Abstract
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>Organisations carefully attend to changes in their social status, since these can impact outcomes that are important to them. Thus, understanding the prevalence, causes, and consequences of status shifts is a crucial focus within status research. Existing research on this topic offers two distinct characterisations of status dynamics among organisations—one that views organisational status as a relatively stable asset that evolves only incrementally over time, and another that highlights cases of dramatic change, such as when an organisation wins a prize, declines according to formal rankings, or is implicated in a scandal. This chapter reviews research in this vein, offering an explicit conceptualisation of status change as occurring when a critical mass (i.e., a substantial number of individuals or a few powerful groups) revises its evaluation of an organisation, and it highlights factors that lead to stability and those that drive change. The chapter then discusses organisational responses to status change and concludes by offering suggestions for future research on status dynamics.</jats:p>