ABSTRACT
We believe the various contributions to this volume do justice to their authors' mentor, John C. Pock. Like him, these essays are provocative, innovative, ambitious, careful and sophisticated in their reasoning and inference, and focused on some of sociology's central issues. At the same time, this collection also highlights the obvious fact that our theories and research addressing status attainment provide a decidedly incomplete picture of the social forces involved. In particular, too little emphasis has been paid to both macro- (demographic, structural, and institutional) and micro- (individual and primary group) influences. We sketch the beginnings of a more comprehensive framework here, and we show how a number of the chapters in this volume address issues that fit comfortably within such an expanded view of how the process of status attainment works in modem industrial societies. We also discuss some implications of this broadened conception of the status attainment process for future research.
