The Sociological Nature of “Respect”: Understanding the Interplay between Hierarchies of Value and Expectations of Treatment

What does sociology have to say about respect? In this paper I interrogate the phenomenon of respect from a sociological perspective. Respect has been a central topic in moral philosophy, but it has not received enough systematic attention in sociological theory. Although there is both theoretical and empirical research on the concept, the sociological literature on respect is still scarce, and there is not enough dialogue between approaches. In this article I offer a systematic reading on the literature on respect and claim that it is fruitful for sociological analysis to construct a deeper understanding of this phenomenon. Given the increasing importance of morality in sociological research, I propose that respect is a moral phenomenon whose sociological nature deserves further exploration. I suggest that respect functions as the norm, the language and the practice through which we communicate value to others, which is culturally situated and historically variable according to shifting definitions of social value. I claim that there are three main types of respect which can be analytically distinguished -categorical, positional and performance- and I argue that looking at the tensions between these three types of respect is a fruitful way to read cultural changes regarding the expectations of treatment that are formed in social interactions.