How Helping Can Reinforce or Attenuate Status Inequalities: The Case of Nonprofit Organizations

Abstract

This article examines one type of social exchange that signals status: giving and receiving help. I focus on formal helping exchanges between staff and participants in nonprofit organizations. Bringing together status theory with research from social psychology on receiving help and studies of nonprofits, I identify how the helping exchanges in these settings can reinforce or attenuate status hierarchies with important consequences for participants. I examine three attenuation practices (sharing control, establishing commonalities, and questioning causes) and three practices that can reinforce status hierarchies (asserting control, reinforcing differences, and assuming causes) to show how status processes play a powerful but unexamined role in the very places dedicated to addressing inequality.