Status as Deference: Cultural Meaning as a Source of Occupational Behavior

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.