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This chapter explores the consequence of taking Rawls' concerns about the strains of commitment to their logical extreme. If there is no external enforcement at all, so that all agreements must be self-policing, it is shown that deals reached in the original position will generate an egalitarian outcome, as Rawls would wish. The conclusions are broadly consistent with the class of laboratory results that psychologists refer to as “modern equity theory”. The concept of an empathy equilibrium is used to predict the standard of interpersonal comparison needed to operate an egalitarian norm that will evolve in the medium run. The manner in which this standard should be expected to respond to need, effort, ability, and status is then explored.

This chapter argues that social emotions derived from power and perceived social status generate a skewed perception of the out-group, resulting in residual negative affect and the creation of a vertical distance, which in turn hinders intergroup reconciliation. Literature within social psychology that describes intergroup power as outcome control, as well as models of intergroup emotions that establish residual negative affect, are reviewed. The literature on perceptions of out-groups that create an immutable vertical distance are then considered. Finally, some possible solutions and policy implications are discussed.

The first part of this chapter discusses retrenchment, recent institutional changes, and senior civil servants in Sweden; it attributes the recent changes in the senior civil service to the budgetary crisis of the state and the emergence of a less interventionalist control regime, in which the heyday of state‐driven economic and social change has gone. The main source of uncertainty now concerns the final destination of the rapid changes in many core aspects of Swedish politics and public administration. The different sections of the chapter look at: the size and structure of the Swedish civil service; ranks of senior civil servants; systems of recruitment and promotion; party membership among senior civil servants; inter‐ministerial mobility of civil servants; status in the civil service; the social and educational backgrounds of top officials; informal contacts across ministries and between ministries and agencies; the relationship between national and sub‐national officials and those working in agencies; political party policies towards the civil service; and the social status of the senior civil service.

In France, the notion of a senior civil servant is a social rather than a legal one, and senior civil servants may be defined through their role as privileged partners of political power and participation in government decision‐making; they are a heterogeneous group of senior managers of the state public administration, whose members share neither the same careers nor prestige nor professional culture, and regard themselves generally as intellectuals rather than as managers. The relationship between senior civil servants and politicians is more ambiguous and closer in the 1990s than it was during the 1960s, and the politicization of the senior civil service has been considerably strengthened, but senior civil servants still consider themselves as representing the permanence of the state, and are still reluctant to talk freely about their political involvements. Whatever the social changes that have occurred during the last 15 years and whatever the political changes, the senior civil service remains strong. An overview of the higher French civil service has to take into account three variables that interact simultaneously: the fundamentally individualistic culture acquired during years of professional training; the decisive role of the grand corps in the career path and in the representation of what is ‘good administrative work’; and the privileged social rank of the higher civil service. This chapter presents the main characteristics of senior public managers in France by trying to highlight signs of an evolution since the 1960s; the different sections look at recruitment and promotion methods, the political activity and mobility of senior civil servants, the internal hierarchy of the civil service, the sociological characteristics of senior public managers, the professional relationships of senior civil servants, the absence of any higher civil service policy, and the debated question of the erosion of higher civil service social status.

Formally, the higher civil service of Greece is a powerful group, but it also has a legitimate claim to relative powerlessness. Its subservient role is correlated with the perennial and problematic features of the organizational structure of the Greek public administration, which, in certain respects, is pre‐modern. Starts by distinguishing the main features of the top management level of the Greek civil service, pointing out the minor role played by Greek civil servants compared with their counterparts in other European countries. Goes on to describe the ranks of civil servants, the methods of recruitment and promotion to the Greek higher civil service, and the interdepartmental mobility of civil servants. Further sections discuss status in the civil service, the social background characteristics and social status of top officials, organizations and informal contacts across ministries, and political party policies towards the higher civil service.

This chapter tracks the changes in political support by generations and social status groups over time. The greatest decline in trust in government and political institutions has come among the better-educated and higher social status, and among younger generations.

This chapter revisits debates about the gendered components of reputation in early modern England in order to question the extent to which male and female honour was incommensurable in line with the sexual double standard. The defamation litigation heard by the Cambridge University courts provides a good case study, since their jurisdiction was far broader than that of the church courts, which have been the previous focus of historians' debates on this issue. While the insults alleged in defamation suits suggest that reputation was more multifaceted for men than for women, there was nonetheless a considerable degree of overlap in their respective concerns, with the substance of suits depending on age and status as well as gender. It is also clear that male litigants were less concerned with proving their honesty in either sexual or economic terms than with disputing their social standing through various points of comparison with other men.

This chapter begins with a brief discussion of early studies on the social status of African American men. It identifies the psychosocial, physical and mental health challenges faced by African American men. It lays out the purpose of the book, which is to provide readers with theoretical and conceptual insights supported by empirical data on the African American male experience in dimensions heretofore only addressed in the limited scope of papers, seminar discussions, and workshops. An overview of the subsequent chapters is presented.

Honour is not simply a moral code regulating conduct, like magic or Christianity, it is a world view. Since physical courage and unwillingness to accept humiliation are essential to male honour, masculinity is closely associated with the right to violence. The French word for affront, injure, captures the sense of aggression and violence inherent in the impugning of honour: to take blood was an escalation of the exchange but it was not disproportionate to the initial offence. If pride and hubris were possessed in inverse proportion to wealth, then violence was often the only adequate means of gaining recognition of one's status. This chapter discusses disputes in France arising from social status and honour, honour as public property, and public proofs of status or recognition of honour among nobles.

This chapter examines new chances for social mobility and how village life was bureaucratized and politicized, along with the transformation of the earlier organizational forms involving kinship and social status. Industrial development and the bureaucratization of society meant the proliferation of new jobs for people in villages, even as they lost the land that had rooted them in their communities. Among the consequences were a re-stratification of village life, as prior hierarchies based on owning means of production gave way to new ones based on political position and other bases of inequality. Additional changes affected family and household, including new patterns of authority and modifications in kinship, which receded in importance as against new kinds of personalistic ties. Especially significant were changes in gender roles and generational expectations. Moreover, the bureaucratization of work changed that basic daily reality for peasants, along with the personhood ideals that had been tied to it.

This chapter addresses some of the later psychological dimensions inherent within adolescents' and adults' internalization of a poem. It sets Thomas Gray's “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” within a very specific institutional and emotional history, directing attention to the mingled pain and pleasure that can exist within the possession of a cultural object. This chapter considers how the highest-achieving elementary-school pupils might have felt when they read and recited a work that dubs the poor both unlettered and mute. Further, it speculates about the ability of the memorized poem to stay within those individuals for the remainder of their days, and to act as a constant reminder of the educational and social processes that moved them out of one class and into another—an elevation the eighteenth-century poem deems impossible.

This chapter shows how cluelessness operates in the real world and offers five explanations for cluelessness. First, cluelessness can be considered as just another kind of mental laziness. Second, to enter into another's mind, one must imagine physically entering his body, and a higher-status person finds entering a lower-status person's body repulsive. Third, clueless people rely upon and invest more in social status because it provides literal meaning in complicated situations; people not naturally talented in strategic thinking gravitate toward status-mediated interactions, such as those within hierarchical organizations, because they need the explicit structure that status provides. Fourth, cluelessness can improve one's bargaining position and fifth, entering another's mind may inevitably lead toward empathy. To illustrate the relevance of cluelessness in the real world, the chapter applies these explanations to the U.S. attack on Fallujah in 2004.

This chapter summarizes key themes and presents some final thoughts. Through close analysis of various forms of evidence—literary, epigraphic, and legal—this book demonstrated that classical Athens had a spectrum of statuses, ranging from the base chattel slave to the male citizen with full civic rights. It showed that Athenian democracy was in practice both more inclusive and more exclusive than one might expect based on its civic ideology: more inclusive in that even slaves and noncitizens “shared in” the democratic polis, more exclusive in that not all citizens were equal participants in the social, economic, and political life of the city. The book also showed the flexibility of status boundaries, seemingly in opposition to the dominant ideology of two or three status groups divided neatly from one another: slave versus free, citizen versus noncitizen, or slave versus metic versus citizen.

Like the economic field of the late eighteenth century, the religious world of early colonial Bengal was also a vast “bazaar,” a marketplace of spiritual goods, both genuine and fake, in which traders from all lands haggled and bartered; amidst this teeming market, with its host of Hindu, Muslim, Christian, and other competing factions, the Kartābhajā sect would emerge as perhaps the most successful of the various minor sects that spread among the lower classes. It is argued in this chapter that not only did the Kartābhajās emerge at a key locus and critical historical moment but they also represented a profound transformation within the older Sahajiyā tradition, which was especially well suited to this changing social context, and which offered a highly marketable set of spiritual commodities. The primary appeal of the Kartābhajās, and the main reason for their striking growth and success, lay in their remarkable capacity for synthesis; their tradition represents a rich bricolage (a method of borrowing elements from a variety of different “exoteric” traditions, while weaving them into a new esoteric synthesis that transcends them) of diverse elements, operating on at least three levels, which are examined in each of the three sections of this chapter. First, on the religious level, the Kartābhajās skilfully combine elements of esoteric Sahajiyā Tantric teachings, more orthodox Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava theology, a strong element of Sufism, and even a degree of Christian influence; second, on the social level, the Kartābhajās bring together members of all classes and social factions, rejecting caste distinctions and proclaiming the divinity of all human beings; and third, on the gender level, the Kartābhajās offered a new social space in which men and women could mix freely, even providing new opportunities for women in roles of spiritual authority. The result is a rather ingenious religious fusion – or “subversive bricolage,” which skilfully adapts and reconfigures elements from a wide range of sources – a kind of poaching or pilfering by poor lower‐class consumers in a dominated religious market that demanded the subtle use of secrecy, both, as a tactic of appropriation, and as a key social strategy or way of life.

This chapter focuses on nothoi. A nothos was defined as the child of two parents who were not legally married, hence the term's standard translation: “bastard.” Nothos status can be divided into two distinct sub-statuses of illegitimate children: (i) a child born to a citizen and a noncitizen (also called a mētroxenos if the mother was the foreigner, as was most often the case); and (ii) a child born out of wedlock to two Athenian citizen parents. In the case of recognized illegitimate children born to two unmarried citizen parents, their pure Athenian blood presumably gave them a higher status than most mixed-blood mētroxenoi. Mixed-blood illegitimate children were likely stigmatized for their impure ancestry, especially in the fourth century, when the ideology of the pureblooded Athenian became most prominent and most strongly policed.

Visual representation of instruments and musical practice has long been integral to the study of the iconology and archaeology of early music. Critical to any assessment of such evidence is an understanding of the authority of the artist, and his/her knowledge and degree of participation in musical culture. Contemporary sources reveal that music played a variety of roles in the lives and public perception of the Renaissance artists. Its most tangible manifestation was that of the artist-musician, of whom Leonardo da Vinci is one of the best-known examples. An association with courtliness was one of several markers of status conferred by musical practice. This chapter investigates the domestic setting of the artist, whether in a courtly environment or in a republic, to develop themes of the social elevation of the artist, entertainment and performance, as well as creativity.

The concluding chapter reviews the ways in which meanings of manhood were shaped by age, householding status, and social status as well as concepts of gender difference. It argues that the differences between men were as critical to constructions of early modern masculinity as those between men and women. It also argues that social differences between men played a growing part in producing conflicting codes of manhood, and were linked to the increasingly uneven distribution of patriarchal dividends along class lines.

The pre‐1914 years were the formative years, the years of big business social and political apprenticeship, the period during which accumulated wealth translated into social status and political influence. Ch. 8 compares the socio‐political position reached by the British, French, and German business leaders at the beginning of the twentieth century. A specific configuration had already emerged, though it was still to evolve in the course of the century.