Construction, Concentration, and (Dis)Continuities in Social Valuations

By Ezra W. Zuckerman. 2012

158 citations recorded by the source corpus.

I review and integrate recent sociological research that makes progress on three interrelated questions pertaining to social valuation: (a) the degree of social construction relative to objective constraints; (b) the degree of concentration in social valuations at a single point in time; and (c) the conditions that govern two broad forms of temporal discontinuity—(i) fashion cycles, especially in cultural expression and in managerial practices, and (ii) bubble/crash dynamics, as witnessed in such domains as authoritarian regimes and financial markets. In the course of the review, I argue for the importance of identifying how objective conditions constrain social construction and suggest two contrarian mechanisms by which this is accomplished—valuation opportunism and valuation entrepreneurship—and the conditions under which they are more or less effective.

Subfields: Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management, Safety Research, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/58b9fe283deaab21eda47909caa1d2a90538b676

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Citations in the corpus

Marks of Distinction (2015, background): “Second, consistency in an actor’s framing repertoire—a degree of predictability in framings over time (intraindividual)—makes it easier for the audience to identify a particular framer, leading to greater appreciation (Rao, Monin, and Durand, 2003; Zuckerman, 2012).”
Sustaining Inter-organizational Relationships Across Institutional Logics and Power Asymmetries: The Case of Fair Trade (2016, background): “…cannot be neglected because such exchanges cross field boundaries— for example, those between family and commerce (see e.g. Zelizer 1985)—or because the field is defined by alternative and potentially conflicting institutional logics (Kaplan and Murray 2010; Murray 2010; Zuckerman 2012).”
It’s the Conventional Thought That Counts (2017, background): “But with acts of conspicuous consumption, like buying an ostentatious house or market speculation, the success of a choice depends almost entirely on others’ reactions (see Zuckerman 2012).”
Rational Herding in Microloan Markets (2012, background): “social interactions, and Zuckerman (2012) for a review of sociology”
Guilty by Association: Product-Level Category Stigma and Audience Expectations in the U.S. Craft Beer Industry (2018, background): “…consumers have difficulty distinguishing between different products (for example, food, beer, or wine) during blind tastings and therefore may rely on other cues to infer quality (Carroll & Swaminathan, 2000; Negro & Leung, 2012; Verhaal et al., 2015; Waguespack & Salomon, 2015; Zuckerman, 2012).”
The Paradox of Publicity (2014, background): “…that the opposite occurred in this case raises an intriguing question: what mechanisms might lead to the disruption of socially endogenous inference processes (Zuckerman, 2012; Correll et al., 2013) that typically cause assessments of quality to rise with the social status of a producer or product?”