Moral regulation as status politics: A critical reconstruction of Joseph R. Gusfield’s theory

Abstract

Sociology of moral regulation has been interested in different kinds of morally charged social movements, such as the temperance movement, to investigate the social reasons why people take part in such movements. One answer is provided by Joseph Gusfield’s classic analysis of the American temperance movement, The Symbolic Crusade, published in 1963. The status politics theory developed therein provides a potential explanation of participation in moral regulation movements. This paper reconstructs the general logic of status politics explanations from an actor-centred perspective, explicating the actor image and the status anxiety mechanism inherent in the theory. Some of the problems discussed include third-person explanations and proof of status anxiety. With due caution, status politics theory provides one alternative for explaining mobilisation in moral regulation movements as well as populist politics.