The Role of Status
The sociologist Cecelia Ridgeway, emerita professor at Stanford, has spent much of her career writing about social hierarchies. A few years she back wrote a book called Status, which is a kind of unified-field theory about social hierarchies, the way they function, and their pathologies. A year before publication, she gave a lecture that summarizes the thesis of the book, which you can read here.
Like any worthwhile theory, it has a lot of moving parts, but she argues that the way this functions is basically that we need to work collectively, so we use status as a heuristic to identify people who will help us achieve success. (Or as she puts it in academese: “Status hierarches are a cultural invention to organize and manage social relations in a fundamental human condition: cooperative interdependence to achieve valued goals with nested competitive interdependence to maximize individual outcomes in the effort.”) Status functions in all human societies, but because it’s based on cultural mores, is specific to each. Status also functions in much smaller contexts, like family and the workplace, and the rules there are also specific.
I was listening to an interview with her yesterday, and of course my mind turned to beer, the small, insignificant area of my expertise. How does status drive our choices when we reach for that can with the bright geometric shapes?
To back up, let’s unpack status a bit. It functions at many levels over the course of our day, and we code-switch from family to work to church to hobbies, each time adopting a different station. You may be the best thoracic surgeon in the state, but as the little sister in an accomplished family, you still play second fiddle at the Thanksgiving table to your brother Mike, the out-of-work mechanic. Joe Biden has become the president of the United States, but that doesn’t free him from his status within that elite club. (By all accounts, he and Obama, or at least their staff, have a tremendous rivalry.) Except for a brief period of his life, my father was a low-status laborer. He was also renowned as an outdoorsman and taught countless people how to hunt and fish. They revered him, which as a child was both thrilling and mystifying. How did a man who nailed asphalt tiles to roofs during the week become this king of the forests on the weekend? Status isn’t fixed, and we’re constantly attuned to its power in any given context. We all know the rules, too, which seem to derive their power precisely because they’re unstated.
So we understand at some innate level that with every choice we make with, say, a pair of pants, a Spotify playlist, or model of car, we are signaling our status. (Ridgeway points out that status is tricky, though. Unlike wealth or one’s profession, which has an empirical value we control, status is granted by other people. If you think buying a Tesla will make people think you’re cool, you might be in for an unhappy surprise.) Even without thinking about it, status guides our choices. If you’re headed to a fashionable dinner party, you’re probably not going to grab a jug of Carlo Rossi wine on the way over. Or a case of Natural Light.
The Status of Beer
Among alcoholic beverages, beer is a pretty low-status affair overall. Until craft beer came along, “beer” was largely a single-status category, and it was all basically the same. People had their favorites, but there wasn’t much of a status bump in selecting Bud over Rolling Rock. In the 1990s, if you were trying to signal your upscale bona fides, you probably ordered a Heineken, but that just got you to the top of the bottom rung of boozy status. It was still just beer.
I was amused to see that beer lists at nice restaurants, even in Portland, remained terrible until well into the new century. This was curious to me, because by that time you could get good beer almost everywhere else. But of course, if you owned a nice restaurant, beer was contemptible and who cares if it’s Bud Light or BridgePort? Indeed, stocking only Bud Light was a way of giving the finger to anyone who thought beer deserved to replace wine at the table. If you’re going to embarrass yourself, let it be with a bottle of Bud Light, sommeliers seemed to be saying.
Craft beer changed things. It (eventually) brought respectability to the category, and created the potential for status among people who cared about it. To be very clear, I think the vast, vast majority of drinkers ignore the status implications of beer, and even if they’re aware of it, feel that it’s too insignificant to sweat the details. I mean, Blue Moon or Allagash White—is it really that big a deal?
In the small group of beery obsessives who write blogs or rate beers online, though, status does come into focus. It seems undeniable that the appearance of hazy IPA is one of the reasons it succeeded, especially in Boston, where status is a big deal. People could see across the room what you’re drinking. That went hand-in-glove with the sixteen-ounce cans with laser-printed pop-art labels. Showing up to parties with those became such a status bump that people were being paid to stand in line at red-hot breweries to score new releases. (You know you’re dealing with status when only certain breweries bring the oohs and ahhs.)
I’ve noticed a status backlash among beer nerds now that has led them to choose simple lagers. This is a phenomenon that we’ve seen in music fandom over the past fifty years or more. Once a hip band gets too successful, or a hip style, it must be rejected by those who accrued status from popularizing it. If everyone’s listening to grunge, it can’t be very countercultural. (Yes, I’m an old White dude from the PNW, so of course I’m going to cite grunge. I am aware of the status downgrade I took using that example.) Whereas a 5% pale lager would have marked you as a chump in 2002—among beery types only, of course—in 2022 it suggests someone whose palate is so sophisticated that ultimate simplicity is the cool kids’ drink. I mean, personally you wouldn’t catch me drinking a helles to save my life. Everyone knows brown ale is the drink for the truly cool. 😉
Even in the mere waxing and waning of styles we see the influence of status. I wrote about Merseburger, a German style famous for its undrinkable bitterness, a while back. What accounts for its popularity if not the status it brought those brave souls willing to knock it back? Look backward over history and you see the role status plays in picking winners and losers in the battle of the styles.
Ridgeway doesn’t argue that this is pure calculation or that our choices aren’t also guided by real passions and preferences. It seems more like our choices of status arenas are driven by our passions, so that whatever affords us the status is aligned with our preferences. Certain people want to live in their heads and the pages of old dusty books, so they become scholars, and then happily participate in the games of status in their profession. Beer, to use the relevant example for this blog, offers so little cultural capital outside its own realm that no one becomes a fake fan. Brag about rauchbier among non-beer people and see how far it takes you. No, we first drink hazy IPA or helles because we like it. If we get a status bump for leading the pack to a new style, so much the better.
Humans are funny. We behave the way we do for so many complex reasons. I find it valuable to identify and name them, even if it doesn’t change anything. Status isn’t a huge part of beer, but we can’t ignore the role it plays, however peripheral. (And sometimes it’s not peripheral at all.) So please, reach for the four-pack of IPA and drink your sparkly glasses of helles with joy. That’s the real whole point of all this. But also notice how status drives the industry, trends, and fashions as you go. It is, if nothing else, fine entertainment.