What do you think is the best example of this kind of principle at work? My first guess would be academia, but I can also think of a dozen reasons why the prestige system in academia is flawed.
My intuition is that there is really no shining example of the prestige economy in the real world—but whether this has to do with the difficulty of implementation, or a flaw with the idea itself, I’m not sure.
There can be many flaws in implementation, and we probably won’t find a perfect one, but academia seems like a decent example. It has a goal (research and education), and it assigns status (academic functions) to people who contribute to that goal, and the status comes with certain benefits (salary) and powers (over students) which means other people will recognize it as a status.
If you spend a lot of time hanging out with professors and learn all their buzzwords, but you will do no research nor teaching, you are not going to become a professor, i.e. you are not able to out-status them within the academia.
Another example would be meritocratic open-source projects, where people are respected according to their contributions to the project.
Or perhaps a sales department, where people are rewarded depending on their sales.
It has a goal (research and education), and it assigns status (academic functions) to people who contribute to that goal, and the status comes with certain benefits (salary) and powers (over students) which means other people will recognize it as a status.
How is that different from pretty much any job? Let’s take ditch-digging.
It has a goal (digging ditches), and it assigns status (becoming a foreman, then a manager) to people who contribute to that goal, and the status comes with certain benefits (salary) and powers (over workers) which means other people will recognize it as a status.
If you spend a lot of time hanging out with ditch-diggers and learn all their buzzwords, but you will do no digging of ditches, you are not going to become a ditch-digger, i.e. you are not able to out-status them within the ditch-digging world.
I don’t think anyone was claiming it doesn’t apply to pretty much any job. (In the original context, the point was that it does apply to pretty much any job, and to a host of other things besides.)
It will apply better to some jobs than others. It needs
the people doing that job to form a community in which social status is actually meaningful
mere membership of the community to be seen by its members as conferring status
doing the job effectively to lead to promotion to a position in which one can do it better
(preferably) status within that community to have some currency elsewhere.
Those are all true for academia. There is definitely such a thing as the academic community, its members relate to one another socially as well as professionally, academics tend to think highly of themselves as a group, promotion means better opportunities for furthering academic research (oneself or by organizing subordinates and taking some credit for their work), and—at least in the nice middle-class circles in which academics tend to move—there’s some broader cachet to being, say, a professor.
I think they’re less true for ditch-digging. So far as I know, there isn’t the same sort of widely-spread confraternity of ditch-diggers that there is of academics. I’ve not heard that ditch-diggers see themselves as having higher status than non-ditch-diggers. I think a lot of ditch-diggers are casual labourers with no real prospects of promotion, though I confess I don’t exactly have my finger on the pulse of ditch-digging career progression. And there are few social circles in which introducing yourself as a ditch-digger will make people look up to you.
So yeah, this structure applies to things other than academia, but it does seem like it applies better to academia than to the other example you offered.
We could swing in the other direction and consider hedge fund managers instead of ditch-diggers if you worry that ditch-diggers are too low status :-)
However I think the issue is a bit different. The original question was how to build a community successfully driven by status. Once we switch to jobs we are talking about money and power—pure status becomes secondary.
Besides, academia seems to me to be a poor example. Its parts where advancement doesn’t give you much in the way of money and power—that is, social sciences—became quite dysfunctional and the chasing of status leads to bad things like an ever-growing pile of shit research being published as “science”.
Once we switch to jobs we are talking about money and power—pure status becomes secondary.
Possibly, though I suspect status is more important relative to money in motivating employees than is commonly thought.
Its parts where advancement doesn’t give you much in the way of money and power—that is, social sciences [...]
I’m not sure you get a lot more money and power from advancement in other areas of academia. (Unless you count coaching the football team, in US universities. Plenty of money there.) It seems to me that there are better explanations if the hard sciences are less dysfunctional than the soft.
Whether things like
an ever-growing pile of shit research being published as “science”
are evidence that the academic community isn’t driven successfully (whether by status or by something else) depends on what you take to be the actual goals of academia as an institution. I agree that if we take those goals to be research that actually uncovers truths, and education that actually improves the minds and the lives of the educated, it’s debatable how well academia does.
I have no experience with professional ditch-digging, so I can’t comment on that. My job experience is mostly software development, and in many companies the people who actually create the software are near the bottom of the status ladder. (Which I guess is okay, because the actual goal is making money; creating quality software is just an instrumental goal which can be sacrificied for the higher goals at any moment.)
What do you think is the best example of this kind of principle at work? My first guess would be academia, but I can also think of a dozen reasons why the prestige system in academia is flawed.
My intuition is that there is really no shining example of the prestige economy in the real world—but whether this has to do with the difficulty of implementation, or a flaw with the idea itself, I’m not sure.
There can be many flaws in implementation, and we probably won’t find a perfect one, but academia seems like a decent example. It has a goal (research and education), and it assigns status (academic functions) to people who contribute to that goal, and the status comes with certain benefits (salary) and powers (over students) which means other people will recognize it as a status.
If you spend a lot of time hanging out with professors and learn all their buzzwords, but you will do no research nor teaching, you are not going to become a professor, i.e. you are not able to out-status them within the academia.
Another example would be meritocratic open-source projects, where people are respected according to their contributions to the project.
Or perhaps a sales department, where people are rewarded depending on their sales.
How is that different from pretty much any job? Let’s take ditch-digging.
It has a goal (digging ditches), and it assigns status (becoming a foreman, then a manager) to people who contribute to that goal, and the status comes with certain benefits (salary) and powers (over workers) which means other people will recognize it as a status.
If you spend a lot of time hanging out with ditch-diggers and learn all their buzzwords, but you will do no digging of ditches, you are not going to become a ditch-digger, i.e. you are not able to out-status them within the ditch-digging world.
I don’t think anyone was claiming it doesn’t apply to pretty much any job. (In the original context, the point was that it does apply to pretty much any job, and to a host of other things besides.)
It will apply better to some jobs than others. It needs
the people doing that job to form a community in which social status is actually meaningful
mere membership of the community to be seen by its members as conferring status
doing the job effectively to lead to promotion to a position in which one can do it better
(preferably) status within that community to have some currency elsewhere.
Those are all true for academia. There is definitely such a thing as the academic community, its members relate to one another socially as well as professionally, academics tend to think highly of themselves as a group, promotion means better opportunities for furthering academic research (oneself or by organizing subordinates and taking some credit for their work), and—at least in the nice middle-class circles in which academics tend to move—there’s some broader cachet to being, say, a professor.
I think they’re less true for ditch-digging. So far as I know, there isn’t the same sort of widely-spread confraternity of ditch-diggers that there is of academics. I’ve not heard that ditch-diggers see themselves as having higher status than non-ditch-diggers. I think a lot of ditch-diggers are casual labourers with no real prospects of promotion, though I confess I don’t exactly have my finger on the pulse of ditch-digging career progression. And there are few social circles in which introducing yourself as a ditch-digger will make people look up to you.
So yeah, this structure applies to things other than academia, but it does seem like it applies better to academia than to the other example you offered.
We could swing in the other direction and consider hedge fund managers instead of ditch-diggers if you worry that ditch-diggers are too low status :-)
However I think the issue is a bit different. The original question was how to build a community successfully driven by status. Once we switch to jobs we are talking about money and power—pure status becomes secondary.
Besides, academia seems to me to be a poor example. Its parts where advancement doesn’t give you much in the way of money and power—that is, social sciences—became quite dysfunctional and the chasing of status leads to bad things like an ever-growing pile of shit research being published as “science”.
Possibly, though I suspect status is more important relative to money in motivating employees than is commonly thought.
I’m not sure you get a lot more money and power from advancement in other areas of academia. (Unless you count coaching the football team, in US universities. Plenty of money there.) It seems to me that there are better explanations if the hard sciences are less dysfunctional than the soft.
Whether things like
are evidence that the academic community isn’t driven successfully (whether by status or by something else) depends on what you take to be the actual goals of academia as an institution. I agree that if we take those goals to be research that actually uncovers truths, and education that actually improves the minds and the lives of the educated, it’s debatable how well academia does.
I think power is more important than commonly thought, but I accept that it’s not easy to disentangle it from status.
You do in some, notably law and business. And yes, I’m not saying that’s the main explanation why soft sciences do so much worse than hard ones.
I have no experience with professional ditch-digging, so I can’t comment on that. My job experience is mostly software development, and in many companies the people who actually create the software are near the bottom of the status ladder. (Which I guess is okay, because the actual goal is making money; creating quality software is just an instrumental goal which can be sacrificied for the higher goals at any moment.)