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MASTER STATUS

Sociologyindex, Sociology Books 2011

Master status is status that overrides all others in perceived importance. The term master status was coined by Everett Hughes. The master status, whether ascribed or achieved, overshadows all other social positions of the status.

Whatever other personal or social qualities the individual possesses they are judged primarily by master status attribute.

Criminal is an example of a master status that determines the community's identification of an individual. A master status can also arise from other achieved or ascribed roles.

Modern family or modernized family traditionalism?:
Master status and the gender order in Switzerland
René Levy, Université de Lausanne
Eric Widmer, Universités de Genève et de Lausanne
Jean Kellerhals, Université de Genève
Abstract: Are present-day families still like those described by sociology in the middle of the 20th century or have they changed beyond resemblance? The media and much of the popular perceptions along with them have long ago opted for an « all-change » perspective on contemporary patterns of living together; the sociological literature is divided between diagnostics of change and diagnostics of resilience. A recent study of intra-couple dynamics in Switzerland shows the existence of a large array of couples’ internal structures of regulation, but with a persistent core of traditionalism. The concept of master status is used to interpret the fact that major changes point less towards clear-cut egalitarianism, which could be an alternative to traditional gender structures, than towards a traditionally biased « synthesis » that could be paradoxically called modernized family traditionalism.
Extract:
".. our analysis, it appears to be more promising to use this concept in a more complex way, i.e. to define master status as meaning the (socially determined) dominance of one status area over the others in an individual’s participation profile, and to apply this definition to the complementarity of sex-specific master-statuses of the partners in a couple. We leave open, for the time being, the question of the reasons responsible for this dominance, but then at the same time underline its importance. Our findings point exactly in this direction:
· the female master status area is the family, employment is subsidiary to it;
· the male master status area is employment, the family is subsidiary to it;
· together, they form a complementary system that can exist in several variants, the traditional model being just one extreme case where each partner’s sex-specifically dominant status area excludes the other one; in most empirical cases today the dominance of one field is less exclusive and moreover, its expression varies across the family phases. This does not mean however that is has entirely disappeared."

Gang Membership and Criminal Processing: A Test of the "Master Status" Concept
Journal: Justice Quarterly Volume:14 Issue:3 Dated:(September 1997) Pages:407-427
T D Miethe ; R C McCorkle
Sponsoring Agency: US Dept of Justice, National Institute of Justice, United States
Annotation: Data from 370 criminal defendants who were processed in an urban court in Clark County (Nev.) in 1993 were used to determine whether gang membership represents a master status that influenced both charging and sentencing decisions.
Abstract: Clark County included the city of Las Vegas. The research reviewed formal efforts to confront the gang problem in this jurisdiction and developed a theoretical basis for considering gang membership as a master status. The research next derived hypotheses from this master-status characterization of gang membership and estimated statistical models to determine whether different factors were used in processing and adjudicating gang and nongang members. Results provided some support for the characterization of gang membership as a master status. Gang membership had a significant net effect on both charging and sentencing decisions. In addition, different factors were involved in dispositional decisions involving gang and nongang members. In keeping with the master status characterization, sentencing decisions for gang members were far less likely than for nongang members to be affected by other offender and offense characteristics. A paradoxical finding was that gang members were treated more leniently than comparable nongang members in both charging and sentencing decisions. Several explanations are possible. Findings suggested that the legal obstacles involved in gang prosecution thwart the political rhetorical calling for tough action against gangs and that the formal labeling of a suspect as a gang member has mixed consequences.
 

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