Inborn and Acquired Status
Statuses based on inborn characteristics, such as gender, are called ascribed statuses, while statuses that individuals gained through their own efforts are called achieved statuses. Specific behaviors are associated with social stigmas, which can affect status.
Ascribed Status is when one's position is inherited through family. Monarchy is a widely-recognized use of this method, to keep the rulers in one family. This usually occurs at birth without any reference as to how that person may turn out to be a good or bad leader.
Read more about this topic: Social Status
Famous quotes containing the words inborn and, inborn, acquired and/or status:
“People never will recollect that mere learning and mere cleverness are of next to no value in life, while energy and intellectual grip, the things that are inborn and cannot be taught, are everything.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“A bird half wakened in the lunar noon
Sang halfway through its little inborn tune.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“I am not sure but I should betake myself in extremities to the liberal divinities of Greece, rather than to my country’s God. Jehovah, though with us he has acquired new attributes, is more absolute and unapproachable, but hardly more divine, than Jove. He is not so much of a gentleman, not so gracious and catholic, he does not exert so intimate and genial an influence on nature, as many a god of the Greeks.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“A genuine Left doesn’t consider anyone’s suffering irrelevant or titillating; nor does it function as a microcosm of capitalist economy, with men competing for power and status at the top, and women doing all the work at the bottom.... Goodbye to all that.”
—Robin Morgan (b. 1941)