In this ethnography of the everyday life of contemporary Korea, Denise Lett argues that South Korea’s contemporary urban middle class not only exhibits upper-class characteristics but also that this reflects a culturally inherited disposition of Koreans to seek high status. Lett shows that Koreans have adapted traditional ways of asserting high status to modern life, and analyzes strategies for claiming high status in terms of occupation, family, lifestyle, education, and marriage.
The Psychology of Social Status outlines the foundational insights, key advances, and developments that have been made in the field thus far. The goal of this volume is to provide an in-depth exploration of the psychology of human status, by reviewing each of the major lines of theoretical and empirical work that have been conducted in this vein. Organized thematically, the volume covers the following areas: - An overview of several prominent overarching theoretical perspectives that have shaped much of the current research on social status. - Examination of the personality, demographic, situational, emotional, and cultural underpinnings of status attainment, addressing questions about why and how people attain status. - Identification of the intra- and inter-personal benefits and costs of possessing and lacking status. - Emerging research on the biological and bodily manifestation of status attainment - A broad review of available research methods for measuring and experimentally manipulating social status A key component of this volume is its interdisciplinary focus. Research on social status cuts across a variety of academic fields, including psychology, sociology, anthropology, organizational science others; thus the chapter authors are drawn from a similarly wide-range of disciplines. Encompassing the current state of knowledge in a thriving and proliferating field, The Psychology of Social Status is a fascinating and comprehensive resource for researchers, students, policy-makers, and others interested in learning about the complex nature of social status, hierarchy, dominance, and power.
Although academics have never lacked for critics, publications on the profession tend to be either popularized polemics, which are engaging but misleading, or scholarly analyses, which are intellectually responsible but of little interest to anyone but specialists. In Pursuit of Knowledge offers an alternative: a unique portrait of academic life that should appeal to both experts and a general audience. Drawing on a wide range of disciplines, including higher education, history, law, sociology, economics, and literature, the book focuses on the ways in which the pursuit of status has undermined the pursuit of knowledge. Deborah Rhode argues that both individual scholars and institutions in higher education are caught in an arms race of reputation. The result has been to skew priorities in scholarship, erode commitments to teaching, compromise efforts of public intellectuals, and impede effectiveness in administration. The book offers several solutions to counter these pervasive problems in our research institutions. Rhode makes a case for increasing accountability and realigning reward systems. She argues that what is needed is a greater sense of responsibility among universities and their faculties to narrow the gap between academic ideals and practices. In Pursuit of Knowledge is meticulously researched and elegantly written. It is also exceptionally entertaining in its use of quotations culled from over a hundred academic novels, including works by Kingsley Amis, Saul Bellow, David Lodge, and C.P. Snow.(For example, from P.G. Wodehouse's The Girl in Blue, "The Agee womantold us for three quarters of an hourhow she came to write her beastly book, when a simple apology was all that was required.") The result is a highly readable but also deeply reflective analysis of the academic profession.
A master class in achieving and sustaining excellence, even in the most challenging of times—from the host of The Learning Leader Show and author of Welcome to Management Millions of business professionals aspire to become effective leaders. But for hardworking, growth-oriented top performers who are always looking to improve and for rigorous thinkers who are never quite satisfied with the status quo, the true goal is the lifelong pursuit of excellence. Leadership advisor Ryan Hawk has interviewed hundreds of the most productive achievers in the world on his acclaimed podcast, The Learning Leader Show, to discover the best practices for pursuing and sustaining excellence. He found a pattern of uncommon behaviors that set these stellar individuals apart. By following their examples, you will learn how to: Commit to yourself and the process―and build purpose, focus, and discipline Develop resilience to face new challenges―and find inspiration for the long haul Seek guidance―and lead others to new heights Meet the moment―and make the most of every opportunity to excel Create a trusted group of advisors―and become a lifelong learner Packed with specific actions to take, experiments to run, and tools to analyze what works best for you, this uncompromisingly practical guide will inspire, challenge, support, and empower you to become your very best. Put mindsets into action and turn behaviors into habits with The Pursuit of Excellence.
The Declaration of Independence claims that individuals need liberty to pursue happiness, but provides little guidance on the “what” of happiness. Happiness studies and liberal theory are incomplete guides. Happiness studies offer insights into what makes people happy but happiness policy risks becoming doctrinaire. Liberal theory is better on personal liberty, but weak on the “what” of happiness. My argument is that American novelists are surer guides on the pursuit of happiness. Treated as political thinkers, my book offers a close reading of four American novelists, Tom Wolfe, Walker Percy, Edith Wharton, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, and their critique of the pursuit of happiness. With a critical and friendly eye, they present the shortcomings of pursuing happiness in a liberal nation but also present alternatives and correctives possible in America. Our novelists point us toward each other in friendship as our greatest resource to guide us towards happiness.
This book focuses on how firms should engage ethical choices in developing and deploying digital technologies. Digital technologies are devices that rely on rapidly accelerating digital sensing, storage, and transmission capabilities to intervene in human processes. While the ethics of technology is analyzed across disciplines from science and technology studies (STS), engineering, computer science, critical management studies, and law, less attention is paid to the role that firms and managers play in the design, development, and dissemination of technology across communities and within their firm. This book covers the topic from three angles. First, it illuminates diverse facets of the intersection of technology and business ethics. Second, it uses themes to explore what business ethics offers to the study of technology and, third, what technology studies offers to the field of business ethics. Each field brings expertise that, together, improves our understanding of the ethical implications of technology. Chapter “A Micro-ethnographic Study of Big Data-Based Innovation in the Financial Services Sector: Governance, Ethics and Organisational Practices", chapter ”The Challenges of Algorithm-Based HR Decision-Making for Personal Integrity" and chapter “Female CEOs and Core Earnings Quality: New Evidence on the Ethics Versus Risk-Aversion Puzzle" are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license via link.springer.com.
Nauru is often figured as an anomaly in the international order. This book offers a new account of Nauru's imperial history and examines its significance to the histories of international law. Drawing on theories of jurisdiction and bureaucracy, it reconstructs four shifts in Nauru's status – from German protectorate, to League of Nations C Mandate, to UN Trust Territory, to sovereign state – as a means of redescribing the transition from the nineteenth century imperial order to the twentieth century state system. The book argues that as international status shifts, imperial form accretes: as Nauru's status shifted, what occurred at the local level was a gradual process of bureaucratisation. Two conclusions emerge from this argument. The first is that imperial administration in Nauru produced the Republic's post-independence 'failures'. The second is that international recognition of sovereign status is best understood as marking a beginning, not an end, of the process of decolonisation.
Status is ubiquitous in modern life, yet our understanding of its role as a driver of inequality is limited. In Status, sociologist and social psychologist Cecilia Ridgeway examines how this ancient and universal form of inequality influences today’s ostensibly meritocratic institutions and why it matters. Ridgeway illuminates the complex ways in which status affects human interactions as we work together towards common goals, such as in classroom discussions, family decisions, or workplace deliberations. Ridgeway’s research on status has important implications for our understanding of social inequality. Distinct from power or wealth, status is prized because it provides affirmation from others and affords access to valuable resources. Ridgeway demonstrates how the conferral of status inevitably contributes to differing life outcomes for individuals, with impacts on pay, wealth creation, and health and wellbeing. Status beliefs are widely held views about who is better in society than others in terms of esteem, wealth, or competence. These beliefs confer advantages which can exacerbate social inequality. Ridgeway notes that status advantages based on race, gender, and class—such as the belief that white men are more competent than others—are the most likely to increase inequality by facilitating greater social and economic opportunities. Ridgeway argues that status beliefs greatly enhance higher status groups’ ability to maintain their advantages in resources and access to positions of power and make lower status groups less likely to challenge the status quo. Many lower status people will accept their lower status when given a baseline level of dignity and respect—being seen, for example, as poor but hardworking. She also shows that people remain willfully blind to status beliefs and their effects because recognizing them can lead to emotional discomfort. Acknowledging the insidious role of status in our lives would require many higher-status individuals to accept that they may not have succeeded based on their own merit; many lower-status individuals would have to acknowledge that they may have been discriminated against. Ridgeway suggests that inequality need not be an inevitable consequence of our status beliefs. She shows how status beliefs can be subverted—as when we reject the idea that all racial and gender traits are fixed at birth, thus refuting the idea that women and people of color are less competent than their male and white counterparts. This important new book demonstrates the pervasive influence of status on social inequality and suggests ways to ensure that it has a less detrimental impact on our lives.
"Subtly altered how I see the world." —Michelle Goldberg, New York Times “[Status and Culture] consistently posits theories I'd never previously considered that instantly feel obvious.” —Chuck Klosterman, author of The Nineties “Why are you the way that you are? Status and Culture explains nearly everything about the things you choose to be—and how the society we live in takes shape in the process.” —B.J. Novak, writer and actor Solving the long-standing mysteries of culture—from the origin of our tastes and identities, to the perpetual cycles of fashions and fads—through a careful exploration of the fundamental human desire for status All humans share a need to secure their social standing, and this universal motivation structures our behavior, forms our tastes, determines how we live, and ultimately shapes who we are. We can use status, then, to explain why some things become “cool,” how stylistic innovations arise, and why there are constant changes in clothing, music, food, sports, slang, travel, hairstyles, and even dog breeds. In Status and Culture, W. David Marx weaves together the wisdom from history, psychology, sociology, anthropology, economics, philosophy, linguistics, semiotics, cultural theory, literary theory, art history, media studies, and neuroscience to demonstrate exactly how individual status seeking creates our cultural ecosystem. Marx examines three fundamental questions: Why do individuals cluster around arbitrary behaviors and take deep meaning from them? How do distinct styles, conventions, and sensibilities emerge? Why do we change behaviors over time and why do some behaviors stick around? The answers then provide new perspectives for understanding the seeming “weightlessness” of internet culture. Status and Culture is a book that will appeal to business people, students, creators, and anyone who has ever wondered why things become popular, why their own preferences change over time, and how identity plays out in contemporary society. Readers of this book will walk away with deep and lasting knowledge of the often secret rules of how culture really works.
