Some social settings are claimed to confer moral standing on those who publicise grievance and appeal to third parties, in contrast to honour and dignity cultures.
Campbell and Manning proposed a third moral culture alongside honour, where slights are answered personally, and dignity, where they are ignored. The typology is analytically neat and empirically thin: it has not been operationalised, and the cases used to build it were chosen because they fitted.
In practice
- An organisation where the route to redress runs through publicity rather than through the manager has changed where standing comes from.
- A typology assembled from examples that illustrate it cannot then be tested against them.
- Possible explanations
- The proposed explanation is third-party appeal: where a strong authority exists and direct retaliation is unavailable, publicising a slight to that authority is the effective move, which rewards documenting grievance rather than absorbing or avenging it.
- In its favour
- The typology is analytically neat, the honour and dignity cultures it builds on are well established in sociology, and the mechanism of appealing to authority is real.
- Against it
- It is constructed from selected illustrative cases rather than measured, no study has established that such a culture exists as described, and the label is applied almost entirely by critics of the settings it describes.
- Standing
- Contested. The typology is constructed from selected illustrative cases rather than measured, and the label is applied almost entirely by critics of the settings described.
- Subject
- Sociology & Culture
- Essay
- How societies hold together, sort people, and change