The phenomenon sociologists call "status incongruence" has equivalents in many languages. Expressions such as "nouveau riche," "déclassé," "roturier" and "parvenu" show that people in many societies perceive the incongruence between various statuses. The popular dictum "the heart on the left, the pocket on the right" expresses this incongruence between positions and feelings.

As a sociological concept, status incongruence is relatively recent. It was devised some time after the adoption of the notion of "status," following the discovery of Max Weber's writings on this subject by American sociologists in the late 1930s. In the 1950s, some twelve articles were published on "status inconsistency," most of them in the American Sociological Review. Those articles had a cumulative effect. At a certain point in the 1960s, it was felt that the debate on this topic had become saturated. In the absence of more empirical evidence, the theoretical discussion...