Research

Click on the links following each paper’s co-authors to view a draft.

Feature-Based Structures of Opportunity: Genre Innovation in the American Popular Music Industry, 1958 to 2016

with Khwan Kim. Available in American Sociological Review.

Abstract:

We offer a new perspective on how cultural markets are structured and the conditions under which innovations are more likely to emerge. We argue that in addition to organization- and producer-level factors, product features—the locus of marketplace interaction between producers and consumers—also structure markets. The aggregated distribution of product features helps producers gauge where to differentiate or conform and when consumers may be more receptive to the kind of novelty that spawns new genres, our measure of innovation. We test our arguments with a unique dataset comprising the nearly 25,000 songs that appeared on the Billboard Hot 100 chart from 1958 to 2016, using computational methods to capture and analyze the aesthetic (sonic) and semantic (lyrical) features of each song and, consequently, the market for popular music. Results reveal that new genres are more likely to appear following markets that can be characterized as diverse along one feature dimension while homogenous along the other. We then connect specific configurations of feature distributions to subsequent song novelty before linking the aesthetic and semantic novelty of individual songs to genre emergence. We replicate our findings using industry-wide data and conclude with implications for the study of markets and innovation.

Disrupted routines anticipate musical exploration

with Khwan Kim and James A. Evans. Available in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Abstract:

Understanding and predicting the emergence and evolution of cultural tastes manifested in consumption patterns is of central interest to social scientists, analysts of culture, and purveyors of content. Prior research suggests that taste preferences relate to personality traits, values, shifts in mood, and immigration destination. Understanding everyday patterns of listening and the function music plays in life has remained elusive, however, despite speculation that musical nostalgia may compensate for local disruption. Using more than one hundred million streams of four million songs by tens of thousands of international listeners from a global music service, we show that breaches in personal routine are systematically associated with personal musical exploration. As people visited new cities and countries, their preferences diversified, converging toward their travel destinations. As people experienced the very different disruptions associated with COVID-19 lockdowns, their preferences diversified further. Personal explorations did not tend to veer toward the global listening average, but away from it, toward distinctive regional musical content. Exposure to novel music explored during periods of routine disruption showed a persistent influence on listeners’ future consumption patterns. Across all of these settings, musical preference reflected rather than compensated for life’s surprises, leaving a lasting legacy on tastes. We explore the relationship between these findings and global patterns of behavior and cultural consumption.

Recognition Killed the Radio Star? Recognition Orientations and Sustained Creativity after the Best New Artist Grammy Nomination

with Spencer Harrison and Lydia Hagtvedt. Published in Administrative Science Quarterly. You can see a pre-print here.

Abstract:

Many organizations rely on group work to generate creativity, but existing research lacks theory on how groups’ responses to recognition for creative achievement shape their subsequent creative outcomes. Through an inductive study of bands nominated for a Best New Artist Grammy from 1980 to 1990, we develop a theory of reactions to early recognition in creative groups. Our multi-method analyses include oral histories from members of each band and quantitative data, which we use to triangulate the processes they describe. Our findings reveal that groups developed sets of emergent reactions and active adjustments to the recognition and its consequences, which we call “recognition orientations.” We identify three such orientations—absorbing, insulating, and mixed—that reflect how groups interpret recognition and integrate it into their subsequent creative processes. Most groups struggled by absorbing recognition, which led to internalizing expectations and opening their relationships to outsiders, ultimately inhibiting creativity. Some groups began to insulate themselves from recognition by externalizing expectations and bounding relationships, allowing them to sustain creative output over time. Finally, other groups developed a mixed orientation, initially experiencing the pitfalls of elevated recognition-seeking but ultimately attempting to insulate their need for external recognition by refocusing on their creative process. These findings reveal that recognition can upend the creative process, and groups that begin absorbing recognition are, ironically, less likely to earn it again in the future. Filling a critical research gap on creative production among groups that intend to continue working together, the results distinguish the skills needed to manage recognition from those needed to generate creativity, and offer insight into how groups enact longevity.

The Collaboration-Association Tradeoff: How the Gender Composition of Networks and Genres Influence the Novelty of Creative Products

with Michael Mauskapf, Sharon Koppman, and Brian Uzzi.

Abstract:

While creative production is widely recognized as a collective endeavor, scholarship on gender and creativity has primarily focused on individual-level gender differences in creative ability and evaluations of creative output. In this paper, we explore how the gender composition of artists’ social worlds—the collaborators with whom they interact, and the other artists with whom they are associated through shared genre membership—influences their creativity. Using an exhaustive and original dataset comprising nearly 250,000 commercially recorded songs written and released worldwide by 15,000 unique artists between 1955 and 2000, we construct a quantitative measure of musical creativity to test how the gender composition of artists’ networks and genres shape the relative novelty of their creative products. Extending prior research, we first demonstrate that female musicians are dramatically underrepresented in the field of music and produce significantly more novel music than men. We then show how artists’ creativity can be both enabled (through network diversity) and constrained (through perceived status threat) by the gender composition of their occupational environments. The results suggest a collaboration-association tradeoff, shedding new light on the role and consequences of gender composition for the creative careers of both men and women.

Where Do New Ideas Come From? The Social Foundations of Creativity in Music

with Michael Mauskapf, Eric Quintane, and Joeri Mol.

Abstract:

Creativity is a central tenet of cultural production, but what conditions enable some producers to be more creative than others? To answer this question, we investigate how different types of social connection influence the creation of novel cultural products. Leveraging Spotify data on over 25,000 musicians and 600,000 songs, we construct a feature-based measure of creative output (i.e., song novelty) and estimate how an artist’s collaboration network, category memberships, organizational affiliations, and geographic location affect their propensity to produce novel work. Our results show that individual creativity is in large part socially determined, not only through direct collaboration, but also – and to a greater extent – through proximity to creative “neighbors” in shared genres, record labels, and cities. Co-membership in a genre occupied by other creative artists is the most significant predictor of future creativity.

What Makes Popular Culture Popular?: Product Features and Optimal Differentiation in Music

with Michael Mauskapf. Available at American Sociological Review.

Click here for a TEDx talk I gave on this research.

Abstract:

In this paper, we propose a new explanation for why certain cultural products outperform their peers to achieve widespread success. We argue that products’ positioning within feature space significantly predicts their popular success. Using tools from computer science, we construct a novel data set that allows us to test how the musical features of nearly 27,000 songs from Billboard’s Hot 100 charts structure the consumption of popular music. We find that, in addition to artist familiarity, genre affiliation, and institutional support, a song’s perceived proximity to its peers influences its position on the charts. Contrary to the claim that all popular music sounds the same, we find that songs sounding too much alike—those that are highly typical—are less likely to succeed, while those exhibiting some degree of optimal differentiation are more likely to rise to the top of the charts. These findings offer a new contingent perspective on popular culture by specifying how content organizes competition and consumption behavior in cultural markets.

Institutionalizing Authenticity in the Digitized World of Music

with Joeri Mol. See a pre-publication version of the chapter here. Or find the published version in Research of the Sociology of Organizations here.

Abstract:

Since the arrival of mass production, commodification has been plaguing markets – none more so than that for music. By separating production and consumption in space and time, commodification challenges the very conditions underlying economic exchange. This chapter explores authenticity as the institutional response to the commodification of music, rekindling the relationship between isolated market participants in the increasingly digitized world of music. Building upon the “Production of Culture” perspective, we unpack the commodification of music across five different institutional realms – (1) production, (2) consumption, (3) selection, (4) appropriation, and (5) classification – and provide a thoroughly relational account of authenticity as an institutional practice.

Threading the Diversity Needle: The Impact of Minority Group Presence on Perceptions of Organizational Status

Abstract:

How do the perceptions of organizational members influence organizational status? Colleges in the U.S. face normative and self-imposed demands for both on-campus diversity and status, making them fertile ground to explore this question. Schools highlight their unique academic opportunities, social desirability, and other amenities to prospective applicants, hoping that drawing the “right” students will drive up status and that higher status will attract more students. Part of schools’ pitch includes an important, if amorphous, commitment to diversity. Each applicant, in selecting where to apply, has an idiosyncratic understanding of what diversity actually means; preferences differ accordingly. This leaves schools to figure out roughly what constitutes an “appropriate” mix of students, while applicants then choose from an array of institutions based on their own preferences and their inferences of other applicants’ preferences. In aggregate, students’ selections have consequences for schools’ status as current applicants’ decisions signal desirability and prestige to future applicants. Against this backdrop, two seemingly incongruous responses arise: increases in the proportion of a school’s Asian American students—a high scoring and high achieving minority group—improve a school’s ranking but appear to harm school status in the eyes of applicants. I explore the loss of status associated with increased Asian American presence on campus and discuss the implications of these dynamics.

What is social status and how does it impact the generation of novel ideas?

with Matthew S. Bothner, Frédéric Godart, and Wonjae Lee. Available in Research in the Sociology of Organizations.

Abstract:

Status constitutes a core research concept across the social sciences. However, its definition is still contested, and questions persist about its consequences. We begin with a flexible, provisional definition: status is a relational asset possessed by social actors insofar as they are highly regarded by highly-regarded others. Using this definition as a backdrop, we develop a fourfold typology based on how status is used as an asset and from where it is derived. The typology allows us to explore the implications of considering status as either a quality signal or a good, and of viewing status-conferring ties as either deference- or dominance-based. We then consider the implications of our framework for the generation of novelty. Though status has been connected to many social and economic outcomes, because of competing predictions in the literature—novelty is purported to come from low- and/or high-status actors—this is where we focus our attention. In particular, we distinguish between creativity and innovation in our effort to better link status and novelty. We also work toward greater conceptual clarity by comparing and contrasting status