Table 2 - uploaded by Sharon Koppman
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PurposeThis chapter proposes and tests a novel relationship between early participation in competitive activities, “competition socialization,” and the attainment of a managerial position in adulthood. Building on extensive qualitative research, I argue that an early emphasis on “winning” becomes internalized as a desire for the extrinsic rewards t...
Context in source publication
Context 1
... Statistics Table 2 presents univariate statistics and correlations for all variables used in the multivariate analysis. The sample was approximately 51 percent female, 7 percent non-white, 44 percent between 20 and 39 years old (56 percent are over 40), and 15 percent had a graduate's degree. ...
Citations
... Though I did not focus on gender in this article (but see Koppman, 2014a), it is clear that its effects are significant. Women are less likely to be employed in creative positions, but the positive indirect path from gender to creative employment via omnivorous socialization and taste (p = .069) ...
Combining primary survey data collected from a probability sample of U.S. advertising agencies and semi-structured interviews with advertising practitioners, I tested a novel link from class background to creative employment through a cultural process of matching people to jobs. Qualitative data show that shared culture, specifically “omnivorous”—diverse and inclusive—taste and socialization, signals creative potential to employers and motivates people to pursue creative positions. Structural equation modeling reveals that omnivorous socialization and taste mediate the relationship between class background and creative employment: when middle-class parents expose their children to diverse leisure activities, this exposure has a positive indirect effect on creative employment. It may not actually make those children more creative, but such exposure makes them more likely to enter fields in which they will be viewed as creative. The findings highlight a new direction for research on creativity, contribute to the debate on the role of cultural capital in occupational attainment, and extend knowledge on the early origins of career choice.
... In my sample, I found that parents' capital composition, largely absent from previous studies (Prieur et al. 2008), shaped aesthetic evaluation, findings that buttress Bourdieu against criticisms that little evidence links social origin and taste in the North American context (e.g., Erickson 1996;Halle 1996). Likewise, I examined the effects of informal childhood socialization, an overlooked influence on adulthood outcomes (Koppman 2014a), allowing me to refine Bourdieu's assertions. Notably, although art education shaped taste in the ways Bourdieu predicted, familial socialization shaped symbolic evaluation and the use of multiple frameworks. ...
... As I found in my own ethnographic work, employees in Creative Services did not consider something "creative" unless it was novel and relevant in ways they considered legitimate-namely, a new form relevant to professional peers, popular culture, or emotional impact. However, it was through the sometimes tense interactions with exactly these sources deemed "un-creative" like product benefits or consumer desires that ultimately produced the agency's products (Koppman 2014b). By highlighting variation in cultural intermediaries' taste, I show how their social background shapes their personal dispositions, which, as other researchers attest (Rocamora 2002;Nixon and Crewe 2004;Pettinger 2004;Maguire 2008;Moor 2008), inform the subsequent production and sale of cultural goods to consumers-albeit in a more complex way than previously hypothesized. ...
Scholars argue that cultural intermediaries—that is, people that sell popular culture—accomplish their work through an affinity between their personal taste and that of their consumers. Yet, studies have not examined the social origins of such taste. To address this gap, I use qualitative and quantitative methods to analyze data collected from a probability sample of U.S. advertising practitioners. I find that although the tastes of cultural intermediaries are socially stratified, they are not consistently the “middlebrow” taste long associated with such industries. Additionally, by incorporating a two-dimensional model of class and focusing on how cultural goods are consumed, I extend knowledge on taste more generally.
