Michael Mauskapf

What Makes Popular Culture Popular? Product Features and Optimal Differentiation in Music:

In this article, we propose a new explanation for why certain cultural products outperform their peers to achieve widespread success. We argue that products’ position in feature space significantly predicts their popular success. Using tools from computer science, we construct a novel dataset allowing us to examine whether the musical features of nearly 27,000 songs from Billboard’s Hot 100 charts predict their levels of success in this cultural market. We find that, in addition to artist familiarity, genre affiliation, and institutional support, a song’s perceived proximity to its peers influences its position on the charts. Contrary to the claim that all popular music sounds the same, we find that songs sounding too much like previous and contemporaneous productions—those that are highly typical—are less likely to succeed. Songs exhibiting some degree of optimal differentiation are more likely to rise to the top of the charts. These findings offer a new perspective on success in cultural markets by specifying how content organizes product competition and audience consumption behavior.

Cultural Attributes and their Influence on Consumption Patterns in Popular Music

In this paper we leverage recent developments in the way scholars access, collect, and analyze data to reexamine consumption dynamics in popular music. Using web-based tools to construct a dataset that distills songs’ musical content into a handful of discrete attributes, we test whether and how these attributes affect a song’s position on the Billboard Hot 100 charts. Our analysis suggests that attributes matter, beyond the effect of artist, label, and genre affiliation. We also find evidence that the relational patterns formed between attributes—what we call cultural networks—crowds songs that are too similar to their neighbors, adversely affecting their movement up the charts. These results suggest that culture possesses its own sphere of influence that is partially independent of the actors who produce and consume it.

Embeddedness and the Production of Novelty in Music: A Multi-Dimensional Perspective

Creativity and innovation are central to cultural production, but what makes certain producers more likely to innovate than others? We revisit the concept of embeddedness to evaluate how different ...

Ups and downs: Trends in the development and reception of qualitative methods

In this chapter, we argue that combining different qualitative research methods can facilitate the study of collective cognition in organizations, thus compensating the limitations of more traditional approaches. Using our own research experience in studying how designers develop new ideas, we explain how the combined use of ethnography, grounded theory and visual narrative analysis allowed us to gain a deep understanding of how material practices influence collective cognitive sensemaking in organizations. In particular, we show (1) how ethnography allowed us to map and unpack the material practices designers engage in when developing new ideas, (2) how interviews and grounded theory helped us articulate informants’ interpretations of these practices and reveal the underlying cognitive processes, and, finally, (3) how visual narrative analysis was useful to systematically track changes in the evolving collective interpretations, and by doing so to link together practices and processes in a longitudinal fashion.In this chapter we discuss a sampling technique that has been employed in recent works, but has yet to be delineated as a distinct methodology: “structural sampling.” Structural sampling allows the investigator to illuminate the inner-workings of a social system by interviewing actors in a variety of roles and making comparisons across multiple levels of analysis. We describe the technique of structural sampling and its purpose, elucidate the benefits and challenges of structural sampling, provide several examples to illustrate potential uses of this technique, and situate structural sampling in the context of extant qualitative research methodologies.

Collective Virtuosity in Bartók's Concerto for Orchestra

Hailed as a critical and popular success since its premiere in December 1944, Béla Bartóks Concerto for Orchestra is most often discussed as the accessible masterpiece that helped launch a posthumous resurgence of the composers earlier musical output. Yet the historical and aesthetic significance of this work in relation to American orchestral life—and Serge Koussevitzkys Boston Symphony Orchestra in particular—remains largely ignored. The Concerto for Orchestra can be viewed through the lens of what might be called “collective virtuosity”: a concept that describes the performance of a work whose challenging musical language requires a heightened level of artistic teamwork. Described through musical analysis and strengthened by archival research and management theory, this phenomenon reflects a multitude of historical and social developments that are particularly salient to the story surrounding Bartóks Concerto, thus serving as a useful analytic tool that reveals new insights concerning the work and its popular success in America.