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Using the American recording industry as a case study, this article analyzes innovation and diversity concurrently and outlines the analytical purchase gained from doing so; examines the effects of performer incumbency and combinatorial role patterns, thereby offering an empirical application of the "role as resource" perspective (Baker and Faulkner 1991); and provides data on an underexplored era in which the emergence of digital technology has had wide-ranging repercussions. Regressing measures of innovation (form) and diversity (content) on incumbency status and combinatorial role patterns reveals that innovation and diversity operate through distinct collaborative patterns. New artists are found to be carriers of musical innovation, and while performing artists with autonomy over the roles of songwriter and producer are more likely to be progenitors of musical diversity, innovation emerges from role specialization. Artistic roles and performer attributes, moreover, come together in particular ways to influence diversity and innovation depending on the environmental context. Post compact disc (CD) format era, innovation wrought by producer specialization is predominant, but the music is devoid of diversity. I conclude by arguing that the manner in which configurations of diversity and innovation interact has implications both for cultural production and reception.

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This article examines the doubly uncertain work environment of professional songwriters: They are affected by wider events in the music industry, and their immediate work context is a team setting where the distribution of tasks varies from one project to the next. Interviews reveal that songwriters pursue professional interests by enhancing cooperation, rather than engaging in defensive tactics. The author identifies two conventions: equal authorship and professional conciliation. Such conventions elucidate how rewards are managed in a team context of task variation and underscore the mutually constitutive relationship between conflict and cooperation within postbureaucratic forms of organizing.