Status honor and the valuing of cultural and material capital

Status claims are made with statements, behaviours, or symbols that indicate to others one's membership in a particular status group. Having one's status claims accepted by others confers status honor, which is critically important not only for dignity but also for one's life chances. Our main argument is that people's felt need to make status claims increases when their status honor is threatened. We focus on specific non-dominant or relatively-deprived circumstances which entail threats to status honor-minority status, lower income or education, age group, and inconsistency between education and income or education and occupational prestige. We also explore the effects of gender and city size. Data are from the 1993 General Social Survey of American adults. Using theories of Veblen and Bourdieu, we posit that status claims are made using displays of cultural or material capital. We use multinomial logit regression models to predict the likelihood of valuing cultural capital ('being cultured'), material capital ('having nice things'), both or neither. Our results support the 'status threat' hypothesis. The strongest effect is for minority status. We also find significant effects for age group, education, income, and for education/income and education/prestige status inconsistency. (C) 2001 Published by Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.