Super-ordination and Subordination

In one line

Super-ordination and subordination is the process by which one party comes to occupy a higher position and another a lower, and both come to treat the arrangement as normal.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: super-ordination and subordination is the social process by which persons or groups are ranked above and below one another in a relationship of authority, prestige or power, so that one commands and the other complies. It is a form of accommodation, being one of the ways a conflict is settled, and it is the process by which stratification is produced and maintained; where the arrangement is accepted by both parties as proper, it has become legitimate authority.

How it happens

Four routes are usually given, and giving the routes rather than a definition alone is what makes an answer analytical.

By conquest or force. The strongest party imposes the ranking, and it is maintained by coercion for so long as the strength lasts.

By ascription. The ranking is fixed at birth and never contested within the person's life. Caste is the type case, and gender within a patriarchal household is another.

By achievement and competition. The ranking is the outcome of a contest, as in a promotion or an election.

By consent and function. The ranking is accepted because the parties agree it is necessary for a purpose, which is what an employment relation, a classroom or an army claims to be.

Its characteristics

1. It is universal. Every society and every organised group ranks its members in some respect.
2. It is relational. Neither position exists without the other.
3. It is situational. The same person is superordinate in one relation and subordinate in another, which is [Status and Role]: a clerk who commands at home, a judge who is a junior member of a club.
4. It requires acceptance to be stable. A ranking maintained only by force is expensive and precarious; one accepted as proper needs almost no enforcement.
5. It is expressed symbolically: forms of address, seating, dress, order of precedence, who may speak first and who must wait.
6. It is a process, and therefore reversible. This is the point of treating it here rather than only in Module I.

Power, authority and legitimacy

The distinction is Weber's and it belongs here, though it is worked in [Weber: Power and Authority].

Power is the ability to secure compliance despite resistance. Authority is power regarded as rightful by those subject to it. The whole difference is legitimacy, and it is what converts a costly relation of coercion into a cheap and stable one.

How subordination becomes accepted. Through socialisation, which teaches the ranking as natural; through ideology, which supplies a justification, whether religious, biological or functional; through the symbols that display it daily; and through the absence of any visible alternative. This is Gramsci's hegemony and Marx's false consciousness from [Marx: Theory of Social Class and Social Conflict], and it explains the standing puzzle of why subordinated groups so often accept their position.