Networks and Artistic Status Orders in Cultural Fields: The Evolution of Hollywood Filmmaking

Abstract

How do status orders emerge in cultural fields? Our study sheds new light on this question by investigating the interplay of networks and status among Hollywood filmmakers from 1920 to 2000. Information on artistic references and collaborations of more than 9,500 filmmakers retrieved from the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) allows us to examine long-term changes in the social organization of this cultural field. Our findings suggest that the distribution of social recognition—measured by filmmakers’ prominence in collaborative ties and artistic references—became more stratified as the field grew. Furthermore, collaborations increasingly exhibited segregation according to filmmakers’ artistic status during the New Hollywood era (1960–1980). This period was characterized by the rising prominence of a new generation of filmmakers who established film as an art form in the U.S. This article shows that contextual characteristics, such as a field's size and institutional environment, can foster or impede stratification and segregation in collaborative networks among cultural producers.