Weberian Social Status Reimagined: A Sociological and Empirical Critique of Existing Status Measures and a Viable Alternative

This paper re-considers social status in contemporary Britain by initially duplicating and further improving upon prior analysis from Chan and Goldthorpe (2004, 2007). This paper analyses the occupational structure of marriage, cultural consumption, friendship closeness, and monopolistic acquisition to construct an original measure of social status that is termed ‘Stände’. This Stände measure is directly compared with the Chan-Goldthorpe scale and the Cambridge scale to make theoretical and empirical arguments in favour of using this newly constructed measure as an appropriate Weberian determinant of social status. This paper examines the relationship between social status and the epiphenomenal role it has with education, income and social class to provide an evidence base for its construct validity. This paper also identifies multiple models based on authoritarian/libertarian social and left/right economic scales across three waves of the British Social Attitudes Survey to directly compare status-based measures. Evidence suggests that this newly created Stände measure is more sensitive compared to alternatives and more adequately captures the status/class relationship evidenced in British society and outlined in Weberian social theory. This new Stände measure captures a more accurate Weberian distinction of social status and builds upon important empirical literature set out in the work of Chan and Goldthorpe (2004, 2007).