Berger, Joseph

The Expectation States Program in Status Processes

This program encompasses a growing set of interrelated theories aimed at understanding how features of the larger society, including cultural beliefs about statuses, such as gender, race, and age, and social structures, such as the distribution of statuses in a particular situation, affect interpersonal behavior and beliefs leading to a group's power and prestige hierarchy.

Within the Expectation States Program, Berger, working with Hamit Fisek, Robert Z. Norman, and others, developed theories to address a wide range of substantive phenomena. Those include, among others, theories on (1) processes by which multiple status characteristics organize interpersonal behavior; (2) how reward expectations form in status situations; (3) processes by which different types of social justice and injustice are created; (4) ways in which expectations formed in one situation transfer to new persons, new tasks, and new status distinctions; (5) ways in which group hierarchies can acquire and lose legitimacy; (6) the effects of public evaluations by outsiders and interactants; (7) processes of social control; (8) interrelations between sentiments and status processes; and (9) processes that create and maintain institutionalized status distinctions. Theories in the Expectation States Program have also served as bases for extensive applications and engineering research (see also Wagner and Berger 2002).

The Program in Theory Growth

Working primarily with David G. Wagner and Morris Zelditch Jr. and building on the research of the philosopher [Page 54]Imre Lakatos, Berger introduced the idea of theoretical research programs (TRPs) into sociology. TRPs are interrelated sets of theories and related empirical techniques and findings. TRPs differ from both unit theories, such as Emerson's power-dependence relations, and from orienting strategies, such as neofunctionalism and rational choice approaches.

Orienting strategies contain fundamental orientations concerning methods, substance, and goals of sociological inquiry as well as working strategies that provide frameworks for the construction of unit theories. A main distinguishing characteristic is growth patterns. Orienting strategies grow slowly, if they grow at all. Unit theories consist of sets of concepts and principles and associated theory-based empirical models that ground these theories in empirical realities. They grow primarily through confrontation with data, but that offers only limited growth potential. Significant theory growth depends on alternative theories; thus, relations between theories in a TRP are crucial.

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