Search results

Leviticus is an important source of moral reflection in Western culture. This paper applies passages from Leviticus 19 and its Rabbinic and medieval commentaries to modern day management education and practice. The purpose of this paper is to explore Leviticus 19's concern with the economic, moral, and spiritual dimensions of how to make and allocate profit. The paper highlights the implications of this distinction for management education through the use of cases and classic essays.

The analysis applies two passages from Leviticus 19 and their later commentaries: Leviticus 19:9‐10, on leaving the gleanings of one's harvest (e.g., the modern equivalent of profit) for the poor; and Leviticus 19:14, on not placing a stumbling block before the blind (e.g., the modern equivalent of the financially illiterate and morally blind). This analysis extends these texts to the social and economic circumstances of modern day business.

Leviticus 19's moral vision understands profit making and distribution in relation to the poor and other stakeholders. In addition, this interpretation of Leviticus 19 within the Jewish tradition provides a richer moral rationale than instrumentalism can give for taking prudent steps to protect both investors and the disadvantaged members of society.

The paper extends the interpretation of Leviticus 19 and its commentaries to how modern day profits should be made and distributed to the disadvantaged members of society. These concerns address the social responsibilities of managers and the education of future business leaders who will prudently examine their professional obligations.

We survey and organize over fifty years of theoretical research on status and expectation state processes. After defining some key terms in this theoretical approach, we briefly describe theories and branches in the program.

We also focus on a few theories that illustrate distinct patterns of theory growth, using them to show the variety of ways in which the research program has grown.

The program structure developed from a single set of theories on development and maintenance of group inequality in the 1960s to six interrelated branches by 1988. Between 1988 and today, the overall structure has grown to total 19 different branches. We briefly describe each branch, identifying over 200 resources for the further study of these branches.

Although the various branches share key concepts and processes, they have been developed by different researchers, in a variety of settings from laboratories to schools to business organizations. Second, we outline some important issues for further research in some of the branches. Third, we emphasize the value of developing new research methods for testing and applying the theories.

These theories have been used to explain phenomena of gender, racial, and ethnic inequality among others, and for understanding some cases of personality attributions, deviance and control processes, and application of double standards in hiring.

Status and expectation state processes often operate to produce invidious social inequalities. Understanding these processes can enable social scientists to devise more effective interventions to reduce these inequalities.

Status and expectation state processes occupy a significant segment of research into group processes. This chapter provides an authoritative overview of ideas in the program, what is known, and what remains to be discovered.

To determine the role of status information conveyance in a negative reward allocation setting.

Using previously published experimental data, we test the relative effects of status information conveyed by expressive and indicative status cues on the allocation of a negative reward. Further, we construct an alternative graph theoretic model of expectation advantage which is also tested to determine its model fit relative to the classic model of Reward Expectations Theory.

Results provide strong support for the conclusion that status information conveyed by expressive status cues influences reward allocations more than information conveyed by indicative cues. We also find evidence that our alternative graph theoretic model of expectation advantage improves model fit.

This research is the first to test the relative impact of expressive versus indicative status cues on the allocation of negative rewards and shows that status characteristics can have differential impacts on these allocations contingent on how characteristics are conveyed. Furthermore, the research suggests a graph theoretic model that allows for this differentiation based on information conveyance and provides empirical support for its structure in a negative reward allocation environment.

Future research is required to validate the results in positive reward situations.

The results show that an individual’s expectations are altered by varying the manner in which status information is presented, thereby influencing the construction and maintenance of status hierarchies and the inequalities those structures generate. Thus, this research has implications for any group or evaluative task where status processes are relevant.

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.

To determine the age at which influence peaks for men and women at work, then use empirical data to develop procedures predicting complex combining effects of diffuse status characteristics.

A survey experiment with a nationally representative sample is used to measure the age at which the status value of men and women at work reaches a maximum. Research results are then incorporated into equations adapted from current status characteristics theory (SCT) procedures to model the combined effects of age, gender, race/ethnicity, education, income, occupation, and beauty.

Analyses reveal that the status value of men and women reaches a maximum in middle age, and that women reach a maximum status value at work at an earlier age than men.

This approach maintains core assumptions of SCT and uses ongoing research results to calibrate a model predicting complex combining effects of diffuse status characteristics. Limitations include the need to develop additional empirical constants to make predictions in new research settings.

Predictions from the model can be used in hiring situations to adjust for interviewers’ nonconscious expectations related to status characteristics of job applicants.

The disadvantage for women at work that increases through mid-career helps to explain the continuing underrepresentation of women in senior leadership positions. Awareness of the impact of socially valued characteristics like age and gender can help individuals respond more effectively to challenging social situations.

Extend the current SCT model to make predictions in contexts where people are being evaluated such as elections, hiring, and promotions.

This chapter develops and tests a theory on relationships between perceptions of ability and adherence to rules, guidelines, and tradition. Drawing from theory and research on status processes in groups, the theory proposes that adherence to rules can provide an alternative to task ability in demonstrating competence at a group task and that persons who perceive themselves to be low in ability will become especially likely to strictly adhere to rules.

In an experimental study, participants received feedback that they had high or low ability at a group task that involved making judgments about bonuses in a fictitious organization.

Supporting the theory, participants who perceived themselves to be low in ability gave less money to employees technically ineligible for raises, even when the reason for the ineligibility was arguably trivial.

The proposed theory and supportive results have a number of theoretical implications for how status processes shape individual behavior in groups. For example, the theory might help explain collective enforcement against free riding, with people low in ability being motivated to enforce norms against free riding to compensate for their perceived lack of ability to contribute.

It is easy to conjure examples in which persons who are seen as exceptionally competent also seem to be given wide leniency in adhering to rules. The theory and experimental test presented here can help in understanding the extent to which the following of rules may be seen as the domain of the incompetent.

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

Existing descriptions of trust in health care largely assume a straightforward association between a patient’s relationship with a regular provider and his or her trust in health care. I extend status characteristics theory (SCT) and social identity theory (SIT) to suggest greater variability in this association by investigating the role of social differences between patients and their regular providers. Whereas the SIT extension predicts lower trust in dissimilar than similar dyads, the predictions from the SCT extension depend on status in dissimilar dyads. Further, research examining how social differences in patient–provider dyads shape trust largely emphasizes racial differences, but the theories implicate gender differences too.

I analyze a longitudinal dataset of patient–provider dyads offering a conservative test of the extensions.

Results generally support predictions from the SCT extension. Specifically, patients’ status based on differences in either race or gender: (1) is inversely related to their trust in health care and (2) influences the resiliency of their trust, whereby the degree health care met prior expectations matters less (more) for the trust of low (high) status patients than equal status patients.

When patients and providers differ on both race and gender, findings sometimes depart from predictions. This indicates differences in two social categories is a unique situation where the contributions of each category are distinct from that of the other.

This research extends SCT to explain greater variability in the connection between patient–provider dyads and trust in health care, while also showing how gender compares to race.

The present chapter expands on recent research demonstrating an empirical link between theoretical constructs within affect control theory (ACT) and expectation states theory. I explore the utility of a joint application of the two theories, employing simulated interactions to examine status organizing processes.

Although simulation results do not constitute data by which theoretical claims can be tested, they are useful for developing new research questions. I report results from a series of simulated dyadic interactions using ACT’s Interact program to investigate potential emotional and identity processes that underlie the enactment of status differences, and to explore affective responses to the legitimation and delegitimation of status orders.

Simulation results call attention to a dynamic interplay between structural elements of the situation and the agentic behavior of interactants, suggesting that behavioral attempts to reduce deflections may lead to shifts in expectations over the course of interaction. Results raise the possibility that differences in affective impressions may produce expectations that are initially asymmetrical between interaction partners. Further, results suggest that the standardized tasks commonly employed in expectation states research may unintentionally generate affective responses that encourage status convergence.

Drawing on insights and methods from ACT, expectation states researchers can improve the scientific understanding of small group interaction. Employing simulated interactions, researchers can promote theoretical advancement by uncovering new lines of inquiry at the intersection of two prominent social psychological traditions. Simulations also provide a further tool for methodological refinement within the standardized experimental setting.

To review three theoretical research programs accounting for the spread of status beliefs and their effects on inequality, and to identify similarities and differences in scope and theoretical principles in the three. We describe suggestions for further research that we hope readers may wish to pursue.

We summarize recent theory and research, identify areas of overlap and dissimilarity, and show how certain research topics could extend understanding of the processes and make connections among the three programs.

The three programs were built on ideas first codified more than five decades ago. Those ideas have been the foundation for empirical research and findings from that have been used to develop the theories, improving the range of situations addressed and the precision of predictions. While the programs here address similar issues, each presumes different initial conditions and behavioral outcomes. With some overlap, the programs also address different situations and propose different mechanisms for the spread of status.

Our review of the programs is necessarily incomplete, because work continues on the programs. The analyses and suggestions about important topics to pursue are ours, and others may identify other topics for theoretical and empirical development.

We hope that our interpretations of these programs make them more accessible to interested scholars who will extend the theoretical and empirical bases of the work. The processes described have implications for the status of immigrant groups, the social position of women, and the value attached to collector’s objects. We hope to foster applications of these theories to understand and alleviate some cases of unmerited inequality.

The processes involved affect mixed-gender interaction in businesses, hiring biases, anti-immigrant exclusion sentiments, influence and bargaining power of individuals, desirability of certain furniture and clothing styles, ability inferences, and other phenomena. We mention instances where these theories can help to understand processes and to develop interventions to produce desirable outcomes.

No readily accessible summary of these programs and no theoretical comparison of them has yet been developed. Formal theories such as these sometimes seem obscure and we hope to show how they apply to important actual situations. Of course, the interpretations and suggestions in this chapter are our own and the scholars whose work we discuss might interpret the work differently.