How Helping Can Reinforce or Attenuate Status Inequalities: The Case of Nonprofit Organizations

Status and Inequality

Status is a comparative social ranking in which we voluntarily accord greater respect, esteem, and influence to those viewed as more competent in relation to achieving some collective goal (Ridgeway 2019, 3). Studies show that status rankings emerge in the first few minutes of groups forming to accomplish a task (Berger, Rosenholtz, and Zelditch 1980). Everyone has experienced situations in which we have been accorded high status, receiving more positive attention relative to others, and those in which we have been accorded a lower status, receiving comparatively less positive attention. We generally seek settings where we feel more valued and respected. Not surprisingly, status explains a wide range of human behavior and predicts one’s overall psychological and physical health (Anderson, Hildreth, and Howland 2015). These feelings explain why we monitor our social status, comparing how our ideas, suggestions or questions are taken up and responded to in relation to those offered by others. It also explains why we might avoid seeking help and the potential status loss it portends.

Status hierarchies have been explained as an evolutionary response to ensuring the well-being of the community: they help resolve a fundamental tension between interdependence and competition in achieving collective goals by according the most influence and respect to those who can contribute the most to achieving a collective goal, thus ensuring the well-being of the group (Ridgeway 2019, 3). These status hierarchies, even if temporary and informal, help us make sense of what to do, and without needing to spend a lot of time figuring out who to follow or whether we should lead. But evolutionary explanations are not enough, as Ridgeway explains (2019, 38), in part because we often do not know who is most competent for achieving the goal. Instead, we rely on cultural status beliefs; beliefs that consciously or unconsciously associate competence with certain behaviors, such as taking charge; emotions, such as anger; and social identity markers, such as race or gender (Berger, Cohen, and Zelditch 1972; Berger and Fişek 2006; Ridgeway et al. 2009; Tiedens 2001). Status hierarchies, then, are not accurate reflections of competence or worth but instead represent biased social beliefs about competence and worth (also see Wilkerson 2020). Yet these status rankings are powerful precisely because they appear voluntary, held in place by cultural beliefs rather than coercive force.

These assumptions about competence and worth deepen inequality in a myriad of ways. At the level of social interactions, for example, status rankings influence who is seen as credible or legitimate, who is given credit for an idea, and who gets a confidence boost to support performance (Ridgeway 2019). Research finds that the same idea introduced by someone presumed to be more competent is evaluated more positively, that is, seen as more credible, than when it is introduced by someone assumed to be less competent or of a lower status (Foschi 2000; Ridgeway 2001, 362). Moreover, individuals who are accorded a higher status gain confidence that in turn boosts their performance, whereas those who are presumed less competent and accorded lower status face a performance burden, having to manage difficult emotions about their status while contributing to achieving the goal (Kemper 1991; Muscatell et al. 2012; Ridgeway 2019, 110). Finally, these biases lead to an extraction of value from lower-status actors, where the person accorded high status is credited with the work of the entire group (Ridgeway 2019, 130). Despite their inaccuracies, these status rankings stay in place because, even though we may disagree with the ranking, we presume that others agree. Indeed, studies show that when individuals try to challenge rankings they are quickly brought back in line by other members. For low-ranking members such challenges can have enormous costs (Ridgeway and Correll 2006). In this way, these status beliefs operate implicitly and quickly to create expectations which in turn influence behavior, giving unfair advantages to those assumed to be more competent. Once in place they become very difficult to change.

Helping, Status, and Inequality

At a basic level, both givers and receivers can experience a mix of positive and negative outcomes in helping exchanges (Konrath and Brown 2012; Nadler 2015).³ For example, research has found that givers can experience burnout from overextending themselves, suffer losses in productivity, and experience threats to their status (Barns et al. 2008; Flynn 2003). Givers also, however, can experience improved psychological well-being as well as greater esteem in the eyes of others (Konrath and Brown 2012; Nadler and Halabi 2015). Similarly, those who receive help can experience a mix of both self-threat and support (Fisher, Nadler, and Whitcher-Alagna 1982; Nadler 2015; Stroebe and Stroebe 1996). Receiving help can lead one to feel cared for, grateful, and part of a larger community. But receiving help can also lead one to experience status threat because asking for help can leave a person feeling dependent, incompetent, or indebted to the helper (Nadler 2015; Schein 2009).⁴

Research that examines the relationships between status, helping, and inequality can be loosely organized into three overlapping areas. One area of research examines how helping affects a person’s status ranking, that is, the status gains from giving and the status loss from receiving (Flynn et al. 2006; Nadler and Halabi 2015). For example, work on costly signaling shows that individuals will incur costs to give in the short term to enhance their reputation over the long term (see Mauss 1990; for an overview, see Nadler and Halabi 2015). The competitive altruism hypothesis posits that individuals are more altruistic when their actions are public because their reputation is at stake. Indeed, studies find that these public altruists are accorded the highest status (Hardy and Van Vugt 2006). Other work has found that high-status groups will engage in defensive helping to secure their positions when status relations are less stable (Nadler et al. 2010).

The second area of research looks at how a person’s social status affects the amount and kind of help a person receives. For example, some studies find that individuals are more willing to help those from higher-status groups, a lawyer, than those from lower-status groups, a gas station attendant (Goodman and Gareis 1993). Others find that status affects the type of help offered. For example, Arie Nadler and Lily Chernyak-Hai find that a person perceived as weak is more likely to be given dependency-oriented help whereas a person perceived as competent and capable is more likely to be given autonomy-oriented help (2014). Plenty of evidence from African Americans’ experience in the health-care system demonstrates that social status affects the amount and quality of help received (Aronson et al. 2013; Ayalon and Young 2005; Hollar 2001).

The third stream of research examines the experience of receiving help. This research finds that one’s experience of receiving help will depend on the kind of help sought, the relationship to the helper, the culture in which helping occurs, as well as an individual’s circumstances and social identity (Durham 1995; Fiske 1992; Nadler 2015; Shen, Wan, and Wyer 2011). This research also shows how the characteristics of the help can exacerbate or mitigate the loss of status experienced by those receiving help, which is my focus. This research suggests that three features of the help can affect this experience: control, cause, and commonality (Fisher, Nadler, and Whitcher-Alagna et al. 1982; Nadler 2015). Even if individuals do not feel a loss of status when seeking help, these features can affect the experience of social status in the helping exchange, leaving one guarded, stressed, and upset, or cared for, respected, and part of a team of people committed to the same goal. I briefly introduce these three features below and then discuss them in more detail in the next section.

Control

Studies of nonprofit organizations do not explicitly examine status or measure the degree of control participants have in these settings but do document the consequences of restricting participants’ autonomy (Williams 1996; Joniak 2005). For example, several studies examine domestic violence survivors’ experience in nonprofit shelters and find that these survivors would rather go back to their abuser than stay in the shelter because of all the rules in the shelter (Glenn and Goodman 2015; Missouri Coalition Against Domestic and Sexual Violence 2016; VanNatta 2010). For example, one study reported that “about half of the participants gave at least one example of how the controlling and limiting nature of the rules, particularly those that involved monitoring their behavior, felt similar to what they had experienced in their abusive relationships” (Glenn and Goodman 2015, 10). The study reported the consequences of this for the survivors: “Rules and their enforcement directly affected participants during their stay in the shelter in two main ways: limiting access to resources and thus impeding progress, and causing emotional distress, including increased isolation” (Glenn and Goodman 2015, 12). As a result, shelters experimented with reducing the number of rules, and, as one study reveals, women stayed longer and participated more regularly in case management and educational programming (VanNatta 2010, 157). As one staff member reflected, “We had rhetoric that survivors are strong and powerful, but we didn’t treat them that way. We handed them a list of 68 rules to follow while they were there and checked up on them. We weren’t respectful in a lot of instances” (Russo and Spatz 2007, 5).

Aside from formal organizational practices, staff can also engage in informal practices that reduce or enhance the control participants have in these settings. For example, performance requirements create real dilemmas for staff that affect how they relate to participants. In studies of social enterprises, where participants are employed as staff and work side by side with professional staff, researchers find that organizational performance expectations create tensions leading professional staff to take over the tasks assigned to working participants or assigning them to simpler jobs, resulting in lower quality job training for them (Cooney 2006; Hustinx and De Waele 2015). In contrast, staff can also exercise discretion in ways that give participants more autonomy and control in the social enterprise. Andrea Chan finds that increases in self-esteem and optimism were associated with staff support that matched the specific demands faced by the worker and interpreted by the worker as helpful (2016, 1737). In another study where participants and staff also worked side by side, one participant described how a staff person approached this issue: “Without BJ I wouldn’t be here. . . . [The rest of the staff focus on] rules, this rule that, this rule this, you can’t do this, you can’t do that and BJ just takes you aside and says, ‘What do you think about this? Do you think there’s room for compromise or something?’” (personal communication, June 24, 2015).

Organizations need some structure to organize and ease coordination, but the degree of autonomy and control participants have in nonprofits can attenuate or reinforce the status hierarchy between participants and staff, which affects their engagement and their social-emotional experience. The examples also confirm that in organizations two hierarchies exist simultaneously: power hierarchies and status hierarchies (Magee and Galinsky 2008). Staff have control over resources that participants desire, that is, the power hierarchy, but the examples also show that asserting control can rest on evaluations of competence, that is, the status hierarchy, whether it is the competence of participants living in a shelter or as employees in a social enterprise. These evaluations can be institutionalized in organizational rules, procedures, and norms (Ridgeway 2019).

Commonalities

Studies of nonprofit organizations show how organizational practices can draw sharper distinctions between participants and staff or can soften those distinctions, which have consequences for participant experiences. For example, in a study of a homeless shelter, researchers discovered that the volunteers had all sorts of privileges not afforded to the participants. For example, the volunteers had their own cubicle for sleeping, whereas those who were homeless slept in bunk beds crammed into a single room, creating a visible hierarchy described as denigrating to participants (Wasserman and Clair 2010, 180). In a study of fifteen antipoverty faith-based nonprofits identified as successful, the organizations had a common practice: participants played a variety of roles, including volunteer, mentor, and board member. In these more role-fluid environments, participants described themselves as collaborators, not clients, and the relationships with staff as mutual, something that surprised the researchers (Netting et al. 2005).

Regardless of whether organizations employ explicit strategies that create more mutual relationships between participants and staff, staff also exercise discretion in ways that inadvertently emphasize these differences or that seek to find commonality and create more mutual relationships. For example, in a study of faith-based providers, Rebecca Sager and Laura Stephens describe participants’ experience with one staff member: “[The leader], he’s a nice guy, but he’s got an ego problem. And he makes sure we all knew he was [professional] of the year, and on and on it went. . . . It’s like this ‘holier than thou’ attitude” (2005, 311). In contrast, another study demonstrates the significance of finding commonality. The study reports that an immigration attorney explained a scenario where she stepped out of her professional role and went to lunch with her client, and how it positively changed the participant’s engagement, where she was able to share more information that supported her case: “That moment of rapport, that moment of allowing us to have an interaction outside her just talking about all these awful things that had happened to her—was transformative and made the rest of the day easier. . . . There is a lot of discussion in the legal field, of how close do you allow your clients to become. Some lawyers never talk about their personal lives with clients, ever, period. I don’t take that tack. I think there are times that it can really benefit [the client]” (Benjamin and Campbell 2015, 996).

These examples provide some evidence of how organizational and staff practices that emphasize commonality can attenuate the status hierarchy affecting participant engagement and their social emotional experiences. The examples suggest that even small moves to establish mutuality can go some distance toward establishing the types of relationships that make interdependent work possible. The importance of mutuality for participant outcomes has been well supported in some fields (see Repper and Carter 2011) but will depend on the context, the problem, and whether the mutuality triggers comparison (Nadler 2015). Again, we need studies that examine such practices—whether hiring staff with shared experience or identity, or simply supporting relationships that extend beyond staff-participant roles—and their consequences for participants’ experience of their social status in nonprofit organizations.

Causes

In nonprofit organizations, attributions about why help is needed are made by participants themselves, as well as by the organization and staff. These causal attributions may be explicit or implicit. For example, studies find that when participants read program descriptions that focus on empowerment rather than need, it has a marked influence on their self-efficacy (Thomas et al. 2020). Research also shows how attributions about participants’ problems can be subtle, such as when flood victims find the used clothing offered by organizations belittling: “Many of the women, most of whom had donated to charity throughout their lives, began to realize the flaws in the notion that one person’s trash is another person’s treasure” (Fothergill 2003, 674).

Other studies point to how these organizations deliberately seek to change participants’ causal stories through critical analysis of the structural causes of their situation (Dodge and Ospina 2016; Karriem and Benjamin 2016). For example, in her study of nonprofits providing social services to sex workers, Samantha Majic notes how these organizations, created by activists who fought for prostitutes’ rights, mixed needed social services with causal analysis that challenged the predominant approach to criminalization of prostitution, including a sign in the waiting room, “Outlaw Poverty Not Prostitutes.” Sex workers, in turn, developed self-efficacy, leading some of them to become more politically active (Majic 2011, 828).

For their part, staff can also exercise discretion in the ways they frame causes for problems when talking with participants. One staff member described the subtle and unprogrammed ways in which she engages in attributional analysis to motivate participants to quit smoking and stop blaming themselves:

I’ve gotten myself armed with a lot of detailed trivia, nuts and bolts stuff, and I pass that along and help a person to see . . . that when you look at it in this much bigger way, instead of being angry about whatever failing, you can just be like “I’m tired of big tobacco” . . . I got a woman to quit smoking three packs a day. . . . [I told her about] the research about how they put together the filters and then purposely put microscopic air holes punched along the side of the filters that line up where your fingers would hold it so that you are now covering the very thing [that is supposed to be ventilating] . . . so you smoke more. (personal communication, October 30, 2012)

Staff can also assume causes by automatically using labels for participants. One staff person recounted how she was talking with a participant and referred to her as homeless: “And she was like, ‘I am unhoused I want you to use that word from now on.’ I was like ‘fine.’ So we really got to know her as a person, how she wanted to work, and she got more comfortable with us” (personal communication, March 18, 2015). These examples provide some evidence that causal attributions about the problem affect participants, including their reaction, their sense of efficacy, and their successful accomplishment of a goal.

These examples illustrate the powerful role that status processes play in nonprofit organizations and how, by exacerbating rather than alleviating the temporary status hierarchy in helping relations, nonprofits can inadvertently reinforce inequality. Countless others have suggested as much, pointing out how these organizations are paternalistic, use labels that connote unworthiness, turn people from citizens with rights into participants with needs, perpetuate racism and white supremacy or, alternatively, how they address important challenges in ways that partner with communities, support and recognize participants’ leadership and expertise, and help people claim their rights and advocate for policies that address inequality (Eliasoph 2009; Dodge and Ospina 2016; Gutierrez 1990; Hasenfeld 2000; Hulme and Edwards 1996; INCITE! 2017; Kissane 2003). But missing has been a basic account that would tie these observations together. This analysis provides such an account and, in so doing, names what has been a hidden but powerful force in these settings, status processes and their effects on participants.

To be sure, other research in this double issue shows that changing how one is ranked in a status hierarchy is not enough to address inequality. For example, even when individuals experience positive status shifts, these gains can easily be diminished as dominant systems reinscribe the meaning of these status gains in ways that can diminish one’s status, for example, by attributing gains to special treatment rather than competence (see Portocarrero and Carter 2022, this issue). Moreover, participants themselves can feel uncomfortable with status gains if this separates them from close others leading to what Mesmin Destin and his colleagues (2022, this issue) refer to as status uncertainty, something that they found can be mitigated with social support.

We need to recognize that attenuating the status hierarchy between staff and participants in nonprofits does not do enough to address the inequities in institutions and systems that have created a need for these organizations. Still, without attention to the initial status hierarchy organizing these relationships, the assumptions about competencies that undergird the status hierarchy go unquestioned, the practices that attenuate status hierarchies remain unsupported, and the practices that reinforce the status hierarchy between staff and participants are not addressed. In the final section that follows, I step back to consider why these status processes in nonprofits have remained undertheorized and not fully addressed despite their significance for participants and for addressing structural inequality.