Moral regulation as status politics: A critical reconstruction of Joseph R. Gusfield’s theory

Sociology of moral regulation has been interested in different kinds of morally charged social movements, such as the temperance movement, to investigate the social reasons why people take part in such movements. One answer is provided by Joseph Gusfield’s classic analysis of the American temperance movement, The Symbolic Crusade, published in 1963. The status politics theory developed therein provides a potential explanation of participation in moral regulation movements. This paper reconstructs the general logic of status politics explanations from an actor-centred perspective, explicating the actor image and the status anxiety mechanism inherent in the theory. Some of the problems discussed include third-person explanations and proof of status anxiety. With due caution, status politics theory provides one alternative for explaining mobilisation in moral regulation movements as well as populist politics.

The Past as a Benchmark in Defining Turkey’s Status Politics

This article deals with Turkey’s status politics since the 2000s, by employing an aspirational constructivist approach that links social psychology with social constructivism in international relations. It focuses on the temporal side of status, stemming from historical identity construction in Turkish foreign policy (TFP) rhetoric and practices under the rule of the Justice and Development Party (JDP) since 2002. Turkey’s status politics is motivated by its past legacies rather than by a peer-to-peer comparison. Therefore, different variances and practices of identity politics in TFP offer valuable insights into its status-seeking practices. The article offers five images of the past that define various role sets and status claims for Turkey.

Unpacking ‘status migration’: The racialized status politics of ‘skill’ in French-Maghrebi expatriation to Dubai

This ethnographic article details the resettlement process of Mounir, a French citizen of Maghrebi background migrating from Paris to Dubai. In so doing, it examines how social status formation plays out in the context of skilled labour migration between France and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Drawing on semi-structured interviews and multi-sited participant observation, it questions human capital theory’s premise that ‘skills’ largely consist of a transposable set of objective technical qualifications. Instead, it finds that any effective validation of skill sets encompasses ‘claims-making’ processes that are co-dependent on social hierarchies of place, such as citizenship, class and race. The ‘expatriate’ portrait presented here demonstrates how tertiary-educated members of the Euro-Maghrebi minority engage in transcontinental migration not only as a way of dealing with hampered economic conversion yields of Bourdieusian capital forms in their home societies, but equally to renegotiate a more comprehensive transformation of social status. By describing Mounir’s hybrid repositioning at the interstices of more dominant status markers in Dubai, this article theorizes ‘status migration’, a transnational process of human mobility, characterized by the skilful propensity of acting-by-moving from the part of (racially) degraded citizens in dealing with the status deficiencies specific to them in their home societies.

Status Quest and Peaceful Change

This chapter discusses various mechanisms and approaches regarding how states could promote peaceful change while seeking status on the world stage. While status competition is often viewed as a source of international conflict, the quest for status can also promote peaceful change. Even if status politics is often competitive, it is not always a zero-sum game. As status is ultimately social and cultural, states could seek it through social creativity, which will help them avoid confrontation with other states. The quest for status could also encourage states to pursue prosocial behaviors. In particular, states could seek higher status through the provision of international public goods. However, to promote a maximalist peaceful change, leading powers must reconstruct norms and criteria for status symbols and implement a more moral foreign policy.

Nineteenth-Century Suffrage Journals

This chapter use theories of status politics (conflicts as proxies for important debates over the deference paid to a particular group’s lifestyle) to show the importance of nineteenth-century suffragists’ own newspapers and magazines to the movement. The women who wrote for, edited, and published these outlets essentially invented and then celebrated at least four different versions of a new political woman and then proceeded to dramatize that new woman, showing how she named herself, dressed, dealt with her family, and interacted in the larger public sphere, and showing why she deserved the vote. The pre-Civil War suffrage periodicals essentially proposed a “sensible woman” while the postwar period saw competition between the “strong-minded” women aggressively promoted in the Revolution and the more moderate “responsible women” advocated by the Woman’s Journal. Later, the Woman’s Era dramatized an “earnest” new black woman.