Status Frustration

Perhaps blogging on fat cats the other day prompted this thought, but it occured to me today that status frustration is perhaps deserving of more attention.

Status frustration can be defined as:

“A feeling of frustration experienced by individuals when they are denied the opportunity of attaining social status.”

It can be caused simply by a person’s position in the stratification system or social hierarchy. The American sociologist Albert Cohen argued in the 1950s that a lot of crime and delinquency could be explained as status frustration. Cohen for example, argued that the poor, unable to gain an academic education and entry to a profession and the socially approved ways of gaining status, sought instead to seek status in illegitimate ways - that is, through crime.

Cohen worked in the functionalist tradition and it may be that status frustration fell out of fashion in the 1970s and 80s as sociologists were more influenced by Marxism and the idea of alienation. Then in the 90s and the early 21C, criminology has moved in a much more psychological direction, again leading to the neglect of status frustration as more psychological explanations are developed.

But it occurs to me that status frustration is worth thinking seriously about, and not just in the context of crime. Economists and Psychologists have recently devoted a lot of attention to the study of well-being. I don’t want to go off into the conceptual jungle that this ‘multi-disciplinary’ concept involves, but it just occurs to me that when popular psychologists like Oliver James (and indeed the more strictly ‘academic’ psychologists like Nobel prizewinner Daniel Kahneman) make their critiques of the lack of well-being exhibited by individuals in contemporary society, one might usefully argue that such individuals are not simply psychologically lacking or even ‘unwell’; they may also be suffering from ‘status frustration’.

Surely status frustration is not just something which is relevant to criminals and crime. With more fat cats around, status frustration may no longer be the preserve of the working classes. In a vastly unequal society, perhaps things like suicide, family breakdown, divorce, political apathy, and even ‘road rage’, may be at least partly explained by social factors, including an increasing incidence or level of status frustration?

Just a thought.