State of the Arts: New Frontiers in the Analysis of Culture and Cultural Organizations

Abstract

Culture has played an increasingly important role in the development of organizational theory and the study of organizations more generally since at least the 1970s (e.g., Hirsch 1972; Barley 1983; DiMaggio and Powell 1991). Nevertheless, scholars from across the social sciences interested in cultural topics have long been criticized for their overreliance on traditional—often qualitative—methods (Rosengren 1983, Mohr 1994). Employing new methods to explicate cultural phenomena requires a particular set of tools and logic of understanding that has until recently been underdeveloped. The state of the field is changing, however. Due to advancements in the way we access, collect, analyze, and visualize data, scholars have begun to rethink how we conceive of and perform cultural analysis. In this symposium, we plan to take advantage of these opportunities by showcasing some of the methodological innovations and novel applications being employed by contemporary organizational researchers. The goal of the symposium is four-fold: to 1) introduce some of the new ways that scholars are conducting research on both culture and cultural organizations, 2) show how the use of new methods, data sources, and empirical sites extends or challenges our understanding of how culture is produced, distributed, consumed, and interpreted, 3) bring together scholars from different backgrounds to discuss these issues, and 4) revisit the value of examining culture and cultural industries for organization and management scholars. Using Big Data to Explain Cultural Innovation: Evidence from Popular Music Presenter: Michael Mauskapf; Northwestern U. Presenter: Noah Askin; The U. of Chicago Disruptive Art? Understanding the Structure of Arts Markets Presenter: Mukti V Khaire; Harvard U. Beyond “Contagion”: An Associational Model of Cultural Diffusion Presenter: Amir Goldberg; Stanford U. Measuring Strategy Through Predicted Values Presenter: Gabriel Rossman; U. of California, Los Angeles Presenter: Oliver Schilke; U. of California, Los Angeles