Status Jockeying as a Mode of Societization

The regulation school's foundational insight was that accumulation is never a purely economic accomplishment. A regime of accumulation persists only when it is coupled to a mode of regulation, the ensemble of institutional forms, norms, and habits that stabilize its contradictions, and beneath that to what Hirsch and Jessop called a mode of societization, the historically specific way a capitalist formation produces subjects, forms of life, and social cohesion compatible with its economic architecture (Hirsch 1991; Jessop 1990). Gramsci saw this before the vocabulary existed. Americanism and Fordism was not an essay about assembly lines. It was an essay about the manufacture of a new type of human being, one whose work discipline, sexual morality, consumption habits, and inner life had been reorganized to match the requirements of mass production (Gramsci 1971). The question regulation theory teaches us to ask of any period is therefore double: what does the regime accumulate, and what kind of person does it require? My previous essay argued that subject formation under desocietized conditions has become stochastic, uncoordinated hailing from apparatuses that no longer converge. This essay asks the complementary question. Uncoordinated formation is not formless. What kind of subject does the present regime select for, and where can we watch that subject being made?

What Fordism societized

The Fordist answer was coherent because it had to be. Intensive accumulation based on mass production required a mass consumption norm, and the mode of regulation delivered it through the wage relation itself: the family wage, the standardized working day, the career ladder, collective bargaining in leading sectors, and a household consumption package underwritten by credit and public provision (Aglietta 1979; Boyer 1990). The corresponding mode of societization produced the subjects this machinery presupposed. The organization man and the white-collar employee were not accidents of midcentury culture. They were the human infrastructure of the regime, formed by schools, firms, unions, and broadcast culture into persons for whom a position in a formal hierarchy organized identity, esteem, and the life course (Mills 1951; Whyte 1956).

Status under Fordism was accordingly routinized. The bureaucratic organization channeled status competition into formal parameters: titles, offices, salary grades, the corner office, the reserved parking space. One knew where one stood because the organization said so, and the saying was backed by an economic hierarchy that culture largely tracked rather than constituted (Mills 1951; Charles and Schor 2025). This is the bottom-left quadrant of the typology Juliet Schor and I developed in Distinction at Work: high formal hierarchy, low informal status jockeying, because the routinization of status ascription undermines individual jockeying for position. The regulationist point is that this was not merely an organizational pattern. It was the status order of an entire mode of societization, reproduced wherever the regime's characteristic institutions reached.

An accumulation regime without a settlement

The regime that replaced Fordism never built an equivalent. Flexible accumulation, financialization, and what I have described, following Riley, as the political-capitalist resolution of the surplus problem dismantled the Fordist institutional forms without erecting successors: the career ladder fissured, the family wage dissolved, the union contracted, and risk migrated onto households (Riley 2026; Streeck 2014). This is the institutional history I have elsewhere called desocietization. Read through regulation theory, it acquires a sharper formulation. The present formation has an accumulation regime without a corresponding mode of regulation, and the search for the missing mode of societization is not an academic exercise. It names the instability of the whole arrangement (Jessop and Sum 2006; Hirsch 1991).

But no formation leaves subject formation entirely to chance, and this one has not either. Its emergent mode of societization is visible once we know what to look for, and what to look for is the subjective correlate of an economy that no longer distributes position through formal hierarchy. When the organizational chart stops assigning standing, standing must be claimed, performed, and continuously defended. The subject the present regime forms and requires is the status jockey: self-directing, passionate, culturally fluent, permanently engaged in informal competition for esteem within fields that describe themselves as level. The claim of this essay is that status jockeying is not a personality type or a moral failing. It is the mode of societization of post-Fordist accumulation, and it can be observed empirically at two sites, one intimate and one planetary.

The makerspace as laboratory

The intimate site is the one Schor and I studied ethnographically for eighteen months. The makerspace we called Industry was a structurally flat organization with open membership, shared tools and governance, and an explicit ethic of egalitarianism and community, an organization that had renounced hierarchy as thoroughly as any in the American economy (Charles and Schor 2025). What we found was the opposite of the founding expectation. The absence of formal hierarchy produced high levels of informal status competition, conducted almost entirely through cultural capital. A high-status group emerged, exclusively White and disproportionately male, that presided over the space's domains, transacted internally through a separate currency of beer while charging outsiders cash, and legitimated its standing through two forms of symbolic labor we termed material disavowal and cultural validation: economic considerations were symbolically distanced, working for money became nearly taboo, and belonging was affirmed through the production of exotic, esoteric, and deliberately impractical objects, tables that refuse to be tables, robots built across fifty hours to be destroyed in an evening (Bourdieu 1984; Charles and Schor 2025).

Look at the subjects this environment formed and rewarded, because they are recognizable far beyond the makerspace. The successful member converted production into identity work, performed distance from necessity as virtue, treated passion as the only avowable motive, disavowed instrumental aims while quietly converting participation into career capital, and competed relentlessly while describing the field as a community of equals. This is the connexionist, projective self that Boltanski and Chiapello identified as the new spirit of capitalism, the subject for whom employability, authenticity, and network position have replaced career, duty, and rank (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005). It is equally Feher's self-appreciating human capital, a person whose task is no longer to sell labor power but to sustain the value of a portfolio self through continuous investment and display (Feher 2009). The makerspace did not invent this subject. It concentrated the conditions under which the subject becomes necessary: suppress economic markers, renounce formal hierarchy, sacralize creativity, and status competition does not disappear. It culturalizes, and the winners are those whose class-conditioned habitus lets them perform disinterest most fluently, which is why a formally open organization in a multiracial neighborhood produced a nearly all-White membership and a masculine one-upmanship culture (Bourdieu 1984; Charles and Schor 2025).

The typology from the paper now scales. Fordist society occupied the bottom-left quadrant: formal hierarchy, routinized status. The present social formation has migrated to the top-right, the makerspace's quadrant: level in form, meritocratic and anti-hierarchical in rhetoric, and saturated with informal status competition in practice. Industry was not an aberration from the surrounding society. It was a laboratory-pure sample of the surrounding society's mode of societization, with the confounds removed.

The platform as the jockeying machine

The planetary site is social media, and it reproduces the makerspace's structure with unnerving fidelity. The platform presents itself as level: anyone can post, anyone can rise, the feed knows no titles. Within this formal flatness, standing is claimed through visible display, verbal transmission of status information, and continuous performance, which is a sentence from our findings section that describes Instagram as accurately as it described Industry. The influencer economy runs on the same two forms of symbolic labor we documented. Material disavowal appears as the authenticity imperative, the requirement that commercial activity be presented as passion, that the sponsored post feel unsponsored, that one appear to do it for love while doing it for a living (Marwick 2013; Duffy 2017). Cultural validation appears as the relentless objectification of taste: the curated feed, the exotic project, the aestheticized life, belonging affirmed through the production of displayable distinction. Even the beer economy has its analogue in the tiered intimacy of collabs, group chats, and mutuals, an internal gift circuit demarcating those inside the status group from the laity who must pay, in money or attention, for access (Charles and Schor 2025; Marwick 2013).

One difference is decisive, and it is where the regulationist framing earns its keep. At Industry, status jockeying was economically incidental. The organization ran on membership fees whether or not anyone competed for esteem. On the platform, the jockeying is the product. Engagement-ranked feeds convert status competition into attention, attention into data, and data into advertising rent, so that every act of distinction-making, every boast, callout, ratio, and carefully staged display of distance from necessity, is simultaneously an act of value production for the platform's owner (Zuboff 2019). Baran and Sweezy analyzed the sales effort as monopoly capitalism's apparatus for organizing demand from outside the consumer. The platform has improved on it by moving the apparatus inside: the users now perform the sales effort on themselves and one another, competitively, for free, as identity work (Baran and Sweezy 1966; Zuboff 2019).

This is the historically novel feature of the present mode of societization. Under Fordism, subject formation was a cost of the regime. Capital and the state paid for the schools, the family wage, and the broadcast infrastructure that produced compatible subjects, because mass production needed them. Under platform capitalism, subject formation has been endogenized into accumulation itself. The formation of status-jockeying subjects is not a precondition of the regime paid for elsewhere. It is a revenue stream, metered in engagement and sold as advertising inventory. Societization has become a profit center, and this resolves what would otherwise be a puzzle in the stochastic interpellation argument: the regime tolerates incoherent subject formation because it does not need coherent subjects. It needs engaged competitors, and incoherence, anxiety, and unsettled standing are better engagement fuel than settled identity ever was (Zuboff 2019; Duffy 2017).

Two classes of jockey

The mode of societization is classed, in the way I described in The Two Control Regimes of Post-Bureaucratic Capitalism. Elite and aspiring-elite subjects experience status jockeying through normative control: they are invited to compete as whole persons, through taste, passion, and authenticity, in fields that reward cultural capital and punish visible necessity (Kunda 2006; Charles and Schor 2025). Precarious subjects encounter the same tournament through technical control: ratings, rankings, metrics, and scores that quantify standing without soliciting identification. The gig worker's five stars and the influencer's follower count are the two class dialects of a single status language. And the makerspace's demographic lesson generalizes: a societization mode that distributes esteem through performed distance from necessity systematically advantages those who already possess distance from necessity, then misrecognizes the result as merit. Misrecognition, which Bourdieu theorized at the scale of fields, now operates at the scale of the social formation, and it is the ideological accomplishment holding the arrangement together (Bourdieu 1984; Boltanski and Chiapello 2005).

Regulation theory would predict that such an arrangement is unstable, because a mode of societization that generates anxiety, exclusion, and unpayable status debts does not produce cohesion. It produces the demand for substitute coherence I traced in After Legitimacy, and the reactionary formations meeting that demand are themselves organized as status orders, with their own hierarchies of purity and their own jockeying. The diagnosis therefore ends where the reconstruction question begins. Fordism routinized esteem through bureaucratic position, at the price of conformity and exclusion. The present regime deroutinized esteem and put it up for auction. A democratic mode of societization would have to do what neither did: distribute recognition through contribution and obligation, in institutions durable enough to make standing something other than a permanent competitive performance. Durkheim thought professional groups could carry that weight. Whatever the contemporary equivalent turns out to be, the regulationist lesson stands. No accumulation regime survives its subjects indefinitely, and a regime that farms its subjects' status anxiety for rent is running an experiment on how long.

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