Quest For Status

A look at how the desire to improve international status affects Russia's and China's foreign policies Deborah Welch Larson and Alexei Shevchenko argue that the desire for world status plays a key role in shaping the foreign policies of China and Russia. Applying social identity theory—the idea that individuals derive part of their identity from larger communities—to nations, they contend that China and Russia have used various modes of emulation, competition, and creativity to gain recognition from other countries and thus validate their respective identities. To make this argument, they analyze numerous cases, including Catherine the Great’s attempts to westernize Russia, China’s identity crises in the nineteenth century, and both countries’ responses to the end of the Cold War. The authors employ a multifaceted method of measuring status, factoring in influence and inclusion in multinational organizations, military clout, and cultural sway, among other considerations. Combined with historical precedent, this socio-psychological approach helps explain current trends in Russian and Chinese foreign policy.

This book explores the effects and consequences of major global power and major regional power status attribution on the foreign policies of states striving for such status and the consequences of status differentiation for the international system and the post-Cold War international order.

Anthropological study

Status-seeking is an important aspect of the foreign policies of a number of small states, but one that has been rarely studied. This book aims to contribute to our understanding not only of status-seeking, by coming at that question from a new angle, that of a small state, but also to our understanding of foreign policy, by discussing the importance of status for foreign policy overall. If status is a hierarchy, then it is important to focus not just on the highest-ranking powers, but also those at lower levels. As the distribution of power is becoming more diffuse, the role of small and medium powers becomes more significant than it was during the Cold war. The book chapters go beyond familiar explications of "soft power" or conflict resolution to highlight new aspects of Norway’s foreign policy, including contributions to national defense, global warming, and management of Arctic resources. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in areas including US Foreign Policy, International Relations and European Politics.

This book brings together contributions from different disciplines to investigate, from ethological and anthropological perspectives, behaviour that appears to have biological roots such as the tendency to seek status through the medium of food.

Is money the major factor in shaping the marketplace? Is salary the prime consideration in job satisfaction? Not necessarily, according to Robert Frank. Economists, Frank charges, have refused to treat people as people, and consequently they have painted a distorted picture of the marketplace. Economists have too often neglected fundamental elements of human nature and therefore have failed to ask many obviously important questions and have offered wrong or at best misleading answers to the questions they do ask. This challenging and provocative book offers an alternative to the prevailing view of human beings as economic automatons. Individual desires--notably the quest for status--profoundly affect the marketplace. "Status concerns play dominant roles in many of the most important private transactions and underlie much of the regulatory apparatus we observe in the modern welfare state," Frank writes. The book offers a radical reinterpretation of what private markets can and cannot do and suggests new ways of looking at familiar regulations and social programs. Many of the issues discussed touch directly upon the strongest concerns we feel as human beings struggling to define our roles and affirm our importance in the world around us. About the Author: Robert H. Frank is Associate Professor of Economics at Cornell University. He is the co-author (with Richard Freeman) of The Distributional Consequences of Direct Foreign Investment.

China’s late-imperial history has been framed as a long coda of decline, played out during the Qing dynasty. Reappraising this narrative, Stephen Halsey traces the origins of China’s current great-power status to this so-called decadent era, when threats of war with European and Japanese empirestriggered innovative state-building and statecraft.

“There's no writer alive like de Botton” (Chicago Tribune), and now this internationally heralded author turns his attention to the insatiable human quest for status—a quest that has less to do with material comfort than love. Anyone who’s ever lost sleep over an unreturned phone call or the neighbor’s Lexus had better read Alain de Botton’s irresistibly clear-headed new book, immediately. For in its pages, a master explicator of our civilization and its discontents explores the notion that our pursuit of status is actually a pursuit of love, ranging through Western history and thought from St. Augustine to Andrew Carnegie and Machiavelli to Anthony Robbins. Whether it’s assessing the class-consciousness of Christianity or the convulsions of consumer capitalism, dueling or home-furnishing, Status Anxiety is infallibly entertaining. And when it examines the virtues of informed misanthropy, art appreciation, or walking a lobster on a leash, it is not only wise but helpful.