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This chapter focuses on brokerage in the prestige economy of the Gabor Roma ethnic subgroup in Romania. It argues that the necessity of the brokers’ employment as well as their economic importance comes from the significant uncertainty characterising the prestige-object transactions, that is, these brokers are occasional entrepreneurs specialised in risk management. The theoretical purpose of the chapter is to demonstrate that brokers and goods mediated by them can be associated with more than one socially constructed transactional identity (cultural, political, economic, etc.) at the same time. It also aims to highlight the shifting nature of these identities – they are not constant and context-free qualities, but highly context-sensitive social constructions that can appear in various combinations.

Based on a study of 523 medical sales representatives, the present study investigates the relationships among employees' perception about organizational image, organizational support, and the way they perform their emotional labor during customer interaction. As predicted, the study found support for a positive relationship of both perceived organizational support and perceived external prestige with the way in which employees perform emotional labor. The study further found the importance of perceived external prestige of the organization in influencing the relationship between perceived organizational support and emotional labor. Implications of the study to practitioners and researchers were discussed.

This paper delineates the proprietary contest developed around a highly valued prestige item: a silver roofed tankard owned by a Romanian, Gabor Roma man.

The author applies “methodological fetishism” (Appadurai, 1986, p. 5), the perspective of things-in-motion, as well as the biographic method to interpret data collected during 31.5 months of multi-sited anthropological fieldwork carried out in the Transylvanian Gabor and Cărhar Roma groups.

As the tankard in question crossed the borders of three Transylvanian Roma groups, and thus went through the processes of de- and re-contextualization three times, it is characterized by a transethnic/transcultural biography. This paper pays special attention to the agency associated with the tankard (the social and economic practices, processes and emotions it caused or influenced), the transformations concerning its symbolic properties, and its movement between various social contexts and value regimes. Furthermore, it examines how the analysis of these issues contributes to a deeper understanding of prestige relations and consumption, morality and business ethics, and measures of success in two Transylvanian Roma groups.

This paper reveals how subjects create, manipulate, and represent their identities, and social and economic differences through the construction of commodity biographies and ownership histories interpreted as symbolic pantheons. By combining the terms of Marcus (1995) and Fowles (2006), it argues that analyses based on multi-sited fieldwork focusing on commodities crossing cultural or social boundaries, and their transnational/transcultural biographies, should be defined as multi-sited commodity ethnographies.

Purpose: The prominence of quality education for building sustainable development is undeniable and is distinctly pointed out in 1 of the 14 sustainable development goals (SDGs). In the same context, this study intends to investigate the role of university commitment, perceived organisational prestige, student satisfaction, and perceived employability in enhancing sustainability in higher education.

Need of the Study: To evaluate how student satisfaction mediates the relationship between university commitment, perceived organisational prestige, and perceived employability with sustainable university institutes.

Methodology: An adapted questionnaire was used in this study to capture the perception of 458 management graduates selected through the purposive sampling method. Partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) technique was used to analyse the data with the help of Smart PLS software.

Findings: The results of this study show that student satisfaction is the strongest predictor of sustainable university institutes. University commitment was found to lead to student satisfaction significantly. Furthermore, student satisfaction wasn’t found to play the role of mediator in the proposed model.

Practical Implications: This study aims to fulfil theoretical, research, and management implications for students, higher education institutes (HEIs), and policymakers. HEIs are recommended to instil university commitment, perceived organisational prestige and student satisfaction via various practices and amendments in their curriculum. Students are recommended to enhance their perceived employability to achieve career sustainability.

Economic inequality in contemporary advanced societies is strongly tied to the variation in wages across occupations. We examine the extent to which this variation is captured by social class and occupational prestige and ask how the associations between class, prestige, and wages can be explained. On the basis of data from 11 countries in the European Social Survey (ESS) 2004, we find (a) that class and prestige account for a very large proportion of the occupational variation in wages; (b) that the tight links between class, prestige, and wages are strongly associated with the skill requirements of jobs but only weakly tied to other positional traits, including authority, autonomy, and scarcity; and (c) that these findings are highly similar in all countries examined. We conclude that the rank order of positions in the labor market is a social constant driven by efficiency requirements of work organizations rather than by the exercise of power. This iron law of labor market inequality clearly contradicts major class theoretical models, including Wright's and Goldthorpe's. In addition to empirically refuting contemporary class theory, we offer a number of more conceptual arguments to the same effect. At a macro level, however, power relations arguably affect the rate of economic inequality by determining the reward distance between positions in the constant rank order, as indicated by the large cross-national variation in wage dispersion.

Purpose – This chapter examines the expectation that because the developmental trajectories of cultural frontiers are often seen as being tied to that of their more complexly developed neighbors, increases in interregional interaction provide frontier communities with previously unavailable political-economic opportunities that promote social change.

Design/methodology/approach – This expectation is examined using data from archaeological excavations at the site of El Dornajo in southwestern Ecuador. Models based on external conditions like interregional interaction are considered alongside those based on internal conditions like environmental perturbations.

Findings – The results suggest that increased interregional interaction promoted the emergence of a regional prestige economy that symbolically legitimated (and perhaps made possible) the co-option of traditional risk buffering strategies during a time when the availability of subsistence resources had changed due to local conditions.

Practical implications – This chapter supports the notion that the emergence of institutionalized inequality requires control over both internal and external relationships. Furthermore, it suggests that examining models based on both internal and external conditions of change may help to explain the timing and pace of that change.

Originality/value – Much of the archaeological literature is dichotomized between models based on internal conditions and those based on external conditions. Few archaeologists would take exception to the notion that both conditions matter, but equally few archaeologists are looking at both kinds of conditions in the same case study.

The perceived prestige of the doctoral degree granting institution traditionally has had a major effect on job opportunities available to a new accounting Ph.D. However, given recent shortages of accounting academics, the role of program prestige may have changed. It is possible that individual factors also may now play a role in the initial placement decision. This study examines the effects of both doctoral program prestige and individual factors on the initial placement decision.

While our results indicate that doctoral program prestige still largely dictates the initial placement decision, several other factors are found to be important. New graduates initially placed at higher level institutions report faculty involvement during the application process as well as significant research support by the hiring institution. New faculty placing lower than expected report the mix of teaching and research as well as the quality of life as being significant factors in their employment decision.

In their endless quest for self-devotion, the elite, the powerful, often seek to appropriate the most beautiful and impressive things. As Thorstein Veblen (1899, p. 36) put it: “In order to gain and to hold the esteem of men it is not sufficient to merely possess wealth or power. The wealth or power must be put in evidence, for esteem is awarded only on evidence.” Looking at it in these terms, pomp and prestige prove to be necessary elements for “upholding one’s rank.” Many authors have acknowledged that Veblen was the first to give a systematic sociological interpretation of “conspicuous behaviour.” However he has often been criticized for taking on a rather puritan and incriminating tone. For his part, Norbert Elias (1974, pp. 48–49) reproaches Veblen for not managing to understand the behavioural logics and the mentalities of societies different from the (American-bourgeois) one he was analysing. Moreover, Elias quite rightly points out that in industrialized societies, one is able to preserve great prestige without providing public proof for it through costly display. Social pressure for prestigious consumption would no longer have the unavoidable character it used to have (particularly within court society) and would take on a much more private one (Elias, 1974, pp. 54–55). Even if this statement often proves to be true, it is also an over-generalization.

There is a popular psychometric thesis suggesting that people with different levels of cognitive ability end up in different occupations because some occupations require greater intelligence than others for successful performance. To examine several central claims of the psychometric thesis, this study uses two kinds of data for analysis: one is cross-sectional and occupation-level data from various sources dated as early as World War I and the other is longitudinal and individual-level data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 Cohort (NLSY79) and the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (WLS) in the United States. Findings of this study suggest that occupational segregation by cognitive ability is much less intensive than that suggested by the psychometric theory, and there is no evidence of a trend of increasing cognitive partitioning by occupation over time.