Centralizing lifestyle in status-making

• In Event: Sociology of Culture Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): 16. Education, Habitus, & Cultural Capital

Abstract

This paper re-centers lifestyle as a critical component in the sociological understanding of status, honor, and social stratification. Building upon Max Weber's foundational distinction between class and status, I argue that status—defined as a hierarchy of honor rather than economic position—is fundamentally shaped through lifestyle practices. While classical Marxist theory emphasizes property ownership as the primary determinant of social position, and functionalist perspectives reduce status to occupational prestige, this analysis demonstrates that lifestyle serves as the material platform upon which cultural evaluations of honor are displayed, contested, and legitimized.

I develop four core propositions. First, status is determined by accumulated honor, which emerges through positive cultural evaluations of lifestyle practices both within and across status groups. Lifestyle functions as a "bulletin board" where honor is attached and recognized, requiring external validation to maintain hierarchical legitimacy. Second, status operates as both cause and goal of lifestyle consumption, challenging Pierre Bourdieu's class-determinant model; material conditions enable lifestyle choices, but the pursuit of recognition and honor drives the meaning-making process. Third, in multi-ethnic societies, racial and ethnic hierarchies mediate the relationship between lifestyle and honor, with dominant groups manipulating cultural evaluations to maintain status distinctions that cannot be overcome through consumption alone. Fourth, counterculture and subculture groups create alternative honor hierarchies that increase the variability of status systems without fundamentally challenging mainstream stratification.

Through examining lifestyle consumption, ethnic lifestyles, and resistant subcultures, this paper illustrates how lifestyle diffusion occurs vertically and horizontally across social groups, and how elites maintain gatekeeping power over legitimate honor attribution. The analysis contributes to contemporary debates on cultural stratification by demonstrating that understanding lifestyle is essential for comprehending how status hierarchies are produced, maintained, and transformed in modern societies.

Author

• Manning Zhang, Brandeis University