V)cial relations
dissociated with the further development of mass consumption and
with the tendency towards a post-modern culture, 'The amvcntional
hierarchies within the cultural system appear to be more frag¬
mented and diversified than in any previous period, f he cultural
realm becomes somewhat dissociated from the economic and the
78 Status
political systems, and the competitive struggle within the cultural
field produces an explosion of cultural signs and a cacophony of
lifestyles.
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Index
Adorno, T. W., 70 cultural capital, 12, 68

age(ing),43.51 culture, 6, 10, 26, 38, 57-8, 65,
Alexander, J. C., 59-60 68-70,74
Australia, 12
Darwin, C., 18
Davis, K. and Moore, W. E., 11
Barber, B., 76
democracy(ies), 13, 16, 52-3, 62,
baroque (culture), 37-8, 40
70- 1,72
Baudrillard, J., 74
distinction(s), 2, 6, 12, 14, 18,
Bell, D., 13, 15,53,66,72,75
26-7,30-1,34,38,66-7,70,
Bourdicu, P., 6, 65-6, 68
71- 2,74-5
Durkheim, E., 22
capitalism, 2, 15, 18, 20-1,26,
28-9, 34, 36, 38^1,45-6, 47, education, 7, 20, 42, 51,71,75
48-9, 53-8,69-70,74 Elias, N., 28
cash nexus, 14, 18, 23 Engels, F., 19,31,54-5
caste(s), 7, 20 England (Great Britain), 21,36,
Chaucer, G., 35 37-8,40, 44-5,49,72
China, 7, 42, 56 entitlements, 12-13, 15, 53, 57-8,
citizenship, 2, 12-13, 15, 30-1,41, 66,68
51-2, 54, 59-61,66-7, 69, 70-1 equality, 14, 14-15,42-4,52-3,
class(cs) (economic), 2, 7-8, 10-12, 63^
14-16, 18,21,24,2^^29,31-2, estates, 5-6, 12, 26, 28, 31-5, 37,
33-4, 38-9, 44-5, 46-7, 50-1, 41,56,75
54-5, 5^7, 63^, 65, 67, 68-9, esteem, 6, 17
71-3,77
clicntclism, 62^ Hobbes, T., 19
conflict sociology, 8, 15 honour(s),6,9-10, 12,20,51,62,
consumption, 8, 12,21,70-4,74-5, 68
77-8
contract (theory of), 14, 19-20, 23, fascism, 63
25-6, 26, 40 feudalism, 28, 33-8, 40, 68-70
credential society, 4 Filmer, R., 19
credentials, 4 Finley, M.. 29, 32-3
Cromwell, O., 37 France, 21,36, 38-9
90 Status
French Revolution, 39 raee (ethnicity), 43, 57. 61,63

rcsource(s), 8, 11. 15-16, 18,65-7
gender, 43 rcward(s). 9-10
Germany, 7, 21-2, 36, 39-41,69, Rex,J. 57-9
72 Rome, 30, 31-2
Glazer, N., 61
Goode,W. J.,9 slavery, 29-34,40,56, 68
Gramsci, A., 46 social closure, 6, 9, 11, 14, 24, 36,
37, 66
historical materialism, 2 mobility, 4, 7. 10-11, 18,20,28,
Holland, 39 32
movements, 44,46, 52
ideology, 14, 43^, 46-7 stratification, 1-3,4, 10-12,
India, 56 13-14,17-18,26-7.34,41,45.
individualism, 18-19, 22-3, 43-4, 47,54,60-1,63,65-7,68,76
49,63 socialism. 49-50
inequality, 2, 13-16, 27-8, 42-4, South Africa, 41
45-6,47,51,53,63-4,71 Soviet Union, 42
Italy, 21 Spencer, H., 22
state, 15. 19. 38, 43, 49, 50-3. 59,
Lenski, G., 29 61-2,65-6,70,71
lifestyle(s), 5, 7-8, 11,27,33,35, status
41,44,65-74,76-8 blocs (columns), 12-13, 15, 43,
Lipset, S. M., 4 50-2,54
Locke, J. 19 community(ies), 2. 5-6, 12-13,
Lukacs, G., 33 50-1,54
conflict(s). 16
Maine, H., 22-3, 25-6 crystallization. 1,3
Marshall, T. H., 15,42,66 group(s), 1-3. 5-8. 11-12,44.51,
Marx, K., 1, 11. 14. 18, 19,26,31, 52-3, 57-8, 61-2, 74-5
34, 45-6, 46-8, 50.53-4,65, hierarchy(ies), 1,4-5, 36, 39, 70,
67,73 71.76
marxism, 2, 31-2 inconsistency. 1
mass culture, 70—4, 76 panic. 1.3
mass society, 70-1,72, 74 politics, 13, 15-16.42-53,57.60,
63. 65-6
Nietzsche. F.. 16, 47 Ste Croix, G. E. M. de, 32
Parkin.F.. 6. 51
Tocqueville, A. de. 70
party. 7. 25
Tomlinson, S.. 58
politics of resentment, 13
Tonnies, F., 22, 24, 70
post-modernism, 74-6
power. 5-7. 17. 27, 36, 39. 44. 48.
54. 55-6, 65. 67 United States (America). 11-12.
prestige, 3-5, 6-7, 9-12, 18. 20. 42, 42,45,52.5^7.59-60
50. 58
privilege(s).6.8.9. 11. 12-13.32. Vcblen,T..8
36.40.53.57-8.62
property. 2, 51 Warner. L.W., 5
Index
Wealth, 6-7, 17-18, 20, 43-4, 47-50, 55-6, 63^, 65-6
62, 67, 68 Welfare (state), 13, 41,43, 50-3,
Weber, M., 1-2, 5-7, 8, 11, 17,21, 57-8, 62-4, 66, 69, 77
23-6, 32, 34, 40, 42-3, 45,
V
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i
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH FLORIDA
ST. PETE LIBRARY
3 EIDS MDlbD 17m
WITHDRAWN
Series Editor: Frank Parkin

Magdalen College, Oxford
STATUS ^
Although status is an essential concept in classical
sociology and a crucial feature of social structure, it has
been much criticized in contemporary social theory and to
some extent replaced by a Marxist concept of economic
class. In this book, Bryan Turner argues that social
stratification has three major components: politico-legal
rights (status as entitlement), cultural distinction (status as
life-style) and economic class. The relationships between
these elements are historically contingent and determined
by social struggles over resources. He examines the
historical variations between these dimensions in slavery,
feudalism and capitalism, and argues that in contemporary ,•
society the decline of economic class and the struggle
between status groups over welfare resources have given
rise to a new form of political life: status bloc politics
under the administration of the state. His analysis of status
concludes with an examination of the effects of mass
consumption on cultural distinction and a consideration of
the implications of cultural postmodernism for the
traditional struggle between high and low culture. His
main thesis is that economic, political and cultural
inequalities can only be understood from a conflict -
sociology perspective.
Bryan S. Turner was Professor of Sociology at the Flinders

University of South Australia and Alexander von
Humboldt Fellow at the University of Bielefeld. He is
currently Professor of Social Science (with special
reference to questions of social transformation) at the
State University of Utrecht in the Netherlands. His
previous publications on related topics include Citizenship
and Capitalism (1986) and Equality (1986). He has
co-authored a number of other publications including
(with N. Abercrombie and S. Hill) the influential The
Dominant Ideology Thesis (1980).
University of ]V1
ISBN 0-8166-1723-6 (pape 9780816617227
ISBN 0-8166-1722-8 (caset^Q^-j 7/2019 9 39-3

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% 'I

Series Editor: Frank Parkin

Democracy Anthony Arblaster

Bureaucracy David Beetham

Socialism Bernard Crick

Liberalism John Gray

Ideology David McLellan

Conservatism Robert Nisbet

Property Alan Ryan

Status Bryan S. Turner

University of Minnesota Press

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be

Published by the University of Minnesota Press

Printed in Great Britain

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Number

ISBN 0-8166-1722-8 (hardcover)

The University of Minnesota

1 The Controversy over Status: Marx and Weber 1

2 From Status to Contract: Historical Change and Social

3 Status Politics in Contemporary Society: Citizenship and

4 Mass Culture, Distinction and Lifestyle 65

r k' »'Wft k*"^

tMi •V^ .|if/;rt i

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> ' .-v

This study of status was written during a period of study at the

The Controversy over

Any student starting a course on sociology will quickly encounter

within societies can be traced back primarily to economic relations.

Within sociology, the notion of social status is often connected

First, it is common to distinguish between ‘ascribed status’ (which

Lunt 1941). The importance of this argument can be explained in

prestige is a social-psychological category: an individual or social

Status groups and lifestyles

In reviewing various definitions of status, I have so far focused upon

prestige, but in my view he only took two aspects of status

process of social and political usurpation involving a collective

In Weber’s comparative argument, this cultural stratum con¬

has been lost. The static categorization of various strata or segments

For Weber, as for Veblen, the function of conspicuous consumption

A status group is therefore a collection of individuals who are

One major debate in sociology has centred on whether social

honours also symbolize or indicate the general ideas and values of a

(of individuals), with the analysis of the occupational structure

privileges was organized in terms of exclusive estates (the clergy,

status column would be all persons belonging to single-parent

Towards a comparative history of status and class

predominantly economic forms of inequality, or they are structured

facilitates welfare claims, or ‘entitlements’ (within the terminology

generally distinguished in terms of economic, political and symbolic

From Status to Contract:

Sociologists often attempt to develop their arguments about society

is, their entire personalities are overwhelmingly or exclusively

conventional criteria of authority (Nisbet 1967). The contrast

concept of aristocratic honour, those social groups which depend

Sociological theory and social change