in this screencast we're going to continue looking at the concepts that represent the building blocks of sociologies of discipline by focusing this time on the concept of status in the last three screencasts we've been looking at the concept of culture and analyzing the way in which culture is transmitted uh through processes of socialization and social control and in the next two screencasts we're going to start to explore uh another key question that's Central to the discipline of Sociology um how are individuals assigned their standing their respect and their influence in their society and we're going to look at two concepts to analyze that question in this screencast we're going to look at status and then in the next screencast we're going to look at the concept of power as usual try and make lots of notes as we go through these ideas and let's start with the definition of status so a status is a person's social standing so it's about the position that they occupy uh within a social group or within society as a whole and also it's about the amount of prestige or respect that's associated with that particular position now most societies tend to be fairly hierarchical which is an issue that we're exploring a lot more detail when we look at the concept of stratification so because Society and social groups tend to be based on social hierarchies we can talk about individuals occupying either a high status position or a low status position the other distinction I want to draw your attention to in this screencast is this distinction between ascribe social status and Achieve social status so an ascribe social status is where an individual's position in society is very much fixed by the social characteristics with which they're born and these characteristics might be a person's gender it might be a person's ethnicity it might be the social standing of their family in contrast an achieve social status is one that's earned so it's based on uh individual Merit is based on the performance qualification or attainment of an individual person so the royal family is obviously a good example of an ascribed status position within Britain it's a position that people are born into it's based on the hereditary principle whereas an achieve status is something that you earn uh during your life and is a reflection of your hard work uh and your talent and the term that sociologists use to describe uh a society based on a chap status is they use the term meritocracy okay before we finish I just want to briefly mention a couple of uses of the term status in the sociological literature and the first book I want to mention briefly is this book The Spirit Level uh very influential book published a few years ago by Richard Wilkinson and Kate picket and the central argument at the spirit level is Big income inequality so big gaps between the rich and the poor are a bad thing for society and and leads to a whole range of social problems and the reason that inequality is such a bad thing for society according to Wilson and picket is mainly because they believe that it makes status differences much more extreme and uh salian and this generates uh a higher level of insecurity uh about about our worth and about where we stand uh within the social hierarchy so according to Wilson and picket we should dislike inequality we should dislike uh living in a society where there are big gaps between the rich and the poor because it produces status anxiety and they believe that such anxiety in turn leads to chronic stress it leads to health problems and other undesirable social outcomes so in unequal societies where there are higher levels of status anxiety uh the result is that the members of that Society are more likely to feel stressed and deprived uh they're more likely to get depressed uh they're more likely uh to smoke uh to drink to take drugs to overeat or even to engage in violent behavior and another argument that Wilson and picket make that's connected to the cartoon that you can see on the screen is they argue that uh status anxiety also leads to conspicuous displays of consumption so buying fancy cars big houses luxury clothes all of which serve no obvious social function apart from reassurance about one's place within a social hierarchy and another study that makes a similar argument about status anxiety and frustration and one that we look at in more detail when we tackle the youth culture topic is a very old sociological study from America uh based on the work of Albert Cohen and Albert Cohen talks about uh status frustration so his argument is that the inability uh to gain uh high social status can lead to frustration and anger and he argues this can manifest itself in a variety of ways this can lead to delinquency this can lead to uh the development of counter school subcultures so Cohen's argument is that groups who find themselves stuck uh towards the bottom of social hierarchies are much more likely to resolve their status frustration by rejecting the success goals that are part of the mainstream culture and replacing them with an alternative set of goals that they can realistically achieve within a delinquent subculture okay so in this screencast we've started to look at how individuals are assigned their standing and their respect within Society uh what we're going to do in the next screencast is have a look at this issue about influence and we're going to do that by looking at the concept of power