ABSTRACT
Status attainment can be understood as a process by which individuals mobilize and invest resources for returns in socioeconomic standings. These resources can be classified into two types: personal resources and social resources. In the last three decades, a research tradition has focused on the effects on attained statuses of social resources. The principal proposition is that social resources exert an important and significant effect on attained statuses, beyond that accounted for by personal resources. Contributions of social network analysis to status attainment can be traced to the seminal study conducted by Mark Granovetter, who interviewed 282 professional and managerial men in Newton, Massachusetts. Clues about the linkage between strength of ties and attained statuses came indirectly from a small world study conducted in a tri-city metropolitan area in upstate New York. The theory begins with an image of the macro-social structure consisting of positions ranked according to certain normatively valued resources such as wealth, status, and power.
