In earlier sociological literature, status was used as a synonym of a person’s overall standing. MacIver, for example, used the word status in his discussion on class, and talks about various ‘bases of status’ such as birth and wealth, mode of living, occupational advantage, political power, etc. For him, status denoted one’s class or caste. This usage is no different from the way people commonly talk of ‘status’, with its connotations of influence, fame or wealth. Several authors used status and role as interchangeable terms. In fact, many use the word Role when in fact they are talking about status. Even Talcott Parsons never bothered to insist on this distinction.
Johnson, on the other hand, uses social position as a generic term that consists of two parts: status and role. For him, status refers to the ‘rights’ associated with the position occupied by an individual in a social system and role refers to the ‘obligations’ that a status occupant has towards the system concerned. The members of a social system are differentiated according to the social position they occupy.
A social position is thus a complex of rights and obligations. A person is said to ‘occupy’ a ‘position’ if he has a certain cluster of obligations and enjoys a certain cluster of associated rights within a social system. These two are called role (referring to obligations) and status (referring to rights). The role structure of a group is the same thing as its status structure, because what is role from the point of view of one member is status from the point of view of others.
This is shown in Figure 7.2.
Figure 7.2 Status and Role
Figure 7.2 rather than making a distinction between position and status in each system of interaction, we would prefer to keep the concept of Position at a higher pedestal-in terms of the overall standing of the person on society determined by the totality of statuses of any given individual. Merton has called such a totality a Status Set; we shall explicate this concept below.
As stated earlier, the term Status is not used here in the popular sense meaning prestige or position or general standing. Popularly used phrases, such as status of ‘women’ or of ‘scheduled castes’ or of ‘scheduled tribes’ refer to general prestige; they should not be confused with the sociological concept of status.
Every status, in sociological terms, is part of an individual’s identity in specific arenas of social interaction. The first condition of any situation of interaction is that the parties involved in it must know who the other party is; a wrong identification of the status of the other party can lead to disastrous consequences in terms of interaction. To explain it further: while ‘status of woman’ is a non-technical use of the term, ‘woman’ is a status based on gender, and this status invokes socially acceptable behaviour toward the status occupant. Mistaking a woman for a man or vice versa can lead the other party to wrongful behaviour and result in confrontation or social disapprobation.5
To take the point further, the person, besides being a woman, also has several other statuses—a daughter, a college student or a lecturer, a fiancée, a passenger in a bus (temporary status), to list a few. The same would be true of any individual—male or female.
It is in this sense that we talk of an individual as a ‘bundle of statuses’, recognizing the point that not all statuses are activated simultaneously, and some statuses remain constantly present. Being an Indian or an American, a male or female, young or old are ‘backdrop statuses’ that influence the performance of the status holder in other capacities/statuses. Thus, while those working in BPOs–call centres–have a common status, a woman is treated differently, because of her status as a woman.6
Each status has associated rights for its incumbent, and also has its obligations–a status occupant is ‘obliged to’ perform those tasks; these constitute the role/s. In most cases, performances of these roles require a receiving party, which forms the ‘counter status’–the alter of the ego, the actor or status occupant in question. In theatrical language, an actor is seen as ‘playing the role’ of …. Here, the word role signifies status: hero, king, villain, a notable, a father, etc. Since it is in that capacity (read status) that he ‘acts’, the focus is, quite naturally on playing (meeting his obligations) and therefore the ‘role’ dimension is specified. Here, the word role means the totality of actions associated with a particular status assigned to an actor in a drama or a film or a serial. In day-to-day language it may sound absurd to say that a particular actor is ‘playing’ the status of … (you do not play but occupy the status, and from that position you play different roles vis-a-vis your counterparts). Thus, role is an essential component of status.
Status Set and Role Set
This concept of status set was introduced by Robert Merton. It indicates the totality of statuses that any individual has at any particular point in time, and makes every person unique. No two individuals would have the same composition or the same occupants in counter positions. It is this set that makes the individual a ‘bundle of statuses’. In a way, it is this set, or a selection of statuses from it, that gives an individual a social position, also known as a ‘station’ in society. Of course, not all statuses of an individual carry similar weight in determining the social position—the ‘class’–but they all influence the public image of the person. One configuration of the status set of a University Professor (Master Status) can be something like this:
Figure 7.3 Status Set of a University Professor
This totality–there may be several more (for example, brother, son, membership to other professional bodies, etc.)–constitutes the status set of this imaginary person. Each of the boxes represents a status, and one may say that the combined weightage of some of these statuses gives this person a social position–a standing in society, a particular station. Each of these statuses has both rights and obligations. Some of these obligations are towards the others in the social system from where the status is granted. The vertical or horizontal7 listing constitutes a status set. And the counter statuses associated with each status block signify the range of obligations that a status occupant has by virtue of this occupancy. This is shown in Figure 7.4.8
Figure 7.4 Schematic Diagram of Merton’s Social Structure Elements
Source: Charles P. Loomis and Zona K. Loomis, Modern Social Theories (1963: 282)
For purposes of simplifying the Mertonian concept of status set, Loomis and Loomis have taken only four statuses of an actor. One of the statuses is that of a University teacher that involves, again as illustration, obligations vis-à-vis other (i) teachers, and (ii) students. Roles associated with these two counter statuses constitute a role-set. To quote Merton:
[A] particular social status involves, not a single associated role, but an array of associated roles. This is a basic characteristic of social structure. This fact of structure can be registered by a distinctive term role-set, by which I mean that complement of role relationships which persons have by virtue of occupying a particular social status. As one example, the single status of medical student entails not only the role of a student in relation to his teachers, but also an array of other roles relating the occupant of that status to other students, nurses, physicians, social workers, medical technicians etc. Again: the status of public school teacher has its distinctive role-set, relating the teacher to his pupils, to colleagues, the school principal and superintendent, the Board of Education, and, on frequent occasion, to local patriotic organizations, to professional organization of teachers, Parent-Teachers Associations, and the like (Merton, 1964: 369).
In this sense,
[T]he role-set differs from the structural pattern which has long been identified by sociologists as that of ‘multiple roles’. For in the established usage, multiple roles refer to the complex of roles associated, not with a single social status, but with the various statuses (often, in differing institutional spheres) in which individuals find themselves-the roles, for example, connected with the distinct statuses of teacher, wife, mother, Catholic, Republican, and so on. We designate this complement of social statuses of an individual as his status-set, each of the statuses in turn having its distinctive role-set …. The concepts of role-set and of status-set are structural and refer to parts of the social structure at a particular time.. The patterned arrangements of role-sets, status-sets and status-sequences can be held to comprise the social structure (ibid.: 369-70).
… operating social structures must somehow manage to organize these sets and sequences of statuses and roles so that an appreciable degree of social order obtains, sufficient to enable most of the people most of the time to go about their business of social life without having to improvise adjustments anew in each newly confronted situation (ibid).
These refinements of the concepts of status and role are useful in the analysis of the processes of integration. These elaborations lead a researcher to attempt answers to questions such as:
- ‘Which social processes tend to make for disturbance or disruption of the role-set, creating conditions of structural instability?’
- ‘Through which social mechanisms do the roles in the role-set become articulated so that conflict among them becomes less than it would otherwise be?’9In attempting to provide tentative answers to these, and similar questions, Merton (1964: 371–79)10 identified some of the mechanisms that help to reduce the situations of conflict in a social system. These are:
Figure 7.5 Status Set and Role Set
Source: Macionis, 2005: 143
Mechanism of differing intensity of role involvement among those in the role-set. In any situation of interaction, the involvement of people varies, and hence different persons in the role set participate with different degrees of intensity. For example, in a parent–teacher association of the school, the involvement of each parent is mainly related to his or her child, whereas the Principal of the school has a much greater involvement as this happens to be her key status. In such a situation, conflicts may occur between the Principal and the leaders from among the parents. At home, parents have equal involvement vis-é-vis their children; and thus, there is greater possibility of a role conflict.
Mechanism of differences in the power of those involved in a role-set. This is an extension of the same point. In an association, office holders enjoy more power than the ordinary members, and this reduces the chances of conflict.
Mechanism of insulating role-activities from observability by members of the role-set. When the role performance is disallowed to be observed, those not observing are prevented from commenting—favourably or unfavourably. A class-room is a good example. The role of the teacher is observable only to the students in the class, but not to other colleagues; hence, there is less chance of conflict between teachers on matters related to the classroom.
Mechanism making for observability by members of the role-set of their conflicting demands upon the occupants of a social status. In those circumstances where conflicting demands are made by members of the role-set, the best option for the status occupant is to make his/her performance observable to others in the role set to appreciate his/her dilemma. A teacher seen checking homework in the staff room makes it observable to other peers that the party concerned is busy, and not able to attend to their other demands. (It sends the message: Don‘t you see how much work I have? How can I accept additional responsibility?)
Mechanism of social support by others in similar social statuses with similar difficulties of coping with an unintegrated role-set. People of identical status suffering from a common set of conflicting demands from other members of the role-set organize themselves to resist the conflicting demands made by others in the role-set.
Abridging the role-set, involving disruption of role-relationships. Another mechanism related to limiting the size of the role-set so that the volume of demands made and the cluster of differing demands become manageable.
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