Ezra W Zuckerman
Biographic Data
| ID | 97815 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ezra W Zuckerman |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ezra W |
| FAMILY NAME | Zuckerman |
| SIGNATURE | ZUCKERMAN E W |
| AFFILIATIONS | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 20 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 931 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 20 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1994 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2017 |
| H-INDEX | 13 |
Why Elites Love Authentic Lowbrow Culture: Overcoming High-Status Denigration with Outsider Art
We develop and test the idea that public appreciation for authentic lowbrow culture affords an effective way for certain elites to address feelings of authenticity-insecurity arising from "high status denigration" (Hahl and Zuckerman 2014). This argument, which builds on recent sociological research on the "search for authenticity" (e.g., Grazian 2005) and on Bourdieu's (1993) notion of artistic "disinterestedness," is validated through experimen…
It's the Conventional Thought That Counts: How Third-Order Inference Produces Status Advantage
A core claim of sociological theory is that modern institutions fall short of their meritocratic ideals, whereby rewards should be allocated based on achievement-related criteria. Instead, high-status actors often experience a "status advantage": they are rewarded disproportionately to the quality of their performance. We develop and test a theory of status advantage in meritocratic settings. The most influential model in past research derives st…
Verstehen for Sociology: Comment on Watts
A Lack of Security or of Cultural Capital? Acculturative Conservatism in the Naming Choices of Early 20th-Century US Jews
Past research demonstrates a marked tendency toward “acculturative conservatism,” whereby immigrants select given names for their children that are established—that is, popular in an earlier generation of the native population. Prior research has generally understood such conservatism as reflecting a lack of “mainstream” cultural capital; established names are popular among immigrants because they are unaware of current fashion. But we argue and …
So You Think You Can Dance? Lessons from the US Private Equity Bubble
This article develops a sociologically informed approach to market bubbles by integrating insights from financial-economic theory with the concepts of voice and dissimulation from other cases of distorted valuation studied by sociologists (e.g., witch hunts, unpopular norms, and support for authoritarian regimes). It draws on unique datalongitudinal interviews with private equity market participants during and after that market's mid-2000s bubble…
The Emergence of Organizations and Markets
When Politics Froze Fashion: The Effect of the Cultural Revolution on Naming in Beijing
The authors examine the popularity of boys' given names in Beijing before and after the onset of the Cultural Revolution to clarify how exogenous and endogenous factors interact to shape fashion. Whereas recent work in the sociology of culture emphasizes the importance of endogenous processes in explaining fashion, their analysis demonstrates two ways in which politics shaped cultural expression during the Cultural Revolution: by promoting forms …
The Denigration of Heroes? How the Status Attainment Process Shapes Attributions of Considerateness and Authenticity
This article develops and tests a theory to explain the common tendency to "denigrate heroes," whereby high-status actors are suspected of being inconsiderate and inauthentic relative to low-status counterparts. This tendency is argued to reflect two conditions typical of status attainment processes: (a) assertions of superiority over others and (b) the presence of incentives to pursue status. The latter is key since awareness of such incentives …
Betrayal as Market Barrier: Identity-Based Limits to Diversification among High-Status Corporate Law Firms
Why are some diversified market identities problematic but others are not? We examine this question in the context of high-status corporate law firms, which often diversify into one low-status area of work—family law (FL)—but face a barrier (strong disapproval from existing clients) that prevents diversification into another such area—plaintiffs’ personal injury law (PIL). Drawing on a qualitative study of the Boston legal market, we argue that t…
Construction, Concentration, and (Dis)Continuities in Social Valuations
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, a…
Breaking up is hard to do: Irrational inconsistency in commitment to an industry peer network
This paper strengthens the basis for a key claim of contemporary economic sociology - that strong ties among capitalists cannot be reduced to rational considerations. Support for this claim has been limited by reliance on an external standard of rationality, whereby irrationality in commitment to a partner or network is based on an observer's evaluation of an actor's interests. In this article we address this limitation by developing an internal …
Peer Capitalism: Parallel Relationships in the U.S. Economy
We gain insight into the reasons why capitalists maintain social relationships with one another by analyzing a largely unexamined type of relationship—that which links “parallel peers” or noncompeting enterprises in the same industry—and an institution—the industry peer network or IPN—that is specifically designed for supporting small, exclusive groups of parallel peers. A wide array of qualitative and quantitative data show parallel relationship…
Comment on Zajac and Westphal, ASR, June 2004: Towards the Social Reconstruction of an Interdisciplinary Turf War
Perhaps more than in any other subfield of sociology, researchers in economic sociology tend to justify their work through opposition to a rival discipline (Sorensen 2003). Yet a fixation on the flaws in economics is dangerous for at least two reasons. First, if we focus exclusively on showing how sociological theories are superior to neoclassical models, we risk overlooking our theories' own limits, which often become clearer when applied to new…
Structural Incoherence and Stock Market Activity
This paper argues that the efficiency of the price-setting process in the stock market is contingent on the coherence of a stock's position in the industry-based classificatory structure that guides valuation. While this structure helps investors interpret ambiguous economic news, it is imperfect because stocks vary in the extent to which they are coherently classified, as revealed by the stocks' position in the network of coverage by securities …
Robust Identities or Nonentities? Typecasting in the Feature-Film Labor Market
This article addresses two seemingly incompatible claims about identity: (a ) complex, multivalent identities are advantageous because they afford greater flexibility versus (b) simple, focused identities are advantageous because they facilitate valuation. Following Faulkner, it is hypothesized that a focused identity is helpful in gaining entrée into an arena but subsequently leads to increasing limitations. The labor market for feature‐film act…
"What Makes You Think You're so Popular? Self-Evaluation Maintenance and the Subjective Side of the "Friendship Paradox
Ezra W. Zuckerman, John T. Jost, What Makes You Think You're so Popular? Self-Evaluation Maintenance and the Subjective Side of the "Friendship Paradox", Social Psychology Quarterly, Vol. 64, No. 3 (Sep., 2001), pp. 207-223
Middle-Status Conformity: Theoretical Restatement and Empirical Demonstration in Two Markets
This article aims to reestablish the long-standing conjecture that conformity is high at the middle and low at either end of a status order. On a theoretical level, the article clarifies the basis for expecting such an inverted U-shaped curve, taking care to specify key scope conditions on the social-psychological orientations of the actors, the characteristics of the status structure, and the nature of the relevant actions. It also validates the…
The Categorical Imperative: Securities Analysts and the Illegitimacy Discount
This article explores the social processes that produce penalties for illegitimate role performance. It is proposed that such penalties are illuminated in markets that are significantly mediated by product critics. In particular, it is argued that failure to gain reviews by the critics who specialize in a product's intended category reflects confusion over the product's identity and that such illegitimacy should depress demand. The validity of th…
Social Capital and Opportunity in Corporate R&D: The Contingent Effect of Contact Density on Mobility Expectations
A Structural Theory of Vote Choice: Social and Political Networks and Electoral Flows in Britain and the United States
The question of how social and political networks influence political behavior stands at the theoretical heart of this article. A general hypothesis details the patterns of crisscrossing and overlapping lines of division and cohesion as they relate to voting decisions: As individuals vary in their membership in mutually reinforcing social and political networks, they vary in the likelihood of persistently voting for the same political party and n…
The Categorical Imperative: Securities Analysts and the Illegitimacy Discount
This article explores the social processes that produce penalties for illegitimate role performance. It is proposed that such penalties are illuminated in markets that are significantly mediated by product critics. In particular, it is argued that failure to gain reviews by the critics who specialize in a product's intended category reflects confusion over the product's identity and that such illegitimacy should depress demand. The validity of th…
Middle-Status Conformity: Theoretical Restatement and Empirical Demonstration in Two Markets
This article aims to reestablish the long-standing conjecture that conformity is high at the middle and low at either end of a status order. On a theoretical level, the article clarifies the basis for expecting such an inverted U-shaped curve, taking care to specify key scope conditions on the social-psychological orientations of the actors, the characteristics of the status structure, and the nature of the relevant actions. It also validates the…
Robust Identities or Nonentities? Typecasting in the Feature-Film Labor Market
This article addresses two seemingly incompatible claims about identity: (a ) complex, multivalent identities are advantageous because they afford greater flexibility versus (b) simple, focused identities are advantageous because they facilitate valuation. Following Faulkner, it is hypothesized that a focused identity is helpful in gaining entrée into an arena but subsequently leads to increasing limitations. The labor market for feature‐film act…
It's the Conventional Thought That Counts: How Third-Order Inference Produces Status Advantage
A core claim of sociological theory is that modern institutions fall short of their meritocratic ideals, whereby rewards should be allocated based on achievement-related criteria. Instead, high-status actors often experience a "status advantage": they are rewarded disproportionately to the quality of their performance. We develop and test a theory of status advantage in meritocratic settings. The most influential model in past research derives st…
Construction, Concentration, and (Dis)Continuities in Social Valuations
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, a…
Why Elites Love Authentic Lowbrow Culture: Overcoming High-Status Denigration with Outsider Art
We develop and test the idea that public appreciation for authentic lowbrow culture affords an effective way for certain elites to address feelings of authenticity-insecurity arising from "high status denigration" (Hahl and Zuckerman 2014). This argument, which builds on recent sociological research on the "search for authenticity" (e.g., Grazian 2005) and on Bourdieu's (1993) notion of artistic "disinterestedness," is validated through experimen…
Structural Incoherence and Stock Market Activity
This paper argues that the efficiency of the price-setting process in the stock market is contingent on the coherence of a stock's position in the industry-based classificatory structure that guides valuation. While this structure helps investors interpret ambiguous economic news, it is imperfect because stocks vary in the extent to which they are coherently classified, as revealed by the stocks' position in the network of coverage by securities …
Betrayal as Market Barrier: Identity-Based Limits to Diversification among High-Status Corporate Law Firms
Why are some diversified market identities problematic but others are not? We examine this question in the context of high-status corporate law firms, which often diversify into one low-status area of work—family law (FL)—but face a barrier (strong disapproval from existing clients) that prevents diversification into another such area—plaintiffs’ personal injury law (PIL). Drawing on a qualitative study of the Boston legal market, we argue that t…
The Denigration of Heroes? How the Status Attainment Process Shapes Attributions of Considerateness and Authenticity
This article develops and tests a theory to explain the common tendency to "denigrate heroes," whereby high-status actors are suspected of being inconsiderate and inauthentic relative to low-status counterparts. This tendency is argued to reflect two conditions typical of status attainment processes: (a) assertions of superiority over others and (b) the presence of incentives to pursue status. The latter is key since awareness of such incentives …
When Politics Froze Fashion: The Effect of the Cultural Revolution on Naming in Beijing
The authors examine the popularity of boys' given names in Beijing before and after the onset of the Cultural Revolution to clarify how exogenous and endogenous factors interact to shape fashion. Whereas recent work in the sociology of culture emphasizes the importance of endogenous processes in explaining fashion, their analysis demonstrates two ways in which politics shaped cultural expression during the Cultural Revolution: by promoting forms …
A Structural Theory of Vote Choice: Social and Political Networks and Electoral Flows in Britain and the United States
The question of how social and political networks influence political behavior stands at the theoretical heart of this article. A general hypothesis details the patterns of crisscrossing and overlapping lines of division and cohesion as they relate to voting decisions: As individuals vary in their membership in mutually reinforcing social and political networks, they vary in the likelihood of persistently voting for the same political party and n…
Peer Capitalism: Parallel Relationships in the U.S. Economy
We gain insight into the reasons why capitalists maintain social relationships with one another by analyzing a largely unexamined type of relationship—that which links “parallel peers” or noncompeting enterprises in the same industry—and an institution—the industry peer network or IPN—that is specifically designed for supporting small, exclusive groups of parallel peers. A wide array of qualitative and quantitative data show parallel relationship…
Social Capital and Opportunity in Corporate R&D: The Contingent Effect of Contact Density on Mobility Expectations
"What Makes You Think You're so Popular? Self-Evaluation Maintenance and the Subjective Side of the "Friendship Paradox
Ezra W. Zuckerman, John T. Jost, What Makes You Think You're so Popular? Self-Evaluation Maintenance and the Subjective Side of the "Friendship Paradox", Social Psychology Quarterly, Vol. 64, No. 3 (Sep., 2001), pp. 207-223
Verstehen for Sociology: Comment on Watts
So You Think You Can Dance? Lessons from the US Private Equity Bubble
This article develops a sociologically informed approach to market bubbles by integrating insights from financial-economic theory with the concepts of voice and dissimulation from other cases of distorted valuation studied by sociologists (e.g., witch hunts, unpopular norms, and support for authoritarian regimes). It draws on unique datalongitudinal interviews with private equity market participants during and after that market's mid-2000s bubble…
Breaking up is hard to do: Irrational inconsistency in commitment to an industry peer network
This paper strengthens the basis for a key claim of contemporary economic sociology - that strong ties among capitalists cannot be reduced to rational considerations. Support for this claim has been limited by reliance on an external standard of rationality, whereby irrationality in commitment to a partner or network is based on an observer's evaluation of an actor's interests. In this article we address this limitation by developing an internal …
A Structural Theory of Vote Choice: Social and Political Networks and Electoral Flows in Britain and the United States
The question of how social and political networks influence political behavior stands at the theoretical heart of this article. A general hypothesis details the patterns of crisscrossing and overlapping lines of division and cohesion as they relate to voting decisions: As individuals vary in their membership in mutually reinforcing social and political networks, they vary in the likelihood of persistently voting for the same political party and n…
Social Capital and Opportunity in Corporate R&D: The Contingent Effect of Contact Density on Mobility Expectations
The Categorical Imperative: Securities Analysts and the Illegitimacy Discount
This article explores the social processes that produce penalties for illegitimate role performance. It is proposed that such penalties are illuminated in markets that are significantly mediated by product critics. In particular, it is argued that failure to gain reviews by the critics who specialize in a product's intended category reflects confusion over the product's identity and that such illegitimacy should depress demand. The validity of th…
"What Makes You Think You're so Popular? Self-Evaluation Maintenance and the Subjective Side of the "Friendship Paradox
Ezra W. Zuckerman, John T. Jost, What Makes You Think You're so Popular? Self-Evaluation Maintenance and the Subjective Side of the "Friendship Paradox", Social Psychology Quarterly, Vol. 64, No. 3 (Sep., 2001), pp. 207-223
Middle-Status Conformity: Theoretical Restatement and Empirical Demonstration in Two Markets
This article aims to reestablish the long-standing conjecture that conformity is high at the middle and low at either end of a status order. On a theoretical level, the article clarifies the basis for expecting such an inverted U-shaped curve, taking care to specify key scope conditions on the social-psychological orientations of the actors, the characteristics of the status structure, and the nature of the relevant actions. It also validates the…
Robust Identities or Nonentities? Typecasting in the Feature-Film Labor Market
This article addresses two seemingly incompatible claims about identity: (a ) complex, multivalent identities are advantageous because they afford greater flexibility versus (b) simple, focused identities are advantageous because they facilitate valuation. Following Faulkner, it is hypothesized that a focused identity is helpful in gaining entrée into an arena but subsequently leads to increasing limitations. The labor market for feature‐film act…
Comment on Zajac and Westphal, ASR, June 2004: Towards the Social Reconstruction of an Interdisciplinary Turf War
Perhaps more than in any other subfield of sociology, researchers in economic sociology tend to justify their work through opposition to a rival discipline (Sorensen 2003). Yet a fixation on the flaws in economics is dangerous for at least two reasons. First, if we focus exclusively on showing how sociological theories are superior to neoclassical models, we risk overlooking our theories' own limits, which often become clearer when applied to new…
Structural Incoherence and Stock Market Activity
This paper argues that the efficiency of the price-setting process in the stock market is contingent on the coherence of a stock's position in the industry-based classificatory structure that guides valuation. While this structure helps investors interpret ambiguous economic news, it is imperfect because stocks vary in the extent to which they are coherently classified, as revealed by the stocks' position in the network of coverage by securities …
Peer Capitalism: Parallel Relationships in the U.S. Economy
We gain insight into the reasons why capitalists maintain social relationships with one another by analyzing a largely unexamined type of relationship—that which links “parallel peers” or noncompeting enterprises in the same industry—and an institution—the industry peer network or IPN—that is specifically designed for supporting small, exclusive groups of parallel peers. A wide array of qualitative and quantitative data show parallel relationship…
Breaking up is hard to do: Irrational inconsistency in commitment to an industry peer network
This paper strengthens the basis for a key claim of contemporary economic sociology - that strong ties among capitalists cannot be reduced to rational considerations. Support for this claim has been limited by reliance on an external standard of rationality, whereby irrationality in commitment to a partner or network is based on an observer's evaluation of an actor's interests. In this article we address this limitation by developing an internal …
Construction, Concentration, and (Dis)Continuities in Social Valuations
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, a…
Betrayal as Market Barrier: Identity-Based Limits to Diversification among High-Status Corporate Law Firms
Why are some diversified market identities problematic but others are not? We examine this question in the context of high-status corporate law firms, which often diversify into one low-status area of work—family law (FL)—but face a barrier (strong disapproval from existing clients) that prevents diversification into another such area—plaintiffs’ personal injury law (PIL). Drawing on a qualitative study of the Boston legal market, we argue that t…
So You Think You Can Dance? Lessons from the US Private Equity Bubble
This article develops a sociologically informed approach to market bubbles by integrating insights from financial-economic theory with the concepts of voice and dissimulation from other cases of distorted valuation studied by sociologists (e.g., witch hunts, unpopular norms, and support for authoritarian regimes). It draws on unique datalongitudinal interviews with private equity market participants during and after that market's mid-2000s bubble…
The Emergence of Organizations and Markets
When Politics Froze Fashion: The Effect of the Cultural Revolution on Naming in Beijing
The authors examine the popularity of boys' given names in Beijing before and after the onset of the Cultural Revolution to clarify how exogenous and endogenous factors interact to shape fashion. Whereas recent work in the sociology of culture emphasizes the importance of endogenous processes in explaining fashion, their analysis demonstrates two ways in which politics shaped cultural expression during the Cultural Revolution: by promoting forms …
The Denigration of Heroes? How the Status Attainment Process Shapes Attributions of Considerateness and Authenticity
This article develops and tests a theory to explain the common tendency to "denigrate heroes," whereby high-status actors are suspected of being inconsiderate and inauthentic relative to low-status counterparts. This tendency is argued to reflect two conditions typical of status attainment processes: (a) assertions of superiority over others and (b) the presence of incentives to pursue status. The latter is key since awareness of such incentives …
A Lack of Security or of Cultural Capital? Acculturative Conservatism in the Naming Choices of Early 20th-Century US Jews
Past research demonstrates a marked tendency toward “acculturative conservatism,” whereby immigrants select given names for their children that are established—that is, popular in an earlier generation of the native population. Prior research has generally understood such conservatism as reflecting a lack of “mainstream” cultural capital; established names are popular among immigrants because they are unaware of current fashion. But we argue and …
Why Elites Love Authentic Lowbrow Culture: Overcoming High-Status Denigration with Outsider Art
We develop and test the idea that public appreciation for authentic lowbrow culture affords an effective way for certain elites to address feelings of authenticity-insecurity arising from "high status denigration" (Hahl and Zuckerman 2014). This argument, which builds on recent sociological research on the "search for authenticity" (e.g., Grazian 2005) and on Bourdieu's (1993) notion of artistic "disinterestedness," is validated through experimen…
It's the Conventional Thought That Counts: How Third-Order Inference Produces Status Advantage
A core claim of sociological theory is that modern institutions fall short of their meritocratic ideals, whereby rewards should be allocated based on achievement-related criteria. Instead, high-status actors often experience a "status advantage": they are rewarded disproportionately to the quality of their performance. We develop and test a theory of status advantage in meritocratic settings. The most influential model in past research derives st…
Verstehen for Sociology: Comment on Watts
Sociology (16 works) · Economics (13 works) · Political science (13 works) · Law (11 works) · Psychology (9 works) · Social and Cultural Dynamics (8 works) · Business (7 works) · Management and Organizational Studies (7 works) · Social Psychology (7 works) · Positive economics (6 works)