Abstract
Theories of Status Characteristics and Expectation States use those concepts to understand the development and maintenance of power and prestige inequality structures in task groups. Expectations, roughly equivalent to ideas of task ability, emerge through interaction or from inferences based on status; once they exist they determine all features of inequality structures. These theories describe how and why that happens. They also identify ways to intervene, either to overcome inequalities or to intensify them. Applications to gender and race and to juries and sports teams illustrate the processes. This chapter presents and explains the theories and related issues in theory building, and identifies areas in which new research is extending this family of theories.
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Notes
- 1.
In Bales’ view, early interaction emphasized defining the problem—remember, these are task groups—and collecting information. Later phases evaluated and synthesized information and reached conclusions, and towards the end of the meeting, individuals turned to planning how to implement the conclusions (Bales and Strodtbeck (1951).
- 2.
Many people are unaware how many innovations from Bales’ research have become accepted parts of our culture. A one-way mirror is essential equipment for every cop show on TV; Bales was the first to equip a laboratory with one-way mirrors so that observers were removed from the interaction. Marketing research relies on focus groups to assess potential new products and even plotlines in movies; those are modifications of the research design that Bales developed. Many leadership training courses adapt the idea of phases in group problem-solving that were first studied by Bales and his students. And the distinction of “pro-active” and “reactive” styles of speech traces to Bales’ reports of group interactions.
- 3.
To avoid normative answers such as “Everyone showed great leadership,” participants are asked to rank all members of the group, including themselves, on most of the questions.
- 4.
An expectation state is a theoretical construct; a term used for things that are not directly observable, but that produce effects that can be observed. Gravity is a familiar theoretical construct. We cannot see gravity or touch it, but we can see its effects and predict the effects with great accuracy. In everyday usage, a conscience is another theoretical construct. We cannot observe a conscience directly, but if we believe that someone has a well-developed conscience, we can use that belief to make predictions of his or her likely behavior. Andreas (2013) describes theoretical constructs more fully.
- 5.
Most of us can remember a time in school when a child who was generally considered to be smart—that is, a child for whom other students and the teacher held high expectations—gave an answer that was less than stellar, but the teacher said “good.” The opposite happens with perfectly good answers from a child thought to be dumb. Expectations affect unit evaluations of performances, which usually makes expectations stable.
- 6.
Remember that this theory does not justify gender inequality or any other sort of inequality. The theory describes how things work, not how they ought to work, what we might wish, or even what is natural. To the contrary, if you want to promote gender equality in task groups, the first step is to understand what’s producing the inequality—performance expectations formed from status generalization—and then use that analysis to design interventions. We will mention some effective interventions later in this chapter.
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Webster, M., Walker, L.S. (2016). The Theories of Status Characteristics and Expectation States. In: Abrutyn, S. (eds) Handbook of Contemporary Sociological Theory. Handbooks of Sociology and Social Research. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32250-6_16
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