This article uses Academy Award nominations for acting to explore how artistic achievement is situated within a collaborative context. Assessment of individual effort is particularly difficult in film because quality is not transparent, but the project-based nature of the field allows us to observe individuals in multiple collaborative contexts. We address these issues with analyses of the top-10 credited roles from films released in theaters between 1936 and 2005. Controlling for an actor's personal history and the basic traits of a film, we explore two predictions. First, we find that status, as measured by asymmetric centrality in the network of screen credits, is an efficient measure of star power and mediates the relationship between experience and formal artistic consecration. Second, we find that actors are most likely to be consecrated when working with elite collaborators. We conclude by arguing that selection into privileged work teams provides cumulative advantage.
This article develops a model of how the structure of exchange can manage such disreputable exchanges as the commensuration of sacred for profane. Whereas existing research discusses the rhetorical reframing of exchange, I highlight structures that obfuscate whether an exchange is occurring and thereby mitigate exchange taboos. I identify three such exchange structures: bundling, brokerage, and gift exchange. Bundling uses crosssubsidization across multiple innocuous exchanges to synthesize a taboo exchange. Brokerage finds a third party to accept responsibility for exchange. Gift exchange delays reciprocity and reframes exchanges as expressions of friendship. All three strategies have alternative meanings and so provide plausible deniability to taboo commensuration. The article concludes by arguing that these sorts of exchange structures represent a synthesis of "nothing but" reductionism and "hostile worlds" moralism, rather than an alternative to them as Viviana Zelizer suggests.
This article models the implications of innovations being nested within categories. In effect, social actors assess the legitimacy of innovations vis-à-vis conformity to categories such that a sufficiently legitimate innovation may be adopted without direct reference to the behavior of peers. However, when innovations lack categorical legitimacy, actors default to proximately peer-oriented heuristics such as information cascades. Eventually, if enough similarly novel innovations achieve widespread popularity, their conventions will become accepted as a legitimate category. Thus density creates legitimacy, but this density can be at the level of the particular innovation or of the category within which it is embedded.Keywords: diffusion; institutions; categories; compatibility In understanding when and how people act, sociologists have tended to be especially interested in "situations where many actors behave in ways contingent on one another" (Granovetter 1978(Granovetter :1442. Indeed, there is often a strong presumption that only such dynamic interdependence is truly social, as in the famous passage from Weber's (1978) essay on social action in which he suggests that "if at the beginning of a shower a number of people on the street put up their umbrellas at the same time, this would not ordinarily be a case of action mutually oriented to that of each other, but rather of all reacting in the same way to the like need of protection from the rain" (p. 23). However, Weber's position is open to the critique that "it never occurred to him that umbrellas are only found in certain societies, and neither manufactured nor used in all" (Elias 1978:120); that is, sociologists from Weber through the present interested in how action might be social have mostly been thinking of whether action is proximately contingent on others-a tendency that has only increased with the recent interest in models based on networks, cascades, and other varieties of complexity. However, what much of this research overlooks is that even behavior that is proximately indifferent to peer behavior may be ultimately social in that the actor's repertoire or tool kit is socially derived (Swidler 1986;Tilly 1983). We can thus usefully distinguish between different levels of abstraction in the nature of social action.Paradoxically, there may well be a trade-off between proximately social and ultimately social action. A behavior that is completely congruent with social expectations may be performed immediately on opportunity to do so, without reference to peers. In contrast, a dubious act will be performed more hesitantly, furtively looking to see whether others are acting likewise. For instance, applause is a thoroughly legitimate act, and most audience members understand what aspects of a speech merit applause, so audience members tend to erupt into applause simultaneously as each member reacts directly to the applause lines, without waiting to see if peers are behaving similarly (Heritage and Greatbatch 1986).1 In contrast, booing is a boo...
A wide class of economic exchanges, such as bribery and compensated adoption, are considered morally disreputable precisely because they are seen as economic exchanges. However, parties to these exchanges can structurally obfuscate them by arranging the transfers so as to obscure that a disreputable exchange is occurring at all. In this article, we propose that four obfuscation structures-bundling, brokerage, gift exchange, and pawning-will decrease the moral opprobrium of external audiences by (1) masking intentionality, (2) reducing the explicitness of the reciprocity, and (3) making the exchange appear to be a type of common practice. We report the results from four experiments assessing participants' moral reactions to scenarios that describe either an appropriate exchange, a quid pro quo disreputable exchange, or various forms of obfuscated exchange. In support of our hypotheses, results show that structural obfuscation effectively mitigates audiences' moral offense at disreputable exchanges and that the effects are substantially mediated by perceived attributional opacity, transactionalism, and collective validity.
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