“New” Luxury: Examining the Maintenance of Elite Status

The importance of status is well established in research on management and organization theory (e.g., Podolny, 1993; Washington & Zajac, 2005). Despite the benefits associated with high status, its consequentiality to commercial success, and emerging evidence that brings the apparent stability of status orders into question (e.g., Delmestri & Greenwood, 2016), scholars still “know little about how status dynamics occur” (Piazza & Castellucci, 2014: 309). In this study, I consider the possibility that status may be actively maintained and agentically renegotiated over time, even by those in favored, elite positions. I conduct an in-depth, inductive case study of the luxury segment of the U.S. hotel industry from 1985-2015, using both qualitative and quantitative analyses to uncover how members of this high- status segment collectively maintained their industry rank and cultural prestige over time. I show that linguistic efforts at sacralization, emotional recasting, and preservation constituted an extended...