The Social Structure of Consecration in Cultural Fields: The Influence of Status and Social Distance in Audience–Candidate Evaluative Processes

Abstract

Building on sociological research that examines the allocation of rewards in peer evaluations, we argue that the recognition of cultural producers' work varies with their status and social distance from the audience members who evaluate them. We study the influence of these two mechanisms within the context of the Norwegian advertising industry. Specifically, we looked at how cultural producers' status and social distance from jury members affect their chances of being honored in "The Silver Tag"-one of the main digital advertising awards contests in Norway-during the period 2003-2010. While our findings provide support for status-based rewards allocation, the positive effects of status may be more circumscribed than previously thought. When accounting for the existence of previous connections between audience members and cultural producers, we find that cultural producers are more or less likely to receive an accolade depending on their degree of separation from the audience members. By exposing network-based determinants of consecrating decisions, and suggesting that the positive effects of status may be more circumscribed than previously thought our findings shed important light on the social foundations of evaluation and, more broadly, the mechanisms of reward allocation in cultural fields.

Friends, Gifts, and Cliques: Social Proximity and Recognition in Peer-Based Tournament Rituals

“…If anything, these observations imply the opposite effect: social proximity should deter recognition. Aadland et al (2018) offer supportive evidence of this dual effect in what is, to our knowledge, the only study to date to explore the effect of proximity between candidates competing for recognition and members of the evaluating audience in the underlying social structure. Yet their framework does not elaborate a general theoretical account that encompasses both positive and negative effects of social proximity on recognition, thus they only advance speculative interpretations.…”

“…Yet, surprisingly no systematic effort has been made to theorize on the evaluative implications of the potential proximity between audience and producers in the underlying social structure and the intriguing conceptual tension that this shortcoming subsumes. The only exception to this general observation the study by Aadland et al (2018) on awarding decisions in advertising contests, in which the authors demonstrate how audiences' evaluative outcomes are a function of their geodesic distance from the professionals whose work they are invited to judge. Although Aadland et al (2018)'s approach is promising, it also runs into difficulties, which we attempt to overcome.…”

“…The only exception to this general observation the study by Aadland et al (2018) on awarding decisions in advertising contests, in which the authors demonstrate how audiences' evaluative outcomes are a function of their geodesic distance from the professionals whose work they are invited to judge. Although Aadland et al (2018)'s approach is promising, it also runs into difficulties, which we attempt to overcome. It is promising because it introduces a simple but plausible analytical framework that leverages the unique features of the data to explore the evaluative repercussions of ties that cross the audience-candidate interface, so causing audience members and candidates to be variably distant from each other in the underlying social space.…”

“…These studies have identified a number of factors shaping evaluative outcomes beyond the "true" quality of the object under evaluation, thus contributing to unveiling the "social magic" that creates discontinuity out of continuity (Bourdieu, 1984: 117). Yet, by focusing on either side of the producer-audience interface, these perspectives have overlooked the existence of social relationships between audience members and producers that often characterize the settings in which awards allocations occur (for an exception see Aadland, Cattani, & Ferriani, 2018). In particular, when we zoom out from the individual producer or the audience level, the focus on the producer-audience dyad raises an important question to which extant literature lacks compelling answers: How does the underlying social structure cutting across the audience-producer evaluative interface affect the allocation of recognition among competing candidates?…”

“…Conceptual reasons corroborated by our interview data and archival sources suggest that each of these variables provides different yet complimentary insight into the relational underpinnings of audiences' evaluation of producers' offers. To derive such insight, we rely on a unique dataset on the Norwegian advertising field, first introduced by Aadland (2012) and then further elaborated by Aadland et al (2018). We integrate this dataset with new field-based qualitative evidence that we combine with large sample statistics to gain stronger analytical leverage.…”