Articles

Prestige

Prestige

Prestige is the reputation or influence arising from success, achievement, rank, or other favorable attributes. It can also mean high status or reputation achieved through success, influence, wealth, etc. It can also be regarded as the power to influence or impress glamour.

Prestige and excellence are semantically related. In some cases you can use “Prestige” instead “Excellence”. It is distinction or reputation attaching to a person or thing and thus possessing a cachet for others.

Prestige is often associated with qualities such as excellence, distinction, and importance. It can be earned through a variety of means, including academic or professional achievements, social standing, wealth, power, or fame.

Prestige serves a sophisticated social function. How a person’s job is perceived can have a huge impact on how they are viewed by others and even themselves. That is a person’s job title.

In some contexts, prestige can be subjective and vary depending on cultural or individual values. For example, certain professions or industries may be considered more prestigious in some societies than in others. Similarly, different people may have different ideas of what constitutes prestige, depending on their own experiences and perspectives.

We’ve come to think of prestige as an inherent quality; we sense that certain jobs are more worthwhile than others, without being able to pinpoint exactly why. On a surface level, we may associate prestige with power (as with state leaders or CEOs), high salaries (as with celebrities), or the intellectual rigor of the job itself (as with medicine or engineering).

When choosing a career, we consider many factors. Top among our considerations are what we enjoy doing, how much we can expect to earn and the kind of lifestyle we want to live and influence. Though many would hesitate to admit it, one other determinant with  an inordinate amount of weight is a career’s relative prestige.

For example, the philosophers, artists and writers of today are not held in the same cultural esteem as they were in the eighteenth century. Airline hostesses, once glamour personified, now simply have a job like the rest of us, albeit it  at 10,000 feet. After 2008, bankers fell from grace. Conversely, in the last decade, the ambitious might consider becoming software developers or entrepreneurs just as much as doctors, engineers or lawyers.

This impetuous assessment of a person’s worth based on their job extends beyond an assessment evaluation of finances or their value in a professional network, and moves into the much more personal realm of character assessment. Because of notion we’ve been given since birth, we automatically attach certain character traits to certain careers (which is why prestige can make a potential career so attractive — or vice versa.

conclusively, prestige should not be just associates or attached to some jobs title or social status to make other jobs or social status feel inferior to others no matter the income or payment involved in any profession. Every profession or jobs should attract prestige inasmuch they are legit and legal. 

One fact that is sure is there is dignity in labour.

The work of the cultivators, miners, artisans, etc, should be respectable as the work of the engineer, the teacher, the doctor, and the lawyer etc. when we say there is dignity in labour, it means all jobs and career as Prestige.

Share this post

About the author

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *