The organizational selection of status characteristics: Status evaluations in an open source community

Organizations mediate societal cultural belief systems and group-level encounters by filtering, and sometimes transforming, social information regarding which status characteristics are salient during group encounters embedded within organizations. This study uses status characteristics theory to add to our understanding of social status within organizations by explaining why organizations matter in determining which status characteristics will be activated within task groups. By analyzing status rankings within an organization of open source software programmers, we find that the organization develops its own unique shared belief system, which inculcates actors with beliefs about status characteristics that are potentially unique within the boundaries of the organization. Specifically, in this study we find that through a process of status generalization, organizational members create new status markers (location) that are potentially only meaningful for the given social situation, and they selectively nullify others (education and age). To the best of our knowledge, the current study is the first work in the expectation states tradition to demonstrate an outcome for an organization-level selection process for status characteristics. This paper adds to status characteristics theory by empirically analyzing how organizational contexts create boundaries around groups in which new and extant status characteristics are activated and in which predefined characteristics inherited from more global, society-level contexts are deactivated.