The combining of status information*

The author would like to thank Professors Joseph Berger and Robert Z. Norman for reading and commenting on an early version of this paper. The authors work on this paper has been partially supported by the Turkish Academy of Sciences.

This paper presents an analysis of the combining mechanism for status information postulated by the mathematical formulation of the theory of status characteristics and expectation states. Six lemmas on the basic features of the combining mechanism are derived from the formulation and discussed. Further, four theorems that illustrate the implications of the particular combining mechanism for power and prestige orders are presented and proven.

Key words:

• Expectation states
• status characteristics
• status organizing processes
• power and prestige orders
• aggregated expectations

Notes

The author would like to thank Professors Joseph Berger and Robert Z. Norman for reading and commenting on an early version of this paper. The authors work on this paper has been partially supported by the Turkish Academy of Sciences.