“Status is an important book, both as a statement of the author’s accumulated insights about status in general and as an explanation of our current predicaments. Cecilia Ridgeway is a major figure in the hot area of interpersonal and small group enactment of status, power, and hierarchy. Ridgeway was one who came early to this topic, and she has guided many subsequent efforts. The book represents her life’s work, to a great extent. Because she is so central, the book will be required reading for anyone serious about this domain. This lays out the Ridgeway theory and research program, all in one place and from the source herself, in her prime. Status is the work of a pro: readable, authoritative, written at the right level, with the audience in mind. Readers will benefit from the logical argument and the collected citations.”
—SUSAN T. FISKE, Eugene Higgins Professor and professor of psychology and public affairs, Princeton University
“By integrating cultural schemas into an influential theoretical framework, Cecilia Ridgeway’s book marks the culminating point of the status expectation theory tradition which has had a considerable influence in American social psychology. Status represents a significant broadening of the analytical toolkit we will draw on to make sense of this aspect of inequality and captures Ridgeway’s most lasting contributions.”
—MICHÈLE LAMONT, professor of sociology and of African and African American studies and the Robert I. Goldman Professor of European Studies, Harvard University
“Cecilia Ridgeway’s treatment, Status, is essential reading for anyone who seriously wants to understand why resources are allocated on the basis of social status. The insight that status hierarchies necessarily emerge from social coordination is crucial, as are Ridgeway’s novel ideas about how status embeds itself in our culture as a grammar"
—EZRA ZUCKERMAN SIVAN, deputy dean and Alvin J. Siteman (1948) Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship, MIT Sloan School of Management