Chelsea's new manager, Jos Mourinho, was signed last week for a reported 5 million a year, while Marks &amp; Spencer's new chief executive, Stuart Rose, received a signing-on fee of 1.25m, and a base salary of 850,000 a year. Both were new records and if either man can bring the turnaround the two organisations seek, presumably they would seem cheap at twice the price. But are Mourinho and Rose accepting their new jobs just for the cash? Ten years ago, even a star football manager and a talented CEO were paid at half today's salaries. If you believe a new book by Sir Michael Marmot, one of Britain's leading experts on health and social behaviour, what is driving men such as Mourinho and Rose is not money but status*.  Both are already very rich. What matters is what the cash signifies. By being rewarded so highly, Rose and Mourinho are confirmed as top dogs; the men with the highest status in relation to their peers. Cash is just the readiest way of keeping score, demonstrating that they are at the top of their respective hierarchies.  Stuart Rose, by saying he needed to show he was hard to get rather than having any appetite for the cash, has con firmed Marmot's thesis. Status counts, as it always has.  This shouldn't be a surprise. Alain de Botton has already mapped the human preoccupation with our relative standing in his bestseller, Status Anxiety. But Marmot has gone much further. He shows that all societies demonstrate the same truth. There is a discernible downward gradient from high-status individuals (and their partners) who live longer, with more satisfying, healthier and contented lives, even if performing allegedly stressful jobs, to those of fractionally lower status.  So it goes on down the hierarchy of whatever status ladder counts in the particular society or subgroup. Oscar winners live four years longer than film stars not so honoured; permanent secretaries in the Civil Service are happier than those even in the immediate grades below them.  What counts, suggests Marmot, is not just the gratification of being admired and respected by others. Social status provides two crucial props to good health and personal well-being. First, you can't be high status without being closely integrated into the social group of which you are part. There is a mountain of evidence that the denser the social networks of which you are a member, the less likely, for example, you are to fall ill. Social intercourse makes us happy and happiness is the best possible shield against illness.  Second, the higher your status, the more control and autonomy you are likely to have over how you live your life and spend your working day. Autonomy spells satisfaction because it gives   greater potential for realising your wants and choices. Again, there is powerful evidence that this control fends off the deep stress that triggers the adverse physical reaction to everything from viral infections to mental disorders.  It is because these drivers are so ubiquitous that Marmot finds a social gradient in every human phenomenon he studies - from obesity to IQ. Thus his theory of a status syndrome. Nor does he have much sympathy with the conservative view or that of the new evolutionary Darwinian psychologists like Stephen Pinker - that the chain of causation runs from our inherited DNA to where we stand in the hierarchy, ie that essentially we are where we are because we were born to be differentially healthy and high-achieving.  The social gradient is so ever-present across the universe of phenomenon in all societies, and the causal impact on health and well-being so irrefutable that it cannot be true that the over-riding driver of who and what we are is our gene pool. Genes may create dispositions; the status syndrome solidifies our lived experience.  Marmot concludes that in a democratic age, the majority are increasingly going to demand a slice of the autonomy, social engagement and respect that those at the top of the social gradient experience - and that this struggle is going to succeed the political battles over equal citizenship rights, the welfare state and even income distribution that have been fought over for the last century.  He has identified an important movement. The popularity of reality TV, which enfranchises the individual viewer and gives him or her a stake in status and celebrity, is surely part of this. So, in another part of the contemporary landscape, is the new willingness of trade union members to threaten strike action, not in the name of socialism as in the 1970s but rather to insist that employers take their issues seriously and respect their claims.  Arguably, the same trend is what lies behind the growth of various fundamentalisms, whether religious, environmental or political. The appeal of the Alpha course asserting the verities of Christianity, the animal rights movement; the fathers' rights campaign and even UKIP and Euroscepticism are that they variously offer their adherents a route to asserting control, status and autonomy.  All are driven by the status syndrome; all find social engagement and more control through what they do. It does not matter whether you approve or disapprove. What we are witnessing is a restless quest for status with a myriad of sub-groups offering their particular route up the social gradient, insisting that what they value is superior to common mores and standards, so offering the necessary status.  The danger is obvious; Jos Mourinho and Stuart Rose, for example, may have assuaged their desire for status, but those who work for them may wonder destructively what their bosses' real motives are, apart from setting a new salary benchmark for the next round of star hirings.  Similarly, there is a selfishness about single-issue political campaigners. In the US, Ralph Nader may be satisfying his desire for status in running for President, but he weakens the opposition to Bush. But we shouldn't underestimate the deep human need on display. Suicide bombers are less driven by the desperation of poverty than their profound sense of shame at their society's standing along with a quest for status that their culture and religion confer.  The political challenge is huge. At home, it is to find a balance between the diversity of a richly pluralist civil society offering a multiplicity of routes to status and the necessary minimum that we must hold in common if society is to stick together.  In foreign policy, it must be to recognise that a willingness to respect the integrity of positions other than the orthodox Western one is a critical component of success, especially against terrorism.  On these questions, the British right, itself fragmented into status-seeking factions, is not at first base; the British left is only fractionally more advanced. These are new questions to which we need better answers - and we need them fast.  * Status Syndrome, Bloomsbury 12.99