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Despite a fair amount of conjecture regarding the circumstances that lead to the generation of status orders, most of the previous literature in this area typically has studied the effects of social cues within a laboratory setting. This article analyzes the evolution of the status hierarchy within a large-scale, natural setting. The results of empirical analyses assessing a large online community of software developers show that in the process of status attainment, community members tend to evaluate a focal actor's reputation according to publicly available social references. Ironically, these same social references also work to constrain an actor's status mobility.
In the literature on social status, there is a tension between the forces that sort members of a social sphere into differing social strata and the forces that constrain membership in relatively stable status orders. Much has been written about both topics, yet there has been little empirical research investigating the dynamics of these social forces in shaping real-world social structure. This article takes the study of social status out of the laboratory and dynamically examines the formation of the status hierarchy in a large-scale, natural setting, thus contributing to our knowledge of status processes in a real-world environment.
The importance of status has recently been emphasized across several levels of analysis important to social scientists. These studies have shown that social status carries many benefits for those who have it, at both the individual and organization levels. First, high-status actors often are given more credit than low-status actors in return for the same amount of effort (Merton 1968), because as an actor's status increases, the propensity of others to overestimate the quality of his performance also increases (Sherif 1966).
Furthermore, status can be an important factor in determining an actor's pattern of future exchange relations because high-status subjects are chosen more often than low-status subjects as preferred exchange partners (Thye 2000). At the organizational level, high status can contribute to an organization's success relative to other actors in the market (Podolny, Stuart, and Hannan 1996) and its access to future privileges (Washington and Zajac 2005). Economists, too, have shown a recent interest in status, because the reputational benefits associated with status hold intrinsic economic value for the organization (Fombrun 2001).
This article departs...