“Write short note: Status inconsistency.” (1990)
Status inconsistency is the condition in which an individual or group holds unequal ranks on different dimensions of stratification, for example high income with low ethnic or caste honour, or high education with a low-paid job. Its opposite is status crystallization, where all ranks are aligned.
Intellectual roots
- Max Weber’s separation of class (market situation), status (social honour) and party (power) implied that these dimensions can diverge. Stratification is therefore multidimensional.
- Gerhard Lenski gave the idea its classic form in “Status Crystallization: A Non-Vertical Dimension of Social Status” (1954). He measured crystallization across income, occupation, education and ethnicity in Detroit.
- Everett C. Hughes (1945) had already described the “dilemmas and contradictions of status” faced by people whose master status (race, sex) clashed with their professional status.
Why it matters: consequences
- Psychological strain: people expect treatment according to their highest rank, while others respond according to their lowest. Elton F. Jackson (1962) linked this mismatch to stress symptoms.
- Political radicalism: Lenski found poorly crystallized people more likely to support liberal and reformist politics against the established order.
- Aggression and mobilisation: Johan Galtung’s “structural theory of aggression” (1964) held that rank disequilibrium is a potent source of collective aggression, more than uniformly low rank.
- Status equilibration: actors try to convert a high rank into the lagging one. Money buys prestige, education buys power.
Indian illustrations
- M. N. Srinivas’s Sanskritisation can be read as equilibration. Castes that gained land or political power claimed higher ritual status by adopting upper-caste customs.
- André Béteille (Caste, Class and Power, 1965) found that in Sripuram caste, class and power, once cumulative, had become dispersed. Non-Brahmins acquired land and political office while Brahmins kept ritual rank.
- Dominant peasant castes such as Patidars, Marathas and Jats combine political weight with agrarian distress, and have led reservation agitations.
- Filippo Osella and Caroline Osella (Social Mobility in Kerala, 2000) showed Ezhava migrants to the Gulf converting remittance wealth into prestige through houses, consumption and gifts. Money did not automatically erase caste stigma, so it had to be displayed.
- Educated Dalit professionals attain class position yet still meet caste slights. Class mobility does not end caste vulnerability: NCRB’s Crime in India 2023 recorded 57,789 cases of crimes against Scheduled Castes.
Criticisms
- Measurement problem: ranks on different dimensions are hard to compare on a common scale.
- Identification problem: Hubert M. Blalock (1966) showed that the effects of inconsistency cannot be statistically separated from the additive effects of the individual ranks. Many findings shrink under rigorous tests.
- Marxist objection: inconsistency describes surface individual profiles and obscures the underlying class relations.
- It can overstate individual discomfort. Many inconsistents adapt without strain or protest.
Conclusion
Despite its methodological weaknesses, status inconsistency remains a useful bridge between stratification and change. It explains why mobile, rising groups rather than the poorest so often drive identity politics and social movements, a pattern clearly visible in contemporary India.