RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Status as Deference: Cultural Meaning as a Source of Occupational Behavior
JF RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences
FD Russell Sage Foundation
SP 70
OP 88
DO 10.7758/RSF.2022.8.7.04
VO 8
IS 7
A1 E. K. Maloney
A1 Kimberly B. Rogers
A1 Lynn Smith-Lovin
YR 2022
UL http://www.rsfjournal.org/content/8/7/70.abstract
AB Status is an independent basis of inequality. Cultural meanings create the voluntary esteem and deference that distinguish status inequities from inequalities in power and material resources, as Cecilia Ridgeway and Hazel Markus explain in the introduction to this issue. Here, we use affect control theory (ACT)—a formal theory of culture, identity, and social action—to explore how cultural meanings of occupational identities shape status behavior. ACT assumes that people try to maintain cultural meanings for identities and behaviors on three affective dimensions (evaluation, potency and activity) as they interact with others. We use ACT to define how actors in different status groups—occupations with similar patterns of deference to and from other occupations—act toward one another. We validate our theoretical behavioral predictions with vignette survey data.