Tag Archives | Cultural Sociology

Identity from Symbolic Networks: The Rise of New Hollywood

Katharina Burgdorf, Henning Hillmann

Sociological Science April 2, 2024
10.15195/v11.a12


To what extent may individual autonomy persist under the constraints of group identity? This dualism is particularly salient in new movements that value individual creativity above all, and yet have to muster community cohesion to establish a new style. Using the case of New Hollywood in the 1960s and 1970s, the authors show how this movement reconciled the demands of collective identity and collaboration in film production with their commitment to the individual filmmaker’s artistic autonomy. Using information from the Internet Movie Database on 17,425 filmmakers who were active between 1930 and 1999, the authors show that a cohesive symbolic network, in which New Hollywood filmmakers shared references to a canon of revered films, served as a foundation for the collective identity of this new artistic movement. References include allusions to iconic scenes, settings, and shots of classic films. In contrast, collaborations in film projects yielded a fragmented network that did little to support the creative enterprise of New Hollywood. The evidence suggests that symbolic ties through shared citations allowed New Hollywood filmmakers to realize their vision of autonomous auteur filmmaking and to draw symbolic boundaries that separated them from the old Hollywood studio system.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Katharina Burgdorf: Department of Sociology, University of Bremen
E-mail: burgdorf@uni-bremen.de

Henning Hillmann: Department of Sociology, University of Mannheim
E-mail: hillmann@uni-mannheim.de

Acknowledgements: We thank Peter Bearman, Jennifer Lena, and Christina Gathmann for their detailed comments on earlier drafts. We also wish to thank Philipp Brandt, Mark Wittek, Elias Strehle, Florian Keusch, Rachel Skaggs, Tania Aparicio, Gillian Gualtieri, Philippa Chong, Laura Garbes, Etienne Ollion and participants of the CREST seminar, Sunbelt, NetGloW, and EUSN conference for their helpful feedback during various stages of this project.

Supplemental Material

Replication Package: All raw and prepared data and the code can be accessed via https://dataverse.harvard.edu/privateurl.xhtml?token=c81114da-6e97-44bb-9272-f19b302afcb9.

  • Citation: Burgdorf, Katharina, and Henning Hillmann. 2024. “Identity from Symbolic Networks: The Rise of New Hollywood.” Sociological Science 11: 297-339.
  • Received: June 30, 2023
  • Accepted: October 13, 2023
  • Editors: Ari Adut, Stephen Vaisey
  • DOI: 10.15195/v11.a12


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