Status Passage

Anselm L. Strauss

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351488136
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Classes & Economic Disparity
• Index: Social Sciences

The French writer Arnold van Gennep first called attention to the phenomena of status passages in his Rites of Passage one hundred years ago. In Status Passage, first published in 1971, the movement of individuals and groups in contemporary society from one status to another is examined in the light of Gennep's original theory. Glaser and Strauss demonstrate that society emerges as a comparative order. In this order, every organized action, collective or individual, can be seen as a form of status passage.From one status to another-from childhood to adolescence to adulthood, from being single to being married, movement from one income group, social class or religion to another-there are passages that entail movement into different parts of a social structure and loss or gain in privileges. Types of status passage are described by their proper ties. The authors present a formal theory of status passage in the form of a running theoretical discussion.The concepts and categories discussed in Status Passage are illuminated by a large number of examples chosen from a wide range of human behavior, and the applicability of the theory to still other examples is made apparent. The result is a stimulating and provocative book that will interest a wide range of sociologists, social psychologists, and other social scientists, and will be useful in a variety of courses.

1. STATUS PASSAGES AND THEIR PROPERTIES

THE PHENOMENA of status passages¹ were enduringly called to the attention of social scientists by Arnold van Gennep’s Les rites de passage.² In that book, the French scholar remarked on various types of passages between what, in modern vocabulary, are termed statuses. Mainly he analyzed such passages as those which occur between age-linked statuses, such as birth and childhood, adolescence and adulthood, and being unmarried and married. Those kinds of passages have, of course, been much studied since van Gennep’s day, especially by anthropologists.³ Sociologists have also expended considerable effort studying status passages that occur within occupations (careers and socialization, for instance) and within organizations (mobility, for instance). Such passages may entail movement into a different part of a social structure; or a loss or gain of privilege, influence, or power, and a changed identity and sense of self, as well as changed behavior.

One of the hallmarks of status passages, especially ones deemed important by passagees or other interested parties, is the astonishingly frequent and free discussion of passages, for these are open rather than tabooed topics. Their very existence points to vital personal and social concerns—as reflected by van Gennep’s initial choice of examined passages—or at least quite absorbing interests. The talk itself is an immensely varied provider of properties of status passage. It may, for example in recruiting, be directed at a potential passagee, to describe or advise him about his future steps. The recruiter may idealize the passage for the passagee to persuade him to embark on the passage if he either seems reluctant to begin the passage or wishes to withdraw after an initial trial in it. The recruiter may also dissuade him from attempting it. The passagee also talks in a variety of modes about his impending passage, and to whom he talks and in what characteristic mode is likely to be socially patterned. Agents in his future passage also talk about him, to each other and to him, in patterned ways.

Passages themselves are continually discussed by participants. They may receive both general support and redefinition, either in part (some of the steps or division of labor among agents should perhaps be changed) or virtually en toto. Because status passages frequently are associated with the functioning of organizations and institutions, public debate about passages is very likely to be prominent in any discussion about organizational or institutional change, including that which has already occurred or should occur or expectably will occur.

No wonder, then, that social scientists have been interested in status passages and have found them relatively easy to research, whether they are isolated for special study or examined as segments of a larger social context. Indeed, we would argue on two grounds that status passages deserve a great deal more study. Insofar as every social structure requires manpower, men are recruited by agents to move along through social positions or statuses. Status is a resting place for individuals. But while the status itself may persist, for many years, no matter how long an individual remains in, say, an office, there is an implicit or even explicit date when he must leave it. The following statement applies to most: “A temporal dimension is implicit in all kinds of status. No one is assigned, nor may he assume, a position or status forever. Always there is a clause, whether hidden or openly acknowledged, whereby a man may be dispossessed or may dispossess himself of the status.”⁴ For the potentially profitable purposes of research, the social scientists has only to look at a person and ask, “What passages is he going through today?" or look at an event while asking, “What passage is occurring, and who is playing what roles in it?”

A second reason for believing that status passages deserve more—and more explicit—study is that they reflect conditions for and changes in social structure and its functioning; and these changes may have consequences for the social structure. We particularly emphasize this point because a principal (and limiting) feature of most status passages studied implicitly by anthropologists and sociologists is their relatively scheduled character. These passages are governed by fairly clear rules concerning when the change of status should be made, by whom and by whose agency. There are also prescribed sequences of steps the person must go through to have completed the passage and regularized actions that must be carried out by various relevant participants in order that the passage actually be accomplished. Scheduling, regularization, and prescription are integral to so many status passages that current analyses naturally have included descriptions of the rituals which tend to accompany at least certain phases of those changes of status. Writings, especially when explicitly focused on status passages, have tended to emphasize the relatively permanent rather than the continual occurence of social change.

Without necessarily being influenced by van Gennep but no doubt affected by anthropological research, sociologists have tended to assume in their analyses that status passages are fairly regularized, scheduled, and prescribed. But those three properties of passage can be absent or present only in some degree in some types of status passage. Furthermore, certain other properties may characterize a type of passage.

Those additional properties include the following:

1. The passage may be considered in some measure desirable or undesirable by the person making the passage or by other relevant parties. Going from unmarried to married status generally is thought desirable; becoming a prisoner is generally undesirable.
2. The passage may be inevitable. In van Gennep’s book, the passage from birth to childhood is inevitable; in our society, the passage into the marital status is not.
3. The passage may be reversible to some degree. The age-graded passages that anthropologists study run in only one direction; they are irreversible. But changes of status within organizations can be reversible—a man can not only move “up” into a status but can also be demoted. Sick people may recover totally or partly.
4. A passage may be repeatable or nonrepeatable. Parson’s analysis of the sick role focuses on reversibility (from normal to sick and back to normal), but this passage can be repeatable. Cleveland was twice elected President of the United States, even after an intervening defeat, whereas Franklin Roosevelt was elected repeatedly.
5. The person who goes through the passage may do so alone; collectively, or in aggregate with any number of other persons.⁵
6. It follows that when people go through a passage collectively, or in aggregate, they may not be aware that they are all going through it together or at least not aware of all aspects of their similar passages. The experience of virtually any cohorts, such as those of a large school class, provides an example.
7. It is worth distinguishing between the above situation and one where, although aware, the person can or cannot communicate with the others. Most often, of course, communication is possible, but there are passages where those being “processed” cannot communicate with others who are simultaneously going through an identical change of status (for instance, junior executives in a large corporation who are simultaneously being demoted.)
8. The person making the passage may do so voluntarily or have no choice in the matter (or perhaps have degrees of choice either en toto or about aspects of the passage). Commitment to prison after trial is involuntary; commitment to a mental institution may be voluntary or involuntary (or partly both).
9. Another property is the degree of control which various agents
   —including the person undergoing the passage—have over various aspects of the passage. For instance, a prisoner may have some degree of control—through his deportment—over how quickly he can leave the prison on parole. A father can forbid or persuade his son not to take the driving exam that, if passed successfully, will make him a licensed driver.
10. The passage may require special legitimation by one or more authorized agents. Thus a man may die, but his death is not official until he is pronounced dead by a legitimate agent: a physician.
11. The clarity of the signs of passage, for the various parties, may vary from great to negligible clarity. It is clear to an applicant that he has been accepted into college when he receives notice of his acceptance, but Sutherland’s thief describes vividly how a con man turns a man into a mark, without the man’s immediate recognition. The signs are not always so clear to the person himself, let alone to relevant parties who, like parents, may not recognize when their children are married.
12. These last examples suggest that the signs might actually be clear enough if they were known, but that they may be disguised by relevant parties. (This, of course, is an aspect of control, just as it is of deliberately managed lack of clarity.)

We can assume that this is an incomplete list of the properties of status passage, but it is important to distinguish among them and among their various possible combinations. After reading this list of properties, a colleague immediately suggested, from his own research, two others of obvious importance: (1) The centrality of the passage to the person, that is, how much difference it makes to him. This is a property of desirability of a passage. (2) The length of time or duration in passage, that is, if it will be very short or very long or somewhere between. This is a temporal property of a passage, which is often scheduled.

As will be argued below, the more explicitly in focus such properties are kept during analyses of status passage, the more systematic will be the analyses; further, the more systematic, the better an analyst can account for the behaviors of, and consequences for, the persons involved in any given status passage.

We might add for the benefit of those readers who grow restive when faced with undefined or ill-defined concepts, that we prefer not to define status passages but to let the full range of meanings for the concept emerge in this book through the combined references of the data analyzed and the analyses themselves. The list of properties should already suggest that the anthropologists have focused attention on far too limited a range of what could be relatable phenomena.

Problems of Substantive Analysis

When analyzing status passages, analysts most commonly and naturally highlight those properties which seem particularly relevant. Julius Roth has focused on the indeterminate pace of recovery from severe tuberculosis, the ambiguity of the signs of recovery especially as the patient sees the signs, and the patient’s manipulations with respect to getting his condition defined “upward” by the legitimating physician.⁶ Similarly, when writing of polio patients and their families,⁷ Fred Davis dwelt mainly on recovery and its ambiguous signs as, when writing of degradation ceremonies, Harold Garfinkel almost inevitably focused on legitimacy and control: the degrading agent must manage to legitimate his activity and his role to make his accusation persuasive.⁸ Orrin Klapp’s analysis of how people are made into fools also had its appropriate focus: the successful or unsuccessful strategies of the foolmaker, and of the person who either manages or fails to avoid that status and who manages or fails to reverse the passage once cast into the status.⁹) Howard Becker and his associates placed primary emphasis on the collective passage of medical students through medical school and their close communication on matters related to control of passage.¹⁰ One last example: Lloyd Warner’s detailed description of age-grading in an Australian tribe almost necessarily turned around an analysis of sequential and collective passages of status, carefully regulated so that entire segments of the tribe were involved at particular times and places.¹¹

Because there are several properties of status passage, these and other existing analyses of given status passages may easily be, and usually are, incomplete when focused exclusively and only on one, two, or three relevant properties of the passage. The author may focus so steadily on a single property or two that he sees no others and no exceptions; or, as with Erving Goffman’s idealized (if negatively toned) depiction of the mental patient’s moral career, readers may mistake his systematic analysis for the total truth.¹²

If an analyst goes on to only mention additional minor properties of the status passage, rather than analyzing their import and relating them to the core properties and thereby densifying the theory, his analysis is st...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Chapter 1 Status Passages and Their Properties
• Chapter 2 Reversibility
• Chapter 3 Temporality
• Chapter 4 Shaping a Passage
• Chapter 5 Desirability
• Chapter 6 Passages: Collective, Aggregate and Solo
• Chapter 7 Multiple Status Passages
• Chapter 8 Status Passage Theory Applied: Temporal Aspects of Social Mobility
• Chapter 9 Generating Formal Theory
• Index