CHANGES IN THE STRUCTURE OF STATUS SYSTEMS: EMPLOYMENT SHIFTS IN THE WAKE OF DEINDUSTRIALIZATION

This paper reviews, adapts, and applies the general conceptual framework for analyzing changes in status systems developed by Haller (1970) to socioeconomic change in older industrial regions using deindustrialization in the Pittsburgh area during the early 1980s as an example. Although the general framework was formulated to be applicable to any human society it requires slight modification to make it useful for analyzing social structural change in societies with modern institutional structures. Its application to assessing some of the contours and consequences of socioeconomic change resulting from deindustrialization in the Pittsburgh region qualifies the observation that shifts in the social structures produced by modern market economies occur at a “glacial” rate. Social structural shifts may also occur suddenly, even in the absence of political forces such as are typically associated with rapid social structural change. The consequences of such shifts can be devastating for communities situated in the wrong place at the wrong time, but the economic and human costs of such social structural shifts are not inevitable. In the case of deindustrialization in the Pittsburgh region, these costs could have been mitigated with greater attention to early warning signals in the market and better communication and coordination between private and public sectors and labor to anticipate and plan for a smoother regional transition.