ASCRIBED AND ACHIEVED STATUS

I have a tough time teaching the notions of achieved and ascribed status because often the boundaries between the two concepts can be fuzzy. Sex and nationality are supposedly ascribed statuses but sex-change operations and naturalization procedures give these statuses an achieved quality. And then there’s poverty: is being poor an ascribed or achieved status? Some will argue that poverty is an achieved status since people who are unable to go to school, find work, fight for their rights, lack social capital, or are just plain lazy will most likely become poor. But how about children who are born into poverty and are too young to fend for themselves? Poverty in this case becomes an ascribed status – “a social position,” in John Macionis’ words, “that someone receives at birth or assumes involuntarily later in life.” Can’t we speak of affluence in the same way? And don’t the statuses of disability and terminal illness operate in like manner? How about an artist whose talents may be both inborn and learned? Even England’s royal Princes, ascribed as their statuses may be, still have to learn to behave like royalty. It seems to me that the concepts of ascribed and achieved status are not mutually exclusive, at least most of the time, and it’s probably best to think of social positions, many of them, as having ascribed and achieved qualities.