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The Spread of Status Value theory describes how new diffuse status characteristics can arise out of the association of initially non-valued characteristics to existing status characteristics that are already well-established in a society. Our objective is to extend this theory so that it describes how still other status elements, which have become of interest to researchers such as “status objects” (Thye, 2000) and “valued roles” (Fişek, Berger, & Norman, 1995), can also be socially created.

Our approach involves reviewing research that is relevant to the Spread of Status Value theory, and in introducing concepts and assumptions that are applicable to status objects and valued roles.

Our major results are an elaborated theory that describes the construction of status objects and valued roles, a graphic representation of one set of conditions in which this creation process is predicted to occur, and a design for a further empirical test of the Spread of Status Value theory. This extension has social implications. It opens up the possibility of creating social interventions that involve status objects and valued roles to ameliorate dysfunctional social situations.

Our elaborated theory enables us to understand for the first time how different types of status valued elements can, under appropriate conditions, be socially created or socially modified as a result of the operation of what are fundamentally similar processes.

Basic science, sometimes called “curiosity-driven research” at the National Science Foundation and other places, starts with a question that somehow stays in the mind, nagging for an answer. Such questions really are “puzzles”; they arise in an intellectual field or context, asking someone to fit pieces to an improving but incomplete picture of the social world. What makes a worthwhile puzzle is a missing part in understanding the picture, or a new piece of knowledge that does not seem to fit among other parts. Sometimes creative theorists can imagine a solution to one of the holes in the puzzle. If they are also empirical scientists, they devise ways to get evidence bearing on their ideas, and some of those ideas survive to give more complete and detailed pictures of the world. This chapter is the story of puzzles and provisional solutions to them, developed by dozens of men and women investigating status processes and status structures, using a coherent perspective, for over half a century.¹

This study engages an understudied presupposition that values are relatively impervious to situational pressures. We do this within a key sociological context, incorporating social status as a meso-level structure, by measuring values before and after a competition situation with an experimentally controlled outcome to determine the situational robustness of values.

We incorporate measures of values into a standard competition experiment, looking at how winning or losing and the status of the perceived competition influence peoples’ values.

Drawing on the well-established expectation states literature, we demonstrate that perceptions of gaining or losing a competition influence core values. Overall, positive, related situational feedback seemed to heighten all of the values-measures, while receiving (manipulated) negative, specific feedback dampened the rating of all values.

This is an initial exploration of the received wisdom; future work should involve different manipulations, wider arrays of values-measurement, and more diverse samples.

We hope that our interpretations of these results suggest how perceived status influences core internal experiences. The processes described have implications for the experiences of groups that win or lose political competitions, and other social interactions whereby people feel more or less affirmed in terms of their core beliefs.

This suggests that individuals and groups who perceive themselves as winning competitions, elections, or challenges will feel affirmed in their core beliefs, and be more motivated to pursue those valued ends. People who perceive themselves as being situationally unsuccessful will feel a general dampening of these core beliefs.

This chapter is the first to link the internal study of values with the general expectation states tradition. It is exploratory, and results suggest this is a fertile area for future inquiry.

We present a specific mathematical model for predicting allocative behaviors in the context of reward expectations theory. We test the goodness of fit of the model to data from two empirical studies and demonstrate that it fits quite well. We also suggest alternative research uses for the model.

This chapter focuses on two theories in the landscape of research on social influence – status characteristics theory and social influence network theory – between which heretofore there has been little communication. We advance these two approaches by dovetailing them in a “modular integration” that retains the assumptions of each theory and extends their scope of application. Here, we concentrate on the extension of status characteristics theory to multiactor task-oriented groups and develop new insights on the effects of status characteristics in such groups. We address the implications for opinion changes of status differentiations in which some individuals are deemed more socially worthy and capable than others.

A conceptual framework for analyzing the relations among macro-, meso-, and micro-level forces is introduced. This framework is used to develop propositions (enumerated in Appendices A-J) explaining the dynamics of embedded encounters. Encounters are viewed as embedded within corporate and categoric units which, in turn, are lodged in institutional domains. Meso-level corporate and categoric units determine the number of individuals present, the nature of the distinctions among these individuals, the locations of individuals in structures, and the broader cultural scripts that circumscribe interaction of those in focused interaction. The encounter itself reveals its own dynamic properties revolving around demographic, status, symbolic, and transactional forces which, on the one side, reflect the structure and culture of corporate and categoric units and which, on the other side, reveal the potential to change meso- and macro-level structures and their associated cultural symbols.