Linking oligopolistic and organizational explanations of cultural production: An interorganizational approach to measuring product content homogeneity in the Golden Age of movies, 1931--1950.

摘要

One particular question that attracted significant attention in production-of-culture research has to do with 'cycles of competition and concentration'---the idea that culture industries alternate between periods of high market concentration leading to low cultural content diversity (resulting from low cultural innovation), and lower market concentration leading to higher product diversity (increased levels of cultural innovation). Researchers used aggregate measures (i.e., market concentration ratios) in looking at industry structure. Despite new insights gained, organizational and inter-organizational variables were not considered when explaining the relationship between structure and diversity.; This study contributes to research in cultural industries in three areas. First, it demonstrates the relationship between changes in organization of production and diversity in cultural product through empirical evidence, while addressing the influence of interorganizational linkages.; Second, the study addresses environmental dynamics that mostly remain a bigger concern for organizational researchers. While concentrating on industry structure, cultural sociologists took-for-granted more exogenous variables such as market uncertainty that affect all firms within an industry. I argue that the latter should not be isolated from organizational and interorganizational effects researchers are interested in explaining.; Third, the study introduces a break from earlier empirical work through the use of computer-aided text analysis (CATA), going beyond broadly-defined cultural content categories (i.e., 'genres'), employed in existing studies. Furthermore, in contrast to industry-level analysis, the 'dyadic comparison' methodology enables addressing of interorganizational linkages between culture-industry organizations.; Insights from organizational and cultural sociology are combined in an empirical study of the Major Hollywood Studio Oligopoly during 1931--1950. The findings show that cultural sociologists' focus on market concentration (in explaining product diversity), and organizational researchers' focus on environmental uncertainty (explaining institutional isomorphism and interorganizational linkages) cannot be thought of as mutually exclusive. Empirical models should take into account both indicators to allow better understanding of the cultural production process. It is also shown that, in Hollywood, product diversity was determined by resource sharing (interorganizational linkages) as opposed to structural similarity (organization of production).