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Niche Overlap and Discrediting Acts: An Empirical Analysis of Informing in Hollywood

Giacomo Negro, Sasha Goodman

Sociological Science, June 9, 2015
DOI 10.15195/v2.a15

This article examines informing on others as a discrediting act between individual agents in a labor market. We conduct an empirical analysis of artists called to testify during the 1950s Congressional hearings into Communism in Hollywood, and multi-level regression models reveal that the odds of an artist informing on another increase when their career histories are more similar. The similarity reflects levels of niche overlap in the labor market. The finding that similarity contributes to discredit in the context of resource competition is compatible with a social comparison process, whereby uncertainty about performance leads more similar people to attend to and exclude one another to a greater extent.
 
Giacomo Negro: Emory University.  Email: giacomo.negro@emory.edu

Sasha Goodman: Northeastern University and Harvard University. Email: s.goodman@neu.edu

Acknowledgements: Emily Bianchi, Michael Hannan, Balázs Kovács, Wes Longhofer, John Levi Martin, James Moody, Jill Perry-Smith, Elizabeth Pontikes, Chris Rider, Peter Roberts, Gabriel Rossman, Jesper Sørensen, Olav Sorenson, Anand Swaminathan, Jim Wade, Dave Waguespack, and seminar participants at Stanford University, Oxford University, and Yale University offered helpful critiques on the current or previous versions of the manuscript. We thank Hayagreeva Rao for his contributions to earlier stages of the study. Olgert Denas provided research assistance.

  • Citation: Negro, Giacomo and Sasha Goodman. 2015. “Niche Overlap and Discrediting Acts: An Empirical Analysis of Informing in Hollywood” Sociological Science 2: 308-328
  • Received: January 16, 2015
  • Accepted: March 5, 2015
  • Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Gabriel Rossman
  • DOI: 10.15195/v2.a15

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