Particular skills: warrant officers in the Royal Navy, 1775–1815

Author(s):  
Evan Wilson

Historians of the Royal Navy in the age of sail have focused their attention on two groups of men: the commissioned officers and the lower deck. Few have bothered to study the men in the middle: the warrant officers, whose particular skills were necessary on board. Masters, pursers, chaplains, and surgeons—the warrant officers of wardroom rank—straddled the civilian and military worlds. They therefore provide a unique window into both the Royal Navy’s command structure and the continuing significance and evolution of social status boundaries in Georgian Britain. This paper focuses on warrant officers during the half-decade following the battle of Trafalgar, when British manpower resources were stretched thinly and exhausted from more than a decade of operations. Between 1805 and 1808, the Admiralty enacted a series of reforms designed to alleviate some of these problems. To make a career as a warrant officer more attractive, the reforms granted surgeons uniforms, increased surgeons’, pursers’, and masters’ pay, and gave all of them a larger share of the prize money spoils. The reforms acknowledged, both implicitly and explicitly, that warrant officers sat uncomfortably in the naval hierarchy. They were crucial to the Navy’s operations, but they lacked the social prestige and promotion prospects of commissioned officers. The reforms suggest that naval administrators were finally beginning to recognize the significance and social standing of warrant officers.

1982 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 258-267 ◽  
Author(s):  
RaGena C. DeAragon

Marriage has been a means of climbing the social ladder in most societies, and post-conquest England was no exception. The Conquest had provided a sweeping opportunity for men of all strata of the feudal hierarchy to gain lands and wealth in England, but high social status and prestige remained the prerogative of magnate families who had constituted the aristocracy of Normandy and northern France before 1066. Most of these families had themselves risen only recently to wealth and power through ducal patronage, but by 1066 they were firmly entrenched in their Norman estates and in the duke's inner circle of advisors. Many magnates possessed comital titles and ties of kinship with the Norman duke-kings, and all profited greatly from the Conqueror's victory at Hastings and his subsequent redistribution of English lands. Families such as the Beaumonts, Montgomerys, Clares, Mandevilles, and Warennes continued to enjoy the highest aristocratic honors in Anglo-Norman society.In the second generation after the Conquest, a number of men of lower social standing amassed land and political importance through service to William Rufus and Henry I, desiring to be accepted as peers by the great magnates. Their striving for social success is illustrated by William of Malmesbury in his History of the Kings of England. In recounting the plan of William fitz Osbern to marry the widow of Count Baldwin of Flanders, the chronicler ascribed his motives to a desire “to increase his dignity.” Many men also wanted to impress the lower orders of society with their rank. Orderic Vitalis's contemptuous tale of one of Henry I's “new men,” Richard Basset, suggests that acquisition of social prestige was a possible motive for marriage. Having married a daughter of the earl of Chester, Basset returned to Normandy “and made a show of superiority to all his peers and fellow countrymen by the magnificence of his building in the little fief he had inherited from his parents.…”


2019 ◽  
Vol 110 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-45

The society of medieval Europe had specific expectations for marriageable girls. From an early age girls were taught how to be wives and mothers, for example by being entrusted with the care of their younger siblings. The girls learned everything they would need in the future by observation. According to the teachings of preachers and writers at the time, girls, irrespective of their social status, were not meant to remain idle, as there were fears that with too much free time on their hands, they might spend it contemplating their looks, practising gestures that were to attract the attention of men or spending time alone in the streets and squares, thus exposing themselves to a variety of dangers. A wife was expected to bear a lot of children, preferably boys, because the mortality rate among young children was high at the time. Wifely duties also included raising children, at least until they were taken over by, for example, a tutor hired by the father, managing the household and ensuring every possible comfort for the husband. As Gilbert of Tournai noted, it was the mother who was expected to bring up the children in faith and to teach them good manners. The duties of the wife obviously depended on her social standing — different duties were expected from the wives of noblemen than from women lower down on the social ladder, who often had to help their husbands, in addition to doing everyday chores.


Author(s):  
Susan E. Hylen

This chapter explores factors that contributed to social status in the Roman period, including family of origin, wealth, citizenship, gender, and one’s standing as a slave, freed, or free-born person. Gender also contributed to social status. However, a combination of these other factors might give a woman relatively greater social standing than a man. This variability in social rank helps to explain some of the evidence of women’s participation in the social and political arenas. The chapter provides evidence of the wealth and patronage of women of various social classes, in both the New Testament and the culture at large.


2013 ◽  
Vol 68 (04) ◽  
pp. 607-613
Author(s):  
Étienne Anheim ◽  
Jean-Yves Grenier ◽  
Antoine Lilti

Social statuses existed before the social sciences. When scholars began to develop this concept in the nineteenth century, they were drawing on the juridical writings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and, more broadly, the vocabulary used by social groups to define themselves across time and space. From this moment forward, social statuses occupied a central position in the work of historians, sociologists, and anthropologists. These scholars were aiming to describe and explain the dynamics of human societies, but they also participated in framing the debates at the heart of the social sciences—as attested by the recurrent disputes between a Marxian notion of class and a Weberian conception of status groups, particularly among readers with tacit political motivations. Max Weber played a fundamental part in the success of the concept, taking the juridical aspect and the idea of society as a body, inherited from the ancien régime, and adding a specifically sociological content relating to the hierarchy of social prestige, which is neither directly inherited (as with castes) nor purely economic (as with classes). In truth, this definition was rarely applied stricto sensu by historians, sociologists, and anthropologists, but it did allow for the elaboration of a concept that could delimit groups of individuals sharing legal and symbolic characteristics within a given society, and that could incorporate the categories used by social actors themselves into historical analysis. Thus, during the 1960s, it was around the notion of status that interpretations of the ancien régime as a society of orders or a society of classes took shape, while anthropologists began to consider notions of emic and etic. From the 1980s, however, the concept of social status receded into the background as the idea of a global interpretation of society by the social sciences was called into question.


2017 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. 38-48
Author(s):  
M.R. Husnutdinova

There is a sharp contradiction between the high importance of work performed for society and a low professional status of general education teachers in the Russian society.The article presents outcomes of a sociological survey “Professional Identity of Modern Teacher” carried out by the Monitoring Research Department of the Moscow State University of Psychology & Education in the spring of 2016.This survey reflects the teachers’ self-assessment of the status of their profession.A total of 1,024 teachers of general education organizations were surveyed in 9 federal districts of the Russian Federation, except the Crimea.The survey was conducted on a three-stage stratified probabilistic sample.The research model of the teacher's social status includes the analysis of the three leading components: prestige, respect and satisfaction with work process.According to the results of the survey, despite the teachers' low assessment of the social prestige of their professional group, they perceive their activities as respected by students and their parents, and also feel satisfied with the results of their work.


2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 158-182 ◽  
Author(s):  
Min Zhou ◽  
Xiangyi Li

We consider cross-space consumption as a form of transnational practice among international migrants. In this paper, we develop the idea of the social value of consumption and use it to explain this particular form of transnationalism. We consider the act of consumption to have not only functional value that satisfies material needs but also a set of nonfunctional values, social value included, that confer symbolic meanings and social status. We argue that cross-space consumption enables international migrants to take advantage of differences in economic development, currency exchange rates, and social structures between countries of destination and origin to maximize their expression of social status and to perform or regain social status. Drawing on a multisited ethnographic study of consumption patterns in migrant hometowns in Fuzhou, China, and in-depth interviews with undocumented Chinese immigrants in New York and their left-behind family members, we find that, despite the vulnerabilities and precarious circumstances associated with the lack of citizenship rights in the host society, undocumented immigrants manage to realize the social value of consumption across national borders and do so through conspicuous consumption, reciprocal consumption, and vicarious consumption in their hometowns even without being physically present there. We conclude that, while cross-space consumption benefits individual migrants, left-behind families, and their hometowns, it serves to revive tradition in ways that fuel extravagant rituals, drive up costs of living, reinforce existing social inequality, and create pressure for continual emigration.


2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 4-32
Author(s):  
Le Hoang Anh Thu

This paper explores the charitable work of Buddhist women who work as petty traders in Hồ Chí Minh City. By focusing on the social interaction between givers and recipients, it examines the traders’ class identity, their perception of social stratification, and their relationship with the state. Charitable work reveals the petty traders’ negotiations with the state and with other social groups to define their moral and social status in Vietnam’s society. These negotiations contribute to their self-identification as a moral social class and to their perception of trade as ethical labor.


2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-46
Author(s):  
Stanislava Varadinova

The attention sustainability and its impact of social status in the class are current issues concerning the field of education are the reasons for delay in assimilating the learning material and early school dropout. Behind both of those problems stand psychological causes such as low attention sustainability, poor communication skills and lack of positive environment. The presented article aims to prove that sustainability of attention directly influences the social status of students in the class, and hence their overall development and the way they feel in the group. Making efforts to increase students’ attention sustainability could lead to an increase in the social status of the student and hence the creation of a favorable and positive environment for the overall development of the individual.


2015 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 97
Author(s):  
Gun Faisal ◽  
Dimas Wihardyanto

The Talang Mamak tribe, one of Indonesian tribe, still practices the hunting and gathering of natural produce despite the fact that among them have chosen to settle permanently and doing farming activities. The aim of this research is to study the characteristics of the Talang Mamak house. The method used in this research is grounded theory method, based on the open coding, axial coding as well selective coding techniques. The method used to find the variation layout of the houses and then evaluate the characters and concept of the layouts. The conclusion of this study is that the core of the Talang Mamak house is based on the connectivity of four rooms namely: Ruang Haluan, Ruang Tangah, Ruang Tampuan and Pandapuran. The house has an open layout where all daily household activities are done without barriers. The social status of the owner is identified by houses furniture and staf


GIS Business ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 202-206
Author(s):  
SAJITHA M

Food is one of the main requirements of human being. It is flattering for the preservation of wellbeing and nourishment of the body.  The food of a society exposes its custom, prosperity, status, habits as well as it help to develop a culture. Food is one of the most important social indicators of a society. History of food carries a dynamic character in the socio- economic, political, and cultural realm of a society. The food is one of the obligatory components in our daily life. It occupied an obvious atmosphere for the augmentation of healthy life and anticipation against the diseases.  The food also shows a significant character in establishing cultural distinctiveness, and it reflects who we are. Food also reflected as the symbol of individuality, generosity, social status and religious believes etc in a civilized society. Food is not a discriminating aspect. It is the part of a culture, habits, addiction, and identity of a civilization.Food plays a symbolic role in the social activities the world over. It’s a universal sign of hospitality.[1]


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