Six Struggles Surrounding Status

Struggle For Function – These are struggles that individuals and organizations have to achieve non-status things. Keep a boat from sinking, don’t burn dinner, or have a wedding plan work out. Your status may depend on how well you do these things.

Struggle For Allies – You want to be liked by, and allied with, particular people that you encounter. Your status may help, but if you succeed they may well end up liking you much more than similar-status others.

Struggle For Status – Status is a widely shared estimate of esteem, within some status community. It is a weighted average of widely shared estimates of many admirable features. It combines direct power (dominance) and indirect power (prestige).

Struggle For Fashion – The weights of status vary with time, like fashions do. People form coalitions to push for more weight onto favorable features. In part via pushing to put their people into particular positions of power.

Struggle For Worlds – Status is usually not global, but instead relative to a community. These communities compete for influence in a wider world. People may care about how their local status struggles influences who wins there.

Struggle Over Struggles – All these struggles compete for the attention of individuals and organizations. Individuals, allies, coalitions, and communities can try to influence which struggles matter most.

The struggles for status, and for the fashion that sets status, tend to be zero-sum, at least directly. But the struggle for function clearly allows for mutual gains and higher efficiency. To a lessor extend, so does the struggle for allies; in principle we really can all have more lovers, friends and co-workers.

So if status puts more weight on function and allies, that can give added encouragement to attend to those struggles. And when people in a community care more about the struggle for worlds, they will want to put more status weight on such things. Especially on the kinds of functions and allies that most help win struggles over worlds.

It is also possible for a community to put less weight on status. For example, when status is the only visible quality marker re lawyers and doctors, customers must use it to pick those experts. But if customers can see visible track records, or use strong incentive contracts to pay for results, their status matters less. That can help to promote such functions, and also help a community to win the struggle over worlds.

Personally, I’m most engaged by the struggle over struggles. I’d like function and allies to matter more. And by reminding people of this struggle over worlds, I hope to influence the struggle for fashion to put more status weight on function, allies, and worlds. Yes, if I personally did better at the struggle for status, I could have more influence over the struggle for fashion. But at this point in my life, the opportunity cost of that seems quite high.

So I’ll content myself for now to point all this out to you, my readers. And invite you to join me in pushing to make status matter less, and to put more weight on function and allies. Such as via more trials with, and fewer legal barriers to, using track records and incentive contracts to substitute for status in picking experts.