Paul DiMaggio

Bio: Paul DiMaggio is an academic researcher from New York University. The author has contributed to research in topics: The arts & Cultural capital. The author has an hindex of 52, co-authored 156 publications receiving 75860 citations. Previous affiliations of Paul DiMaggio include Yale University & Boston University.

Comment on Jerolmack and Khan, “Talk Is Cheap” Ethnography and the Attitudinal Fallacy

Abstract: The authors (Jerolmack and Khan [J&K]) argue that sociologists who use surveys and interviews to understand behavior ignore the situated nature of action, fail to theorize surveys or interviews as situations, and consequently draw incorrect conclusions from their data. Surveys, they argue, are good at ensuring the representativeness of individuals, but terrible at sampling variation in situations. In making a trenchant case for the situated nature of both behavior and the expression of cultural dispositions, and explicating the relevant virtues of ethnography, J&K constructively revive a conversation that sociologists neglect at great risk. Although I am sympathetic, I suspect J&K underestimate the ability of researchers to address the attitude–behavior consistency problem, which is really several problems, most of which are soluble. I shall describe five reasons that survey responses may not predict behavior and offer solutions to four of them. Part of my optimism reflects my view of culture. To be sure, meanings are negotiated in social and physical environments and situations constrain the expression of individual dispositions. But actors often enter into these negotiations with stable and consequential cultural dispositions. Culture, in this view, constitutes an ecology of representations, with social contexts

Cultural democracy in a period of cultural expansion

Abstract: Students of American society, from the times of Tocqueville and Veblen, have been concerned with the social role of high culture in a democracy. The debate over the extent and consequences of elite dominance of the arts constituency has been intensified in recent years by the rise of government support for the arts. Little is known about the social composition of the arts constituency. Drawing on 268 largely unpublished studies of visitors to museums and audiences of live performing arts, we conclude that the gender and age composition of the arts audience is little different from the general public. However, the social class composition is strikingly elite: audiences are better educated, of higher occupational standing and more affluent than the general populace. Conversely, blue-collar workers, individuals with low incomes or little education, and racial and ethnic minorities are found to be greatly underrepresented. Analysis of differences between and within art forms reveals that museums, particularly science and history museums, draw a broader audience than do performing arts events; frequent attenders within most forms are found to be more elite than irregular consumers. Assessment of audience composition trends since the early 1960s indicates no movement toward a broader inclusion of the public, suggesting that a recent expansion in the scale of arts activities and government subsidies has not been accompanied by a democratization of cultural consumption

Searching for Homo Economicus: Variation in Americans' Construals of and Attitudes toward Markets

Abstract: Economic sociologists agree that economic rationality is constructed and that morality and economic interests intersect Yet we know little about how people organize economic beliefs or judge the morality of markets We use Relational Class Analysis to identify three subsets of respondents whose members construe economic markets in distinct ways Subsamples display more structure than the full sample in associations among attitudes, and between attitudes and sociodemographic predictors The economically advantaged favor market solutions in each subset, but religious and political identities, respectively, predict pro-market views uniquely in subsamples that construe markets through a religious or political lens Results illustrate the value of distinguishing between construals and positions, and of examining population heterogeneity in opinion data Self-interest drives faith in markets, but only when people construe markets in ways consistent with their religious and political faiths

Public Opinion and Political Vulnerability: Why Has the National Endowment for the Arts Been Such an Attractive Target?

Abstract: Federal government arts programs appear to deviate from the rule that legislative behavior closely follows public preferences. Between the mid-1970s and the late 1980s, despite stability in public opinion, the NEA evolved from Congress's bipartisan darling to its controversial scapegoat. We inspect 55 items from public opinion surveys and re-analyze data from 2 state and 8 national surveys undertaken between 1975 and 1996 to resolve this puzzle. Our conclusions: (1) Arts support is not a salient issue to most voters, leaving legislators relatively unconstrained. (2) Positive responses to general questions about arts funding often mask complex, ambivalent views. (3) The core constituency for federal arts support - college graduates - is difficult to mobilize because their interest in the arts is balanced by skepticism about federal government programs. (4) Opponents of arts spending successfully built on ties to Christian conservative and Republican loyalists to mobilize the stable minorities opposed to the NEA. As a result, arts politics in the U.S. has consisted of a standoff between a committed minority of 15 to 20 percent of the public that strongly opposes federal support for the arts and a weakly committed majority of about 60 percent that favors the federal role.

The iron cage revisited institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields

Abstract: What makes organizations so similar? We contend that the engine of rationalization and bureaucratization has moved from the competitive marketplace to the state and the professions. Once a set of organizations emerges as a field, a paradox arises: rational actors make their organizations increasingly similar as they try to change them. We describe three isomorphic processes-coercive, mimetic, and normative—leading to this outcome. We then specify hypotheses about the impact of resource centralization and dependency, goal ambiguity and technical uncertainty, and professionalization and structuration on isomorphic change. Finally, we suggest implications for theories of organizations and social change.

Managing Legitimacy: Strategic and Institutional Approaches

Abstract: This article synthesizes the large but diverse literature on organizational legitimacy, highlighting similarities and disparities among the leading strategic and institutional approaches. The analysis identifies three primary forms of legitimacy: pragmatic, based on audience self-interest; moral, based on normative approval: and cognitive, based on comprehensibility and taken-for-grantedness. The article then examines strategies for gaining, maintaining, and repairing legitimacy of each type, suggesting both the promises and the pitfalls of such instrumental manipulations.

Toward a Theory of Stakeholder Identification and Salience: Defining the Principle of who and What Really Counts

Abstract: Stakeholder theory has been a popular heuristic for describing the management environment for years, but it has not attained full theoretical status. Our aim in this article is to contribute to a theory of stakeholder identification and salience based on stakeholders possessing one or more of three relationship attributes: power, legitimacy, and urgency. By combining these attributes, we generate a typology of stakeholders, propositions concerning their salience to managers of the firm, and research and management implications.

Social Structure and Competition in Interfirm Networks: The Paradox of Embeddedness

Abstract: This chapter aims to develop one of perhaps multiple specifications of embeddedness, a concept that has been used to refer broadly to the contingent nature of economic action with respect to cognition, social structure, institutions, and culture. Research on embeddedness is an exciting area in sociology and economics because it advances understanding of how social structure affects economic life. The chapter addresses propositions about the operation and outcomes of interfirm networks that are guided implicitly by ceteris paribus assumptions. While economies of time due to embeddedness have obvious benefits for the individual firm, they also have important implications for allocative efficiency and the determination of prices. Under the conditions, social processes that increase integration combine with resource dependency problems to increase the vulnerability of networked organizations. The level of investment in an economy promotes positive changes in productivity, standards of living, mobility, and wealth generation.

Strategic responses to institutional processes

Abstract: This article applies the convergent insights of institutional and resource dependence perspectives to the prediction of strategic responses to institutional processes. The article offers a typology of strategic responses that vary in active organizational resistance from passive conformity to proactive manipulation. Ten institutional factors are hypothesized to predict the occurrence of the alternative proposed strategies and the degree of organizational conformity or resistance to institutional pressures.