ABSTRACT
Social structures at all levels of social organization generate expectations as well as expectations from the cultural systems attached to each level of social structure. Institutional domains are constructed from congeries of variously interrelated and integrated corporate units, whereas stratification systems are generated by inequalities in the distribution of resources by corporate units to subpopulations marked by categoric-unit memberships, such as social class and other categoric distinctions that are correlated with social-class memberships. If individuals can experience at least satisfaction, if not more positive emotions, even when in lower-level positions, then the group is not systematically generating negative emotions that can accumulate in ways that create larger reservoirs of negative emotions among members of subpopulations in a society. Thus, status is the entry point into social structure and the constraints that it imposes directly and, indirectly, cultural expectations attached to social structures. The expectations ultimately are filtered down to status locations in divisions of labor and memberships in categoric units.
