Middle-Status Conformity Revisited: The Interplay between Achieved and Ascribed Status

Abstract

Decisions about conforming to or deviating from conventional practices in a field is an important concern of organization and management theory. The position that actors occupy in the status hierarchy has been shown to be an important determinant of these decisions. The dominant hypothesis, known as middle-status-conformity, posits that middle-status actors are more likely to conform to conventional practices than high-and low-status actors do. We challenge this hypothesis by revisiting its fundamental assumptions and developing a theory where actors' propensity to conform based on their achieved status further depends on their ascribed status that actors inherit from their social group. Specifically, we propose that middle-status conformity applies only to actors who have a sense of security, based on their high ascribed status. For actors with low ascribed status, we propose that high-and low-status actors show greater conformity than middle-status actors. We test our hypotheses using data from the U.S. symphony orchestras from 1918 to 1969.

Reconceptualizing and Redirecting Research on Guanxi: ‘Guan-Xi’ Interaction to Form a Multicolored Chinese Knot

“…Surprisingly, in contrast to the core members of a xi network, peripheral members usually need to work harder, such as taking on extra responsibilities and offering extra services. This is similar to when people with low ascribed status (even with high achieved status due to the low sense of security) tend to conform to conventional practices more than those with high ascribed status (Prato et al, 2019). As discussed before, building trust is critical in the developmental process of xi networks.…”

“…Two essential bases are identified with respect to guan dyads: (1) ascribed bases (e.g., distant kinship, hometown, and attending the same university) and (2) achieved bases (e.g., non-kin friendship, education, profession, attending the same university, common workplace, and shared hobbies) (Chen et al, 2013; Li, 2007; cf. Prato et al, 2019).…”

“…Third, the substance and structural dimensions of guanxi are inherently intertwined, but close kinship and stranger ties are not subject to the effect of network structure. For instance, Burt and colleagues posit that close kinship ties (and pseudo-kinship ties) constitute a cocoon independent of network structure (Burt, 2019; Burt & Opper, 2017; Zhao & Burt, 2018), but a new study (Prato, Kypraios, Ertug, & Lee, 2019) shows that ascribed and achieved status as different social positions in a specific social network are often intertwined with interactive effects.…”

Great Successes and Great Failures: The Impact of Project Leader Status on Project Performance and Performance Extremeness

“…High‐status actors can feel entitled to deviate without being subject to penalties, while low‐status actors feel that they do not have any status to lose as a consequence of deviating (Perretti and Negro, 2006; Phillips and Zuckerman, 2001). Recently however, status scholars started to question this assumption and explored the conditions in which the theory of middle‐status conformity applies (Durand and Kremp, 2016; Fralich and Bitektine, 2020; Kovács and Liu, 2016; Prato et al, 2019). The project leaders we focused on in our study were not at the top of the formal organizational hierarchy (i.e., not top managers).…”

Taking Advantage of Social Conformity in Entrepreneurship

“…The social conformity has lots of influencing factors and as years pass, more and more information regarding the factors of conformity that are revealed. The previous studies show that the social status holds a very important role as to reflect how intense the interaction of the individual to the social world around them online and offline (Baer, 2010;Gommans, Sandstrom, Stevens, ter Bogt, & Cillessen, 2017;Prato, Kypraios, Ertug, & Lee, 2019;Y. Zhang et al, 2019;Zimmerman, 2010).…”