As a variety of social capital, scholars’ traditional understanding of a producer’s status is difficult to carry over from one market context to another. However, from organizations seeking to hire rainmakers away from competing organizations within the same markets to producers expanding their offerings into adjacent (and sometimes distant) markets, actions are based on the belief that status in one market will buoy them in another. It appears that people and organizations attempt to capitalize on status generated in one context by porting it to another. However, how such activity, takes place remains unclear. This dissertation reflects this interest, concentrating not only on the origins and consequences of locally-constructed but globally-assigned status in international art markets, but also on the mechanisms of inconsistent status effects on performance across markets. The fundamental issue I address concerns why some producers, in this case artists, leverage their success in their original or home market to achieve success in other markets, while others are unable to do so. To explore this topic, I focus on global contemporary art markets. Professionals and consumers in these rapidly expanding cultural markets depend more on social signals (i.e., status) due to an inherent uncertainty in the quality of their products and due to a high degree of external environmental ambiguity. Focusing on international contemporary art markets between 1995-2015, I have employed several methodological approaches to disentangle the inter-market status dynamics examining the marketization and globalization of the contemporary art world, the intersection of social signals in these markets, and the market relations where artist status originated and diffused. I demonstrate how neoliberal marketization constitutes the framework for a study of inter-market status dynamics and how some artists’ status leverages prior success under conditions of market expansion, yet others may actually be penalized. Furthermore, I demonstrate how the selective effects of status signals across different cultural markets (or boundaries) are moderated by the time-varying distances across markets based on national cultures and the networks of professionals and consumers that operate within the markets. This work expands the understanding of inter-market status dynamics and proposes a more dynamic model of selective information flows across international markets, based on the distinct types of status related information, and the levels of uncertainty and ambiguity associated with the information as defined by market relations. The findings are important for the study of economic sociology, organizational theory, and sociology of culture and help understand how producers can manage their status globally across different cultural boundaries.

Last modified

• 01/30/2019

Creator

• Kangsan Lee

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/N2JF33

Subject

• Sociology

Keyword

• Status
• Art market
• social signals

Date created

• 2017-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright