Giacomo Negro, Sasha Goodman
Sociological Science, June 9, 2015
DOI 10.15195/v2.a15
Abstract
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.
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.
- 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