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A person may have status of a daughter, wife, mother, student, worker, church member and a citizen. The term "status set" was coined by Robert K. Merton in 1957. He made a clear distinction between a "role set" and a "status set". [1] Merton stated that status set is the set of statuses in a society while role set is the set of roles in a society
Achieved status is distinguished from ascribed status by virtue of being earned through the set of accomplished tasks and/or goals. Many positions are a mixture of achievement and ascription. For instance, a person who has achieved the status of being a physician is more likely to have the ascribed status of being born into a wealthy family.
A role (also rôle or social role) is a set of connected behaviors, rights, obligations, beliefs, and norms as conceptualized by people in a social situation. It is an expected or free or continuously changing behavior and may have a given individual social status or social position.
Likewise, society is believed to be grouped into structurally related groups or sets of roles, with different functions, meanings, or purposes. Examples of social structure include family, religion, law, economy, and class. It contrasts with "social system", which refers to the parent structure in which these various structures are embedded.
In a society, the relative honor and prestige accorded to individuals depends on how well an individual is perceived to match a society's values and ideals (e.g., being pious in a religious society or wealthy in a capitalist society). Status often comes with attendant rights, duties, and lifestyle practices. [6]
A social class (or, simply, class), as in class society, is a set of subjectively defined concepts in the social sciences and political theory centered on models of social stratification in which people are grouped into a set of hierarchical social categories, [5] the most common being the upper, middle, and lower classes.
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They are defined as "a subculture having a rather specific rank (or status) within the stratification system. That is, societies tend to include a hierarchy of status groups, some enjoying high ranking and some low." [2] One example of this hierarchy is the prestige of a university professor compared to that of a garbage man.