1. Introduction and Summary
Large states are less liable to faction than small ones, because in them the middle class is large, whereas in small states it is easy to divide all the citizens in two classes who are either rich or poor, and to leave nothing in the middle. And democracies are safer and more permanent than oligarchies, because they have a middle class which is more numerous and has a greater share in the government; for when there is no middle class, and the poor greatly exceed in number, troubles arise, and the state soon comes to an end.
---- Aristotle, Politics
Generally, all social systems are conceived as stratification systems based on the division of labor and differential social characteristics. Stratification is an ordering of people on some esteemed, desirable characteristic and a person's position in this ordering is his status. Contemporary sociologists consider the major status characteristics of societies as wealth (or privilege), power, and prestige; a person's wealth, power, and prestige comprise his statuses, and in combination they measure his total status-his rank-in society. As previously discussed, along with class these three dimensions (components) define our sociological space.
Upon this definitional base, and assuming individuals or nations wish to improve their status, two basic behavioral propositions have been argued and tested extensively. The first is that individual interactions increase as a positive function of rank. High status individuals or nations interact more with others than do low status ones, and those in low status direct behavior upward in the hierarchy.
The second proposition is that status disequilibrated individuals--those high on some statuses and low on others--will be frustrated and under stress, potentially leading to internal or external conflict. The group of disequilibrated individuals is a pool of potential suicides, radicals, aggressors, or innovators.
Although many elaborations of status-theory exist,
(1)Society comprises a stratified social system.
(2)Some behavioral components are linearly dependent on status.
(3)Status behavior is directed towards higher-ranking persons, and the greater a person's rank the more his status behavior.
(4)High-rank persons support the current social order.
(5)People emphasize their dominant status and the other's subordinate status in interaction.
(6)The more similar in wealth, the more people are mutually cooperative.
Marx, however, more restrictedly defined class by property ownership, where the bourgeoisie constitute those owning the means of production. Hence, people can have similar wealth (a status variable) and still have different property relationships to production and be in different classes. For Weber also " 'property' and 'lack of property' are the basic categories of all class situations" (Weber, 1966, p. 22). These categories determine class interest. For modem sociology to generalize "class" to be "equal rank groups" loses Marx and Weber's important meaning (e.g., that equal rank groups can have different economic interests), without providing a substitute concept.
As to why societies are universally stratified, sociologists provide no clear answer. One functional view is that stratification represents the distribution of abilities and rewards, where those able to make the most contributions to society in its terms are most rewarded and the status dimensions reflect these benefits.
There is a difference in perspective on status between anthropologists and sociologists. According to Smith (1966, pp. 141-76), while
|Anthropologists conceive stratification concretely, as a feature of some, but not all, societies, sociologists tend to stress its universality as an abstract necessity of all social systems, whether these are conceived analytically or not. Underlying these differing orientations is the anthropologist's emphasis on status as the primary concept for analysis of social structure, and the sociologist's emphasis on role. I suggest that this difference also explains why sociologists are keenly concerned with a theory of stratification, while anthropologists are little concerned about it. Because anthropologists conceive social structure as a status structure, in their view an inclusive theory of stratification would represent a general theory of all forms of social structure. On the other hand, because sociologists regard societies as systems of roles, they need a theory of stratification to analyze the articulation of these roles.|
Further, according to Smith, not all social structures are stratified. As I understand his argument, those societies which are politically decentralized have coincident political and status structures. The "units of public order and regulation are ... related by the same principles that regulate the distribution of status" (pp. 173-74). These are headless societies resting "on general normative consensus." While Smith agrees that all social systems can be status systems, he prefers to consider stratification as uniquely social. Thus, where political and status systems coincide, there is no unique social ordering and thus no stratification.
Smith would consider international relations as a status system, but not stratified since (as will be argued throughout this chapter) political and status systems do overlap considerably and international relations is acephalous. This is a difference that makes a difference, since it is the very fact that international social status and political structures overlap that enables us to make political observations and generalizations about nations on the basis of a social status theory. However, sociologists generally use "stratification" only to mean the presence of a status system, and this is what I have done here.
To observe that all societies are stratified is to note that they are social spaces spanned by status components. What characterizes these components? Above all, as components-as latent functions underlying manifest social reality-they define the patterning or clustering of social relationships, the social order. And status comprises such a pattern.
Status is not one attribute or position, such as a person's education or his being a judge. It is a generalized evaluation underlying a cluster of manifest attributes and positions (Zelditch and Anderson, 1966), what some call a halo effect (Berger, Cohen, and Zelditch, 1966), adhering to social manifestations.
Indeed, in Zetterberg's words (1966, p. 130), "ranks become convenient bundles of evaluations of their occupant."
Clearly, status so conceived is a latent function, as described in Chapter 10. It is a component of a space of status manifestations. For example, wealth is a status-component for a cluster of beliefs and characteristics, such as a person's politics, residence, income, education, and manner.
Status is esteemed, wanted. The status literature shows consensus on this, although authors place different emphases. For example, status is: superiority, equality, or an inferiority relationship (Wright, 1942, p. 1443; Svalastoga, 1965, p. 2); a "favorable evaluations" reward pattern (Zetterberg, 1966); an "evaluation" that one person is better or worse than another (Berger, Cohen, and Zelditch, 1966); and "a matter of perception, and of perception that puts stimuli in rank order" (Homans, 1961, p. 149). As status is defined, Veblen's leisure class theory is fundamentally a status interpretation of behavior. His famous "invidious comparison" concept is used in "a technical sense as describing a comparison of persons with a view to rating and grading them in respect of relative worth or value" (Veblen, 1966, p. 38). To have status is to put it in evidence. Thus arises Veblen's concept of conspicuous consumption.
Status as a component reflects what is generally esteemed or desired in a society. And as previously postulated, there are three such components. One delineates the scarce and most desired resources of society at our personal disposal, his wealth. What represents wealth may differ from one society to another, as, say, between an abundance of wives, horses, cattle, material possessions, land, money. The common ingredient, however, in all such differential possessions is that they are prized by a society in which members differentially own or command them for their personal use.
The second status, power, is productive of effects. It is manifesting a desired behavior or state, whether for personal, paternalistic, altruistic, or idealistic goals, and whether intentionally or not. 11 Clearly there is a relationship between wealth, or command over resources for personal use, and power, or being effective. To control scarce resources is to have the power to produce effects to some degree. However, wealth and power are separable and distinct, as can be seen when a wealthy person receives a parking violation from a poor metermaid; when the President of the United States with instant power over millions, has an income and personal wealth less than that of a professional football player or when a wealthy corporation president is unable to prevent his employees from going on strike or stop several expensive consumer court suits.
The third status-component, prestige, reflects the esteem of others, the degree to which they look to you for help, advice, or as a model of what they want to be. Wealth commands an abundance of desirable possessions. Power produces effects. Prestige generates favorable feelings, emotions, or interests. It is neither command nor producing effects, but emotive projection.
Prestige partially results from having power and wealth. Lenski, for example, notes that "with respect to occupational prestige, the chief determinants are variables which are normally subsumed under the categories of power and privilege."
In some societies, such as the international, prestige is almost wholly determined by wealth and power. Evidence supports that prestige for nations is dependent on economic development and power. For example, Schwartzman (1966) asked respondents to rank Latin American countries by their "prestige or importance." The ranking was highly correlated (.93) with economic development and size (a power base) rank. Similar results were obtained by Alcock and Newcombe (1970) for Latin America and by Shimbori (1963) for the world's major nations.
Nonetheless, some individuals of low wealth and power have high prestige, as the winner of a gold medal in the Olympics or a much decorated war hero. Charles Lindberg's cross-Atlantic flight in 1927 is a dramatic case in point. Because one can have high prestige without wealth or power, or as in the case of a person disgraced in office, lose it although powerful or wealthy, prestige is surely an independent component of social space.
However, there is usually a close relationship between a person's prestige, wealth, and power.
Because prestige is so related to wealth and power and for simplicity in the following analysis, I will henceforth treat it as a component largely subsumed by these two. Prestige is still considered distinguishable, still a latent function underlying social manifestations, however.
Turning to the status-components of wealth and power, they cut across all cultures and help define what is the social apart from the cultural. Within the social space delineated by these components we are located relative to each other. The origin of this space, its center, so to speak, is an ever-changing focus dependent upon our shifting interests, capabilities, and expectations. As these change, so alters the origin of social space. It describes a societal path through history, providing at any one time an anchor point for status evaluations. Thus, the poor person of today would be wealthy in his possessions by thirteenth-century standards; the powerful person of today whose authority is based on the legitimacy of an election process would be bereft of power in ninth-century Christian Europe. And as for the prestige of today's successful hard-rock singer....
Thus, a person's status is ever changing, relative to a time and place, and to the distribution of statuses of others. One who begins with a comfortable middle-class wealth may find that in spite of constant income and solid possession like an automobile, two-bedroom home, and television set, that in time his status deteriorates as an increasing standard of living and inflation makes commonplace his wealth.
The difference in status between two people therefore cannot be an absolute measurement, like the miles between two landmarks. Rather, two people differ by virtue of not only their own wealth and power, but also as a function of the distribution of these statuses in society. We cannot gauge the similarity and differences without considering the standards, desires, distribution of resources of society as a whole.
But this relativity is in the nature of a-component or latent function which reflects the underlying, contextually bound patterns in society. As a coordinate of social space, encompassing the common interrelationships among such social manifestations, the status-component reflects this relative and subjective nature of status. Our location in this social space, his status position, is thus relative to societal context, standards, and desires.
Most important, status as a need is a force towards upward status-mobility. That we desire to improve our status is a commonplace of everyday observation, introspection, and sociology.
What is not so clear is that people with unbalanced statuses prefer to balance them, indeed, prefer to equilibrate (balance) their statuses before further upward mobility on the highest status.
I will deal with dissonance later. To be more specific about this, we can adopt a simple way of illustrating status propositions. Call the high status person an
alpha (A); the middle status one a mu (M); and the low status one the omega ().
Adopting this simple notation does not imply that status is trichotomous. Status is a continuous variable. However, the development can be simplified and pencil and paper tests of its internal logic conducted by considering just high, medium, and low statuses (or only high and low). For a deduction true for a continuous variable also holds for trichotomous and dichotomous cases. The simplification spotlights logical error, contra-intuitive constraints, and predictions without a full-scale empirical test.
Now, an AA person is balanced, as are MM and ones. Such combinations as A, A, MA are unbalanced. The desire to equilibrate status means that an M person, for example, will try to raise the status to an M. His need for status rules out equilibration by decreasing M to an . Jointly, the need for equilibration and for upward mobility imply that an unbalanced person, such as an M, will prefer elevating to M before increasing M.
Rank is the simplest aspect. It is a person's total status, the sum of his wealth and power (and implicitly, his prestige). That is, if RI is the rank of a person i, then
- Ri = 1si1 + 2si2,
- where si1 and si2 are the statuses of person i on wealth and power, respectively, and 1 and 2 are positive parameters.
This departs from the usual definition
Specifically, the positive parameters weighting the two statuses imply that a person's rank lies in the quadrant bounded by his wealth and power. Figure 17.1 may clarify this. Figure 17.1a shows i as above average in wealth (W) and power (P), and because 1 and 2 are positive parameters, the rank vectors (1si1 + 2si2) are restricted to the first quadrant. The other figures show to what quadrant total status is limited as i is above or below the two status averages (the origin).
The parameters are necessarily restricted to positive values. Were negative parameters also possible, then the parameters would have the following sign combinations: + + (case 1), + (case 2), + (case 3), and (case 4). Case 1 is the definition of rank. Case 4 also could define rank parameters, but then "rank" would mean joint low status. Both cases 1 and 4 cannot be allowed simultaneously, but status-theory permits defining rank using either case.
If cases 2 and 3 were admitted, the definition of rank would depart from the conventional meaning. Statuses could cancel out, then, and "rank" would not reflect a person's over-all high or low status. For instance, AA, MM, and persons could have similar rank values.
Also, my definition of rank (17.1) delimits a single person's rank. Now, the sociological literature often limits status-theory definitionally to a person's rank (or status-disequilibrium, as discussed below), to which behavioral consequences are linked. However, in theoretical discussion, this behavior often and confusingly appears to be dyadic and dependent upon two persons' joint status.
To extend to dyads the definition of rank (Equation 17.1) consistent with this definition, for persons i and j:
- Equation 17.2:
- Dyadic Rank = 1(si1 + sj1) + 2(si2 + sj2),
- where 1 and 2 are the same positive parameters in (Equation 17.1). This definition simply extends to the dyad the definition of a person's rank: joint rank equals 1si1 + 1sj1 + 2si2 + 2sj2 = 1(si1 + sj1) + 2(si2 + sj2).
Status-theory uses rank as a key concept explaining behavior. Another such concept is status-disequilibrium, synonymously called status-incongruence (Malewski, 1966), disafflne status (Sorokin, 1969), status-inconsistency (Kimberly, 1966), and status-imbalance (Zelditch and Anderson, 1966). The antonym of status-disequilibrium is status-equilibrium or crystallization (Lenski, 1954), which means that a person's statuses are equal.
As with rank, status-disequilibrium will be considered first for the person, then the dyad. When we say that a person's status is disequilibrated, we mean that his statuses are unequal: at the extreme, he is high on one and low on the other, as is the wealthy merchant without political power in a socialist society, or a colonel of poor peasant background who through a coup d'état assumes presidential power. More specifically,
- Equation 17.3:
- Disequilibration = (+ or ) 1si1 ( or +) 2si2,
- where 1 and 2 have different signs.
This extends our definition of rank to signs + or + for the parameters, which are cases 2 and 3 discussed above. Consequently, the rank (Equation 17.1) and status-disequilibrium (Equation 17.3) definitions entail our total possible variation on the status plane delimited by the wealth and power components. Any status dependent behavior is dependent on either a person's rank or status-disequillbrium. No other (linear) possibilities exist.
This notwithstanding, does status-disequilibriurn as defined accord with practice? Usually, such disequilibrium is defined as the absolute, and not the
arithmetic status-differences. Lenski (1954), for example, measures status crystallization as the positive square root of the squared differences of an individual's statuses from the mean, which produces an absolute difference. Jackson (1962) categorized individuals as to their status-crystallization, which also equals ranking on absolute differences.
Defining status-disequilibrium by absolute differences does not differentiate, for example, A and A statuses. Distinguishing them is important, however. Assume that the first status (wealth) is achieved and the second (power) is
Moreover, regarding dyadic behavior, the absolute difference would predict the same behavior of a A to a A and A. This is contra-intuitive, and contra-status theory itself. For the theory is that those having the same disequilibrium, as do people with A statuses, will behave differently towards each other (like two black doctors) than do those having distinctly different disequilibria, such as a A and A (like a black doctor and white laborer).
Considering all this, the absolute difference measure does not conform with status theory, nor with its empirical propositions. Another reason for rejecting this measure is that it does not cover all the variation on the status plane remaining after rank is accounted for: there are linear status combinations which have no behavioral consequences. Either this variation must be covered by another status concept or postulated as behaviorally irrelevant. Thus, my definition of status-disequilibrium appears to be sound on theoretical and logical grounds.
The definition of disequilibrium can be now extended dyadically. The status incongruence between two people i and j is defined as:
- Equation 17.4:
- Incongruence = (+ or ) 1(si1 sji) ( or +) 2(si2 sj2),
- where 1 and 2 have different signs.
The term "incongruence" is used because disequilibrium is a monadic concept, seldom applied to status imbalance between people. Even where dyadic behavior is concerned, disequilibrium usually defines a person's status imbalance and its effect on his behavior towards another. Moreover, "incongruence" reflects my concern about two people's difference in status profile and status magnitudes. The more alike in profile and magnitude, the more congruent their statuses.
The previous definitions of rank, disequilibrium, and incongruence concern the status aspects of social space. They and the attendant discussion explicate the logic and substantive interpretations relating status-theory in sociology to my field orientation. Along this fine, the following corollary will couple the incongruence concept to interpersonal distances in social space.
Status-incongruience between persons i and j is the distance vector between their status-vectors on a status-component.
Now, just focusing on i, his statuses on wealth (si1) and power (si2) are vectors as shown in Figure 17.2a. His location in the space is the resolution of vectors si2 and si1, as shown in the figure by vector i. Another person, j, can have a location in this space as shown in Figure 17.2b. Figure 17.2c then displays the distance vectors between these two people on the status dimensions and the joint distance vector. It is the separate weighted status-distance vectors--the vector distances on wealth and power weighted by specific parameters--that define status-incongruence.
This unites the two fundamental concepts of status and field theories: status and distance. Substantively, however, should these concepts be connected? Have what sociologists kept apart been artificially joined? Recalling from Chapter 16 that the distance vector within the status space is also a status-distance, the answer is no. In fact, status-distance unifies a number of other concepts in sociology:
In addition to positions and roles that are differentiated according to prestige and popularity, we might have mentioned differentiations of power and authority (within families or organizations, for example); knowledge, skill, or other kinds of expertness (especially within occupational groups); social class; and caste (often, though not necessarily, associated with racial differences). Each of these kinds of differentiation is unique in some ways, but an important thing they have in common is that behavioral relationships vary with status distances. The greater the status distance between persons, the greater the behavioral distance between them on such dimensions as deference or the kinds of intimate behavior that are associated with high mutual attraction. If the giving and receiving of deferential behavior may be assumed to represent distance, and intimate behavior closeness, then behavioral distance tends to parallel status distance.
---- Newcomb, Turner, and Converse, 1965, pp. 340-411
Other examples combining status and social distance can be given. Lundberg, in his classic (and controversial) 1939 sociological foundations work, says. (pp. 312-13) that the "phenomenon of status is ... an aspect of every societal situation. Since it is always relative, and since relative status is expressed in spatial terms in most, if not all, modern languages, the term social distance has
been adopted to denote degrees of separation in status." And considering more contemporary literature, "The central concept to be used here is that of distance as a mechanism of stratification" (Van Den Berghe, 1960, p. 156).
Now, keeping this relationship between status and distance in mind, it follows from the nature of our psychological and social fields that status-distances are forces acting upon our mutual social behavior. Why should this be so? First, we perceive others relative to ourselves in our psychological space. This relationship comprises a variety of distances vectors between himself and another person on his psychological components, and which relevant to my purposes here consist in part of the motivational needs. One of them is self-assertion, the need for status.
Thus, one perceives another as partially relevant to his need for status. This relevance, this projection of one's perceived distance from another on this psychological status-component, generates motivational tension and activates associated interests.
* Scanned from Chapter 17 in R.J. Rummel, The Conflict Helix, 1976. For full reference to the book and the list of its contents in hypertext, click book. Typographical errors have been corrected, clarifications added, and style updated.= 1 and 2 = 1, which is case 3. Then for case 3, the rank of AA = +1(2) 1(2) = 0; the rank of MM = +1(l) l(l) = 0; and the rank of = +1(0) 1(0) = 0.
Portions of this chapter are a significant revision of my "A Status-Field Theory of international Relations" appearing in Rummel (1977).
1. [Footnote omitted]
2. For an overview of the literature and its content, see MacRae (1953-1954); Pfautz (1963); Glenn, Alston, and Weiner (1970).
3. I include here the literature on international relations employing status theory.
4. For example, see Gleditsch (1970, 1970a); Berger, Zelditch, and Anderson (1966). See especially the excellent synthesis of many status concepts and theoretically innovative efforts by Galtung (1966, 1966b).
5. See, for example, Ossowski (1967, p. 91); Kohn and Schooler (1969, p. 660); Lenski (1966, pp. 74-75), and Lipset and Bendix (1962, p. 275).
6. See, for example, Davis and Moore (1945, pp. 242-49).
7. See also Sorokin (1928, p. 57); Kaufman (1953, pp. 22-23).
8. See, for example, Weber (1966, p. 21). I believe there is much truth to this view, especially insofar as stratification derives from class divisions. See Chapter 24.
9. By "rank," Zetterberg means the "evaluation of a position" (p. 130). In substance, his use of rank is analogous to my use of status and should not be confused with rank as defined below.
10. At this point, a status component is not to be confused with rank as defined below. Rank is not a status pattern, but the total of an individual's statuses across all components. Thus, if there are three status components like wealth, power, and prestige, then a person's rank is his overall standing on all three.
For a statistical definition of status as component, see Cattell (1942, pp. 293-308). who factor analyzed a variety of status related variables to define the "axis along which social status is to be measured" (p. 297).
11. In this context I am concerned with only power as status. In the following chapters I will be more explicit about the definition and forms of power, after which I will return to the question of power as status in Section 21.3 of Chapter 21. The particular definition I am using for power as status is close to Russell's (1938, p. 18): "Power may be defined as the production of intended effects." I leave out intentionality, for reasons that will be made clear in subsequent chapters.
12. Not all sociologists claim such a strong relationship. For some contrary examples, see Benoit-Smullyan (1944, p. 159).
13. This does not contradict the previous sentence. Two highly correlated components can be still (linearly) independent. A space may be defined by coordinates that are at right angles (the conventional representation) or oblique (correlated).
14. For example, Galtung (1966, p. 158) states this as the Axiom of Upward Mobility: "All individuals seek maximum total rank and the only stationary status set is the status set with only high statuses." See also Galtung (1966b, p. 142) and Gleditsch (1970a, p. 4). For an application to politics, see Apter's (1958) model, within which the "dominant motive" of individuals is improving their rank. They therefore "join in political groups to expand mobility opportunities and, in this respect, make representations to government or to influence or control government in some manner" (p. 221). See also Lipset and Bendix (1962, especially p. 61).
Like Apter, Sorokin (1969, p. 288) has made improving rank society's core motivation. "As any stratification means 'superiority and inferiority,' 'domination and subordination,' it generates an incessant struggle of the members of the various strata, all seeking to climb up the ladder to a higher place in the hierarch." Not all empirical work confirms this "incessant drive." See, for example, Lane (1962).
15. Benoit-Smullyan (1944) argues that individuals' statuses tend to a common level--to equilibrate. Fenchel and colleagues (1951, p. 479) tested this equilibration hypothesis on seventy-two male sophomores and the "findings were in accord with the hypothesis."
Galtung (1966, p. 158) presents an Axiom of Rank Equilibration: "All individuals try to equilibrate their status sets upwards, and only status sets with equal ranks are stationary." In a technical sense, this axiom contradicts his aforementioned Axiom of Upward Mobility (see footnote 14). Galtung argues from his Mobility and Equilibration axioms that individuals unbalanced on their statuses will first tend to equilibrate them before improving the previously higher status. However, his Equilibration Axiom asserts that once equilibration is achieved the status sets are stationary. This contradicts his Mobility Axiom, which states that only the top statuses are stationary.
16. In my "Status Field Theory of International Relations" paper (Rummel, 1976), I had used the terms topdog, middledog, and underdog. However, these terms imply a moral-political view I do not accept: that low-status people are the victims of social injustice and the high-status people are exploiters. This is the ideological perspective of Galtung, who first employed the topdog-underdog classification.
17. For example, see Galtung (1966a, 1966b).
18. To show this, assume A = 2, M = 1, and = 0. Let 1
19. See Mitchell's (1964) similar criticism of Lenski's and Jackson's status crystallization work.
20. To be clear, monadic refers to the behavior of an actor, without reference to a particular other. For example, "she is cooperative," "he has much conflict," "the United States has had four wars in the twentieth century." Our behavioral descriptions of people are usually monadic, as in saying "he eats a lot" or "she usually works late."
Dyadic refers to behavior between an actor and some specific other, such as in "she kissed John ... .. Jim called Tom," "those two are always arguing." Monadic and dyadic behavior are independent, in the sense that a cooperative person may nonetheless be very conflictful with a particular other; or a person who is very sociable with a close friend may in general be cool and taciturn.
For a sociological analysis of the dyad (two interacting individuals), see Wolf's (1950) translation of Simmel (Part II, Section III).
21. Other examples are Gleditsch (1970a) and Galtung (1966b, especially p. 126; 1968b, p. 286). Not all conform to this practice of measuring status-disequilibrium by absolute differences. Midlarsky (1968), for instance, measured status inconsistency by the arithmetic differences between his ascribed and achieved status variables.
22. Generally, wealth is more an achievement due to a person's efforts. It can be won or lost. People can, of course, inherit wealth, but this can be lost through stupidity or incompetence. Wealth or poverty are not indelible characteristics.
Many status characteristics are, however, difficult if not impossible to change by virtue of a person's efforts. Such is race, family background, ethnic extraction, parents' religion, caste, and so on. Depending on the culture, these characteristics are bases of social power. They are ascribed: they define a person for life and in many societies determine his power. Until recent times, the Southern black in the United States, the Korean born in Japan, the overseas Chinese in Indonesia, the untouchable in India, and the Jew in Germany were in power at the bottom of society. They could be wealthy, as some were, but their power was scant.
23. To show, for example, that the definition discriminates between an A and A disequilibrium, consider the case of +1, and 2. Now, let A = 1 and = 0. Then, the A status disequilibrium = +1(1)1(0) = 1. That of a A = +1(0)1(l) = 1.
24. My definition of status incongruence extends to the continuous case Galtung's rank congruence and incongruence definitions for two units and two status dimensions (Galtung, 1966b, p. 132). Galtung also treats rank congruence as a difference, which can be positive or negative. Regarding status-theory development, then, he leaves unanswered the question as to why he defines the difference between statuses for one unit on two dimensions as absolute and for dyads as signed.
According to Homans, who also applied the status congruence concept (1961, p. 248), "status congruence is realized when all of the stimuli a man presents rank better or higher than the corresponding stimuli presented by another man-or when, of course, all of the stimuli presented by the two men rank as equal. The less fully this condition is realized, the greater the status incongruence." Homans does not clarify this logically, and actually seems to be defining rank equality and inequality rather than "congruence" in Galtung's usage and the definition adopted here.
25. See also Warner and DeFleur (1969), Laumann (1965), Westie (1959), Svalastoga (1959, especially p. 354), and Ellis (1956).
26. Remember that interests equal attitudes plus their strength to manifest behavior.