Middle‐Status Conformity: Theoretical Restatement and Empirical Demonstration in Two Markets

Abstract

This article aims to reestablish the long-standing conjecture that conformity is high at the middle and low at either end of a status order. On a theoretical level, the article clarifies the basis for expecting such an inverted U-shaped curve, taking care to specify key scope conditions on the social-psychological orientations of the actors, the characteristics of the status structure, and the nature of the relevant actions. It also validates the conjecture in two settings that both meet such conditions and allow for the elimination of confounding effects: the Silicon Valley legal services market and the market for investment advice. These results inform our understanding of how an actor's status interacts with her role incumbency to produce differential conformity in settings that meet the specified scope conditions.

Squeezed in the middle: The middle status trade creativity for focus.

“…Those with middle status may be an important but overlooked segment of the social hierarchy in modern psychological research. Indeed, the idea of middle status conformity was intriguing but largely forgotten in social psychology by the early 1970's (Phillips & Zuckerman, 2001). And, though the concept of middle status conformity has attracted some attention in the sociological literature (Phillips & Zuckerman 2001), that work has not yet addressed or identified the underlying psychological process that causes individuals with middle status to more readily conform to a group majority.…”

“…We suggest that high status individuals may be more confident in their social acceptance and hence, assume they have more leeway to take risk. Low status individuals, on the other hand, may think they have less to lose since moving from "low" to "lower" may not represent as meaningful or significant a change in status position as moving from a middle status position to a low status position (Phillips & Zuckerman 2001). Hence, when the status hierarchy is unstable, individuals MIDDLE STATUS AND CREATIVITY 36 with middle status may be less likely to suggest creative solutions than individuals at the top or the bottom of the status hierarchy.…”

Robust Identities or Nonentities? Typecasting in the Feature‐Film Labor Market

“…6 The market for attorneys displays similar patterns though they are somewhat looser. The critical boundary in this market divides higher status corporate work, which is generally open only to graduates of elite law schools, and lower status work for individual clients performed by graduates of lower-tier schools (e.g., Heinz and Laumann 1982;Phillips and Zuckerman 2001). Each of these sectors contains a wide variety of specialties, such as bankruptcy and patent law on the one hand and family and personal injury law on the other, which channel subsequent career mobility.…”

“…To see how typecasting operates, we consider the interaction between employer and potential employee as an interface between a set of candidates who compete with one another to be selected by an audience (Zuckerman 1999;Phillips and Zuckerman 2001;cf., White 2002). In this role-relationship, audience members engage in two ideal-typical stages of choice, which correspond to two phases of candidate behavior.…”

“…As Phillips and Zuckerman's (2001) argue, once having gained admission to a market or interface, better-established candidates (for which, tenure is a proxy) can afford to deviate from the behavior that typically defines members of a given category. 11 Such deviance is especially likely in labor markets where generalists are regarded as superior to specialists because the former may often have an advantage over the latter even in a given specialty.…”