Third parties and status position: How the characteristics of status systems matter

Abstract

For organizations, as for individuals, status position governs access to a variety of valued rewards. To uncover the causes of status position, recent research has focused on the relationship between the attributes of individual organizations and their standing in a status hierarchy. Although this research has made valuable contributions to our understanding of both the consequences of status to organizations and the determinants of status, its emphasis on organizational attributes has not addressed how the characteristics of status systems shape the nature and distribution of these positions. Drawing on data from 134 in-depth interviews with law school administrators and faculty, this article investigates how variations in the characteristics of status systems influence status processes. Concentrating on the theoretically underdeveloped role that third parties play in status systems, I examine how a third party change -the emergence and increasing popularity of the U.S. News and World Report's law school rankings -has had powerful effects on the shape of the status hierarchy of legal education as well as the values that underlie this hierarchy. These changes have, in turn, transformed the landscape of positions that are available to actors, the process by which these positions are allocated among various actors, and the bases upon which this allocation is carried out.The effect of status position on social actors has been a long-standing and wide-ranging subject of sociological inquiry. With a lineage that dates back at least to the classic works of Veblen and Weber, the consequences of status have been carefully detailed across a spectrum of levels of analysis, stretching from individual interactions in small task groups to cross-national comparisons of occupational status attainment and mobility.One's standing in a status hierarchy, as organizational scholars have amply demonstrated during the last decade, is consequential for organizational as well as individual actors, and the outcomes associated with an organization's status position have been shown to be varied and far-reaching. High status not only provides a competitive advantage for firms as it signals the quality of the firm's products (Fombrun, 1996;Fombrun & Shanley, 1990) and thus "lowers the cost of producing and selling a good of a given quality" (Podolny, Theor Soc (2006) 35: 299-321

Status Distinctions in Interaction: Social Selection and Exclusion at an Elite Nightclub

“…Such findings suggest that processes of interpersonal evaluation and status conferral are dependent not only on structural and contextual features of the status system (see Sauder 2006) but also the properties of the particular actors being evaluated at a given time. The way in which doormen evaluated worth and conferred status varied by a) the constellation of cues displayed by a specific actor, and b) the meanings they attributed to a given level of a cue for members of a particular social group.…”

College Rankings as an Interorganizational Dependency: Establishing the Foundation for Strategic and Institutional Accounts

“…This paper thus provides empirical support for the resource-based assumptions underlying previous qualitative and conceptual work, which has analyzed the strategic and organizational responses of universities to ranking systems (e.g., Elsbach and Kramer 1996;Espeland and Sauder 2007;Sauder and Fine 2008). Reputation is clearly an organizational resource in higher education that has been, and is increasingly defined by, the formal structure of rankings (Bastedo and Bowman 2010;Sauder 2006). The results described here allow us to go further to specify the organizational conditions under which rankings can be predicted to influence varying resource flows.…”

“…From an institutional perspective, rankings constitute a third-party status system that form a significant part of the normative environment of universities (Rao 1994;Sauder 2006). Powerful institutional effects are created by third-party organizations in the organizational field, especially those that seek to measure and evaluate others from whom they have organizational distance.…”

“…We would expect that universities that better conform to the values and norms of rankings systems to garner greater support for their research and development efforts from government, industry, and foundations (DiMaggio 1983). We would also expect that universities that receive the imprimatur of third-party status providers like U.S. News and World Report will be able to charge higher tuitions to students, independent of actual changes in quality (Sauder 2006). We would similarly expect alumni to respond to these sanctions by increasing the likelihood and amount of their donations.…”

Getting on the Front Page: Organizational Reputation, Status Signals, and the Impact of U.S. News and World Report on Student Decisions

“…Bastedo and Bowman (in press) have shown that college rankings affect college deans' and presidents' perceptions of institutional quality. In addition, rankings have a strong influence on internal decision making at professional schools, since administrators are sensitive to the strong reaction to various rankings within their own markets (Elsbach and Kramer 1996;Espeland and Sauder 2007;Sauder 2006). Decision theory, however, would suggest that these high-level administrators are much less likely than students and parents to be persuaded, since administrators possess a great deal of information about peer institutions, and many of them believe the rankings are quite flawed (Finder 2007).…”